American priorities

By Dilip -

 


Andrew Bacevich: High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century

Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death

Lucian Truscott: Trump wants to end the forever wars - except the one about oil and money

Alfred McCoy: The crumbling delusion of Washington's endless world dominion

William Astore: The U.S. Military’s Lost Wars // Chris Hedges: The American Empire Will Collapse Within a Decade, Two at Most


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The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

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'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certai...
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