Ron Jacobs

1 week ago | counterpunch.org | Ron Jacobs

As they often did, the headlines in the New York Times brought more bad news the morning of September 12, 1973: “Allende Out, Reported Suicide. Marxist Regime in Chile Falls in Armed Forces Violent Coup.” I read the article while waiting for my professor to appear in the Fordham University classroom where my Political Science class was held. The coup leader and new president of Chile was a military officer named Augusto Pinochet.

2 weeks ago | counterpunch.org | Ron Jacobs

Spanish antifascist Mercedes Núñez Targa’s memoir Bearing Witness: Prison Stories from a Woman’s Fight Against Fascism is a powerful and passionate read. Although essentially bereft of beauty because of the topic of its content, the book was recently released in English by Pluto Press. It was first published in fascist Spain by Ebro, the publishing house of the Spanish communist party in 1967. Targa died in 1986 and remained a lifelong fighter against fascism.

3 weeks ago | counterpunch.org | Ron Jacobs

If there’s one truth about the nuclear power industry, it would be that it is persistent. Despite the fact that nuclear power has been drastically curtailed in a few countries and is being rejected for economic and other reasons in many others, the industry continues to push its product as if it had never been the pariah it should be. Like an annoying mosquito, it buzzes in and out of the body politic, just waiting for an exposed place to suck blood from that body.

4 weeks ago | counterpunch.org | Ron Jacobs

I’ve never really understood the psychology of nationalism. Even when I was in elementary school and we were supposed to pledge our allegiance to “the flag and the country (USA) for which it stands” I was skeptical. What exactly did this pledge entail, I wondered as my classmates and I stood with our hands over our hearts, repeating words most of my classmates gave little thought to.

4 weeks ago | counterpunch.org | Ron Jacobs

As residents of a Vermont town that recently passed the AFSC Apartheid-Free Communities pledge, we write today to ask our Vermont state and federal representatives to stop collaborating with the weapons industry made up of corporations like GlobalFoundries, General Dynamics, and Israel’s Elbit Systems that, besides building deadly weapons, have been exposed as causing severe harm to our pristine Vermont environment.