This Halloween season, there is no book I could recommend more highly than Silvia Federici's brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004), which tells the dark saga of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe for more than 200 years. In uncovering this forgotten history, Federici exposes the origins of capitalism in the heightened oppression of workers (represented by Shakespeare's character Caliban), and most strikingly, in the brutal subjugation of women. She also brings to light the enormous and colorful European peasant movements that fought against the injustices of their time, connecting their defeat to the imposition of a new patriarchal order that divided male from female workers. Today, as more and more people question the usefulness of a capitalist system that has thrown the world into crisis, Caliban and the Witch stands out as essential reading for unmasking the shocking violence and inequality that capitalism has relied upon from its very creation.

Who Were the Witches?

Parents putting a pointed hat on their young son or daughter before Trick-or-Treating might never pause to wonder this question, seeing witches as just another cartoonish Halloween icon like Frankenstein's monster or Dracula. But deep within our ritual lies a hidden history that can tell us important truths about our world, as the legacy of past events continues to affect us 500 years later. In this book, Silvia Federici takes us back in time to show how the mysterious figure of the witch is key to understanding the creation of capitalism, the profit-motivated economic system that now reigns over the entire planet.

The rescue of 33 miners in Chile is an extraordinary drama filled with pathos and heroism. It is also a media windfall for the Chilean government, whose every beneficence is recorded by a forest of cameras. One cannot fail to be impressed. However, like all great media events, it is a facade.

The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile and is the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Copper is Chile's gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile's privatized mines. The San Jose mine, where the trapped men work, became so unsafe in 2007 it had to be closed - but not for long. On 30 July last, a labor department report warned again of "serious safety deficiencies," but the minister took no action. Six days later, the men were entombed.

For all the media circus at the rescue site, contemporary Chile is a country of the unspoken. At the Villa Grimaldi, in the suburbs of the capital Santiago, a sign says: "The forgotten past is full of memory." This was the torture center where hundreds of people were murdered and disappeared for opposing the fascism that General Pinochet and his business allies brought to Chile. Its ghostly presence is overseen by the beauty of the Andes, and the man who unlocks the gate used to live nearby and remembers the screams.

I was taken there one wintry morning in 2006 by Sara De Witt, who was imprisoned as a student activist and now lives in London. She was electrocuted and beaten, yet survived. Later, we drove to the home of Salvador Allende, the great democrat and reformer who perished when Pinochet seized power on 11 September 1973 - Latin America's own 9/11. His house is a silent white building without a sign or a plaque.

Cenk Uygur of the online news show The Young Turks interviewed former Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura earlier this year. Their discussion about the hidden history of the US is one you will never hear on mainstream media. Watch it and find out why...

Since The Great Flood hit Pakistan in July ...

• Many millions have been displaced, evacuated, stranded or lost their homes; numerous roads, schools and health clinics destroyed
  
  
• Hundreds of villages washed away
  
  
• Millions of livestock have perished; for the rural poor something akin to a Western stock market crash that wipes out years of savings
  
  
• Countless farms decimated, including critical crops like corn; officials say the damage is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and it does not appear that Pakistan will recover within the next few years
  
  
• Infectious diseases are rising sharply
  
  
• Airplanes of the United States of America have flown over Pakistan and dropped bombs on dozens of occasions [1]

I direct these remarks to readers who have to deal with Americans who turn into a stone wall upon hearing the United States accused of acting immorally; America, they are convinced, means well; our motives are noble. And if we do do something that looks bad, and the badness can't easily be covered up or explained away ... well, great powers have always done things like that, we're no worse than the other great powers of history, and a lot better than most. God bless America.

A certain percentage of such people do change eventually and stop rationalizing; this happens usually after being confronted X-number of times with evidence of the less-than-beautiful behavior of their government around the world. The value of X of course varies with the individual; so don't give up trying to educate the hardened Americans you come in contact with. You never know when your enlightening them about a particular wickedness of their favorite country will be the straw that breaks their imperialist-loving back. (But remember the warning from Friedrich Schiller of Germany: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. - "With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain.")

With all the rumblings about 'Disclosure' going on all around, I can't help but wonder why those who are interested in this topic seem to be missing the biggest cover-up of all: cometary/asteroid disruptors/destroyers of history.

Destroying history means, of course, destroying large segments of the human population who pass history on to their offspring. When you find a blank spot in history, a discontinuity, you can pretty well figure out that something really awful must have happened.

I've recently been wading through the complete works of Anatoly Fomenko. Those of you who have read my book The Secret History of the World know that I referred to him and his theories, but this was based on the available articles about it in English at the time. I've now been gifted with volumes 1 through 4 of his 7 volume work, along with the images from the final three volumes which are still being translated. It's a real revelation.

Noam Chomsky explains the reality of Israel's actions to Canadian interviewer Evan Solomon.

The show is Hot Type on CBC

This is a documentary on 911. What makes this documentary different from others is that it is from home movies footage from various people who witnessed the event.

Part One:

In her book, Eichmann in Israel, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the "banality of evil." On wonders though, how banal was that evil? Among the defendants at Nuremberg were eight jurists, one university professor and one dentist. All of them were very well educated. It is important to know who they were and their specific functions within the Nazi government. A brief sketch of the principals and the sentence each received is presented below:

Hermann Goering

Goering was perhaps the most influential person, next to Hitler, in the Nazi organization. He was one of only 12 Nazis elected to the Reichstag in 1928. He orchestrated the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933 and, with Goebbel's assistance, used the fire as a propaganda tool against the communists. In the mid-1930's Goering was in charge of the Aryanization of Jewish property, a policy which extended to Jews throughout Europe following Anschluss. After the events of Kristallnacht, November 8 and 9, 1938, Goering (under instructions from Hitler) called a high-level meeting of the party, on November 12, to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it. Present at the meeting were Goering, Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Walter Funk and other ranking Nazi officials. The intent of this meeting was two-fold: to make the Jews responsible for Kristallnacht and to use the events of the preceding days as a rationale for promulgating a series of antisemitic laws which would, in effect, remove Jews from the German economy. (An interpretive transcript of this meeting is provided by Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, New York: Harper and Row, 1983:164-172):

Judgment at Nuremberg is a MUST SEE movie if you seek to understand what happened in Nazi Germany and what is happening now in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Made in 1961, Judgment at Nuremberg is a thinly fictionalized film account of the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials. It was written by Abby Mann and directed by Stanley Kramer. Starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, Werner Klemperer, William Shatner and Montgomery Clift.

The Warsaw Uprising began on August 1st of 1944. The Polish Home Army, numbering about 40,000 Polish patriots, having been promised assistance from the Allies, engaged the German troops in the streets. The Nazis then sent eight divisions to battle the Poles. The help never came and some historians suspect that this was a deliberate set-up. Way more Poles and Russians were murdered during WW II than Jews. Jews actually constituted only 10% of the death toll, if you take their numbers at face value. Some don't, but I am not inclined to dispute them since we know that many Jews were involved in the Holocaust Industry. Just read Hannah Arendt; she was there and reported on it to the great dismay of the Zionists.