Bear Left!
Where else would you get your leftist bearings every week?
Volume II, Number 488 December 2002
This Week's Article:
Anti-War Heroes
My son recently chose Mairead Corrigan, a secretary from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and cofounder of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement (Peace People), as the topic for a school paper. He chose her because we share the same last name, but she was an excellent choice anyway. Corrigan won the 1976 Nobel Prize for her courageous stand against political and religious violence. Her story was still fresh on my mind this week when I read the story of Irene Vandas and Jennifer Ziemann on the CBC News website. Vandas and Ziemann, of Vancouver, British Columbia, recently volunteered to be human shields in an effort to stop the Bush administration and its allies from attacking Iraq. The courage and common sense of women like Corrigan, Vandas, and Ziemann should be a lesson to all of us. We can stop the insanity. We can make a difference.
[Click on the link to read the whole article.]
Older Articles:
Articles from previous weeks are in our archives. If you're not careful, you might learn something.
Fact of the Week
On Thursday, 5 December, Trent Lott, leader of the Senate Republicans, spoke at a party for retiring Senator Strom Thurmond, who was celebrating his one-hundredth birthday. Lott recalled the presidential election of 1948, that featured Thurmond's candidacy as a States Rights Democrat. United Press International quoted Lott as saying, "When Strom ran for president, my state voted for him. And if the rest of the country had followed Mississippi's example, we wouldn't have faced many of the problems we have since."
These two sentences are chock full of meaning. In 1948, "my state" meant, essentially, "white voters in my state." The States Rights Democrats were opposed to the radical notion that lynching, Jim Crow laws, the poll tax, and segregation were wrong. They were an unabashedly racist and hateful bunch, and Trent Lott publicly wished that their candidate had become president in 1948. We can only hope, but fear otherwise, that Senator Lott did not mean that the expansion of civil rights in the 1960s to Americans of African descent consituted a "problem."
The enormity of Lott's remarks did not keep George Bush from being seen at the White House with both Thurmond and Lott the very next day.
Sources:
Washington Post,
7 December 2002;
United Press International,
5 December 2002;
Mississippi Hostory Now;
White House photo, 6 December 2002.
Our favorite links regarding Afghanistan
- The Guardian (London)
- The Independent (London)
- Federation of American Scientists (Washington)
- National Security Archive (Washington)
Our favorite links on the impending war with Iraq
- Red Pepper news on Iraq.
- No Rush to War: a collection of articles from The Nation.
- Target: Iraq from Global Security.org.
- Iraq's Nuclear Weapon Programme from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
- Iraq dossier presented to Parliament by Tony Blair.
- New York Times op-ed ad signed by 33 international relations scholars (HTML version of the ad).
- Stand Down cross-ideological, anti-war weblog.
- Alternative Resources on the US-Iraq Conflict: like it says, from the American Library Association.
- Iraq War Debate: a huge collection of links from the University of Michigan.
- Project on Defense Alternatives: analyses of Iraq and Afghanistan.
- More, alas, likely to come.
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"Bear left! Bear left!" / "Right, Frog!" (Kermit and Fozzie, The Muppet Movie)
© 2002, Paul Corrigan and Tim Francis-Wright.
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