Liberalism and the Left

Younger leftists will work to preserve our country’s social welfare architecture — but we’re also setting our sights on revolutionary ends!

Uri Avnery on Crimea, Ukraine, Putin and the Nazis

Uri Avnery

March 21, 2014

A Hundred Years Later

THERE IS an old Chinese curse that says: “May you live in historic times!” (If there isn’t, there should be.) This week was a historic time. The Crimea seceded from Ukraine. Russia annexed it. A dangerous situation. No one knows how it will develop. After my last article about the Ukrainian crisis, I was flooded with passionate e-mail messages. Some were outraged by one or two sentences that could be construed as justifying Russian actions.

What If They Gave A War and Nobody Paid?

Editor’s note: an interesting article by a Tikkun subscriber and ally. What if they gave a war and nobody paid?  By David Hartsough
 

“Considering the Tax Shelter.” (Flickr/JD Hancock)

As April 15 approaches, make no mistake: The tax money that many of us will be sending to the U.S. government pays for drones that are killing innocent civilians, for “better” nuclear weapons that could put an end of human life on our planet, for building and operating more than 760 military bases in over 130 countries all over the world. We are asked by our government to give moral and financial support to cutting federal spending for our children’s schools, Head Start programs, job training, environmental protection and cleanup, programs for the elderly, and medical care for all so that this same government can spend 50 percent of all our tax dollars on wars and other military expenditures. My wife Jan and I have been war tax resisters since the war in Vietnam. We cannot in good conscience pay for killing people in other parts of the world.

Ukrainian Fascism & Anti-Semitism–Not Everyone Agrees

We continue our attempt to provide a wide variety of perspectives on what is happening in the Ukraine. Here we present the perspective of some of the Jewish establishment organizations reassuring us that anti-Semitism is not a big problem in the new post-coup reality of Ukraine, and then an article from a very different perspective by Zoltan Grossman arguing that the new Ukrainian government includes overtly fascist forces and that it is moving quickly to “privatize” essential services and utilities that are being given to the rich who will sell these back to the Ukrainian people who previously received them without regard to private profit.  Again, we take no stand on the accuracy of any of this material, but only present it to our readers so that they can hear a wider range of views than those presented in the lamestream American media. Open letter of Ukrainian Jews to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin
LE MAÏDAN
 

 

La place du Maidan
Mr. President ! We are Jewish citizens of Ukraine: businessmen, managers, public figures, scientists and scholars, artists and musicians.