It’s the first time G. W. Bush actually made sense on the effects of US policy in Iraq. In a speech to the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, Bush likened Iraq’s US-imposed “democracy” to the founding of the United States. In effect, he said that violent upheaval, civil war, centuries of injustice and struggle, are all part and parcel of the establishment of normal democracies.

[In the US,] the eight years from the end of the Revolutionary …

I always ask the question: Can a black man in America receive justice? I can say to you or anybody else that the answer is absolutely no. -Stanley Tookie Williams

Speaking of his time as a gang member, Stanley Tookie Williams said, “My courage was predicated on violence, on a negative reputation…, on ignorance.”^[1] Now Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, who has …

by Justin Podur and Sonali Kolhatkar; Briarpatch; December 05, 2005

ON JULY 11, 2005, WITH great nuance and tact, Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff General Hillier described the forces arrayed against the NATO mission in Afghanistan: “These are detestable murderers and scumbags, I’ll tell you that right up front. They detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties.”

This was not Canadian officialdom’s typical line on operations abroad. Canada’s Haiti mission, for example, is framed in terms of …