In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a team of Greenpeace activists has boarded an Arctic-bound drilling vessel owned by the Shell oil company.

“I’m just one voice out here, but I know I’m not alone, and millions if not billions of voices demanding the right to safe and healthy lives will have a huge chance of changing things.” —Johno SmithApproximately 750 miles north-west of Hawaii, the team of six campaigners intercepted the ship—which they’ve been tracking across the Pacific since last month—and scaled the 38,000 ton drilling platform which is being hauled by a larger transportation vessel. According to Greenpeace, its campaigners will set up camp on the underside of the rig’s main deck and are equipped with supplies to last for several days and technology which will allow them to communicate with supporters around the world in real-time, despite being hundreds of miles from land.

#TheCrossing Tweets

Named the Polar Pioneer, the Shell drilling rig is destined for the Chukchi Sea, off the coast of Alaska, where the company—despite the enormous risks posed to the fragile region and the global outcry calling for a ban on Arctic drilling—intends to begin exploratory drilling later this year. According to Greenpeace, its international team of activists—including campaigners from the USA, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden and Austria—landed on the larger ship transporting the Polar Pioneer, the 700-foot long heavy-lift vessel called the Blue Marlin, using inflatable boats launched from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, which has been following the 400 foot vessel for weeks.

Aliyah Field, one of the six, tweeted from the Polar Pioneer: “We made it! We’re on Shell’s platform. And we’re not alone. Everyone can help turn this into a platform for people power! #TheCrossing.”

It’s good and right that we commemorate the mass killing in the Ottoman Empire during World War I of between 500,000 and 1.5 million Armenians.   

Many nations now call the slaughter of 1915-1916 as “genocide.” This week the 100^th anniversary of the notorious event was observed.   Pope Francis and the European parliament called on Turkey to recognize the killings as genocide.

Turkey, successor to the Ottoman Empire, admits many Armenians were killed in WWI, but rejects the label of “genocide,” saying their deaths occurred in the confusion of war, not by design.  The United States, a very close ally of Turkey, avoids  the “g” word. Interestingly, Israel does too, perhaps not wanting to detract from the genocide Jews  suffered in WWII. 

Armenians insist the Ottoman authorities were determined to eradicate the ancient Armenian people. Turks claim that Armenian guerilla bands known as “dashnaks” acted as a fifth column for their bitter foe, Russia, which was attacking the crumbling Ottoman Empire.  Large numbers of Armenian civilians were herded from their homes in eastern Turkey, across the mountains, and into the wastes of northern Syria.

The greatest loss of life occurred on these “death marches,” a fact that Turkey accepts.  What is rarely stated by either side is that Kurdish tribesmen inflicted a significant number of deaths, pillage and rape on the helpless Armenian deportees.

Modern Turkey is determined to avoid being branded with the shame of genocide because it tends to demote the bearer to a second-rate nation forever begging forgiveness, like eternally cringing Germany.   

But what really galls the Turks is being singled out as genocidal mass killers when so many other similar perpetrators are ignored.  

Begin with Spain, which wiped out its Muslim population then inflicted mass murder on West Indian native islanders, then in its Latin American colonies.   No one even remembers the Arawak Indians, for example, wiped out by the Spaniards, British, and French.

Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it’s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, then uncritically accept those anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But they’ve learned no such lesson. That tactic continues to be the staple of how major US and British media outlets “report,” especially in the national security area. And journalists who read such reports continue to treat self-serving decrees by unnamed, unseen officials – laundered through their media – as gospel, no matter how dubious are the claims or factually false is the reporting.

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Award-winning Uruguayan writer and thinker Eduardo Galeano, considered a leading voice of Latin America’s left, has died at 74.

The world-renowned author, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, died in Montevideo on Monday.

The novelist and journalist—whose work transcended genre and who once said “all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti”—was the prolific author of books including Memory of Fire, a three-volume narrative of the history of North and South America; The Book of Embraces, described by Library Journal as a “literary scrapbook, mixing memoir, documentary, essay, and prose poem”; and The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which analyses five centuries of economic and political exploitation in the region, perpetrated first by Europe and later by the United States.

The last book brought Galeano into the spotlight 36 years after its original publication, when in 2009 the late Hugo Chavez, then president of Venezuela, gave President Barack Obama a paperback copy.

Galeano, a regular contributor to The Progressive and the New Internationalist, was a powerful critic of both capitalism and imperialism in every form.

“This world is not democratic at all,” Galeano told the Guardian in 2013. “The most powerful institutions, the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank belong to three or four countries. The others are watching. The world is organized by the war economy and the war culture.”

According to Reuters:

Galeano started out as a journalist in the 1960s, writing ‘Open Veins’ at a time when he said his cattle-producing country “produced more violence than meat or wool.”

Following a coup in 1973 and the banning of the book, he fled to neighboring Argentina. When that country’s military dictatorship began its ‘dirty war’ against leftists in 1976, he went into exile again, this time in Spain.

He returned to Montevideo in 1985.