Tag Archives | Counterpunch

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or “Moral Injury”?

By on December 28, 2012 in News 3

Picture: USAF (PD)

Shepherd Bliss writes at Counterpunch:

“My God, what have we done?” combat soldiers sometimes gasp as they see those they or comrades just killed, especially when they include innocent children, women, and other civilians.

“We knew that we killed them/…the terrified mother/ clutching terrified child,” writes former Lieutenant Michael Parmeley in his poem “Meditation on Being a Baby Killer.” In l968, Lt. Parmeley led a combat platoon in the American War on Vietnam. He receives benefits for what is clinically described as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

“My gunner…started to cry,” Parmeley writes. “There’s a myth of recovery,/ that you put it behind you/…but memories aren’t like that/…I know that we killed them.”

Parmeley and I have participated in the Veterans’ Writing Group for twenty years. We attend regular meetings, break silences, tell our stories in a healing context, and listen without judgment. His poem appears in our book “Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace,” (www.vowvop.org) edited by our writing teacher, award-winning author, and former University of California Berkeley professor Maxine Hong Kingston.

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The Free Market: Means or End?

By on October 8, 2012 in News 48

Picture: Elembis (PD)

Jason Bernard Claxton writes at Counterpunch:

Free market advocates sometimes champion the free market as a means to an end, sometimes as an end in itself.  Sometimes the free market is better at achieving certain goals than any alternative, sometimes there is no alternative.  Sometimes the free market is the best way of achieving prosperity, security, and a good life for a people, sometimes the free market is “the only moral system.”  If it were clear at any given moment which justification were being offered, a lot of confusion might be avoided.  But free market advocates often take both positions within the same argument – a strategy that is rhetorically effective, but logically dubious.

When an owner’s right to dispose of property exactly as that owner desires is considered morally ultimate, then the free market becomes an end in itself.  And if individual property rights are so sacred that no state of affairs that market intervention could possibly bring about would justify the rights violations that market intervention implies, then it simply wouldn’t matter whether more market regulated economies are more productive than free market economies.

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Alexander Cockburn, RIP

By on July 23, 2012 in News 2

I’m sure there will be many disinfonauts who mourn the passing of Alexander Cockburn, whose research and writing informed many a dissenting American patriot. Even the mainstream media’s Gray Lady affords him a glowing obituary:

Alexander Cockburn, the mordant left-wing journalist and author who though born in Scotland thrived in the political and cultural battlegrounds of the United States, died on Saturday in Bad Salzhausen, Germany, where he had been receiving medical treatment, his family said. He was 71.

The cause was cancer, said Jeffrey St. Clair, a friend and colleague.

Mr. St. Clair announced Mr. Cockburn’s death on CounterPunch, the Web site that the two men edited. Mr. Cockburn kept his illness a secret, Mr. St. Clair, added, and continued writing until the end of his life.

“His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever,” Mr. St. Clair wrote on the site.

Mr.

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