Archive | Commentary

See, the Maoists have a strategy, the protracted people’s war strategy.  Since the merger of CPI(ML) People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre, they have moved the struggles of the rural poor to a higher level, so to say.  This is one of guerrilla warfare and the establishment of guerrilla zones.  The state has reacted, […]

  The Real News tiene prueba de como el Tribunal Supremo Electoral de Honduras reportaron cifras equivocadas.  Cifras, se dice, han servido para consolidar el golpe de estado. Realizado por Jesse Freeston, desde Honduras.  In English: Jesse Freeston, “Honduran Elections Exposed” (The Real News, 6 December 2009). | | Print  

In Part 1 of this article we argued that Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou’s account of the foundation of Communist universalism in the event of Christianity signals a number of inconsistencies immanent to their respective ontologies (Coombs 2009).  For Žižek it appears difficult to reconcile his touted open interpretation of Hegel with the ontological significance […]

Today an all women fact finding team comprising of activist friends like Madhumitta Dutta, Shweta Narayan (from our Collective in Besant Nagar) and 6 other women were attacked on their way to Narayanpatna, Orissa, where a democratic tribal movement led by the Chasi Mulia Adivasi Sangh is being brutally suppressed by the police at the […]

Introduction: As developing Asia is the most “globalised” region of the world in terms of both trade flows and financial flows, it was expected that the global crisis would adversely affect the region.  However, while the impact has indeed been strong, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth has, as of yet, not been negative; rather, the […]

The battle for health care reform is heating up in Congress.  The House has already passed one bill, and the Senate is debating another version.  But as Dr. Andy Coates explains, both bills will fail in solving the health care crisis — and, in fact, place a greater financial burden than ever on working people.  […]

The defeat of the Marxist emancipatory project has brought an end to radical secular universalism.  The result has been twofold: identity politics and their post-modern ideologies of difference have become the legitimating motifs of Western democracies, whilst radical political Islam has taken the anti-systemic baton of secular Marxism, but subverted it with a brand of […]

  Michael Axworthy.  A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind.  New York: Basic Books, 2008.  352 pp.  $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-00888-9. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, a large number of Iranians joined the ranks of expatriates living in Europe and the United States.  Suddenly uprooted and finding themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, some of […]

The original title for the article that follows was “Response to ‘Raoul Djukanovic’.”  “RD” is the Internet pseudonym of Daniel Simpson, who we mention in our second paragraph (below), and who, as a member of what we refer to as the Bosnia Genocide Lobby, assails us wherever we publish something related to the former Yugoslavia.  […]

  Abstract: What is the effect of the spread of nuclear weapons on international politics?  The scholarly debate pits proliferation optimists, who claim that “more may be better,” against proliferation pessimists, who argue that “more will be worse.”  These scholars focus on the aggregate effects of nuclear proliferation, but never explicitly consider the differential effects […]

The Hammond Square Mall in Hammond, Louisiana, was a staple of my childhood.  My family didn’t go there all that often, but when my parents felt we needed to shop for things besides food, that’s where we usually went (there weren’t many options at the time in my hometown of Amite, Louisiana).  I was always […]

  Human societies have created the bases of our survival, sustenance and advancement through the use of our natural resources in production with rudimentary tools and rising levels of science and technology.  Yet in no time in history has environmental destruction been systematically brought about in most parts of the world. The people of the […]

  Additional number of American troops President Obama plans to deploy to Afghanistan: 30,000 Total number of U.S. troops that will be there after the deployment: 98,000 Number of private contractors working for the U.S. in Afghanistan as of September 2009: 104,101 Percent by which that number grew between June and September: 40 Percent of […]

  Eric Davis.  Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.  397 pp.  $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-23546-5. This review has been a long time coming, but during this time, Davis’s book has become the subject of extensive comment, achieving an almost iconic, certainly landmark, status in […]

Jesse Freeston, Producer, The Real News Network: The Honduran elections of Sunday, November 29 were unique in that they were less about who was going to win than they were about how many people were going to vote.  Both major presidential candidates were supporters of the June 28 coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya and […]

  General elections were held in Bolivia on Sunday, December 6, 2009.  A few weeks before these elections I had the opportunity to discuss the contours of Evo Morales’ first term in office with the Bolivian Ambassador to Canada, Edgar Tórrez Mosqueira.  The following interview provides a backdrop to the elections that were held yesterday, […]

(PU) Last night, in another embarrassing lapse of security, nine Secret Service agents were trampled to death when approximately 658,000 U.S. residents of every race, age, and sexual orientation mobbed the White House, demanding admission to a state dinner.  Most explained that their reason for crashing the dinner was to have a chance at appearing […]

  Explaining about a draft agreement on nuclear fuel for the Tehran research reactor, Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Manouchehr Mottaki noted: “The two sides decided to review the draft.  It is being reviewed in Vienna, and Iran will soon declare its viewpoint.”  However, some officials have already voiced their opposition to the recent nuclear […]

Over the last decade an epoch-making political change has taken place in the Western Hemisphere: Latin America, a region that was once considered the United States’ “back yard,” is now more independent of Washington than Europe is. But while Latin America has changed, U.S. foreign policy has not — even now, with the election of […]

Fears of a new speculative boom on which the global recovery rides are being expressed in different circles.  There are as many aspects to these fears as there are to the so-called recovery, which include the huge profits being recorded by some major banking firms, the surge in capital flows to emerging markets, the speculative […]