Dissident Voice

1. Gaza Stripped and 77 Years of the Nakba

May 15 marks the 77th anniversary of the Nakba in the shadow of Israel's continuing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and increased aggression and colonial expansion in the West Bank. Our newest visual, "Gaza, Stripped: The Colonial Isolation Of Gaza," was created in partnership with Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights to show the many layers of colonial fragmentation and control that Palestinian lands are subjected to, shaped by the legacy of British colonialism, the Nakba, and decades of ongoing Zionist settler colonialism.

Gaza is a place with thousands of years of history—an ancient coastal city that has long been a crossroads of cultures and trade. The term "Gaza Strip" first appeared on the map in 1948, as a Zionist colonial invention designed to confine 27% of the 750,000 Palestinians who were forcibly uprooted from their villages during the Nakba to 1% of historic Palestine. This visual highlights how decades of isolation, blockade and military control led to the harsh reality of Israel's ethnic cleansing and genocide that we are witnessing today.

The post Gaza Stripped and 77 Years of the Nakba first appeared on Dissident Voice.

2. Calls for Resistance Against the Accelerating Imperialist War on Black/African Peoples in Our Americas

The Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace condemns the increasing militarist aggression by U.S. imperialists in Our Americas that targets Africans, indigenous peoples and poor communities and calls for regional pan Africanist strategy and anti imperialist unity to defeat the war on Africans and colonized people at home and abroad. The increase of violence in the region, whether in Haiti, Ecuador or the Caribbean, through armed paramilitary groups often with ties to neo colonial puppets and the US/West, is used as a justification to expand U.S./NATO militarism, economic domination, and interventionism in the region to guarantee full spectrum dominance.

African peoples, along with indigenous communities, across Our Americas bear the brunt of U.S.-led militarism, often with deadly interactions between state forces and armed groups in poor neighborhoods leading to fatal consequences for the masses, as part of a broader effort to expand militarism in the region. This must be framed as an escalation of war on Africans, colonized and poor communities at large by US imperialist forces to maintain its hegemony over the region, particularly against what it sees as threats to its interests from Russia and China.

The State Department's recent designation of armed paramilitary groups in Haiti as both Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists to use as the justification to continue violating the sovereignty of the Haitian people, clear out and occupy land, and operate with even more impunity. The  U.S.-orchestrated Multinational Security Service Mission (MSS) in Haiti that has only further degraded safety and violated national sovereignty has not slowed down any of this violence, in fact it has increased. Now, declaring Haitian armed paramilitary groups as terrorists will only serve as justification for further militarized assaults on the nation and its people, with little regard for their wellbeing. Amidst a three month long teachers strike, the Executive Board of National Union of Haitian Educators (UNNOH) wrote, "in the current context of cynically manufactured chaos—orchestrated by powerful international criminals and their local collaborators—" and call for international mobilization amid a "silent genocide."

Looking at another assault on Africans in Our Americas, on April 13 in Ecuador, Daniel Noboa declared himself president in a still contested run off election amidst heavy militarization at the polls, which the Revolución Ciudadana opposing candidate Luisa Gonzalez has publicly denounced.  Despite attempts to limit international observers , the North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, in partnership with Movimiento Afrodescendiente Nacional Ecuatoriano and Global Black, were able to observe intentional oppressive tactics by Ecuadorian state forces leading up to and throughout the electoral process that have not subsided post-election.

Furthermore, cases like the Guayaquil Four become all too normalized as the war on poor African communities in Ecuador intensifies through US-led militarism as President Noboa changes the constitution to allow foreign military bases, along with reaching a "strategic alliance" with private mercenary Blackwater's Erik Prince to "fight organized crime." Prince also negotiated contracts in Haiti last month to provide attack drones and training for an anti-gang unit. The increase in violence in the region also means profits for the private mercenaries, not to actually address violence against African peoples throughout the region, including in the United States, but to use as a proxy to intervene and support their geopolitical and imperialist interests.

The expanding role of SOUTHCOM not just in Haiti, Ecuador or the Caribbean but throughout the region, particularly through joint military exercises such as Operation Tradewinds with militaries in the region under the command of the US and NATO and increased military bases, from the Panama Canal down the Pacific Coast, is not unrelated to this expanding crisis of violence throughout the region. The war on crime, war on drugs and war on terror have exposed the parallels behind the use of state violence as a trojan horse for resource extraction whether in West Asia, including the genocidal onslaught in Palestine, violence against Yemen, Lebanon and the people of Syria, or the expanding use of violence in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana or Suriname for resource extraction of fossil fuels. US imperialism is using the same playbook to justify its presence, expansion and full spectrum dominance.

While member states of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) have condemned the intervention in Haiti, they do so while also upholding the Kingston Declaration , continuing a historic trend in the region of supporting neocolonialism in Haiti led by Brazil. Whether officially sanctioned as a UN mission or not, Western interventions have never been the answer for the Haitian people. More importantly, the lack of solidarity with Haiti undermines the sovereignty of all nations as Haiti is used as a laboratory for the rest of the region. It was precisely the lack of solidarity with Haiti that Nicaragua highlighted as to why they did not sign the Tegucigalpa Declaration – "[the text must] reject the extortions against and express unequivocal solidarity with the brotherly people of Haiti without external interventions."

BAP invites organizations and individuals to join the U.S./NATO Out of Our Americas Network as a platform to collectively develop regional Pan-Africanist strategy to oppose intervention in Haiti, a core demand of the Zone of Peace campaign, through mass based popular struggle. As Haitian Flag Day approaches on May 18th, we call for renewed and strengthened solidarity with the people of Haiti, in connection with all African peoples, oppressed peoples, and popular movements of Our Americas struggling to free our region of US military and economic dictates.

The Black Alliance for Peace asserts the right of African/Black peoples across Our Americas to self defense and organized resistance in response to this escalating imperialist war against the masses of our people, whether in Port au Prince, Guayaquil, or Los Angeles. No compromise, no retreat!

The post Calls for Resistance Against the Accelerating Imperialist War on Black/African Peoples in Our Americas first appeared on Dissident Voice.

3. Despite Setbacks, Latin America’s Long History of Anti-imperialism Continues

"An American team will win the next soccer World Cup," a Nicaraguan boy once told me. It took me a second to realize he meant Brazil or Argentina, not the United States. Greg Grandin's new book shows that America (or, in Spanish, América) was the name used for the whole hemisphere by the late 17th century. In the 18th century, the great liberator Simón Bolívar set out his vision of "our America": a New World free of colonies, made up of distinct republics living in mutual respect. He even cautiously welcomed the newly declared Monroe Doctrine as a rejection of European imperialism. Bolívar died without realizing his dream of a Pan-American international order but, Grandin argues, his ideals would be revived and eventually be enormously influential.

Yet the visionary Bolívar was under no illusion that an expanding United States would behave respectfully towards its neighbors. Already, by 1825, politicians in Washington began to insist that their countrymen were the only "Americans," claiming hemispheric superiority. The tussle over words was symptomatic of a widening rift. From Mexico southwards, many of those who had liberated their republics from Spanish rule were idealists who (at least, in theory) recognized the universal rights of all their peoples. But the prosperity of a growing United Sates depended on "stolen Indian land and slave labor" and, within two decades, the stealing of half of Mexico to form the state of Texas.

Worse was to follow. In 1855, the adventurer William Walker did "Texas all over again." His mercenaries invaded Nicaragua and – recognized by Washington – installed him as president. Chilian radical Francisco Bilbao summarized the fears this raised in Spanish America: "Walker is the invasion. Walker is the Conquest. Walker is the United States." A Costa Rican newspaper said he threatened the whole of "Latin America" (the first known use of the term).

By the end of the 19th century, the United States had intervened militarily in Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Colombia as well as Mexico and Nicaragua. Washington began  to use "human rights" to spin its foreign-policy objectives when it suited US interests, as it did when Spain harshly repressed those fighting for the independence of its last remaining colony, Cuba. Spain lost, but instead of gaining full independence Cuba became a de facto US colony and Cubans' human rights barely improved.

Grandin's argument is that Pan-American humanist internationalism was first kindled in response to the horrors of the Spanish conquest ("the greatest mortality event in history"). The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas and other scathing critics of Spain's atrocities in the 16th century established the principles of a common humanity that would be developed further by Bolívar and his successors. The "Bolivarian dream" might have been taken to global level after the First World War with the establishment of the League of Nations, of which many Latin American countries were founding members. But lacking US support and dominated by the old imperial powers of Britain and France, it quickly failed.

Idealism receded in the inter-war period when Latin America became the focus of the US's nascent military-industrial complex. Huge arms imports fed massacres of rebellious workers, brutal suppressions of dissidents and the pointless and chaotic Chaco war which cost 150,000 lives in the 1930s (when Bolivia and Paraguay fought over what turned out to be a non-existent oil field). US marines again pillaged Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Eventually, however, Pan-American idealism resurfaced in the US in the form of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "good neighbor" policy which – had it been sincerely implemented – would have eschewed intervention and conquest. FDR even added that the constitutional arrangements in Latin American republics were not something that warranted US interference. The New York Times felt able to announce, in 1934, that the era of imperialism "nears its end."

However, Grandin is rather too effusive in his praise for a policy that to a large extent was a rebranding. He doesn't mention that 1934 was also the year in which the guerilla leader Augusto César Sandino was assassinated in Nicaragua after ending its 20-year-long occupation by US marines. The Washington-backed Somoza dictatorship would last until 1979. FDR is alleged to have excused his role in this, remarking that "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

Nine years later, Pan-Americanism provided the basis for FDR's model of a post-war world order based on cooperation and social justice. According to diplomat Sumner Welles it would be "the cornerstone in the world structure of the future." Latin Americans would go on to write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At this moment, Grandin argues, Washington had the luxury of "an entire resource-rich hemisphere" eager to work with it to create a new world order.

It would be short-lived. A brief social democratic interlude in Latin America after the Second World War, paralleling that in Europe, was eclipsed after the final Pan-American conference, held in Bogotá in 1948. Grandin highlights the murder of the Colombian progressive Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the subsequent mayhem (the "Bogotazo", witnessed by both Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez) as instrumental, because it occurred while the conference was in progress. It enabled the US delegation to successfully push through anti-communist resolutions. The event also saw the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS), which was never a progressive body and soon afterwards legitimized military coups in Venezuela and Peru.

Practically all of Latin America had, by 1950, reverted to dictatorships. Backed by the US military industrial complex, death squads and repression became commonplace. Covert action eclipsed even mildly progressive forces, epitomized by the CIA's 1954 coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala. This began more than three decades of repression and revolt in Central America in which 100,000s would die. Only between 1961 and 1969, Washington engineered 16 Latin American regime-change operations.

Grandin underrates the Cuban revolution as a turning point, singling out liberation theology, economic theories of dependency and radical literary and artistic movements as the agents of a fresh wave of change during the 1970s that he calls a second Enlightenment. It is exemplified by Salvador Allende's short-lived left-wing government in Chile and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Grandin captures the feeling that many of us had at that time, that political struggle and solidarity were key to an individual's self-actualization and this was nowhere more evident than in Latin America's radical efforts to change its realidad social.

If Latin America could be inspiring, it could still also be horrifying. Pinochet's Chile pioneered neoliberalism, laced with corruption, and exported it to Mexico, Argentina and globally. Reagan's response to the Sandinista revolution was to finance the Contra war and kill 30,000 Nicaraguans, in the process rejecting a ground-breaking judgment against the US by the International Court of Justice. George H. W. Bush's 1989 invasion of Panama was another blatant violation of the supposed principle of non-intervention, his action blessed by the ever-compliant OAS.

As a North American himself, it is unsurprising that Grandin is in despair at the evolution of both domestic and foreign policy in the US. He notes that it has rendered nearly worthless the international law and institutions that Latin America helped create. He laments that US presidents pay little attention to wise advice from Latin American governments which refuse to join its wars and argue for reconciliation in Ukraine, Palestine and Iran.

If he is more optimistic about Latin America, he acknowledges the danger of the rise of the right (Milei, Noboa, Bukele et al). Latin America "teeters between the dark and the light" he says. Yet he believes the "indomitable spirit of Latin American humanism" will prevail. Writing in the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai accuses Grandin of engaging in "mythological thinking" and glossing over Latin America's many defects. On this, as a resident of Latin America, I side with Grandin.

My criticism is a political one. Grandin notes that, by the end of the 19th century, the term "anti-imperialism" had entered the vocabulary of Latin American intellectuals, referring not only to Spain but to the imperial designs of the US. While anti-imperialism crops up throughout the book, he fails to acknowledge how fundamental it is. Take the example of Honduras – the country was Washington's long-term lackey, it temporarily broke free only to be reined in by a coup in 2009 and the imposition of corrupt, neoliberal governments. Under Xiomara Castro in 2021 it broke free again, but she has to be continually on the watch for new interference by Washington.

US-inspired coups, covert action and more recently economic sanctions and "lawfare" have deposed or undermined progressive leaders across Latin America. Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have had to curtail US intervention (masquerading as "democracy promotion") to preserve peace and maintain their revolutionary progress. They deserve more respect for their achievements than Greg Grandin offers them.

Furthermore, a book which fully recognizes the struggle against a reborn Monroe Doctrine should have space between its covers for key figures such as Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Above all, the omission of Hugo Chávez Frías, who led Venezuela's new Bolivarian government for 14 years and inspired leftists across the hemisphere, is inexcusable. It was Chávez, speaking at the UN General Assembly after George W. Bush, who said that the podium "still smells of sulfur." Simón Bolívar's anti-imperialism – as well as his humanism – are alive and well in Latin America.

The post Despite Setbacks, Latin America's Long History of Anti-imperialism Continues first appeared on Dissident Voice.

4. What Does It Take to Make Community?

The ingredients for any community should start with the basics: active and informed citizens. Participants in a community's past (context, knowledge), present (all those factors tied to the weakest and most vulnerable, are they included?) and future (getting to a place where climate chaos, predatory capitalism, neofascism doesn't completely pull all the loose strings of a threadbare set of safety nets). There are plethora of planning books on the smalltown.

Then what about a sustainable city? Unfortunately, when planners and politicians talk about making cities more sustainable, they are thinking of large urban centers like Portland or Seattle. Oh, the buzz phrases: walkable neighborhoods, traditional architecture, and diverse land uses. It's neighborhoods that sort of look like small towns. The fix is in for those large cities as planners and developers are B.S.-ing introducing a "small-town feel" into large cities and suburbs. This will never ever create a sense of community, nor will it reduce the use of automobiles.

From the promo stuff on the book, The New American Small Town: "So, what of small towns themselves? We don't talk about these places as much. They are often assumed to be utopias of the past or crumbling ghost towns of the present day rather than places with potential for sustainable living. This book critically examines narratives of American small towns, contrasting them with lived experiences in these places, and considers both the myth and reality in the context of current urban challenges. Interweaving stories from and about U.S. small towns, the book offers lessons in sustainable urbanism that can be applied both in the towns themselves and to the larger cities and suburbs where most Americans now live."

Like I stated above, there are dozens of books for planning students and developers and chambers of commerce and policy wonks on how to jigger things for smalltowns.

"The book offers hope-filled portraits of small towns as livable, sustainable, and diverse places and serves as an important corrective to the media narrative of alienated, left-behind rural voters."

—Mark Bjelland, author of Good Places for All

Thinking of community from that large urban space, Jane Jacobs approached cities as living beings and ecosystems. She suggested that over time, buildings, streets and neighborhoods function as dynamic organisms, changing in response to how people interact with them. She explained how each element of a city – sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy – functions together synergistically, in the same manner as the natural ecosystem. This understanding helps us discern how cities work, how they break down, and how they could be better structured.

She was looking at big urban places, like her home, New York:

"Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental." (source)

In my small town, population 2,300, we look toward the sea and the forest as reminders of how vital ecosystems are. The county becomes a network of towns along the coast and inland — Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Newport, Seal Rock, Waldport, Yahcats.

We drive a lot, and the traffic during tourist summer season balloons. The town of Lincoln City is around 10,000, but on some weekends, it swells to 50,000. All that infrastructure, all that water, all those restaurants and beaches, well, think of five times the impact, or more, since locals do not all swarm to the beaches or the restaurants all in one fell swoop.

We are living on unceded land, and in many cases, sacred burial land: Indigenous Communities in Oregon.

The links below are the websites of Oregon's nine federally recognized tribal communities:

• Burns Paiute Tribe
• Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians
• Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon
• Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians
• Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
• Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs
• Coquille Indian Tribe
• Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians
• Klamath Tribes

The story of a community is all wrapped up in its context, history, and in this age of a memory hole crazy presidency —  with white supremacists like Jewish Stephen Miller running the Trump team's Gestapo and Big Brother training camp —  we will see history literally erased.

Communities that are small are more vulnerable than those large urban areas Jacobs wrote about, and studied.

From my urban and regional-planning graduate-student days (looking at concepts of small is better and scaling down) there are so many quotable axioms tied to communities that are considered small. Here are some notes from one of my planning classes looking at regional smalltown planning:

• "A small town is where everyone knows everyone, and everyone has a secret."
• "In the quiet of the village, the soul finds its reflection."
• "A village is a symphony of nature and humanity."
• "Simplicity and serenity find their home in village life."
• "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry."
• "If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is … to find the right places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish."

For me, big ideas and a global perspective capture where I live. There is a deep economic tie to tourism and Air B & B sort of lifestyle out here. Fishing as an industry is big. Logging and a pulp mill in the town of Toledo are still big economic drivers. A big brewery, Rogue, gobbles up precious freshwater, as does the pink fish industry of Pacific Seafoods.

We have the NOAA station and the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences Center, as well as the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Many highly educated (college) retirees end up here since many worked for those two large entities listed above. I've written about "this place" for Dissident Voice, capturing my old gig as a columnist for Oregon Coast Today. I write for the local rag, called the Newport News Times, with a name change of Lincoln County Leader.

Conference celebrates how the ocean connects to all of us — coastlines, people, cultures

This one captures my day in and day out life on the wrack line:

"Respite: Smart People, Concerned Environmentalists, Talking Whales, Kelp, Tidepools."

I've worked with poor people and homeless folk, with developmental delayed clients, and I have had columns in two newspapers, one of which became a book out there, to be purchased on Amazon — Coastal People inside a Deep Dive: stories about people living on the Central Coast and other places in Oregon.

Here's an interesting one, while I was training to be a bus driver, but alas, that fell through because of bad HR, MAGA co-workers, and a multinational company, First Student, ruling over the local school system's transportation:

"More and More Boys are Coming Home from School with Behavior Sheets!"

Here's a weird idea of mine, a letter to Jeff Bezos' ex, billionaire  MacKenzie Scott Tuttle. "Another 400 Acres Up for Sale!"

The big idea around homelessness. That was more than three  years ago, and today, those first 100-plus days in this DOGE — Department of Oppression Greed Excrement — nightmare, and the signs of fascism, "at the foothills of fascism" as professor Gerald Horne calls it, I see the major trauma cracks in this smalltown existence.

Daily, the Meals on Wheels delivery route I volunteer for shows America in a microcosm — old people, alone aging in place, many in homes or apartments that are long in the tooth, with major repair issues facing them. The TV "news" is usually blaring in the background. And the people energy is thankfulness and fear.

Just a few minutes with each free meals recepient will help them feel somehow connected to the outside world, a world not wrapped up in medical visits and isolation. The Meals on Wheels programs get state and federal grants. The MOW programs are on the DOGE chopping block, part of the billionaires' scheme to hobble the weak, vulnerable, the 80 Percenters.

Just put in your Google-Gulag search, "Paul Haeder Newport News Times," and you'll find the thousand word Op-Eds that are still getting published in the local rag, though after a few looks at the stories, the PayWall comes into play. Some of those pieces have been republished in Dissident Voice.

You can search Dissident Voice for those, or Muck Rack.

"Community" includes all those puzzle pieces, from education, health care, environment, economics, people, transportation, etc. From an urban planning point of view, the boiler plate definition of planning encompasses a broad range of fields and specializations focused on shaping the built environment and improving the quality of life in urban and regional areas. This interdisciplinary field taps into various disciplines, including geography, economics, sociology, and public policy.

And I did the "sustainability" thing, even going to Vancouver for the University of British Columbia's summer sustability program.

Fourteen years ago, and boy have I changed on that green is the new black and new green deal mentality:

"The rise of sustainability as a force to critique, celebrate and co-modify."

Journalism seems to be one avenue into a MURP degree, as I ended up in the Eastern Washington University program in 2001, just new to the Pacific northwest coming from El Paso. The program included tribal planning, looking at scenic by-ways, neighborhood planning, even planning principles around farmer's markets and sustainable businesses.

I was teaching English at community colleges and Gonzaga when the advisors at EWU said I should get into that master's program, emphasizing that many journalists have entered into the field of planning.

One dude, James Howard Kunstler, I brought to Spokane, putting him through a whirlwind set of speaking engagements. Here, myew of him on my radio show, Tipping Points: James Howard Kunstler calls suburban sprawl "the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known." His arguments bring a new lens to urban development, drawing clear connections between physical spaces and cultural vitality. Books like The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere made him famous.

In Spokane, I created local and regional news interest, with a column in the monthly magazine, Spokane Living — Metro Talk. Dozens of columns: "Go Tell It on the Mountain" is just one example of that journalism. Music Therapy? Check that out: "Music to the Ears." And  then a column in the weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander ("War and Peace In Vietnam"), and had a column in the Spokesman Review, tied to Down to Earth ("You Never Know a Place is Unique Until the Story Gets Told"), and then a radio show, Tipping Points.

The guests on that show were varied in background, political leanings and creative impetus. See those shows here at Paul Haeder (dot) com.

Now? At age 68? I teach a memoir writing class for the community college, and even that gig is all messed up with MAGA, or the fear of MAGA, as I was warned this spring quarter that a student who received an email from me along with the other enrolled students complained that she thought the class was misrepresented in the Oregon Coast Community College catalogue. The class is about writing, including memoir writing, fiction, poetry, long and short form creative non-fiction, editorial writing, and flash fiction and flash essays.

My email to the class, all blind copied, included articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education and articles in literary magazine around the cuts to humanities, including the cuts to journalism, writing programs, etc. This person wanted her money back and she wrote to a vice president who, like most in educatoin, are spineless creatures.

Can you issue a full refund for my registration to the "Writing As Gift Class" in Waldport which starts this afternoon?  This class is not as described in the Catch the Wave catalgue.  I write about nature and short stories of personal experiences.  This class appears to be biased towards politics.  Can you also let the instructor know to delete my email and contact information permanently?  I do not give the instructor permission to forward my contact information or use it for any other purposes.

Well well, you have read plenty of my work at Dissident Voice around the decay-rot-putridity in higher education, part-time faculty organizing, and the rise of the administrative class in education.

See: "Disposable Teachers"

"Fifteen Dollars and Teaching for Scraps"

"Hoodwinked — Hook-Line-and-Sinker the School is Drowning"

So, yes, big towns like Seattle or Portland or El Paso, where I worked as a journalist, educator, activist, and social services person, all the while writing novels and essays, they too are bastions of that mean as cuss Americanism. Seattle and Portland? "Death by a Thousand Cuts: Vaccines, Non-Profits, and the Dissemination of Medical Information";   "Falling into the Planned Parenthood Gardasil Snake Pit."

I deploy D.H. Lawrence in setting the stage for this brutish culture, America:

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.

— D. H. Lawrence  (Studies in Classic American Literature. Ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey & John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.)

So, here is part of that smalltown community college sort of fearful letter from the spineless administrator, the same sort of spinelessness I received decades ago from the University of Texas, or Gonzaga University or Clark College or Greenriver College:

I'm going to ask that you not bulk email the students henceforth. Our team will send emails on your behalf about any announcements – assignments, presentations, date/time changes, etc. Just send those to us and we'll distribute. (Of course, any student who wishes to hear from you directly can tell you so and provide their preferred email address; we have no interest in interfering with that.)

Time is short, but we're forced to consider canceling the class this morning for two reasons: First, in your email, you introduce an experience far from what we advertised in our catalog. Second, in my estimation it doesn't conform to our Academic Freedom policy. Based on your email, the class certainly does not appear to be an examination of issues, but presents a singular political agenda. (Note that I'm setting aside here the fact that you and I may share many viewpoints raised in your email to students; this isn't about my personal beliefs and concerns.) If you wanted to present a workshop focused on your personal opinions, and your past writings, about the current or former administrations or other political issues, one alternative would have been to rent a room from the College or a Library and delivered the event without being tethered by the College's commitment to freedom of expression of all viewpoints. That may be an option to consider in the future.

Ahh, my class will/is explore/exploring writing in a time of "community and societal and family estrangement"  which is the blurb at the top of the description printed in the Oregon Coast Community College catalogue. Utilizing fiction and non-fiction.

Writing As A Gift …to yourself, and to the world

We'll tackle fiction and non-fiction. We'll explore writing in a time of community and societal and family estrangement. Personal essay or hard hitting poetry. Writing is an act of internal dialogue ex-pressed to an audience. We will start off with class input on where individuals are in this process. Beginner fiction writer or aficionado of creative non-fiction? We'll discover through writing who we are as a creative community. Paul Haeder's been in this game of teaching and publishing and editing writing  for five decades.

And so it goes, so it goes. You know that being a dissident, or a voice of dissidence, well, it has always been a Joe McCarthy moment for those of us in academic-journalism who would date challenge people to think.

And the language of the administrator or provost or gatekeeper will always sound like a two-bit lawyer's verbiage:

01/21/2015: Institutions of higher education exist for the common good, and the unfettered search for truth and its free exploration is critical to the common good. The college seeks to educate its students in the democratic tradition, to foster recognition of individual freedoms and social responsibility, and to inspire meaningful awareness of and respect for a collaborative learning environment. Freedom of expression will be guaranteed to instructors to create a classroom atmosphere that allows students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues. OCCC instructors are responsible for exercising judgment in selecting topics of educational value for discussion and learning consistent with course requirements, goals, and desired outcomes.   (Emphasis added, DP)

Not sure how my email exploring higher education's fear of losing all of the humanities, losing all the Diversity Equity Inclusion courses, and gutting liberal arts in general, how all of that is "not allowing" students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues.

Small towns or big towns, pick your institution and Kafkaesque poison.

But part of my role in community consciousness raising is primarily community journalism, also known as solutions journalism, so in this most recent iteration of Haeder, I have a fairly new show, one hour a week, dealing with public affairs, but truly an interview show, a deep dive with a guest or guests, and alas, all shows, all topics, all of it derives from my own deep well of experience, exploration, education and emancipation — the Four E's, man, of life!

Some upcoming shows, Wednesday, on the air, 6 to 7 PM, Finding Fringe: Voice from the Edge, KYAQ.org (streaming live) and 91.7 FM, Lincoln County.

I'm shifting some of the program dates around since we have current news around the mayor of a small town, Waldport, being arrested and removed from her position as elected mayor. That's May 14.

You have to listen to her. May 14. 6 pm. again, stream the show, kyaq.org

• Then, have you ever heard of the Amanda Trail in Yachats?
• Do you know what it is like to be incarcerated and then put on 6 years house arrest? Part I & II.
• Rick Bartow, the famous artist, will be a living reflection at the Yakona Nature Preserve.
• The Rights of Nature and the Community Bill of Rights? Kai of CELDF will tell us all about that.
• Siletz is the Home of the Elakha Alliance, a non-profit to work with stakeholders of every sort to reintroduce sea otters to Oregon's coast.
• So you leave prison and you have a farm to work on to heal, to reorient oneself, to let the soil salve the PTSD. Freedom Farms.

May 14 — Heide Lambert, Waldport Mayor controversy May 21 — Amanda Trail,  Joanne Kittel May 28 — Prisons, Incarceration, Probation — Kelly Kloss June 4 — Prisons, Incarceration, Alcoholism — Kelly Kloss June 11 — Three women from Yakona Nature Preserve & Learning Center — Anna, Rena, JoAnn June 18 — CELDF, Rights of Nature & Community Rights — Kai  Huschke June 25 — Chanel Hason, Elakha Alliance, sea otters July 2–  Freedom Farms — Sean O Ceallaigh

Past shows are on the website, but only in limited form. Go to archives, and then put in Finding Fringe.

Try listening to a smalltown radio station, tuning into a smalltown resident's take on what it TAKES to be a citizen of the world in a small town, this one called Waldport.

Here, yet another global thing attached to Waldport — a former Georgia slave paid for his freedom and ended up out here!  You Can't Have Your Mule and Forty Acres, Too!

How about the legacy of genocide out here? Not Just One of those Tales of Another Dead Indian

You'll get the picture that Waldport or Vancouver, BC, or El Paso or Mexico City, we all face the same problems that the rich and the militarists and the oligarchs force us to fight.

Tune in, KYAQ.org, streaming worldwide, Wednesdays, 6 PM, PST.

The post What Does It Take to Make Community? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

5. Coexistence Not Co-Destruction: Remembering Bandung 70 Years On

Image credit: Dossier no. 87 'The Bandung Spirit', Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 2025.

Seventy years ago this month, leaders of twenty-nine newly or nearly independent Asian and African nations inaugurated the historic Bandung Conference, embarking on the 'Freedom Walk' along Asia-Africa Road to the conference's Freedom Building (Gedung Merdeka) in Bandung, Indonesia. As a diplomatic performance and collective political action, these leaders walked among the teeming crowds to announce that the peoples of the Third World had stood up after centuries of colonialism.

There was, however, no consensus on the future towards which these countries were marching. Participating nations ranged from those in US military alliances (Turkey, the Philippines) to non-aligned states (Indonesia, Egypt, India), and included ideologically distinct regimes – from newly communist nations (North Vietnam and China) to those accusing Soviet communism of being 'another form of colonialism' (Ceylon, now Sri Lanka). In other words, it was unclear how unity could be built from such diversity.

In his opening speech, Indonesian President Sukarno emphasised that 'colonialism is not dead' and that it persists in new forms. He declared:

Colonialism also has its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, and actual physical control by a small alien community within a nation.

Now these nations were united in their opposition to colonialism – 'the lifeline of imperialism' – to defend their hard-won independence. As former colonies:

This line [that] runs from the Straits of Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Sea of Japan. For most of that enormous distance, the territories on both sides of this lifeline were colonies; the peoples were unfree, their futures mortgaged to an alien system.

'We have so much in common', he added, 'and yet we know so little of each other'.

Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai played a pivotal role by raising the banner of 'seek[ing] common ground while reserving differences', as part of the young communist country's debut on the international diplomatic stage. One of the conference's major achievements was the unanimous adoption of a ten-point 'Declaration on the Promotion of World Peace and Cooperation'. These principles – including sovereign equality, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence – have since become the cornerstone of Global South diplomacy.

Itji Tarmizi (Indonesia), Bandung Lautan Api, 1972.

The Bandung Spirit, as an assertion of the historical agency of the formerly colonised world, rejected the Cold War logic of military blocs and great-power domination. It offered an alternative vision: That these countries could establish a set of universal norms to ensure their own survival and sovereignty. The conference also served as a testing ground in diplomacy for nascent nations, allowing them to 'localise' diplomatic norms and push for regionalism – seen as a powerful instrument for defending national independence.

Yet the Bandung moment was hard-won and immediately contested. Western imperialist powers viewed the awakening of the Third World with alarm. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles saw the conference's Afro-Asian solidarity as 'by its very nature and concept anti-Western' and feared that inviting the People's Republic of China (PRC) would give Zhou Enlai a platform to broadcast communist ideology to what he called the 'naïve audience of anti-colonialists'. In the following years, the West retaliated violently against the emerging Third World project that Bandung helped propel – most notably through a wave of CIA-backed coups in countries such as Indonesia that deposed Sukarno a decade later. Despite these efforts, the ideals of Bandung have endured in the political imagination of the Global South.

A New Mood: The Rise of China and the Global South

Seventy years on, a new world order is slowly emerging, aspiring towards one of Bandung's core ideas: that international affairs need not be dominated by Western powers. The rise of the Global South has generated new multilateral institutions embedded with the principles of equality and mutual benefit in international relations.

Notably, BRICS has grown in prominence as a platform for the Global South to cooperate – both economically and politically. It has expanded to include five new members – Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the UAE – along several partner states. This new mood is backed by material changes. The centre of gravity of the world economy has shifted eastward, with China and other Asian countries becoming engines of global growth​.

By 2023, China was the largest global economy in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and 47% of its foreign trade was with countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative – a figure that rose to 50% in 2024,​ reflecting a deliberate diversification away from Western markets. Likewise, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a multilateral trade pact spanning Asia and the Pacific, has strengthened regional trade ties, with intra-RCEP trade growing by 12% year-on-year​. These developments signal a major shift: China is now the largest trading partner for over 120 countries in the world​.

As in 1955, China today occupies a central position in this unfolding Global South project –serving as both a target of imperialist aggression and a torchbearer of an alternative path. Nowhere is this dual role clearer than in the global trade war unleashed by the United States, particularly under Donald Trump's administration. In a throwback to Cold War hostility –   employing tariffs instead of troops – Trump began his series of offensives by signing an executive order placing a blanket 10% tariff on all imports into the United States in February. Then, on April 2 – labelled by Trump as 'Liberation Day', the US President unleashed a series of punitive 'reciprocal' tariffs on 57 countries. These were ostensibly to correct trade imbalances and hit friends and foes alike. A week later, Trump grandiosely announced, via social media, a ninety-day tariff reprieve for countries that 'have not…retaliated in any way', while doubling down on China as the primary target with a 145% tariff on all goods.

Amrus Natalsya, Mereka Yang Terusir Dari Tanahnya (Indonesia), Those Chased Away from Their Land, 1960.

Much like Dulles in 1955, the US establishment today fears China's emergence, which in the past served as an ideological threat as the world's largest communist Third World nation and is today seen as an economic and existential threat. The tariff onslaught has injected instability into the global economy and further eroded the norms of multilateral trade ​– ironically undermining the very international trading system that the US helped build in its own favour.

Beijing, however, has refused to bow to this economic aggression. China responded swiftly and resolutely to Trump's tariff barrage. Within days, the Chinese government announced reciprocal tariffs, zeroing in on sensitive sectors to maximise pressure. 'We have abundant means to retaliate and will by no means sit by if our interests are harmed', Chinese officials declared, denouncing Washington's economic coercion and asserting China's right to defend its national sovereignty. This stance was met with an outpouring of public support inside China: Patriotic sentiment surged on social media, with the hashtag 'China's countermeasures are here' with 180 million engagements in a week. As one Chinese netizen highlighted, 'Patriotism is not just a feeling – it is an action'. That China and the Chinese people have stood united against US' bully tactics carries symbolic significance for the Global South.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, invoking President Xi Jinping's words from 2018, summed up this spirit of resistance on April 8: 'A storm may churn a pond, but it cannot rattle the ocean. The ocean has weathered countless tempests – this time is no different'. Two weeks after Trump unleashed tariffs on the world, hitting Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia (49%) and Vietnam (46%) the hardest, Xi toured the region, signing 31 and 37 agreements spanning various sectors in Malaysia and Cambodia, respectively. In Vietnam, where Xi called on deeper bilateral ties to resist 'unilateral bullying', 45 agreements were signed while party-to-party exchanges underscored the alignment between the countries' communist parties.

Trump's strongarm tactics and economic warfare dressed as 'reciprocity' is the antithesis of the Bandung principles of non-interference and equality. Within this context, South-South cooperation frameworks are receiving increased attention, together with renewed calls to strengthen cooperation and unity within the BRICS, RCEP, and other Global South multilateral platforms. Finding unity among the extreme diversity of the Global South is a tall order. This unity, however, cannot rely solely at the level of states and their leaders, but it must also come from below, from the energy of peoples' movements and progressive forces across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to revive a true Bandung Spirit against US imperialism and unilateralism. As Zhou Enlai evoked at the Bandung Conference, the hand of imperialism has five fingers – political, military, cultural, social, and economic spheres – which can only be overcome through the unity of the Global South and its peoples.

As Sukarno wrote in 'Towards Indonesian Independence' (1933): 'If the Banteng (bull) of Indonesia can work together with the Sphinx of Egypt, with the Nandi Ox of the country of India, with the Dragon of the country of China, with the champions of independence of other countries – if the Banteng of Indonesia can work together with all the enemies of international capitalism and imperialism around the world – O, surely the end of international imperialism is coming fairly soon!' One of the major blows against US imperialism was the victory of the Vietnamese people, celebrated fifty years ago today.

René Mederos (Cuba), Viet Nam Shall Win, 1971. (courtesy: Center for the Study of Political Graphics)

For more about the Bandung Spirit, read our Institute's latest dossier.

– Tings Chak, Tricontinental Asia

The post Coexistence Not Co-Destruction: Remembering Bandung 70 Years On first appeared on Dissident Voice.

6. Liberation of the Palestinians

Israel and its worldwide supporters are relatively few, maybe 50 million confined to the western world, compared to those who recognize the genocide of the Palestinian people, maybe 500 million throughout all continents. Despite the disparity in numbers, Israel and its followers have overwhelmingly controlled the information sources, media involvement, and government apparatuses throughout the western world. The Palestinians have won the "battle of minds," and are ready to lose the "battle for liberation." How can this be?

How can governments and those in powerful positions permit an obvious genocide? What does a human being gain from being party to the murder of others? No reason and no necessity. The indigenous Palestinians have always been willing to share space with the foreign Jews, and the Jews can live anywhere. They don't need barren hilltops and parched deserts to satisfy their daily living.

The "how" is best answered by the Zionists' organization ability. From day one of their origin, the Zionists carefully planned the manipulations of western life — political, cultural, entertainment, educational, and economic — providing the questions and controlling the answers, steering populations from disbelief into their beliefs, making their victims the aggressors and their aggressions a defense of their victimhood. This did not occur unnoticed and has infuriated populations in many countries, resulting in a backlash against the Jewish people, which the Zionist used to their advantage — reaction to nefarious deeds and protests against genocide are anti-Semitism. Oh, how they suffer.

The success of the Zionists' mission is due to their diabolical organization ability. The military prowess, complete with a nuclear arsenal, evolved from organizing trickery and knavery into establishing themselves as helpless and desperate, a subterfuge that fooled an unknowing and innocent world. Failure to halt the oppression of the Palestinian people is related to the inability to counter the Zionists' methodical planning and regional operations, to create a worldwide organization that takes the offensive, exposes the Zionist manipulations of societies, and sets a different tone to the happenings, a tone that is beneficial to the Palestinians. The trajectory to destruction has been unidirectional and, without effective organizations to stand against the thought control, the destruction will soon be complete.

Difficulties emerge. it is difficult for those who walk the high road and will not compromise with accepted moral values to contend the Zionists who use treacherous methods to promote their cause — harassments, illegitimate accusations, and profane charges of anti-Semitism, even assassinations, bribery and coercion. Their public relations efforts can be subtle, injected into programs such as PBS' Antiques Roadshow and Finding Your Roots as everyday conversation. Tomorrow is too late. The Palestinians need organizations.

(1) Website(s) that articulate clearly expressed information that guide messages to audiences and respond to the misinformation distributed by Israel's loyal army of followers.

My experience is that too few have sufficiently detailed information that counter fraudulent narratives perpetrated by Israel's supporters. As examples:

• Nobody had to obey UN Resolution 181, the partition plan. The UN General Assembly does not have the power to enforce its own actions directly. Its resolutions are recommendations, and not legally binding.
• The UN did not create two states; it divided one Palestinian state into two states — a Palestinian state composed of almost 100 percent Palestinians, and a Palestinian state composed of about 650,000 native to the area, of whom about 60 percent were Palestinians (400,000 Palestinians), and 40 percent were foreign Jews and their children (250,000), who had arrived earlier to live permanently in Palestine. Another contingent of foreign Jews (250,000) had arrived for expediency and not with intention of remaining in the British Mandate.
• Arab armies did not invade and attack Israel. Besides the Jordanian Arab Legion, which remained in Jerusalem, the only Arab army of significance in numbers and unified command was the Egyptian army. The Egyptians only entered territory that was awarded to the state composed of nearly 100 percent Palestinians and with the attempt to recapture Palestinian territories that were seized by the Zionist forces.

The propagation of misleading information is punishing and importunes a website(s) that can provide credible information.

(2) Organizations in all nations that design daily protests, rallies, meetings, and discussions and provide information on the legal aspects, logistics, and formation of the meetings and protests.

Street and campus protests have been rewarding — energizing crowds and alerting masses, but running into two barriers — unless there is violence, media coverage is limited, and the protests are made to appear as expressions of anti-Semitism.

These barriers are overcome by abundant protests, daily, worldwide, in every plot of land, and more personally directed — before embassies, before media headquarters, before industrial partners to the crimes, on street corners, on main boulevards, in libraries, in homes, in cultural and religious centers; an inundation of anger at those who support the genocide, a touch at the nerves of those who are humane and regard then sanctity of human life. Where are the 1.4 billion Catholics following the deceased Pope Francis' pleas to halt the genocide? Don't they vote?

(3) Websites in all nations that describe the activities, protests, meetings, and discussions appearing in every country. Three websites, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, and Popular Resistance partially fill the gap. A decade ago, and found on the Wayback Machine, websites published a calendar of all resistance and protests events throughout the nation. The calendar with all events is mandatory. Where is any today, and why not?

(4) Political action that analyzes the means by which a small coterie of Zionists can influence government officials to defend Jewish citizens and a foreign nation before defending their own constituents and their own nation. Seems anything can be said about Catholics, Quakers, Chinese, atheists, and zebras without arousing official replies. Curse USA and the pilgrims and no condemnation. Hint you might not like Jews, Israel is committing genocide, and the Zionists are deceptive oppressors and expect a call from the FBI.

Government officials supporting Israel are "enemies of the state" and are committing treason. Aren't there any "think tanks" that can give thought to exposing this treason and forcing the genocidal representatives to change their behavior. Aren't there any "think tanks" that can give thought to resolving the number one issue that has enabled the oppression? Why cannot governments learn they are responsible for a genocide and why aren't there programs that force them to change their actions?

(5) Legal fund that supports activists caught in the fraudulent legal processes that Zionists use to stifle opposition. The scurrilous Anti-discrimination League (ADL) has been sued and been judged guilty on several occasions. Obtain some of the deep pockets from Qatar and the Zionists might learn to behave more legally and correctly.

I have attempted to create a website that answers organization number one and acts as an information source.
Organizations number two and three are not complex and can be handled by those who can gather and publish information.
Organization number four is difficult, but an abundant good thinkers and "think tanks" exists. Getting brains together that can solicit information, absorb it, discuss it and provide a path to nirvana is not unreasonable. Preventing genocide is a worthwhile motivation.
Organization five needs experienced fund raisers, access to philanthropists, and a capable legal team.

For those interested, which I hope will be everybody and those receiving chain messages that encompass the world, the website that contains a list of "talking points" information is available at: https://www.alternativeinsight.com/ME_TalkingPoints.html.

From this site, the articles can be reached. I will continually update the website and am open to suggestions of making the website more effective. I will not be able to address adding any articles to the website; too time consuming.

If a unidirectional past dictates the future, then I have doubts this message to the universe will have much effect. I have tried previously and have had no success. Millions of dedicated, well-meaning and praiseworthy individuals and thousand of groups have labored energetically and resourcefully to prevent the oppressions and halt the genocide. Unfortunately, the efforts have not changed the reality. My unbiased opinion is that this is the only way to stop the genocide, it is the last opportunity, and, if not implemented, the Palestinians are doomed.

The post Liberation of the Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

7. Jeremy Bowen’s Interview with Gaza Aid Chief was Shameful

There was no excuse for the BBC to follow Israel in treating the head of UNRWA as though he is aligned with terrorism. This kind of craven journalism just makes Israel's job of genocide easier.

There was yet more shameful reporting by BBC News at Ten last night, with international editor Jeremy Bowen the chief culprit this time.

He prefaced an interview with Philippe Lazzarini, head of United Nations refugee agency UNRWA, with an utterly unwarranted disclaimer – as though he was talking to a terrorist, not a leading human rights advocate who has been desperately trying to keep the last aid life-lines open to the people of Gaza as they are being actively starved to death by Israel.

The only time I can remember Bowen prefacing an interview in such apologetic terms was when he interviewed Hamas' deputy political chief, Khalil al-Hayya, last October.

That was shameful too. But at least on that occasion, Bowen had an excuse: under Britain's draconian Terrorism Act, saying or doing anything that might be viewed as favouring Hamas can land you with a 14-year prison sentence for supporting terrorism.

But why on earth would Bowen imply that Lazzarini's remarks – on the intense suffering of Gaza's population in the third month of a complete Israeli aid blockade – need to be treated with caution, in the same manner as those of a Hamas leader?

For one reason only. Because Israel, quite preposterously and for completely self-serving reasons, claims UNRWA is a front for Hamas. Since January, Israel has outlawed the organisation from operating in the Palestinian territories it continues to illegally occupy. As ever, the BBC is terrified of upsetting the Israelis.

Israel has long wanted UNRWA out of the picture because it is the last significant organisation to uphold the rights of Palestinian refugees enshrined in international law. It is, therefore, a major obstacle to Israel ethnically cleansing Palestinians from what is left of their homeland.

Before airing the interview with Lazzarini, Bowen cautioned: "Israel says he is a liar, and that his organisation has been infiltrated by Hamas. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.

"First off, the British government deals with him, and funds his organisation. Which is the largest dealing with Palestinian refugees. They know a lot of what is going on, so therefore I think it is important to speak to people like him."

Bowen would never consider prefacing an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu in a similar manner, even though the following would actually be truthful and far more deserved:

The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, accusing him of crimes against humanity. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.

First off, the British government deals with him, and sends weapons to his military to carry out the crimes he is accused of. As its leader, he obviously knows a lot about what Israel is up to, so therefore I think it is important to speak to someone like him.

Can you imagine the BBC ever introducing Netanyahu in that way? Of course, you can't – even though, in journalistic, ethical and legal terms, it would be fully warranted.

But in the case the Lazzarini, there are absolutely no grounds for such a prologue – except to promote an Israeli pro-genocide agenda. Bowen's remarks suggest he needs to explain why, in the midst of an Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza, the BBC would choose to speak to one of the most knowledgeable public figures about that starvation.

Bowen's resort to an explanation instantly paints Lazzarini as problematic and controversial. It aligns with, and reinforces, Israel's entirely bogus conflation of UNRWA and Hamas.

Even were Israel's claims about UNRWA true of local staff in Gaza – and Israel has supplied precisely no evidence they are, as Lazzarini makes clear in a longer edit of the interview that aired on the BBC's Six O'Clock News – that would in no way implicate Lazzarini. His remarks in the interview, on the catastrophic suffering of Gaza, are echoed by all aid agencies.

Bowen's apologetic tone not only served to undercut the power of what Lazzarini was saying, but bolstered Israel's ridiculous smears of UNRWA. That will have delighted Israel, and given it a little bit more leeway to carry on the starvation of Gaza, even as the first establishment voices tentatively start calling time on the genocide – 19 months too late.

Notice this from Bowen too. He asks Lazzarini: 'When people look back on what's been happening in the future, will they see, actually, a big international failure?"

Lazzarini responds: "I think in the coming years we will realise how wrong we have been, how on the wrong side of history we have been. We have, under our watch, let a massive atrocity unfold."

Bowen jumps in: "Would you include the 7th of October in that?"

Lazzarini answers: "I would definitely include the 7th of October."

But the set-up from Bowen is entirely unfair. He asks Lazzarini a question about "international failure" in relation to Gaza, and Lazzarini responds about the failure by the West to do anything to stop an atrocity – more properly a genocide – unfold over the past 19 months.

The events of 7 October 2023 are irrelevant to that discussion. There has been no "international failure" to support Israel. The West has armed it to the hilt and prioritised the suffering caused to Israelis by Hamas' one-day attack over the incomparably greater suffering caused to Palestinians by 19 months of Israel's slaughter and starvation.

Bowen's interjected question about 7 October is a nonsense. It is levered in simply to cast further doubt on Lazzarini's good faith in the hope of placating Israel, or at least providing the BBC with a defence when Israel goes on the offensive against Bowen for speaking to UNRWA.

The atrocities carried out on October 7 occurred in the context of decades of brutal and illegal Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories, of settlement expansion and apartheid rule, and of a 16-year siege of Gaza.

The international community was certainly on the "wrong side of history", but not in the sense Bowen intends or Lazzarini infers from Bowen's question. The West failed because it did precisely nothing to stop Israel's brutalisation of the Palestinian people over those many decades – in fact, the West assisted Israel – and thereby guaranteed that Palestinians in Gaza would seek to break out of their concentration camp sooner or later.

Lazzarini's remarks on the catastrophe in Gaza should be seen as self-evident. But Bowen and the BBC undermined his message by framing him and his organisation as suspect – and all because Israel, a criminal state starving the people of Gaza, has made an entirely unfounded allegation against the organisation trying to stop its crimes against humanity.

This is the same pattern of smears from Israel that has claimed all 36 hospitals in Gaza are Hamas "command and control centres" – again without a shred of evidence – to justify it bombing them all, leaving Gaza's population without any meaningful health care system as malnutrition and starvation take hold.

Israel struck another hospital yesterday, the European Hospital in Khan Younis, as medics there were waiting to evacuate sick and injured children. The attack killed at least 28 people and injured many more, including a BBC freelance journalist who was conducting an interview there as the missiles hit.

Notably, BBC News at Ten blanked out its journalist's face, adding: "For his safety, we are not revealing his name." The BBC did not explain who the journalist needed protecting from, or why.

That is because the BBC rarely mentions that Israel has assassinated more than 200 Palestinian journalists in Gaza, as well as banning all foreign correspondents from entering the enclave, in its attempts to limit news coverage and smear what does come out as Hamas propaganda. Israel understands it is easier to commit genocide in the dark.

You might assume a major news organisation like the BBC would wish to be seen showing at least some solidarity with those being murdered for doing journalism – some of them while working to provide the BBC with news. You would be wrong.

We shouldn't pretend that it was Bowen's choice to attach such a disgraceful disclaimer to his interview. We all understand that he is under enormous pressure, both from within the BBC and outside.

BBC executives have appointed and protected Raffi Berg, a man who publicly counts a former senior figure in Israel's spy agency Mossad as a friend, to oversee the corporation's Middle East coverage.

And as the late Greg Philo reported in his 2011 book More Bad News from Israel, a BBC News editor told him at that time: "We wait in fear for the telephone call from the Israelis". Things are far, far worse 14 years on.

Excuses won't wash any longer. We are 19 months into a genocide. Helping Israel to launder its crimes is to become complicit in them. No journalist should be allowing themselves to be pressured into this kind of moral and professional failure.

The post Jeremy Bowen's Interview with Gaza Aid Chief was Shameful first appeared on Dissident Voice.

8. Are Albertans Striving to Leaving Canada?

The idea to separate from Canada appeared with the Social Credit Party of Alberta in 1930s, but it failed to win widespread support there and then. Separatist sentiment in the province strengthened only in 1980s, after the Canadian government introduced the National Energy Program trying to tighten federal control over the sector. Being the largest producer of crude oil in the country, Alberta suffered great losses, leaving a huge number of locals unemployed.

The election victory of Mark Carney's Liberal Party on April 28, 2025, provoked fresh strain and already rigid posing of Alberta's separation question. "For the last 10 years, successive Liberal Governments in Ottawa have unleashed a tidal wave of laws, policies and political attacks aimed directly at Alberta's free economy – and in effect – against the future and livelihoods of our people," wrote the province's Premier Danielle Smith. The implementation of the No new pipelines law Bill C-69 as well as the oil tanker ban, increase of taxes on carbon emissions and imposing restrictions on oil and gas industry are just several examples of the liberal governments' actions that cost Alberta billions of dollars.

It should be emphasized that the province contributes great sums of money to the federal budget of Canada, some hundreds of billions of dollars more, then other parts of the country. Despite this fact, the money is not allocated between provinces in proportion to their contribution. Thus, the Albertans give several times more, than they get.

It's no surprise that, according to the data reported for May, 2025, the idea of independent Alberta is supported by approximately 36% of the locals. Their desire to leave Canada is quite reasonable as independence will open up new horizons to the current Canadian province and will help to avoid the limits set by Ottawa. Among other advantages Alberta will gain an opportunity to export its natural resources not only to the USA but also to other countries, all money it earns will stay within Alberta that will substantively increase the living standards of the population.

Premier Danielle Smith says she is ready to hold a referendum on provincial separation already in 2026 if citizens gather the required signatures on a petition. Taking into account that Ottawa demonstrates no intention to change its policy towards Alberta as well as to meet the demands voiced by the province's Premier, there is no doubt the task will be implemented within a short period of time. By the way, it's important to stress that the Albertans are not the first who started to talk about separation in Canada. The experience of Quebec, that tried to gain independence twice, should help the Albertans to achieve their goal.

The post Are Albertans Striving to Leaving Canada? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

9. Trump Is Making America Constitutionally Literate—By Violating the Constitution

Few modern political figures have done more to prompt spontaneous national discussions about the Bill of Rights and constitutional limits on government power than Donald Trump—if only because he tramples on them so frequently.

Indeed, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.

Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.

First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest, and assembly): Trump's repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as "the enemy of the people" and threatening to revoke media licenses to blacklisting law firms, threatening universities with funding cuts for not complying with the government's ideological agenda, and detaining foreign students for their political views, Trump has treated constitutional protections not as guarantees, but as obstacles.

Second Amendment (right to bear arms): Trump has shown an inconsistent and, at times, authoritarian approach to gun rights, summed up in his infamous 2018 statement: "Take the guns first, go through due process second." At the same time, Trump has encouraged the militarization of domestic police forces, blurring the line between civilian law enforcement and standing armies—a contradiction that cuts against the very spirit of the amendment, which was rooted in distrust of centralized power and standing militaries.

Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures): Trump's expansion of no-knock raids, endorsement of sweeping surveillance tactics, sanctioning of police brutality and greater immunity for police misconduct, and the use of masked, plainclothes federal agents to seize demonstrators off the streets have revived conversations about privacy, unlawful searches, and the right to be secure in one's person and property.

Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments (due process and equal protection): Perhaps nowhere has Trump's disregard been more dangerous than in his approach to due process and equal protection under the law. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that neither citizens nor non-citizens can be deprived of liberty without fair procedures. Yet Trump's Administration has repeatedly floated or enacted policies that sidestep due process, from the suggestion that he could suspend habeas corpus to the indefinite detention of individuals without trial, and openly questioned whether non-citizens deserve any constitutional protections at all.

Even the Sixth (right to a fair and speedy trial) and Eighth Amendments (protection against cruel and unusual punishment) have found new urgency: Trump has promoted indefinite pretrial detention for protesters and immigrants alike, while presiding over family separations, inhumane detention centers, and support for enhanced interrogation techniques. Trump has also doubled down on his administration's commitment to carrying out more executions, including a push to impose the death penalty for crimes other than murder.

Tenth Amendment (states' rights): The Tenth Amendment, which preserves state sovereignty against federal overreach, has been tested by Trump's threats to defund sanctuary cities, override state public health measures, and interfere in local policing and elections. His efforts to federalize domestic law enforcement have exposed the limits of decentralized power in the face of executive ambition.

Fourteenth Amendment (birthright citizenship): No clause has been more aggressively misunderstood by Trump than the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His push to strip citizenship from children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents (birthright citizenship) ignores over a century of legal precedent affirming that citizenship cannot be denied by executive whim.

Article I, Section 8 (commerce and tariffs): Trump's use of tariff authority provides another example of executive power run amok. Although the Constitution assigns Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on allies and used them as political leverage. These actions not only undermine the constitutional balance between the branches but also weaponize trade policy for political ends.

Article I, Section 9 (Emoluments Clause): Trump's disregard for the Emoluments Clause—a safeguard against presidential profiteering—brought this obscure constitutional provision back into the public eye. Between continuing to profit from his private businesses while in office and his reported willingness to accept extravagant gifts, including a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, he has raised urgent ethical and legal concerns about self-dealing, corruption and backdoor arrangements by which foreign and domestic governments can funnel money into Trump's personal coffers.

Article I, Section 9 (power of the purse): Trump has trampled on Congress's exclusive power over federal spending, attempting to redirect funds by executive fiat rather than operating within Congress's approved budgetary plan. He has also threatened to withhold federal aid from states, cities, and universities deemed insufficiently loyal.

Article II (executive powers): At the heart of Trump's governance is a dangerous misreading of Article II, which vests executive power in the president, to justify executive overreach and the concept of an all-powerful unitary executive. He has repeatedly claimed "total authority" over state matters, wielded executive orders like royal decrees in order to bypass Congress, and sought to bend the Department of Justice to his personal and political will.

Historical Emergency Powers and Legal Precedents: Trump has also breathed new life into archaic emergency powers. He invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify rounding up, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants without due process. He has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops domestically in order to deal with civil unrest, raising the specter of martial law cloaked in patriotic language.

In routinely violating the Constitution and crossing legal lines that were once unthinkable, Trump is forcing Americans to confront what the Constitution truly protects, and what it doesn't.

Still, what good is a knowledgeable citizenry if their elected officials are woefully ignorant about the Constitution or willfully disregard their sworn duty to uphold and protect it?

For starters, anyone taking public office, from the president on down, should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. And if they violate their contractual obligations to uphold and defend the Constitution, vote them out—throw them out—or impeach them.

"We the people" have power, but we must use it or lose it.

Trump may have contributed to this revival in constitutional awareness, but as we warn in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the challenge isn't just knowing our rights—it's defending them, before they're gone for good.

The post Trump Is Making America Constitutionally Literate—By Violating the Constitution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

10. Theroux’s Film on Israel’s Violent Settlers Was a Mirror

For once, the BBC aired a documentary showing Israeli society's dark underbelly. The backlash is not because Louis Theroux got it wrong. It's because his film tells us far too much about ourselves

Louis Theroux explains in a commentary published by the Guardian on 10 May why the backlash to his recent film about violent, Israeli state-backed settlers misses the point.

His critics say he is unfairly presenting a few marginal "crazies" in Israeli society, who rampage across the West Bank to drive out the native Palestinian population, as significant and influential.

That's exactly what they are, Theroux responds.

Settler leader Daniella Weiss, who Theroux spent much time following and interviewing, "enjoys enormous clout within the Israeli cabinet and … has the protection of the army in her project of settler expansionism".

He quotes Haaretz journalist Etan Nechin in noting that the setters' "representatives are literally sitting in the government and control everything from the police to treasury".

Theroux makes a further point about why it is important to focus on the settlers and understand what they really represent.

"A film about extreme West Bank settlers isn't simply about a region of the Middle East. It's also about 'us'," he writes in the Guardian.

He adds: "The urgency here is that West Bank settlers are a bellwether for where society may be going in countries across the west… Around the same time that the documentary aired, Israel's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a settler, was being hosted at [Donald Trump's] Mar-a-Lago."

There has been a backlash to Theroux's documentary – just as there is continuing support for Israel, even as it commits what the International Court of Justice deems a "plausible genocide" – precisely because those extremists are "us".

The gun-toting, stone-throwing, orchard-burning, house-torching settlers are from Texas, London and Paris. And so are many of the soldiers – some of them volunteers from western countries – who are currently slaughtering and enforcing the starvation of children in Gaza.

It is "us" watching this genocide unfold in slow-motion and shrugging our shoulders, or both-sidesing the stream of constant Israeli crimes on our screens. It is "us" still sending weapons to make the genocide possible. It is "us" decrying the protesters marching against the genocide, against the starvation of babies, as "antisemites", "haters" and "supporters of terrorism".

Israel's crimes didn't begin 19 months ago. They date back a century or more. They began with Britain's sponsorship of an exclusive Jewish enclave imposed on the Middle East – a colonising state-to-be that was always going to require the containment and ultimately the expulsion, or extermination, of the native, Palestinian population.

That process had nothing more to do with "Jewish control" then than it does now. After all, it was an arch anti-semite, Arthur Balfour – Lord Balfour – who wrote the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917 promising a Jewish state on the Palestinians' homeland. He was supported by the entire British cabinet – apart from Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish government minister, who rightly lamented Britain's support for a Jewish state in Palestine as evidence of his countrymen's enduring antisemitism.

Why were Balfour and the other government ministers so keen to have "the Jews" in the Middle East?

Religious reasons played a part, to be sure. But more important were all-too practical, foreign policy objectives.

First because, like other governments driven by ethno-nationalist sentiment that was then running riot in European capitals, the British government preferred that "a Jewish state", dependent on Britain, would project its interests as a British colony in the oil-rich Middle East.

If Britain didn't seek to promote and harness a European Jewish presence in the region first – to weaponise those Jews against "the natives" – France or Germany might do so instead.

It was a race between European powers for regional control. Though ultimately, of course, they were beaten to the finishing line by the United States, which has been Israel's main patron since the founding of a so-called "Jewish state" through the mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in 1948.

The crimes Israel carries out today were engineered – made inevitable – by the decisions western powers took from the early twentieth century onwards.

Which is why Theroux is right that we in the West are responsible for Israel's actions in a way that is entirely untrue of Burma or China or Russia.

Israel's supporters want us looking away from Israel's crimes to Burma's, China's or Russia's precisely because Israel is "us". Its state terrorism is ours.

If the Israel fortress colony falls, so the fear goes, the West's system of colonial power projection – those 800-plus military bases the US has stationed around the world in its bid for "global full-spectrum dominance" – will begin to unravel with it.

Israel is still secretly viewed by the West – by "us" – as it was by the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, 130 years ago: as "a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism".

Those cheerleading Israel's genocide, or staying complicity silent, are the ideological inheritors of Lord Balfour and his ugly racism.

Either they wish for "the Jews" to complete the takeover of historic Palestine – exterminating or ethnically cleansing what is left of "the natives" – as a public flexing of "our" muscle, as a demonstration of who controls the world, of what awaits anyone who defies "our" might.

Or they have been so brainwashed by a fearmongering western narrative that the world is divided into two – and only the western half is actually civilised – that the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children and the starvation of a million more seems a reasonable, even moral, response to the state of the world.

Yes, the West's Jewish populations have been more easily sold on this preposterous notion because, given their history of western persecution, they are more easily persuaded to live in a state of permanent fear, they are more readily convinced by establishment narratives that there are exceptional reasons to support this genocide.

But "our" leaders are no less in thrall to this kind of perverse logic. They gain their positions only after they have been fully initiated into an institutionalised system of power that requires fealty to western – chiefly US – projection of dominance across the globe.

Whatever Starmer's personal feelings (assuming he has any), the fact is he is not wrong in proclaiming that his government is in no position to impose a sales ban on the components for F-35 fighter jets, the ones dropping bombs on Gaza's population to level their homes and shred their children.

As his government implicitly acknowledges, the West's system of arms production is necessarily so tightly integrated that no one, apart from the central hub of empire headquartered in the US, is in a position to change course. The West's arms industries, just like its financial industries, are simply too big to fail.

Britain is locked in to producing F-35 components not specifically because Israel needs them, but because the West – because the US – needs them for its projection of power, for its continuing control of resources, for its global dominance – or, in the British government's bogus rhetoric, to safeguard "Nato security" and "international peace".

Were Starmer to dare to refuse, it would be no different from some local, small-time mafia boss telling the Don in Washington to take a hike. The British prime minister knows his fate would be straight out of a Sopranos script.

This too is the reason why he has been secretly shipping weapons to Israel for use in Gaza – more than 8,500 items – in violation of the promise he made to the British public last year that the shipments had stopped.

While Starmer has to placate those in his party who cannot stomach being complicit in genocide, he also has to keep the Don happy. And the Don is far more dangerous than either Starmer's party or the British parliament.

Theroux's film, The Settlers, is a vanishingly rare example of popular documentary-making showing Israeli society's dark underbelly. The backlash is not because his thesis is wrong. It is because it tells us far too much about ourselves.

The post Theroux's Film on Israel's Violent Settlers Was a Mirror first appeared on Dissident Voice.