Sheldon Richman

As one of the original settlers of the sparsely populated territory situated between the deranged and warring states of Antitrumplandia and Philotrumplandia, I’m breathing easier today. Anyone who longs for peace and an end to the big-power nuclear threat can only welcome what Trump and Kim did in Singapore this week. It’s just the beginning, … Continue reading “Trump, North Korea, and Iran”

Whenever I write about Palestine, Israel, and Zionism – especially when I point out that American Reform Jews en masse gagged on the thought that America was not their “homeland”; they insisted they were Jewish Americans not American Jews – I am lectured on Facebook about how “keeping to one’s own kind” is a natural … Continue reading “Separation, Not Association, Requires Force”

Shlomo Sand, a remarkable scholar who studies how “peoples,” including the Jewish people, have been invented through myths propagated by court historians and politicians, makes a startling yet obvious connection in his book The Invention of the Land of Israel (2014): In fact, it was the United States’ refusal, between the anti-immigration legislation of 1924 … Continue reading “How the US Created Israel and a Whole Lot of Trouble”

From April 1950, nearly two years after the Zionists in Palestine unilaterally declared independence for the state of Israel, to March 1951, three bombs exploded among Jews in Baghdad, Iraq: one each outside a cafe on Abu Nawwas Street; at the US Information Centre, a popular reading place for young Jewish Iraqis; and outside the … Continue reading “The Abused Jews of Iraq”

If the reader will indulge me, I want to relate some further thoughts about the concern over Russia and the American political system. For the sake of discussion I will assume that expressions of this concern are sincere, that “Russia” did what it’s alleged to have done, and that the American political system, over which … Continue reading “Who’s Afraid of Russian Propaganda?”

The panic over Cambridge Analytica looks like an acknowledgment that Russiagate is a losing horse. CA is the latest excuse for Hillary Clinton’s ignominious loss to Donald Trump, following “the Russians” and former FBI Director James Comey. Since those others haven’t exactly carried the day – still no evidence given against Russia and plenty of … Continue reading “Cambridge Analytica – Bogey of the Week”

On the 10th anniversary of the U.S. government’s criminal, catastrophic, and still-to-this-day consequential war against Iraq in March 2003, I wrote: It is no exaggeration to say that most news operations were little more than extensions of the White House Office of Communications. Abandoning even the pretense of an adversarial relationship with the government, the … Continue reading “The Iraq War After 15 Years”

Grammar, usually taken to consist of the rules of correct syntactic and semantic usage, becomes, in [philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein’s hands, the wider – and more elusive – network of rules which determine what linguistic move is allowed as making sense, and what isn’t. This notion replaces the stricter and purer logic, which played such an … Continue reading “The Grammar of Russiagate”

The whole election-meddling distraction is remarkable in both comic and tragic ways. The tragedy can be summed up in three words: New Cold War. At a time when the U.S. and Russian governments ought to be working toward nuclear disarmament, relations are deteriorating dangerously. As the estimable Australian writer Caitlin Johnstone, notes, despite Donald Trump’s … Continue reading “The Tragicomedy of Russiagate”

Donald Trump has embraced the popular “peace through strength” doctrine (PTSD) with his characteristic panache: “I’m going to make our military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody – absolutely nobody – is gonna to mess with us,” Trump says. On other occasions he’s said similar things: “We want to defer, avoid and prevent … Continue reading “‘Peace Through Strength’ Is a Racket”