"Never Again"
After the Holocaust we said "never again"
Throughout history I'm not sure if we have ever told ourselves a bigger lie.
What makes this worse, is not just the silence, but the complicity of so many.
Gaza is the cemetery upon which our collective humanity has died
🚨 BREAKING: The official U.S. government website has quietly removed Sections 9 and 10 of Article I from the Constitution.
Let me say that again:
They didn’t amend the Constitution.
They didn’t debate it in Congress.
They just erased two of the most protective sections; the ones that deal with habeas corpus, limits on federal power, and Congress’s sole authority to set tariffs.
The Israeli Army is now targeting starving children in the head and testicles in Gaza, while terrorising others, together with violent lunatics, in the West Bank.
These past 650 days, Israel has written one of the darkest pages of human history.
And it is absolutely sickening that the EU leadership rewarded this country with more economic partnership instead of putting an end to the genocide.
Actor Mandy Patinkin makes an impassioned plea for Jewish people around the world to think about the consequences of what they're doing and allowing to be done in Gaza.
The New York Times has just published an op-ed by an Israeli genocide scholar who agrees with all the other genocide scholars and human rights organizations who say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The debate is over. The Israel apologists lost.
Watch till the end.
Listen to the outrage, despair, and yes, fear, in @PatinkinMandy's voice.
That is the sound of a person with a conscious.
All our voices should sound like this.
The Only Man Who Refused the Nobel Peace Prize
They like to tell us the Nobel Peace Prize is the highest honor a human being can receive.
They hand it to presidents who launch drone wars.
They give it to men who build walls, fund apartheid, and sign off on sanctions that starve children.
But only one man in history ever looked the committee in the eye and said:
No.
Not because he didn’t value peace.
But because he refused to lie about it.
His name was Lê Đức Thọ.
A Vietnamese revolutionary.
A negotiator.
A man who spent his life resisting empire, not with rhetoric, but with results.
In 1973, the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which were supposed to end the war in Vietnam.
Kissinger accepted.
Lê Đức Thọ did not.
Because unlike Kissinger, he understood what peace actually meant.
It was not a speech.
Not a handshake.
Not a paper signed under U.S. bombing raids.
It was justice.
Sovereignty.
No more corpses. No more lies. No more B-52s dropping "freedom" from the sky.
"There is no peace in Vietnam," Lê Đức Thọ said, refusing the prize.
Because while the ink was still drying, the U.S. continued its bombings.
Continued its lies.
Continued to violate every promise it made. Just as it always had.
He knew the truth:
Awards mean nothing if the blood hasn’t stopped.
And a peace prize means nothing if it comes from the same hands that dropped napalm.
So he stood alone.
He walked away from the applause.
And in doing so, he did something no other laureate has done before or since.
He kept his integrity.
They don’t talk about Lê Đức Thọ in Oslo.
They don’t quote him in Western textbooks.
They don't include his name in glossy montages of "great peacemakers."
Because what he did wasn’t just rare.
It was unacceptable.
He exposed the farce.
He reminded the world that peace isn’t awarded.
It’s earned.
It’s fought for.
And sometimes, it’s refused—if accepting it would mean dressing up injustice as resolution.
While Kissinger collected his medal and went on to orchestrate more death in Chile, Cambodia, and East Timor,
Lê Đức Thọ returned to Hanoi.
To the war.
To the rubble.
To the people who never had the luxury of pretending peace had arrived.
He was not a pacifist.
Not a saint.
He was a Vietnamese revolutionary who understood that real peace cannot be built on lies, and that decorated silence is more dangerous than honest resistance.
The only man who ever refused the Nobel Peace Prize was Vietnamese.
Let that sink in.
Part of the generation that defeated the Japanese, the French, and the Americans.
A man who did not need the West to validate his struggle, his dignity, or his history.
While others begged for seats at the table of empire,
He walked away from it.
Because he knew something the world keeps forgetting:
There is no peace without justice.
No justice without memory.
And no honor in accepting awards from the very systems that tried to erase you.
Lê Đức Thọ’s refusal was not an insult to peace.
It was a reminder of what peace demands.
And history will remember him, not as a laureate, but as something far more rare.
A revolutionary who told the truth.
And meant it.
"Being by the sea is like a permanent baptism; the light and air hypnotises, and your soul is washed by vastness."
~ Iain Pears
Girl in a Silver Sea (1909)
🎨 Joaquín Sorolla
A priest, a professor and a nurse walk into a protest and get arrested.
This is not a joke.
This is Britain.
In 2025.
Why are the free-speech warriors who decry "cancel culture" now so conspicuously silent? Ah right, because it's okay to cancel those resisting a genocide.
@thelonningsguy What a silly notion! Perhaps you should investigate the veracity of recently reported higher ratios of adult-to-child giggling in such serious places. (Pack a recorder, do, and be sure to measure in decibels. I quite enjoy manly giggles. It’s all about Paradox!)
@ardija01talk@Sherlock_Pages Love the S&P stamp! Didn’t know there was such a thing; maybe if you buy in person? Lucky you. I’ll be reading my (un-stamped) copy of this book from @Sherlock_Pages this summer, too. From Canada (armchair travel only). 🍁
@visitnorthyork Yes, but not in one sitting, I shouldn’t think, and probably happy to skip the next meal or two (or day or two) if I did manage it all somehow. Possibly the prospect of a good hike in drizzling rain would entice me sufficiently to make the attempt. But tea, surely, not a latte?