Archive | Commentary

“Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity must be respected.”  Had George Bush said what he said about Georgia from Beijing about Serbia as well, this is how he would have approached the so-called independence of Kosovo.  The truth, of course, is far from this.  The US was the first country to recognize […]

Once more Georgia was launched into a situation of chaos and bloodshed.  A new fratricide war exploded with renewed strength on Georgian soil. To our great disillusion, the alerts of the Georgian Peace Committee and of progressive personalities of Georgia on the pernicious character of the militarization of the country and on the danger of […]

Perhaps some governments are unaware of the concrete facts, and so for that reason Raúl’s message setting Cuba’s position seemed to us to be very timely.  I shall be generous in the aspects that cannot be dealt with in a brief and precise official statement. The government of Georgia would never have launched its armed […]

  The Movement of Financial Capital In recent years, there has been an intensive, continuous process of concentration and centralization of corporations operating and controlling the entire production process of global agriculture. Concentration is the concept used in political economy to explain the movement of large corporations to combine, accumulate, and become large groups.  Thus, […]

MOSCOW (AFP) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev, who ordered the end of operations against Georgia, presented on Tuesday a plan to resolve the Russian-Georgian conflict.  Tbilisi for its part demanded NATO “military assistance.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov immediately warned that Russia will be forced to take further “measures” […]

LA PAZ, 11 August (IPS) — A storm of opposition broke out in Bolivia against President Evo Morales, whose mandate was resoundingly ratified by more than 63 percent of the votes in the referendum according to the consensus of exit polls broadcast by the major television networks in the country. Bolivia has been shaken by […]

The exit poll results ratified the mandate of President Morales and his Vice President García Linera and recalled three of the eight governors who were subjected to voting at the referendum. The exit poll results published by TV Bolivia give victory to Morales and García Linera with 61 percent of the votes. (Photo: TeleSUR) The […]

Celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died on 9 August 2008, at the age of 67, after open-heart surgery.   Here is a video of his most famous poem “Identity Card” (published in 1964): A poet of exile par excellence, Darwish died in exile.   The village of his birth in western Galilee, al-Birwa (whose Arabic […]

  This is Vanunu Mordechai from East Jerusalem. I’m the man who exposed Israel’s atomic secretes 22 years ago, in 1986, sentenced to 18 years in prison. Now, since my release in 2004, I have not been allowed to leave Israel. I’m still under Israel’s power, imprisoned in East Jerusalem. Today, I’m reading my message […]

炎の記憶 原爆の残り火をキューバへ 炎の記憶 − 原爆の残り火をキューバへ (Memory of Fire: Bringing Embers of Hiroshima to Cuba) was produced by 広島ホームテレビ(Hiroshima Home TV) and first broadcast in 2007.  The documentary tells the story of Ernesto Che Guevara’s thoughts on Hiroshima and their relation to the Cuban Revolution’s commitment to humanism, for example, its humanitarian aid and protection of […]

The origins of the conflagration in June in Kashmir on forest land allocation for construction of facilities for the Amarnath yatra lie in open state promotion of the pilgrimage.  The yatra has caused considerable damage to the economy and ecology of the area.  The high-handed actions of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board only aggravated the […]

The Israeli Coalition for a Middle East Free of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons demonstrated in a vigil to mark Hiroshima Day in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv on 6 August. Their statement called for An international initiative to create a Middle East free of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, in a […]

Note on the Status of CCS within the University of KwaZulu-Natal On 30 July, the staff of the Centre for Civil Society and our host institution, the School of Development Studies (SDS), were summoned by Dean Donal McCracken, and told that as of 31 December 2008, CCS would be permanently closed, that Professor Patrick Bond […]

Efforts to beat the drums of war for an attack on Iran’s nuclear reactor facilities are promoted in both the USA and Israel scenes.  The recent New York Times opinion piece of July 18th, written by the Israeli historian Benny Morris, serves to consolidate those political forces.  The Jewish opposition here expresses our outrage in […]

In another few days, I will sail on one of the Free Gaza movement boats from Cyprus to Gaza.  The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of […]

Cedric Johnson.  Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics.   University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Cedric Johnson‘s Revolutionaries to Race Leaders traces the ideological cooptation of one of the twentieth century’s most vibrant social movements.  The Black Nationalist resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s demanded nothing short of self-determination, […]

For the last several months Turkey has been immersed in a major political crisis as various sections of the Turkish ruling classes openly feud.  It has pitted the ruling, Islamic-influenced AKP government against sections of the Turkish military, political, and judicial elites.  It is also dispute over the direction of Turkish economic restructuring as well […]

  Thank you for the opportunity to speak.  I want to thank also our friends in Hokkaido for the excellent preparation for this symposium. When we heard the news of the G8 Summit taking place in Toyako, we thought that we should urge the government of Japan, as the only country that has been bombed […]

  “When we talk about a financial crisis, it’s really only a symptom. . . .  Financial adventurism is essentially what we have been witnessing for the last thirty or forty years, exploding from time to time in the form of financial crisis.  It’s really adventurist, speculative capital which has to find in some way […]

As much as we enjoy puns in titles, Stephen Zunes’ recent defense of Gene Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in the article “Sharp Attack Unwarranted,” doesn’t have much else going for it.  Zunes spends most of his time diverting attention from the real issues: the AEI’s role in imperial projects, a role which is politically […]