History

Editordude: In honor of St Patrick’s Day, we publish the following piece just sent to us by Michael Steinberg, who went to Ireland a number of times during the 1980s. Happy Paddy’s Day!

By Michael Steinberg

In 1983, I was among a contingent of 82 Americans, including 7 San Diegans, who went on a fact finding tour of Northern Ireland.

What we found there was a vicious colonialism that rules through murder, lies and a concerted attempt at total social control. And a native people who exist under this everyday terror and resist it with extraordinary courage and grace.

I arrive a few days before the tour begins to explore the southern Republic a bit. I first visit the city of Limerick at the mouth of the River Shannon on the west coast. It was from here that my great-grandfather Cornelius Donahue emigrated sometime in the mid 19th century.

[Editor: Here are sites for San Diego’s Christmas Tree Re-cycling Program.]

In William Carlos Williams’s famous poem “Burning the Christmas Greens” he notes how at “the thick of the dark moment” in “winter’s midnight” we turn to the trees because “green is a solace” that we use to “fill our need.” Thus the “living green” along with “paper Christmas bells covered with tinfoil and fastened by red ribbons” seem “gentle and good to us.”

But then when their time is past we feel the relief as we clear our rooms and assign the greens to the fireplace and “in the jagged flames green to red, instant and alive.” And we stand “breathless to be witnesses as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.”

Today, November 22nd, is the 54th anniversary of the assassination of President John F Kennedy.

And for weeks now, the government has been releasing large batches of long-secret JFK assassination records – but it’s been mainly hype as the documents lack any substantive content and “at least two-thirds of the never-seen JFK files that were supposed to be released — some 2,538 records — remain secret”, states a report from AlterNet.

Here are the 3 Big Lies repeated by Matthews:

1. The Warren Commission was right.
2. Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy.
3. And Oswald did it alone.

Just the opposite is actually true.

By Bob Dorn / San Diego Free Press

Tough subjects seem always to end up with Greek or Latin roots. Alienation, bulimia, catastrophe, depression … just go through the alphabet and you’ll find them.

In our fragile democracies, maybe we assign concepts like these, wrestled over by so many psychoanalysts, social and clinical psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, writers for large daily newspapers — even some politicians — that they’ve become contorted and distorted to the point that they are merely suggestive, symbolic, abstracted from the particular.

Today – June 17th, 2017 – is indeed the 45th anniversary of the infamous Watergate break-in.

It was the night of June 17, 1972, that 5 so-called “burglars” were caught red-handed inside the National Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC.

But as it turned out, not only did the burglars have CIA and anti-Castro Cuban connections – they also – and most importantly – were being paid out of a slush fund from the Committee to Re-Elect President Nixon, which was managed by the highest officials inside the White House.

The burglary of the Democratic Party’s HQ was just the tip of the iceberg – but it was that tip that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation on August 8th, 1974.

The Story of the “October Surprise”and How the Republican Candidate Got Away with It

Originally published April 5, 2017
With all the scandals bursting around Trump and the White House these days, with FBI and Congressional investigations into possible crimes committed by the President’s men, many pundits and commentators are making obvious comparisons with Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal.

Yet, besides Watergate, there’s another very striking historical parallel in our not-to-distance past, and it’s another comparison that it would be good for us to review as well. If we turn the clock back thirty-six or so years, we would find another time and another American Presidential election, an election in which the Republican candidate colluded with a foreign government to manipulate the results of that election to defeat the Democratic candidate.