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Russia and NATO Tried to Wage War on the Cheap in Ukraine, But Could Now be Heading for Total War

The risk is that endless wars have a natural tendency to escalate as opponents try new strategies and tactics to break the deadlock and defeat their enemy. Vicious and destructive though the war in Ukraine has been so far, it is a long way from “total war”, a phrase that became popular to describe the situation in the Second World War as each side used every resource to destroy their opponent. More

Class Warfare Grinds On

The business of America is said to be business. But that is not the business of America’s tens of millions of workers. Their business is getting paid fairly and not working 100 hours per week. Their business is having an occasional day off and paid sick leave. Their business is getting treated decently on the job. And when these things don’t happen, the business of the many millions of blue collar and part-time workers is to strike. Lately they’ve done quite a bit of that. More

Queen Elizabeth II and the Weight of History

To date, Britain has largely been successful in sugar coating its colonial crimes with jingoism, propaganda and patriotism. With its developed university and media infrastructure and schools of history associated with Oxbridge traditions, Britain had been able to represent colonialism and imperial building as emanating from a ‘high moral purpose’  where Britain carried out “progressive constitutional freedoms and the rule of law, along with free trade and free labor, among the less fortunate barbarians.” More

The Bomb That Cracked an Island

In 1965, the Long Shot test exploded an 80 kiloton bomb. The $10 million test, the first one supervised by the Pentagon and not the AEC, was really a trial run for bigger things to come. But small as it was, there were immediate problems. Despite claims by the Pentagon that the test site would not leak, radioactive tritium and krypton-85 began to seep into freshwater lakes almost instantly. But evidence of radioactivity, collected by Defense Department scientists only three months after the test, was kept secret for five years. More