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Anthem Protest

Helmut Sorge | Posted : August 24, 2020

During the medal ceremony at the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City on October 16, 1968, two Black American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, each raised a gloved fist during the playing of the U.S. national anthem. The two Americans received their medals shoeless, but wearing black socks to represent black poverty. Smith wore a black scarf around his neck to present black pride. Carlos, who won a bronze medal, wore a necklace of beads, which he said “were for those individuals that were lynched or killed and that no-one said a prayer for, that were hung and tarred. It was for those thrown of the side of the boats in the Middle Passage”.

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A Shadow Over the Generous Spending

Helmut Sorge | Posted : August 11, 2020

Possibly Roger Federer would have been ready to play the match against the socialite, who was willing to pay (in 2014) £160,000 for a celebrity match of tennis. But Russian tennis fan Lubov Chernukhin, 48, chose two different partners to be her opponents: David Cameron, then British prime minister, and Boris Johnson, then mayor of London. Chernukhin, who settled in Britain in 2003 and is a British passport holder, like her husband Vladimir, 50, a former Russian deputy finance minister and former chairman of the Russian state bank Vnesekonom, played her British opponents after an auction to benefit the Conservative Party. Mrs Chernukhin never really made a secret out of her interest in really getting to know the power players of Her Majesty’s government: in 2019, the Russian dished out £135,000 for a dinner with prime minister Theresa May and six of her female cabinet ministers at the Goring Hotel in plush Belgravia. The year before, she paid £35,000 at a Conservative Party fund-raising auction to have a private dinner with the then secretary of state for defense, Gavin Williamson. Since 2012, the Russian-born lady has given the Conservative Party £1,765,804, the highest female donor in the party’s history.

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It’s Pretty Tough Walking a Tightrope

Helmut Sorge | Posted : August 03, 2020

It was notthe way you would expect a scientist to be celebrated. InStyle, an American fashion magazine showed on its cover Anthony Fauci, America’s frontline warrior against the COVID-19 virus. Fauci has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and has been honored by presidents since Ronald Reagan, battling against HIV/Aids, SARS, swine flu, MERS, and Ebola. He is, BBC News stated, “the face of America’s fight against COVID-19”. The virologist, wrote online magazine The Daily Beast (July 16), has spent most of this year as an avuncular figurehead for many Americans desperate for facts and dealing with a truth-adverse administration. InStyle portrayed him sitting by a pool, button-down shirt, dark sunglasses, relaxed, a touch of Hollywood—without face mask though. “Whatever Fauci may lack in outright glamour, he makes up in ubiquity”, observed the Daily Beast. “For much of 2020, his celebrity remains unparalleled … Without trying—only by showing up to work and sharing facts—Dr Fauci has reached the type of all-out idolization Trump so desperately craves”.

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The Indians Were Selfish

Helmut Sorge | Posted : July 21, 2020

John Wayne was more than just a Hollywood actor. He was an icon, a symbol of the fearless pioneer, fighting Indians, advancing the settlers into unknown territory, always defeating, even humiliating the Indians—proud tribes such as the Sioux and Apache. John Wayne was also a staunch conservative and white supremacist, transferring his movie roles into political life.

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Abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban Wolves

Helmut Sorge | Posted : June 26, 2020

Peace was near, most of the 5000 Taliban fighters were released—one condition for serious peace negotiations—and a city was selected for the negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government: Doha, Qatar. But an invisible enemy committed sabotage. COVID-19 brought down members of both sides. Worse: the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada was rumored to be on the threshold of death. NATO’s new senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, Stefano Pontecorvo, confirmed to Radio Free Afghanistan that COVID-19 was “impacting on all levels. It’s impacting on the levels of forces on both sides. It’s impacting the leadership” The new date of the Intra-Afghan talks will be announced as soon as the quarantined members of the negotiation teams reach Doha and test negative.

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Revolution Leading to Victory

Helmut Sorge | Posted : July 03, 2020

The unshaven man, who did not let go of his Kalashnikoff while we talked, had been wounded in battles with Israeli troops, and was now hiding in the land that those troops had occupied—the Jordan Valley. Yasser Arafat, whom I met for the first time in the spring of 1968 at his secret base, was then still known as Abu Ammar, willing to sacrifice his life for the liberation of his people dispersed by around the world, particularly in neighboring Arab nations. The 1968 interview, Arafat’s first extensive one-to-one with a foreign publication, documented an optimistic leader of El-Fatah, 38 years old and certain of triumph. “I believe in our revolution and victory, and I am certain that we will recover our stolen land”, said Arafat, later honored with a Nobel Peace Prize for his struggles to achieve peace with Israel. “History is on our side”.

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All Options Are on the Table

Helmut Sorge | Posted : June 26, 2020

At the beginning of June, officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, usually active on America’s periphery, were deployed to Washington D.C., where President Donald Trump had sighted an internal threat posed by “anarchists, agitators, looters, or lowlifes”. In reality, American citizens were protesting, mostly peacefully, against police brutality, and the killings of African-Americans by cops.

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Consolidating Power

Helmut Sorge | Posted : June 16, 2020

In times of shadow and despair, populists and authoritarians move in to undermine free speech and democracy. For authoritarian-minded leaders, wrote Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, writing in the New York Review of Books, “the coronavirus crisis is offering a convenient pretext to silence critics and consolidate power. Censorship in China and elsewhere has fed the pandemic, helping to turn a potentially containable threat into a global calamity. The health crisis will inevitably subside, but autocratic government’s dangerous expansion of power may be one of the pandemic’s most enduring legacies”.

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