Rafiq Kathwari

"The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum." ~ George Bernard Shaw

Mandated since 2016.

There is no universe where this is not an evil act - cold blooded murder of innocents

136 years ago, the man who broke the spell was born. If Hồ Chí Minh could see today’s world, he would not be surprised. He knew that history bends toward balance, not empire. He would look at Vietnam's victory, still standing, still sovereign, still proof that the most powerful military on earth can be defeated by a people who refuse to disappear. He would look at China’s rise, at Russia's defiance, at Africa’s awakening, at Cuba's endurance, at Iran's resistance, and smile. Not because the struggle is over. But because the world is finally beginning to resemble the one he died believing in. A world where power no longer means domination. Where sovereignty is not a privilege but a birthright. He would say what he later gave Vietnam as an immortal truth: "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom." That spirit has outlived its borders. It lives wherever the Global South refuses to bow. Happy birthday, Uncle Hồ. The spell is broken. The prophecy holds.

Hoy murió Étienne Davignon, el último funcionario belga que estuvo involucrado en el asesinato de Patrice Lumumba en 1961, ha muerto justo cuando iba a ser juzgado por sus crímenes de guerra en el Congo. Lumumba fue torturado, asesinado y disuelto en ácido por Bélgica y por la CIA por oponerse a que saquearan su pais, simplemente por luchar por una independencia real del Congo, lejos del colonialismo occidental. Tras descuartizarlo y disolverlo en ácido, los imperialistas belgas se llevaron un diente de oro de Lumumba como trofeo de su asesinato... así es como se construyó la "democracia" europea.

This deeply moving letter written by Fayez Kanafani (10 years old at the time) shortly after his father, Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated by Mossad in Beirut on 8 July 1972. To my father, Ghassan Kanafani When I was small, my father used to take me to Al-Muharrer, seat me on his own chair and ask me to draw some pictures. When he moved to Al-Anwar, I used to accompany him there too. Then he moved to Al-Hadaf and took me, along with my sister Laila, to meet his colleagues there. My father was a good man. He bought me all I wanted and I still love him, although he is dead. I found Arabic difficult but he taught me lots of things. As a result, I could read all the articles written about him. I liked having such a father because he was very intelligent and people loved him. When we were in Denmark, Laila and I used to miss him very much and asked my mother to take us back to him. When we returned we used to see him working in the garden every Sunday, planting flowers with gentle hands. Sometimes we worked together and when it got hot we used to take our shirts off. After work, he would often teach me how to use the small rifle he had bought me. I liked to watch television with him. When I grow up I want to be like my father and will fight to return to Palestine, my father’s homeland, the land he and Umm Sa’ad used to tell me so much about. From now on, I will help my mother and sister a lot so that they won’t miss him too much. But we will never forget him, or Lamees who died with him and whom we all loved very much — Lamees who was always kind and never lost her temper. Fayez Ghassan Kanafani -Photo: Ghassan with his children Fayez and Laila

Mossad booby‑trapped 21,000 communication devices with explosives, sent them to Lebanon through shell companies, and detonated them remotely — killing dozens (including children) and injuring over 3,400. • The devices exploded in people's hands, on their faces, and in their pockets. • They did it over two consecutive days. • On day two, the explosives went off while Lebanese families were at the funerals of those killed the day before. • The attack inflicted roughly 3,000 injuries in a single hour on the first day alone. This terrorist attack was the largest simultaneous mass‑detonation in history by the number of individual bombs. 'israelis' joke about it to this day. If you didn't boycott Apple for the Congo, boycott it now.

“Never has the Palestinian cause appeared more just than in contrast with the repugnant brutality of its adversaries. Humanity will forget neither the heroism of the victims nor the barbarism of the aggressors.” — Fidel Castro

One of the most horrific scenes in human history has been leaked. When Israel forced thousands in Gaza to run after a loaf of bread under gunfire. A moment the world should never forget.

This’s Cuba and there’s no electricity The U.S is starving millions of people in Cuba. The U.S. is laying siege cruelly cut off all fuel, power is out, leaving hospitals without electricity. Dialysis patients, babies in NICU, and others will die. This’s a crime against humanity.

The Palestinian (1977) was financed and produced by Vanessa Redgrave, who sold her own home to fund it. She wanted to highlight the lives and struggles of Palestinian refugees the Jewish Defense League bombed the Doheny Plaza in LA ahead of the film's premiere in protest

Beethoven could not hear the music he wrote. At the age of 28, he realized he was no longer able to listen to a flute being played in the distance, and he spent the rest of his life composing the most enduring music in Western history in almost complete silence... He had been a working musician since childhood. His ears were everything. In 1798, in the middle of a heated argument with a singer, he noticed for the first time that something was wrong. The sound was thinning at the edges. He could hear voices, but high frequencies were beginning to disappear. He told no one for years. By 1802, the truth was no longer deniable. On his doctor's advice he moved to Heiligenstadt, a quiet village outside Vienna, hoping the country air would help. It did not. There, alone and surrounded by farmland, he wrote a letter to his two brothers that he never sent. It was found among his papers after his death. We now call it the Heiligenstadt Testament, and it is one of the most devastating documents ever written by an artist about himself: "You men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the cause of my seeming so... what a humiliation, when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing, and again I heard nothing." He wrote, in the same letter, that he had thought of ending his life. And then he wrote the line that explains everything that followed: "Only my art held me back. It seemed impossible to me to leave the world before I had produced everything I felt called upon to produce." He went back to Vienna. He went on composing. Over the next two decades his hearing continued to fade. Friends began writing their words down in small notebooks instead of speaking them aloud, and waiting while he read. Modern scholars call these the conversation books. Around four hundred of them survive. To compose, he developed his own methods. He bit one end of a wooden rod and pressed the other against the soundboard of his piano, letting the vibrations travel through his jaw to his inner ear. He had stumbled, through trial and error, onto the principle that modern science calls bone conduction. The cause of his deafness has never been settled. What we do know is this: he realized he was losing his hearing at twenty-eight, and he could have stopped. He wrote the letter, he held the thought of dying in his hand, and then he put down the pen and went back to work. Most of what he is remembered for was composed after that moment: The Fifth Symphony. The Seventh. The Ninth. The Missa Solemnis. The late quartets. All of it was made by a man who could no longer hear most of what he was writing. There are people who give the world what they receive, and there are people who give the world what they were never able to receive. The most enduring beauty in human history has almost always come from the second kind... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: James-lucas.com/welcome I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

Fidel Castro explains why the US despises Cuba and is desperate to destroy it: "Our country does not drop bombs on other people, nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities. Instead our country sends doctors to those most lost corners of the world."

"Arabs massacred Jews for 1500 years." This is civilizational framing designed to make a twentieth century political conflict appear to be the inevitable conclusion of eternal religious hatred. Jews lived under Islamic governance for centuries with considerably more safety than they experienced in Christian Europe. The Inquisition was not in Baghdad. The pogroms were not in Cairo. The Holocaust was not organized in Damascus. The modern conflict begins with the Balfour Declaration, with British colonial policy, with the specific political project of Zionism arriving in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Collapsing 1500 years of varied, uneven, multi-directional history into one slogan about Arab violence against Jews is not historical argument. It is the replacement of history with mythology to avoid the specific question being asked.

🤣🇮🇷🇺🇸 Iran’s new WARNING to Trump comes in the form of a Simpsons cartoon — the only language the President understands…

@yousef_ki1 Azadi

If you see this video, put a dot to break the algorithm.

@supressedvoic @ipeace4all Azadi

Join the "One Million Voices for the Free of Hussam Abu Safieh" campaign. Reply with 🇵🇸 or even a dot.

"Se débarrasser des archives papier et les remplacer par des archives numériques leur permet de supprimer l’histoire. Un jour, vous trouverez le message « la page n’existe pas », et le lendemain, vous les verrez nier que cela ait réellement eu lieu". Julian Assange

"I began the revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I would do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action." - Fidel Castro

Dostoevsky understood the modern crisis before it became normal. A man can study truth, praise progress, and speak about humanity while still failing to help the child standing in front of him. This is the central wound inside Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. The man had spent years thinking about life, yet he had no strength left to live it. One winter night, after sitting with friends who spoke grandly about truth and progress, he walked home with a revolver waiting in his room. He had decided that this would be his last night. On the way, a little girl grabbed his coat. She was wet, frightened, and begging for help. Her mother was sick. The man understood enough to know she needed him, yet he pushed her away and told her to find the police. When she kept pleading, he shouted at her. She ran off into the cold. He reached his room, sat before the revolver, and prepared to die. Then the girl’s face returned to him. Her fear disturbed him. Her pain followed him into the silence. He wondered why guilt still hurt if life had no meaning. Then he fell asleep. In the dream, he saw himself dead. A bright being lifted him from his grave and carried him beyond the stars to another world. The people there looked human, yet they lived without greed, envy, lies, or cruelty. They loved naturally. They had no need to explain happiness because they lived inside it. Then he corrupted them. One lie led to another. Pride entered. Envy followed. Soon they competed, deceived, punished, and killed. When he begged them to remember who they had once been, they mocked him. They said they had science, knowledge, and the laws of happiness. They believed understanding happiness mattered more than happiness itself. He woke at six in the morning. The revolver still sat before him. He threw it away. The dream had given him a task. He would find the little girl. He would tell people the truth. They would call him ridiculous again, but this time he knew something they had forgotten. A life without love can know everything and still understand nothing. Dostoevsky’s lesson attacks one of the modern world’s favorite lies that knowledge alone can save us. The man in the story has thought about life so much that he has stopped living it. He can judge society, expose hypocrisy, and explain despair, yet one suffering child reveals the poverty of his soul. That is the force of the story. A little girl does what philosophy cannot do. She brings him back to responsibility. The dream shows the same truth on a larger scale. A perfect world falls when deceit enters it, then its people begin to defend corruption. They suffer, yet call their suffering wisdom. They lose happiness, then comfort themselves with theories about happiness. Dostoevsky noticed that a civilization can become brilliant and still become cruel. It can build systems, write laws, praise progress, and lose the simple moral instinct that tells a man to help a child in the rain. His final lesson is severe and necessary. Truth begins with love in action. Love begins with the person in front of you. That is why the ridiculous man becomes wise. He stops studying life from outside and accepts the burden of living it. For more content like this, subscribe to the Culture Explorer… newsletter.thecultureexplorer.com