Geography Archives: Asia

  Achievements of the Cuban Revolution are well known to Monthly Review readers.  What is striking about Raúl Castro Ruz’s address on 26 July 2007 (an excerpt from which is reproduced below), on the occasion of Cuba’s National Day of Rebellion, is not his tribute to them but his candid assessment of the “errors which […]

LaborFest, held each July to honor the aspirations and struggles of working people, is a moveable feast that ranges across the San Francisco area and back and forth in time. Why San Francisco? San Francisco is union country and it is working people who established LaborFest and have hosted it for the past 14 years.  […]

Vladimir Putin has not been getting good press in the United States or even Western Europe in the last year or so.  He has been charged with being authoritarian, with attempting to recreate Russia‘s imperial control over its neighbors, and with reviving Cold War obstructionism in the United Nations. So it is with some surprise […]

“Containing Russia: Back to the Future?” by Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov was published on the Web site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation on 19 July 2007.   The account of Lavrov’s conflict with the journal Foreign Affairs, which follows his essay, was published on the same Web […]

  The post-911 immigration regime originates in 2003 when immigration control shifted from the Department of Justice to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  The Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished March 2003, and its functions were transferred into the newly created DHS, in a merger of some 180,000 employees from 22 different agencies.  […]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — For my first three days in Pakistan, no conversation could go more than a few minutes without a reference to the crisis at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) compound.  I had landed in Islamabad on July 8, and by then it seemed clear that government forces would eventually storm the mosque and […]

1. Introduction: The War We are in the fight of our lives.  The hostile onslaught against U.S. labor that was launched after the Second World War and redoubled in the 1980s is entering a new phase that will profoundly influence the future of all working people in North America.  How we respond to this latest […]

As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century — or what the neocon ideologues propping up the Bush administration triumphantly call the New American Century — the contradictions of capitalist imperialism are becoming more and more acute. The most recent fallout of Bush’s policy is in Pakistan, where a movement against the US-backed regime of General Pervez Musharraf has been brewing since March 9, 2007 when the general dismissed the Chief Justice (CJ) on charges of corruption and nepotism.

CHAIN OF DISASTERS & THE WEAKEST LINK The only thing that Bush’s “war on terror” has spread faster than disaster and misery has been opposition to its means and ends.  Six years into this self-righteously promoted crusade, Washington is more isolated internationally than ever.  Within the U.S., the Commander Guy’s approval rating has fallen below […]

  How should progressives respond to the ongoing brouhaha about Salman Rushdie‘s knighthood?  We should begin by reminding ourselves, particularly if we live in the West, that the so-called “Muslim” response to the announcement of Rushdie’s knighthood does not speak for the majority of Muslims, or for what matters to most Muslims in the world.  […]

Michael Heinrich is a political scientist and mathematician in Berlin and a member of the editorial board of Prokla — journal for critical social science.  Below is an interview with the “. . . ums Ganze!” [. . . All or Nothing!] coalition. “…ums Ganze!”: The federal government has staked out a position for the […]

Offshoring U.S. jobs to the Far East has been a major campaign in the war of attrition against U.S. labor that began in the post-World War II era, was redoubled in the 1980s by the neo-conservative forces under the regime of President Ronald Reagan, and continues unabated to the present day. The first wave of […]

Vacationers visiting Baltic Sea beaches in the area have always loved the little small-gauge railroad affectionately called Mollie.  But during the G-8 summit of presidents and premiers, Mollie was strictly reserved for those directly connected with the conference in the swank hotel at the beach.  To all others it was definitely a No Go Zone. […]

Introductory Note: This essay is an adaptation and reworking of a historic 1963 document of the Students for a Democratic Society.  Its original was mimeographed in several thousand copies and distributed jointly by the SDS National Office and the newly-created Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP).  America and the New Era was intended to be […]

3 million Vietnamese people and tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers are affected by Agent Orange — a chemical weapon used by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War which causes cancer, other life-threatening illnesses, and serious birth defects in children — even those born several generations after the war. U.S. veterans received some compensation […]

This month, US Labor Against the War, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and other organizations are sponsoring an “Iraq Labor Tour” in various U.S. cities. One of the featured speakers represents the Iraq Federation of Oil Workers, which spearheads opposition to privatization of Iraqi oil and demands immediate U.S. withdrawal. However, the tour also […]

The following is the text of Delia D. Aguilar’s keynote address at the 22-23 March 2007 Pacific Northwest Regional Conference of the National Association for Chicana/o Studies, University of Washington: “Class Dismissed?  Reintegrating Critical Studies of Class into Chicana and Chicano Studies.” — Ed. I cannot begin to tell you how delighted I am at […]

WCP leader Maryam Kousha addresses protesters in London in 2005.  Also pictured is Peter Tatchell. It is a sad day when self-described progressive gay rights defenders risk their credibility to promote the agendas of Middle Eastern fanatics.  Yet that was just the scenario when Doug Ireland and Peter Tatchell broke with several reputable rights groups […]

This article by John Mage of Monthly Review also appears in the May 19th, 2007, issue of Economic and Political Weekly of Mumbai, India. A revolutionary civil war in Nepal ceased de facto with the popular triumph over King Gyanendra in April 2006, and de jure with the peace agreement reached in November 2006.  The […]

BLACK EARTH: A Journey through Russia after the Fall by Andrew MeierBUY THIS BOOK Andrew Meier’s Black Earth is a travelogue of epic proportions.  In its finely written pages Meier, Moscow correspondent for Time from 1996 to 2001, recounts a reportorial odyssey that took him to every point of Russia’s compass, even to Chechnya and […]