In the US, vast fortunes have been made recently, and wealthy Americans are increasingly donating to charitable foundations in order to avoid taxes and decide for themselves where to spend the money instead. A so-called “non-profit industrial complex,” has grown up around this lavish funding, which In These Times magazine warned amounts to “corporate influence-peddling.”

Last week, Variety reported that “more than 1,000 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest Oscar speech.” The angry letter is a tight script for a real-life drama of defending Israel as it continues to methodically kill civilians no less precious than the signers’ own loved ones.

The impending famine in Gaza is the result of deliberate, conscious, informed choices, and nobody in the Israeli or American governments can be in any doubt as to where they are leading. As Derek Sayer writes, we are on the threshold of a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem. Ladies and gentlemen, this way for your ambient genocide.

Climate change is the most visible, most threatening expression of a larger, planetary ecological crisis. Our approach must be commensurate with the structural challenge that crisis poses to the way society is organized if we are to halt and reverse the ecological catastrophe toward which we are now hurtling—and which is fueled by our dependency on fossil fuels.

On March 18, the House of Commons passed an opposition day motion put forward by NDP MP Heather McPherson. It called for a reconsideration of Canadian policy toward securing Middle East peace in the midst of Israel’s onslaught in the Gaza Strip. The initial NDP proposal was significantly stronger than the final version—though not nearly as strong as it should have been.

This article by Sol Littman originally appeared in a 1987 edition of Canadian Dimension. It casts a critical eye on the Deschênes Commission, officially known as the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, which was established by the federal government in 1985 to investigate claims that Canada had become a haven for Nazi war criminals.

Bob Rae recently stated that “the ultimate responsibility for the conduct of the [Gaza] war lies with the parties who are fighting.” In so doing, Rae, a former Rhodes scholar, ignores the United States’ pivotal role in providing Israel with weapons, money and diplomatic support. Of course, Rae’s official rhetoric must reflect Canada’s deference to US Middle East policy.

Russia’s new economic model may prove inefficient in the long term, creating a situation in which it is never able to catch up economically with the West. But in the short term, Russia looks more than able to withstand the pressures of the war in Ukraine. At the same time, Putin is here to stay. These are realities that policy makers in the West are going to have to face.

A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump: the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, and the Democratic Party. Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches.

History does not allow for a great deal in the way of direct instructions, but it is capable of identifying the times and places where people disturbed the complacencies of their time. In doing so, they brought about changes that were necessary but never inevitable. These struggles did not fully succeed, but their influence continues to be felt, and this too is one of McLachlan’s legacies.