Listen live Fridays 8 to 10 Eastern on Revolution.Radio later archived at https://kevinbarrett.substack.com
First hour: Moti Nissani, Professor Emeritus (Biology), Wayne State University, discusses his new free online book Eight Billion Cheers for Direct Democracy: Direct Democracy is Humanity’s Last Best and Only Hope. Nissani argues that today’s most pressing problems—prospective nuclear war, runaway technology, and eco-catastrophe—could be solved by creating and expanding real democracy (as opposed to US/Western oligarchy) borrowing ideas from ancient Athens and modern Switzerland, Iceland, and Berlin (the Philharmonic, not the Bundestag). His sad conclusion: “It is heart-breaking then, to know that in real democracy is the salvation of the world, and yet to suspect that real democracy is a pipe dream.”
Second hour: Peter Bahlawanian is the producer of director/writer/editor Mariam Avetisyan’s The Desire to Live. The winner of 136 awards from 72 Film Festivals worldwide, the film is “a visually stunning record of the 2020 war’s impact on the indigenous people of Artsakh” depicting “the uncertainty and challenges of a crippled or nonexistent livelihood in a region wracked by war.”
For background, Peter Bahlawanian recommends the article “Genocide is About to Unfold in Artsakh and the West Has Secured a Front-Row Seat.” It begins:
“Azerbaijani special forces and military personnel—masquerading as ‘environmentalists’—have blocked the only road connecting Artsakh to Armenia. They have effectively severed the only lifeline the Artsakh Armenians have to the outside world—a lifeline guaranteed by the Trilateral Statement of November 10, 2020. With 120,000 Artsakh Armenians now completely encircled and isolated, Azerbaijan is poised to rid itself of the entire Armenian population…”
More background from Covert Action Magazine:
“In the past month, the Biden administration has condemned a blockade imposed on the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijanis, while at the same time extending a waiver for the second year in a row allowing provision of $100 million in military aid to Azerbaijan…”