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With a new biography out and a recent documentary still making waves, it's time to consider Gore Vidal's legacy.
Gore Vidal, one of America's greatest literary renaissance men and the master of the acerbic witticism, once said to an interviewer near the end of his life, "Anyone stupid enough to worry about how he will be remembered, deserves to be forgotten." With Jay Parini's new biography of Vidal earning high praise, and the recent documentary on Vidal's bitter feud with right wing dean of letters, William F. Buckley, Jr., still attracting attention, many critics and commentators are considering the question of Gore Vidal's legacy. Those who take the fate of American democracy seriously should use the abundant and abrasive opportunity of Vidal's literature to inspect the danger of the country falling into every steel claw trap Vidal warned of existing on the ruinous road to empire.
An examination of Vidal's art and politics is insufficient if it does not acknowledge the secular prophecy pulsating throughout the best of his novels and essays. It is not enough to merely enumerate the ideas Vidal helped introduce to American culture, or telegraph the time jumping bravery and brilliance of Vidal's innovative artistry, but that is a good place to begin.
© David Shankbone
An examination of Vidal's art and politics is insufficient if it does not acknowledge the secular prophecy pulsating throughout the best of his novels and essays. It is not enough to merely enumerate the ideas Vidal helped introduce to American culture, or telegraph the time jumping bravery and brilliance of Vidal's innovative artistry, but that is a good place to begin.
© UnknownBibi serving up the 'Big lie' at the recent 37th World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem.
But this is happening now. And not only abroad. More and more people in Israel are asking themselves the same question.
All this is the result of one event. But people are now looking at many other events - past and present - in a new light.
Until now, many strange actions and utterances by Binyamin Netanyahu have been seen as the manipulations of a clever politician, a talented demagogue who knows the soul of his constituents and supplies them with ample lies.
Not anymore. A troubling suspicion is getting around: that our prime minister has serious mental problems. Is he losing his marbles?
IT ALL started two weeks ago, when Netanyahu made a speech to a world-wide Zionist assembly. What he said was shocking.
© Reuters/Robert Galbraith - RTR4V7IP
"I see this as more of a warning, a red flag that there's something going on here that isn't in the models, that we maybe don't understand as well as we think, and we should dig down deep deeper and try to figure this out better," he said during a panel discussion at the Brookings Institute in Washington.
Williams, who is a voting member of the Fed's policy-setting panel through the end of the year, has said the central bank should begin to raise interest rates soon but thereafter go at a gradual pace.
George Soros, left, and Viktor Orban
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that George Soros, an American billionaire and human rights advocate, was responsible for the ongoing refugee crisis. Soros belongs to a group of "activists" that encourages migrants to head to Europe and thus intentionally aggravates the situation, Orban said.
"His name is perhaps the strongest example of those who support anything that weakens nation-states, they support everything that changes the traditional European lifestyle," Orban said in an interview on public radio station Kossuth, according to Bloomberg. "These activists who support immigrants inadvertently become part of this international human-smuggling network."
Comment: How about that, and coming from the leader of an EU country!
Now ask yourself which country has taken most flak for preventing refugees from entering (even though they're all doing the same thing)?
The Powers That Be have it in for Orban because he's the most openly pro-Putin EU leader.
Orban's portrayal of Soros as master-manipulator, while astonishing for the masses, is long-suspected by 'conspiracy theorists', who sound less and less looney by the day...
Regarding the 'Syrian refugee crisis', we suspected from the get-go that there was something contrived about it, but we encourage readers to not fall into black-and-white thinking on this issue. Many or most of the refugees may have been manipulated into heading for central and western Europe, but most of them nevertheless deserve sympathy as they flee from the hell created in the Middle East by the Western imperialists and their regional allies.
See also:
Assange: Refugee crisis part of strategy by Assad opponents to destabilize country
Syrian refugees in Europe, regime change in Damascus, and the mass migrations still to come
© AFP 2015/ JOE KLAMAR
"US Secretary of State is scheduled to meet with President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov," the ministry's press service said.
As for the ministerial talks, they will be held in Samarkand, Uzbekistan's second-largest city. The regional issues of mutual interest, particularly the situation in Afghanistan, will be high on the agenda of the meeting.
Comment: So what is the US up to in these buffer countries between Russia and Afghanistan? Maybe trying to pave the way for Islamic State militants to reach Russia and extend NATO's reach? Some of these countries have already joined or in the process of joining the European Economic Union.
- Moscow to prevent the spread of NATO's Islamist proxies into Central Asia
- Massive Russia-led war games simulate 'international threat coming from central Asia'
- Russian general: U.S. orchestrating expansion of Islamic State in order to surround Russia and China with hotspots of tension
© Carlos Garcia Rawlins / ReutersVenezuela's President Nicolas Maduro
"We can't have that decree around. It's like the Sword of Damocles here," Maduro said in a TV speech on Thursday, as cited by the Latin American Herald Tribute.
"Venezuela is going to file a lawsuit in the United States itself over the international illegality of Barack Obama's decree which has been threatening Venezuela since March 9 of this year."
There has still been no reaction from Washington to Maduro's words.
Maduro has previously slammed the US decree as a "colossal mistake" and "imperialist arrogance".
Comment: It's good to see another country standing up to US imperial bullying. The US has been trying to overthrow the Maduro government because it does not wish to be controlled by US imperialist demands. At some point the US should be held accountable for breaking international law.
© ReutersRiot police stormed the Bugun and Kanalturk TV building in Istanbul on 28 October, apparently because of its links to a rival of President Recep Erdogan
Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been accused of targeting pro-opposition media in a bid to stifle criticism of his government ahead of this weekend's parliamentary polls. Turkish police on 28 October stormed the Istanbul headquarters of the Koza-Ipek media group that has links to US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, a rival of Erdogan.
Dramatic footage of the incident appears to show riot police forcing their way through the metal gates of the compound using chainsaws, before forcing the Bugun and Kanalturk television stations off the air. An Ankara court had ordered the takeover of Koza-Ipek's 23 companies on 26 October after a court-appointed panel said it found financial irregularities.
A video believed to have been shot inside the offices of the Bugun newspaper shows a court-appointed trustee threatening, abusing and firing staff on the spot. It came after a leaked European Commission report, seen by Reuters, warned that Erdogan's government was becoming more authoritarian and that it was exerting undue political pressure on the judiciary.
Comment: The concerns of Turkish journalists are well founded indeed. See also:
Complicit Western media stay silent on the killings of journalists that are not an 'appendage' of U.S.-NATO
Western intel op? Press TV reporter killed after reporting that ISIS terrorists are entering Syria from Turkey as 'undercover NGO activists'
© Russian Defense Ministry
"As far as I know, ISIL' budget is close to $2 billion. However, Islamic State-controlled oil sales have declined significantly in recent weeks due to the Russian campaign in Syria," Nicolas Dhuicq said.
In over a month of operations requested by Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Russian General Staff said over 1,600 terrorist objects were destroyed in nearly 1,400 sorties in Syria. A total of 131 ammunition and fuel depots have been destroyed since September 30, it said.
Comment: Sounds like the US is trying to shift the blame for funding and supporting ISIL off of themselves and solely onto Saudi Arabia and Turkey via their vassal France. Not that Saudi Arabia and Turkey aren't complicit, but very interesting how a "former CIA official" lays the blame exclusively on Turkey while France blames Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
© Edward LozanskyEx-Soviet dissident and these days American dissident Ray McGovern (left), former senior CIA analyst, at the Russian-American forum in Moscow. September 2014. Both are RI contributors
Our interlocutor is a graduate of the Physics Department at Moscow State University. In 1970 he was sentenced to 6 years in a gulag prison for trying to cross the border using a false identity. He emigrated to the United States In 1979, where he soon became an influential proponent of the hawkish policies of the US Republican Presidents.
Не returned to Russia in 1998.
In an interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda editor-at-large and RI special correspondent Alexei Pankin he explains why he abandoned his extremely successful career in the United States and returned to an uncertainty back home.
He has been RI's guest columnist.
"I can't believe I was involved in all this"
Dmitry Mikheyev's life trajectory is very similar to the fate of many Soviet dissidents: from a romantic Komsomol member, to an ardent anti-communist, to disillusionment with the West. Yet, very few achieved such high positions on the "other side," only to break so abruptly with their anti-Soviet past.
We find ourselves sitting comfortably in a cozy apartment amongst a shabby block of flats in the city of Korolev, just outside of Moscow. My host, Dmitry Mikheyev, avidly shares his stories about how he fought with the Soviet regime. No, he did not struggle in the suburbs of Moscow, nor did he struggle in Moscow, passing banned books from hand to hand in the Soviet Union, printed on tissue paper. He fought from inside the elite Hudson Institute, which developed policies toward the Soviet Union for the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He fought them in the corridors of Washington D.C. In the margins of, as they say, various intelligence agencies of the United States of America.
Comment: Mr. Mikheyev may be too optimistic in his views of "American pragmatism". That would require a objective assessment of world events. The neocons are still caught up in their belief that they can create reality.
Comment: Be afraid. Be very afraid. There is little Bibi will not say or do - even if it contravenes basic and accepted black and white facts - in order to fulfill the grand plan for a 'Greater Israel' and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In a strange kind of a way however, his recent speech is very instructive; if there was ever any doubt in the minds of many that Netanyahu is willing to lie and demonize Palestinians in such horribly egregious ways, they should have no doubts now. Though, you never know. The Zionist programming runs so deep among so many that justifications and rationalizations may even be found to excuse this new falsehood.