“This book examines how the United States constructs a repressive military apparatus, in a region long considered by many to be its “back-yard,” through the lens of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA). The School of the Americas is a U.S. Army centre for Latin American militaries that, since its establishment in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946, has trained over sixty thousand soldiers in combat-related skills and counter-insurgency doctrine. It has been at the centre of an intense public controversy over the last decade, because of the participation of some of its alumni in human rights atrocities. Some of the most notorious graduates include Argentine General Roberto Viola who was convicted of murder, kidnapping, and torture during Argentina’s “dirty war” (1976-2983); former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega; Salvadoran Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, who commanded the brutal Atlacatl Battalion that massacred nearly one thousand civilians in El Mozote; Guatemalan Colonel Julio Alpirez, who tortured and murdered guerrillas and a U.S. citizen while on the CIA’s payroll; and Honduran General Luis Alonso Discua, who commanded an army death squad known as Battalion 3-16.”

“When the Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, said “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, he could of been describing the situation we are facing today. Socialists and anti-imperialists therefore have an obligation to find common cause help the new to be born and reverse the morbid symptoms we are already witnessing., like the rise of the far right.”

“It was a line of thinking that came directly from Zuckerberg. In Facebook’s earliest days, when their office was still a glorified loft space, “Company over country” was a mantra the CEO repeated to his employees. His earliest speechwriter, Kate Losse, wrote that Zuckerberg felt that the company had more potential to change history than any country – with 1.7 billion users, it was now in reality already larger than any single nation. In that worldview, it made sense to protect the company at all costs. Whatever was best for Facebook, whatever continued the company’s astronomic growth, user engagement, and market dominance, was the clear course forward.”

And you think you got it bad? A 19-strong consortium of female journalists (sahafiya) spanning Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Morocco, Syria, Yemen Iraq & more deliver their powerful & widely-straying accounts from events in the region.

“Why, and under what legal provision, was there a hearing in private to discuss the sealing of the wills? Why was seemingly no formal record of this hearing made public? Most of all, what does it say about our democratic and legal safeguards if a judge can subvert the law relating to the openness of wills by issuing a ‘practice direction’ to help the royal family, and then keep it secret that this has occurred?”

Hidden away, in an ivory laboratory fashioned from the drek of privilege, & other incestuous aberrations of unearned advantage, runts & fuck-ups that would otherwise struggle in life’s natural currents find a way to cheat the deck.

“After growing up alien in a black-and-white world, we founded the home/land we never had and gave birth to ourselves as Asian Americans – a political identity based in the alternative universe of the Third World. As part of the worldwide revolution, we said puckyooo to racism, to imperialism, to assimilation, to white standards, to a failed democracy [America], to our own internalized boundaries and barriers, to everything that had kept us distanced from out sovereignty of our communal selves. And with this new voice we created a new world. With the power of new conciseness and new language, and ample doses of audacity and naivety, we created a new sense of community and culture with few resources and no experience – because until then we had nothing to lose.”

“The Libertarian fantasy of private companies usurping governments, is, I’m afraid, becoming a reality.“