The series unveils uncomfortable truths about youth alienation and online radicalisation — but the real crisis lies in austerity and the absence of class consciousness in addressing young people’s disillusionment, says teacher ROBERT POOLE
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The great balloon fiasco
While it is impossible not to see the absurdity of ever-escalating US claims over balloon spying – in the press, by the military and by politicians – they have deadly serious consequences and raise the risk of war, argues ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
In this image provided by the FBI, special agents assigned to the evidence response team process material recovered from the high-altitude balloon recovered off the coast of South Carolina, at the FBI laboratory in Virginia; and (right) the remnants of th
KARL MARX famously said in the Eighteenth Brumaire that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
While there are many examples of this insight from history, Marx could not foresee how farce would become the staple of the US ruling class, how elites would defend what they see as their interests with a web of calculated deception extending beyond the limits of the absurd.
Like the mad General Jack D Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s great film, Dr Strangelove, a US Air Force four-star General, Mike Minihan, “sent a memo on Friday [January 27] to the officers he commands that predicts the US will be at war with China in two years and tells them to get ready to prep by firing ‘a clip’ at a target, and ‘aim for the head’,” as reported by NBC News.
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