In his latest move to clamp down on illegal immigration and immigration more broadly, President Trump has filed a presidential action invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a seldom-used law that gives the president authority to detain or deport nationals of an enemy nation during wartime. It’s only the fourth time in American history a president has used the act — and the first since World War II.
The directive targets members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang, and authorizes expedited removal of all Venezuelan citizens 14 and older, deemed to be members of the organization, who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.
I visited Xinjiang recently. Before I went, I asked my followers what they would like me to see for them, and one of them wanted me to check whether there is the book of “1984” by George Orwell in Xinjiang’s bookstores and libraries.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia, MacArthur had told Kennedy, because if you do, you will be repeating the same mistake the Japanese made in World War II—deploying millions of soldiers in a futile attempt to win a conflict that cannot be won.
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Kennedy appreciated MacArthur’s soothing judgment on Cuba (and would soon change the military’s top leadership—perhaps in keeping with MacArthur’s views), but then shifted the subject to Laos and Vietnam, where communist insurgencies were gaining strength. The Congress, he added, was pressuring him to deploy U.S. troops in response. MacArthur disagreed vehemently: “Anyone wanting to commit ground troops to Asia should have his head examined,” he said. That same day, Kennedy memorialized what MacArthur told him: “MacArthur believes it would be a mistake to fight in Laos,” he wrote in a memorandum of the meeting, adding, “He thinks our line should be Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines.” MacArthur’s warning about fighting in Asia impressed Kennedy, who repeated it in the months ahead and especially whenever military leaders urged him to take action. “Well now,” the young president would say in his lilting New England twang, “you gentlemen, you go back and convince General MacArthur, then I’ll be convinced.” So it is that MacArthur’s warning (which has come down to us as “never get involved in a land war in Asia”), entered American lore as a kind of Nicene Creed of military wisdom—unquestioned, repeated, fundamental.
Though belatedly, I am completing these notes in the course of my trip through Africa, hoping in this way to keep my promise. I would like to do so by dealing with the theme set forth in the title above. I think it may be of interest to Uruguayan readers.
A common argument from the mouths of capitalist spokespeople, in the ideological struggle against socialism, is that socialism, or the period of building socialism into which we have entered, is characterized by the abolition of the individual for the sake of the state. I will not try to refute this argument solely on theoretical grounds but rather to establish the facts as they exist in Cuba and then add comments of a general nature. Let me begin by broadly sketching the history of our revolutionary struggle before and after the taking of power.
Twelve days ago, I was asked by the Opinion section of the New York Times to write an essay on the JFK assassination nearly 60 years later. This was a major breakthrough because the newspaper of record has always embraced the official version of the assassination, even as the Warren Report, based on the “magic bullet” and all that nonsense, has grown increasingly tattered over the years. In 2015, when The Devil’s Chessboard — my book about CIA spymaster Allen Dulles and the national security state’s war with President Kennedy — was published, the Times refused to review it. (Nonetheless, the book was a New York Times bestseller.)
With the conflict in Gaza provoking debate over what constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law, The Onion asked Americans to define a “war crime,” and this is what they said.
During the Monday press conference, Menendez implied that he was also one of the many fleeing Communism. He called himself the “son of Cuban refugees,” and said that the cash found by the FBI was “from my personal savings account, which I have kept for emergencies, and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” But Menendez was born in New Jersey years before Castro’s revolution, to a family of working-class immigrants who had left Cuba under the previous, capitalist dictatorship. Menendez’s Senate office did not respond to a question about what confiscation his family faced.
In 1989, the American public was flooded with iconic images of brave Chinese students standing up to Chinese Communist tanks in Tiananmen Square—students who were then brutally slaughtered by the Chinese military. Or so we were led to believe.
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