Geography Archives: Asia

  • Remembering Where Flowers Come from on Valentine’s Day

    Every year on Valentine’s Day, millions of Americans head to their local florist shop or supermarket to buy flowers for a friend, spouse, or family member.  Some place their orders through NPR, which rewards contributors to public radio with a dozen roses sent to the person of their choice.  Especially if there’s a romantic relationship […]

  • Is the Big Ship America Sinking?Contradictions and Openings

    There’s something happeningWhat it is ain’t exactly clearBuffalo Springfield, 1966 Are we in the midst of a momentous turn in world politics?  Donald Rumsfeld has been shuffled out of the Pentagon.  Daniel Ortega, Washington’s nemesis from the Sandinista Revolution of the late 1970s, is back as President of Nicaragua.  Hugo Chavez has been triumphantly re-elected, […]

  • Abolish It!

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. […]

  • General Strike in Kashmir

    The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front called a bandh, i.e., a general strike.  The strike began today, 6 February 2007.  The JKLF chairman Mohammed Yasin Malik said at a press conference in Srinagar: “Peace process and killing of innocent Kashmiris cannot go together, and the recent discoveries about the killings of innocent Kashmiris by Indian forces, […]

  • Change the System — Not the Climate!

      Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has helped dramatize the enormity of the global environmental crisis.  The scale of the threat posed by industrially induced global warming, and the short time in which to take meaningful action to prevent catastrophic consequences, makes the question of how to combat global warming arguably the most urgent […]

  • Once Again to Washington, DC

    Jane Fonda told the crowd at the January 27, 2007 demonstration in Washington DC that it had been 34 years since she had appeared at an anti-war demonstration, due to the lies told about her by the right wing. It has been almost 38 years since my first DC demonstration, the great outpouring of November […]

  • Academia and Social Change

      The American Historical Association (AHA) is the most prominent professional organization for American historians.  Its annual meeting, held recently in Atlanta, featured abstruse panels and presentations with titles such as “Disciplined Bodies and the Production of Space, Place, and Race: Atlanta’s Latino Day Laborers at the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century” and “The Desire […]

  • Mass Movement to End the War Now

    To endorse the statement below, please go to: www.petitiononline.com/NYCLAW2/petition.html. January 24, 2007 Despite overwhelming rejection of its policies in the November elections, the Bush administration has steadily escalated its war in the Middle East. This has meant not only ordering thousands more troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, but arming and financing Israel’s attacks on Lebanon […]

  • The “Special Economic Zone” Debacle of the Left Front in West Bengal

      Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its January 2007 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. In an article entitled “Capital, Technology and Development,”1 Harry Magdoff, refuting the myth of bourgeois social science that capital and technology are the magic which will bring the […]

  • A Counter-Revolution in Military Affairs? Notes on US High-Tech Warfare

    When Colonel Harry Summers told a North Vietnamese counterpart in 1975 that “[y]ou know you never defeated us on the battlefield,” the reply was: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.1 News stories surrounding the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq proclaimed the arrival of a long-promised “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA), a […]

  • Of the People: A Conversation with Howard Zinn

      G.M.S.: Here in Tucson, Arizona, 70 miles from the border, we are feeling the effects of President Bush’s deployment of National Guard troops at the U.S. border.  The first hundreds arrived last summer, and 2,500 are expected to be in our “Tucson Sector” by August.  Moreover, the Border Patrol is to grow from 12,400 […]

  • Somalia: A History of US Interventions

      There’s a woman — some call her “Black Hawk Down” lady — who lives in a packed, squalid neighborhood in the middle of Mogadishu and runs a rather simple but grisly museum.  For under a dollar, visitors can view her prized possession, the mangled, mud-splattered nose of a US Black Hawk helicopter that was […]

  • Dignity Returns

    “Dignity Returns” is becoming a unique clothing label and logo in Thailand, a “workers’ brand” at a factory run and owned entirely by its 30 workers in Bangkok.  The Solidarity Factory in western Bangkok is an example for garment workers anywhere in the world.  Turning out T-shirts, headbands, kids’ clothes, in an operation without bosses, […]

  • Justice for the Omaha Two

    Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa are not names familiar to most Americans.  The longest-serving political prisoners in the United States, these two former Black Panthers have spent more than thirty-five years behind bars for a crime they did not commit — the 1970 murder of Omaha, Nebraska, police officer Larry Minard. The American media […]

  • An “Islamic Civil War”

    The war that Western powers — primarily US, Israel and Britain — began against the Islamic world after September 11, 2001 is about to enter a new more dangerous phase as their early plans for “changing the map of the Middle East” have begun to unravel with unintended consequences. Codenamed “the war against terror,” the […]

  • Nadia Cherabi, Producer-Director: A Regard for the World and Human Beings [Nadia Cherabi. Productrice-réalisatrice: Un regard sur le monde et les êtres

    Aussitôt achevées ses études de sociologie, elle s’est précipitée sur le cinéma.  Sans doute achevée pour y trouver des moyens vivants d’interroger notre société et de porter un regard sur les choses mais surtout les êtres, mettant en valeur ceux qui émergent en dépit des modèles formatés. Vous vous êtes signalée par un docu-fiction sur […]

  • Worker Centers Increasingly Are Forging Alliances with Unions

    This August, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), a network of over 140 worker centers that organize mostly immigrant day laborers, entered into an agreement that would allow worker centers to apply for membership with local and state federations of the AFL-CIO.  The agreement could signal a new chapter in the way organized labor […]

  • Kuwasi at 60

    Annual Fundraising Appeal Friends of MRZine and Monthly Review! The continuing existence of MRZine and Monthly Review depends on the support of our readers.  Unlike many other publications, we make all new Monthly Review articles, as well as MRZine articles, available online, free of charge.  We do so without drawing any advertising money at all […]

  • James Brown’s Appeal

    Annual Fundraising Appeal Friends of MRZine and Monthly Review! The continuing existence of MRZine and Monthly Review depends on the support of our readers.  Unlike many other publications, we make all new Monthly Review articles, as well as MRZine articles, available online, free of charge.  We do so without drawing any advertising money at all […]

  • The Phenomenal Form of Contemporary Social Movements: An Interview with Georgy Katsiaficas

    Annual Fundraising Appeal Friends of MRZine and Monthly Review! The continuing existence of MRZine and Monthly Review depends on the support of our readers.  Unlike many other publications, we make all new Monthly Review articles, as well as MRZine articles, available online, free of charge.  We do so without drawing any advertising money at all […]