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John Wightis the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir --Dreams That Die -- published by Zero Books. He's also written five novels, which are available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1
SHARE Thursday, May 7, 2020 COVID-19: Donald Trump's Caligula Moment
John Wight sizes up the tragedy and farce embodied by the U.S. president and notes that Britain has its own problems with leadership by disordered minds.
SHARE Saturday, April 13, 2019 We are all Julian Assange
the arrest and removal of Julian Assange brings an end to seven long, soul-destroying years of confinement in one small room of the tiny embassy. This has now brought into view the grim prospect of his extradition to the US and his disappearance into the void of the American prison system, which is notoriously cruel and callous.
(11 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 4, 2018 No More Mr. Nice Guy: Putin Unveils Next Gen Russian Nukes
The defiance with which Putin revealed the country's new and enhanced missile technology was unmistakable. It was perhaps illustrative of the years of broken promises, bad faith, duplicity and encroaching and enveloping military pressure exerted by the US and its allies against the Russian Federation. For Russia, it is now a case of meeting might with might.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 18, 2018 Military Conflict Between East and West Has Never Been Closer
In Donald Trump, a man for whom subtlety is an alien concept, we have ourselves a US president who cannot seem to make up his mind whether he is a recurring character in the Sopranos or the elected leader of the world largest economy and nuclear power. With his presidency, the sheer reckless, aggressive and capricious character of it, the time has come to pose the question: Who will save us from America?
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 23, 2018 Trump Administration's New Defense Strategy: Cold War Redux
19 January 2018 will go down in history as the date of Washington's declaration of a new Cold War, delivered by Defense Secretary James Mattis in the course of a speech he gave at John Hopkins University, marking a new low in US foreign policy.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 9, 2018 Iran's Real Crime: It Won't Bow
That Iran is not a free country is self-evident. How could it possibly be free when it exists in the crosshairs of US imperialism? The only reason, the single reason that Iran is being depicted as a "terrorist state" in which human rights are non-existent, is because under its current government it refuses to bow to Washington or its vassals in western Europe and the region itself.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 3, 2018 Britain's Dirty War in Ireland, Revisited
Charles Haughey was a strong supporter of a united Ireland and as such enjoyed a testy relationship with his UK counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, who took a notoriously hard-line stance against Irish republicanism, most infamously with her refusal to countenance any compromise during the 1981 hunger strike by republican prisoners in the Maze Prison just outside Belfast.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, November 27, 2017 Libya "Chose" Freedom, Now It Has Slavery
Washington and Europe have never been a source of stability in the Middle East or North Africa. On the contrary, their presence and double dealing has only ever brought the people of this part of the world unremitting suffering and despair.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 11, 2017 Fear of Corbyn: How Theresa May Clings to Power
Jeremy Corbyn is the British establishment's worst nightmare and the primary reason Theresa May has not yet been kicked to the curb, risking in the process an early general election which Corbyn would almost certainly win at this point.
SHARE Wednesday, November 1, 2017 Catalan Independence Flounders on the Rocks of Reality
Instead of burying the corpse of neoliberalism, as they should have, political elites have for purely ideological reasons extended themselves in trying to breathe life back into it with the imposition of austerity programs that have sown even more misery and dislocation in the lives of millions of their own citizens. Thus, they are authors of their own demise.
SHARE Wednesday, October 18, 2017 Weinstein as Symptom: Notes From Hollywood
Lost in what has now become a feeding frenzy of condemnation -- to the point where it is hard to escape the whiff of opportunism on the part of those who've jumped on a bandwagon that has reached warp speed -- is that Weinstein's contemptible abuse of women, far from the exception or an aberration has long been the norm in Tinsel Town.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 11, 2017 We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us
The question is not over the rights or wrongs of the Second Amendment; the question is the culture of violence married to the near total lack of social cohesion that pervades in a country suffocating under the weight of its own nauseating hypocrisy. We have met the enemy and he is us.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 2, 2017 Order Prevails in Barcelona as Democracy Dies in Madrid
Regardless of the whys and wherefores of constitutional legality, does the Rajoy government in Madrid really believe that the sight of armed riot police attacking civilians outside polling stations in order to stop them casting a vote is one that will enhance its reputation and democratic credentials in the eyes of the world?
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, September 29, 2017 Labour Party Conference and the Great Antisemitism Stitch-Up
Defense of the apartheid State of Israel cannot possibly be supported on moral, legal, or ethical grounds. To not only defend this system of injustice but also attempt to smear those who dare raise their voices against the brutal oppression endured by the Palestinians, this is a species of mendacity for which history will not be kind.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 21, 2017 Trump at the UN: Nuremberg Redux
The time for equivocation and satire where Donald Trump is concerned has passed. If the current US President's address to the 72nd UN General Assembly in New York confirms anything, it is that satire must now give way to a sober and serious appreciation of the clear and present danger his administration poses to the world.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 16, 2017 No Inquiry Needed: Grenfell Tower Fire Was a Crime
At the heart of this issue are the questions of class and inequality that have long blighted British society. Their most grievous symptoms in 2017 are food banks, benefit sanctions, the welfare cap, homelessness, the housing crisis, and as Grenfell attests to, substandard housing.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 26, 2017 Colin Kaepernick and the NFL: Man vs Machine
In failing to conform to the received truths that continue to feed the mythology of a nation drowning in cant and hypocrisy, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has found himself on the receiving end of its wrath. His decision to refuse to stand for the national anthem before an NFL pre-season game last season, in protest at racial injustice, has seen him shut out of the sport this season, with no club willing to sign him.
SHARE Wednesday, August 16, 2017 Charlottesville: Outrage, Hypocrisy and Obama's Betrayal
Even though Obama spent his two terms in the White House going out of his way to cloak the snarling beast of US exceptionalism and its white supremacist roots in the garb of democracy, he was not embraced by those who prefer their coffee white. Here it is impossible to avoid the fact that Trump's election was in large part a reaction to Obama's race as much as it was to his policies.
(12 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 15, 2017 Charlottesville, White Supremacy, and Why the US Civil War Never Ended
Let us not mince words. If ever a cause was unworthy, that cause was the US Confederacy. If ever a cause was righteously defeated in battle, it was the cause of the US Confederacy. And if ever a flag was -- and is -- an insult to human decency and dignity, it is the Confederate flag. If ever a society was crying out for the aggressive assertion of human rights, racial equality, and justice, it is the United States.