Joy Harjo: An Old, Old Story

Photo by Molly

Our words matter. True leadership knows this and uses words to empower and bring people together.

I will be seventy-five next month and never thought I would hear the unhinged and dangerous rhetoric spewing from so-called leadership. In Mvskoke culture (considered one of the world's oldest democracies) anyone endangering the community by their words and actions was banished.

When I am in the middle of a challenge, like walking the New Jersey Turnpike at two in the morning to find a hotel, I tell myself, this will one day make a good story. What a story we're in. I keep thinking that one day we will tell what a terrible story we lived through, but we made it out of the destruction together. And how we set up safeguards so no dictator could rise up from greed and hatefulness. And how everyone in the community came together and reinstated educational, economic, and cultural institutions that reinvigorated the people (and by people, all living ones). ...sounds like an old, old story...

— Joy Harjo

https://www.joyharjo.com/

Pema Chödrön: Something to Reflect Upon Everyday

Photo by Molly

Something to Reflect 

Upon Everyday

Every day we think about the aggression 

in the world. Everybody always strikes out at 

the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. 

We could reflect on this and ask ourselves, 

"Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?" 

Everyday we can ask ourselves, 

"Am I going to practice peace, 

or am I going to war?"

If one wishes for suffering not to happen

to the people and the Earth, 

it begins with a kind heart.

— Pema Chödrön

https://pemachodronfoundation.org/

Chris Hedges: Why the Ceasefire is Doomed

For decades Chris Hedges has been spot on in his assessments, predictions, warnings, and expertise in understanding the shadow side of our nation, the wealthy and greed soaked individual and corporate interests embedded in both major political parties and the mainstream American media, and the imperialism, Christian nationalism, and white supremacy embodied in the systems of power dominating the policies and practices of the United States. When Chris speaks, I listen. As, I believe, should we all. — Molly

Rescue team works at a damaged building in the Barbour neighborhood of Beirut, Lebanon, on April 8, 2026, after an Israeli strike. Rescuers at the scene said at least six people were killed and others remained missing. (Photo by Nael Chahine / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)

By Chris Hedges

It is highly unlikely, unfortunately, that the ceasefire agreement brokered by Pakistan will endure. This is due to two principal impediments.

First, Israel is adamantly opposed to a cessation of the bombing of Iran’s infrastructure. This bombing campaign is part of the Israeli effort to turn Iran into a failed state. Israel has the ability to sabotage the agreement. Indeed, Israel is already doing so by refusing to halt its attacks on Lebanon.

Secondly, the minimal demands being made by Iran remain unacceptable to the U.S. and Israel. The demands will only be achieved by creating more pressure, which Iran can generate by continuing to block oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and targeting vital infrastructure in the region.

Iran is demanding a permanent and formalized end to hostilities, control of the Strait of Hormuz, an end to Israeli attacks in Lebanon, a withdrawal of U.S. military bases in the region, reparations for war damage, the right to carry out nuclear enrichment and the lifting of all sanctions on Iran.

I don’t see Iran backing down on these demands, especially as it has the ability to force the U.S. through prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz to concede. This means more war and a strangulation of the global economy.

This is Iran’s war to win. And the Iranian regime knows it.

Please go here for the original article: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/why-the-ceasefire-is-doomed

* * *

Chris Hedges is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister. In his early career, Hedges worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, and The Dallas Morning News. Hedges reported for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005,^[1] and served as the Times Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In 2001, Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. Hedges produced a weekly column for Truthdig for 14 years until the outlet's hiatus in 2020. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007); Death of the Liberal Class (2010); and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), written with cartoonist Joe Sacco. Hedges writes a weekly column at Scheerpost and hosts the program The Chris Hedges Report.

I highly recommend the work of Chris Hedges to everyone.

EXCELLENT — Timothy Snyder: The President Speaks Genocide

This is an excellent and vitally important 

article by historian Timothy Snyder. 

— Molly

The words, the law, the future

By Timothy Snyder

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

These are not the words of Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or Assad, or Putin. These are the words of the president of the United States, today.

Do not be distracted by circumstances. Of course there are emotions, personalities, politics, a war. None of this excuses that sentence. The reason we have a notion of genocide, and a convention on genocide, is to define certain actions as always and definitively wrong.

Are these “only words”? No, they cannot be “only words.” As any historian of mass atrocity knows, there is no such thing as “only words.” The notion of killing a whole civilization, once spoken, remains. It enables others to say similar things, as when another elected representative compared the entire country of Iran to a cancer that had to be removed.

Whatever happens tonight, the president, by saying such things, has already changed the world for the worse, and made acts of mass violence more likely. If we are Americans, he has also changed our country. He has changed us, because he represents us; we voted for him, or we didn’t vote and allowed him to come to power, or we didn’t do enough to stop him. These words are America’s words, until and unless Americans reject them.

Yes, there have been other genocides, and there are other politicians who endorse genocide. That makes the words of the president worse, not better. Yes, the United States has undertaken atrocities before. That makes it all the more important, all the more urgent, that we catch ourselves now. Neither the evil nor the good in our history determines who we are. It is what we do now.

If we do not say something ourselves about this horror, we allow ourselves to be changed.

Around the president there will be people, sadly, who work deliberately to normalize the language of genocide. There will be other politicians who find the right words to reject it. One can hope that there will be politicians who find the courage to remove the man who speaks genocide from office. And these words should lead to resignations by everyone who works closely with the president.

But we cannot count on politicians. This is ultimately up to us, the citizens: for our own sake, for the sake of the future of the country, for the sake of a possibility of new beginnings, we need to say something, to someone else, to ourselves: this is simply wrong.

Whatever happens tonight, or any other night in this war, is now legally defined by the president’s statement. In the practical application of the law of genocide, the Genocide Convention of 1948, the difficulty is usually in proving “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Henceforth the intent is on the record, in the published words of the president of the United States and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces about the death of “a whole civilization.”

Article III of the Genocide Convention makes it clear that not only the person who issues the genocidal order is guilty. Genocide itself is of course a crime, where genocide means the intent that Trump expressed, and actions such as killing members of a group, causing members of a group serious harm, or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” -- which would of course include actions such as destroying access to energy or water. But also defined as a crime are conspiracy to commit genocide, incitement to commit genocide, attempts to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide.

We all have good ethical and political reasons to reject the president’s words. But those who serve in government, and in the armed forces, have been placed under the legal shadow of genocide by what Trump wrote. To bomb a bridge or a dam or a power plant or a desalinization facility, very likely a war crime in any event, could very well have a different legal significance, a genocidal one, if it takes place after the expression of genocidal intent by the commander and head of state.

The concept of genocide was created by a survivor and an observer of atrocities, Rafał Lemkin, so that we could see ourselves, judge ourselves, stop ourselves. But genocide is not only a concept. It is also a crime under international law, signed by the United States in 1948 as a convention, ratified by the United States as a treaty in 1988. That makes the words I have quoted here the law of the land.

The president speaks genocide. And so we too must speak. Not only about crimes, but about their legal punishment.

Please go here for the original article: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-president-speaks-genocide

EXCELLENT — Cristina Breshears: There Is No Such Thing As "An Entire Civilization" Ending In a Night

 Tears. Excellent. And so rich and deep and wise. 

Thank you, as always, Cristina Breshears.

🙏💜 Molly

There is no such thing as “an entire civilization” ending in a night. It is not possible no matter what hyperbolic terroristic threats he may spew.

Certainly not the civilization that began along the rivers of ancient Persia, where mathematicians first gave shape to the unknown and called it algebra. Not the one where Al-Khwarizmi translated the language of numbers into something the world still speaks today. Not the one where Avicenna mapped the human body with a precision that would guide medicine for centuries.

A civilization like Iran does not live in buildings alone, nor in governments, nor in the fragile machinery of any one regime. It lives in poems whispered across generations. In the breath between lines of Rumi, where longing becomes a form of knowing. In the verses of Hafez, where love and defiance intertwine like vines that refuse to be uprooted.

It lives in language. In memory. In the quiet, daily acts of continuity: parents teaching children, scientists experimenting in small labs, artists shaping meaning out of chaos. It lives in resilience.

Empires have risen and fallen across that land for millennia. Conquests have come and gone. Borders have been drawn and redrawn by men convinced they were writing final chapters. And yet, the civilization remained ... not unchanged, but unextinguished.

Because a civilization is not a target. It is an inheritance carried in millions of living bodies. To speak of its destruction so casually is to mistake power for permanence. To believe that force can erase what time itself has failed to undo.

Iran is not a moment. It is a continuum -- with organized urban settlements dating back to 4000 BC and early state formations around 3200 BC. And what has endured for thousands of years cannot be so easily spoken out of existence in a single night.

He is the president of the country I live in. But he is not the measure of my values. There’s a difference between belonging to a country and agreeing with what it does. I can’t say “not in my name” because what happens next will be done in every American's name. But I can say: not in my heart, not in my spirit, and never without resistance.

The only people who can hold this country accountable are the ones who live here. Whatever comes next, it will be up to us to answer for it.

— Cristina Breshears

Faisal R. Khan: This Will Be the Turning Point In American History

This is so extraordinarily insane. What’s unspeakably horrifying is that this president cannot experience being a “loser.” He is consequently compelled to “win” at all costs — even if it means destroying Iran and the world in the process. He is so profoundly mentally ill and his malignant narcissism is now coupled with dementia — an incredibly deadly combination.

That said, my friend Faisal is right. This psychopath is surrounded by pathological enablers who are themselves rooted in extreme ignorance, greed, hatred, and delusion. And, absolutely true, this is also not about one man. There are systemic imperialist pathologies that have followed and plagued and been embedded in our nation since its earliest days of colonialism, slavery, and the genocide of Indigenous Peoples. It is so far past time for us to reckon with the shadow side of America and engage in the deep work of facing, owning, healing, and transforming that which has needed our attention for so very, very long.

Today my heart breaks for all of the victims of this profoundly tragic and terrifying madness. And given our interconnectedness with all beings, my heart breaks for all of life on Earth. — Molly

By Faisal R. Khan

This will be the turning point in American history

It will be seen as a major turning point, and the collapse of neoliberal hypocrisy and MAGA ideology and its complicity in war crimes and genocide. The United States just bombed Kharg Island. The U.S. president is now using rhetoric that suggests the annihilation of a 5,000-year-old civilization.

There are no words left only barbarism, cruelty, and savagery. And it is not happening in isolation. It is unfolding alongside Israel. Only God knows what comes next. But history will record this moment as a defining moment for the United States.

Let’s be clear: this is not about one man. Congress, the Senate, and the judiciary all bear responsibility in one way or another. This does not mean every individual citizen but in a system “for the people, by the people,” government actions reflect collective representation, whether we accept it or not. The shameful reality is that many Americans remain silent.

The United States has now struck Kharg Island again reportedly targeting dozens of military sites, a critical hub that exports around 90% of Iran’s crude oil. And the president’s statement is not just unhinged, it is dangerous, invoking threats that would violate international law and amount to catastrophic human consequences, continuing patterns we have already seen in Gaza and Lebanon.

This is a very sad and consequential moment.

Iranians Form Human Chains at Power Plants, Bridges

Quoting my friend Cristina Breshears: There is something deeply human, even heroic, about refusing objectification.

It’s one thing to bomb “infrastructure.” It’s another to bomb a bridge filled with people who have chosen to stand there, together, refusing to let their lives be reduced to targets. When people gather, when they stand on a bridge shoulder to shoulder, they collapse that distance. They reinsert the flesh and blood body into the equation. They make it impossible, or at least much harder, to pretend that destruction is clean or contained.

Bombing bridges and power plants kills people. And the Iranian people are making that plain. It is the difference between abstraction and embodiment. A human chain makes the cost visible. It makes distance impossible.

Residents gather in front of a coal-fired power plant in Kazerun, Iran, forming a 'human chain'. Photo by Fars News Agency

Civilians guard infrastructure ahead of U.S. deadline to avoid strikes

By Jeong Chae-bin

Ahead of the final deadline for the agreement proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump, Iranian civilians gathered at power plants and bridges to form a "human chain," according to Iranian local media.

This followed President Trump’s warning that the U.S. would completely destroy power plants and bridges if negotiations with Iran failed, prompting Iranian authorities to urge citizens to form human chains to resist potential strikes.

On the 7th (local time), Iranian media outlets such as Fars News Agency and Tasnim News Agency reported that citizens had gathered at key locations, including the thermal power plant in Tabriz (northwest Iran), Bisotun in Kermanshah Province (west), Mazandaran (north), and the Shahid Rajaei Thermal Power Plant—the largest in Iran—located in Qazvin Province (northwest). They were reportedly guarding the facilities.

Photos and videos showed Iranian citizens holding national flags and signs reading, "Attacking power facilities is a war crime," forming a ring around the sites. Some were seen holding hands.

Fars News Agency also reported residents gathering in front of a thermal power plant in Kazerun, southern Iran. The footage showed adults and children standing around the facility. The agency stated, "(They) gathered in front of the power plant to condemn attacks on public infrastructure, defining them as clear war crimes."

In addition to power plants, hundreds formed human chains at bridges in Dehloran and Ahvaz, Khuzestan Province (southwest Iran).

Earlier, President Trump had declared that if the Strait of Hormuz was not opened by 8 p.m. on the 7th (U.S. Eastern Time), the U.S. would bomb all of Iran’s power plants and bridges.

In response, Ali Reza Rahimi, Iran’s Minister of Youth and Sports, called via state media on the 6th, "I invite all our youth, athletes, artists, students, university students, and professors. Regardless of belief or political inclination, please gather at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, the 7th, around power plants, which are our national assets and the future of Iran and its youth." He described it as a "human chain of Iranian youth for a bright tomorrow," adding, "This will be a sign of the youth’s dedication to protecting Iran’s infrastructure and building a bright future."

With less than a day remaining before the negotiation deadline, reports emerged that bridges and railways across Iran were under airstrikes. Iranian Mehr News Agency cited the deputy governor of Isfahan Province on the 7th, stating, "The U.S. and Israel attacked the Yahyaabad Railway Bridge in Kushan, killing 2 civilians and injuring 3."

A projectile also hit the Tabriz-Tehran Highway, located 90 km north of Tabriz in East Azerbaijan Province, halting traffic. Additionally, bridges on the outskirts of Golpayegan (central Iran), railways in Qazvin (north), and Karaj (west of Tehran) were reportedly bombed. Power outages occurred in parts of Karaj and Pardis due to airstrikes, and all railway operations were suspended in Mashhad (northeast) following air raid warnings.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.chosun.com/english/world-en/2026/04/08/W6GHV5LA7ZD7JHF4SHP6DRUTSI/

Doctor Raises Alarm Over Trump Dementia

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Jermaine Fowler: But Would Kamala Have Been Better?

This is an excellent piece. In answering the question — yes. The primary reason is that Kamala is not a malignant narcissist. And that is where there is a substantial difference between Trump and Harris. But that's where the "being better" stops. Without a doubt, she is aligned with imperialism. And Kamala Harris would not have been acting to stop the U.S. government's funding of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. So it depends on who a Harris presidency would be better for — certainly not for the Palestinian people. And she would have remained aligned with the neoliberal capitalist forces which have long taken over nearly all of the Democratic Party. As is true for other neoliberals, Kamala would have continued to serve the donor class connected with the military industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street and the big banks, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the prison industrial complex and animal agricultural industries, AIPAC and Israel, and on and on. She would not have prioritized the needs of We the People and the planet over the longstanding status quo which for decades and under both major political parties has had us all on a suicidal trajectory. Kamala Harris would have slowed down the madness of this death spiral that we've been on under the current fascist regime, and she would not be throwing kerosene on the fire that Trump and Project 2025 are. And the trajectory would have remained the same. Would she have been better? Yes. That said, this incredibly low bar that must not be normalized when the cost to all of life on Earth is imperiled. — Molly

By Jermaine Fowler

Millions read it and checked again. Some thought it was AI. Some thought he had been hacked.

It was real.

“Open the F**king Strait, you crazy ba**ards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Easter Sunday. The president of the United States.

35%.

That is the share of Americans who approve of military action in Iran. Not a fringe. Not nothing. Thirty-five percent of a nation of 340 million people, which is a great number of people to still be standing in that figure after everything the ledger contains.

At least thirteen Americans dead in a war that began on a timeline Israel set and America funded. On the first day of that war, a missile struck a girls’ primary school in Minab, Iran. A hundred and ten children between seven and twelve years old. Since that morning, the Center on Conscience and War has recorded a 1,000% increase in active service members seeking conscientious objector status — across every branch, pilots and officers included. These are not people afraid of dying. Every one of them has said so. They believe the war is wrong. The school was the moment they could no longer stay silent.

The gas above $4 and climbing — not because of the market, because of the Strait, because of the war, because of the choice — and every Sunday since. The stock market falling as the trade war and the shooting war pull at the same thread. Grocery prices rising as the thread frays: food costs nearly 25% more than five years ago, the war pulling, the tariffs pulling, both running out of thread. Four million Americans losing food assistance this year under the largest cut to food aid in American history: veterans, parents of teenagers, people in their late fifties who cannot find work, the work requirements written into a bill that paid for tax cuts with the grocery money of people who had none. Healthcare premiums that doubled, in some cases tripled. A woman in Fresno canceled her insulin the same week her husband’s food stamps ran out. ICE still moving through neighborhoods before dawn, pulling people from homes, separating families — the apparatus of enforcement never pausing, never short of funds, never overwhelmed.

A $250 million ballroom going up in the White House. A monument to himself planned across from the Lincoln Memorial. On a website, a tumbler for sale. The copy reads: we would’ve made it with salvaged steel from Iranian naval ships, but they’re at the bottom of the sea.

Tariffs that raised the price of everything a family touches. DOGE, which promised $2 trillion in savings and left chaos. A foreign president captured and held. The Strait still closed — the deadline extended once, then again, then a third time, each extension arriving not as relief but as more weight: more days of $4 gas, more days of the market falling, the grocery bill climbing with it. On the other side of the Strait, Iran is striking power grids and oil infrastructure across the Gulf, hitting back at what America hit first.

Bridges. Power plants. Civilian water supply lines.

Trump has threatened Iran’s desalination plants.

The water. He threatened the water.

The world was already behaving wrong before Easter Sunday. The post made enough people look up.

In Crystal Lake, Illinois, the Trump Truth Store has closed. Owner Lisa Fleischmann said sales were dead from the moment the war began. Her customers are afraid to wear it now — afraid someone will come up and ask questions. The store carried ICE ICE baby shirts. DOGE caps. Gulf of America merchandise. Now the lights are off and the door is locked.

And still. 35%.

Still Here

At least three ways to hold that number.

The first belongs to the one buying the tumbler. The one typing blow it all up. The one who sees brown people, Muslim people, the enemy — and feels nothing when the school burns and something close to satisfaction when the ships sink. The weight of the ledger does not reach this person. It cannot. The weight has been converted into fuel. It burns clean and hot. Requires nothing from the one who tends it.

The second carries the full ledger and feels it. Runs every item without flinching — the way a person runs a hand along a wall in the dark, feeling each crack, each gap, each place the plaster gave. The tariffs. DOGE. Maduro. Netanyahu. The war. The school. The gas. The food. The healthcare already gone. Feels every crack. Measures every gap. And then, after the wall has been mapped end to end in the dark, the hand pulls back and arrives at: Do you really think Kamala Harris would be doing better? Yes, he’s a clown sometimes. But nobody will convince me he wasn’t the better option.

The list is complete. Its conclusion withheld. And still the hand pulls back from what it touched. The thing in the dark stays unnamed.

The third is the one who stopped coming into the store. Confirmed it was real — not AI, not hacked, him — and still does not know what to do with it. Is not defending. Is not condemning. Is afraid someone will ask questions. The quiet has become the answer.

Three postures. One number. Beneath all three, the same conclusion, reached and unspoken, because speaking it would mean looking directly at what was chosen, at what it cost, at who has always carried it.

Who It Was For

America has always known how to feel nothing. An old skill. It was practiced when Japanese American families were loaded into internment camps while their neighbors watched from porches and said nothing. It was practiced when the bombs came down on Black Wall Street in 1921, when a prosperous Black neighborhood was bombed from the air and burned to ash. It was practiced through the Chinese Exclusion Act, through the Bracero workers who built the fields and were deported when the harvest was done, through forty years of Tuskegee, through every decade of militarized police moving through neighborhoods that never belonged to the people who ordered it.

The country learned to feel nothing by learning to feel it selectively. By deciding, long before any of this happened, whose suffering required a witness and whose did not. Not in a single moment. In ten thousand small agreements made across generations: that certain people’s pain was a fact of life and certain other people’s pain was a crisis. That certain violence was order and certain other violence was chaos. That the aim mattered. That as long as the suffering moved in the right direction, toward the right people, the floor would hold.

The Muslim ban held. Raids on Hispanic families held. Children separated at the border — held. ICE moving through neighborhoods before dawn, the apparatus of enforcement running clean through the shutdown and the war and all of it, never pausing, never short of funds — that held. Through all of it, the 35% held. They had been practicing their whole lives. They had inherited it from people who had been at it longer.

Then a president typed “Praise Allah” on Easter Sunday and some of them checked their phones twice. Not because the contempt was new. The contempt is as old as the country. Because the aim felt uncertain. Because for one moment the violence seemed to curl back toward the hand holding it, and people who had built their safety around where the suffering aimed suddenly could not feel the floor.

The Trump Truth Store closed because owner Lisa Fleischmann’s customers were afraid to be seen in the hat. They had worn it through everything. They stopped when the aim became uncertain.

What a country will not look at does not disappear. It passes down. It becomes the floor the next generation walks on without knowing. And when that floor shifts — not collapses, just shifts — they reach for their phones. They check twice. They ask if maybe he was hacked.

He was not hacked.

The Strait is still closed. Three deadlines have passed. The gas is above $4. The grocery bill is higher than it has ever been. Food assistance is gone for millions. Healthcare is gone for millions more. The bombs are falling on civilian water supplies. Service members are leaving this war at a rate no one has ever seen. The Trump Truth Store is dark. The tumbler is still for sale.

But would Kamala have been better?

Please go here for the original article and notes & sources: https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/p/but-would-kamala-have-been-better