Geography Archives: Asia

A series of bomb blasts ripped through packed commuter trains July 11 in Mumbai, India.  Seven bombs exploded one after another during the evening rush hour.  As of this writing, 186 people had died and nearly 800 injured, while hundreds more were still missing. So far, no one has claimed responsibility for the bombing. The […]

  George Galloway MP is the controversial British politician who has proved a thorn in the side of advocates of the Iraq war.  He is a fierce advocate of the Palestinian state, and a redoubtable campaigner against oppression and injustice throughout the world.  In 2005 he made a memorable appearance before the US Senate, successfully […]

The priority of the Iranian people, according to the Zogby poll released on 13 July 2006,1 is economy: 41% say economy should be Iran’s top priority, a far larger proportion than those who regard nuclear capability (27%) or freedom (23%) as the most important.  The correct priority if you ask me, as the Supreme Leader […]

International intrigues and eventually war — with all its now daily horrors — flow partly from the highly unstable economics of global oil.  Not only has this been true for a long time, it promises to continue that way unless and until some mass movement ends it.  The report of US planning to bomb Iran […]

We have pledged to help reclaim the honor of the United States of America.  Accordingly, we call for the impeachment of the president of the United States, George W. Bush. Since lying in combat could needlessly cost the lives of fighting men and women, West Point graduates have been trained to live by a code […]

  As the Nepalese people’s struggle against the autocratic feudal monarchy to establish a democratic republic hit a high point during the month of April, it coincided with the arrival from India of the Second International Road-Building Brigade.  While the old oppressive and exploitative feudalist world was being attacked and dismantled in the country’s towns […]

The AFL-CIO has just formally petitioned the Bush Administration to “take immediate action to stop exploitation by the Chinese government and multinational corporations of workers in China, who are paid as little as 15 cents per hour”  (AFL-CIO, “AFL-CIO Files Workers’ Rights Case Against China ,” Press Release, June 8, 2006).  It appears that the […]

  Flying into Hong Kong with my wife, Amy Demarest, early in the morning of June 8, 2006 and jetlagged, I wasn’t sure I’d be up to the next two days of a fully packed conference on the Cultural Revolution.  The conference was sponsored by the China Study Group, Monthly Review, and the Contemporary China […]

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Iran must really adore the American model of state conduct.  Contrary to popular perceptions, the decision-makers in Tehran agree with their nemesis, Akbar Ganji, who recently told the Voice of America that the West was “the cradle of civilization.”  Two recent moves by Iran are especially noteworthy […]

The current debate in Congress over the war in Iraq has put the myth of victory and its opposite — surrender– back on the front pages.  These are actually more than myths; they are genuine misrepresentations of what’s happening in Iraq — lies, in other words.  It doesn’t really matter, though, because those who want […]

Capitalism’s demand for cheap labor is the thread that runs throughout the history of immigration in the U.S. and remains the central issue today.  Currently, the crux of the immigration issue is the status of the undocumented Mexican and Central American labor force working in this country.  Just how closely the U.S. economy is linked […]

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM by David HarveyBUY THIS BOOK Neoliberalism has left an indelible, smoldering mark on our world for the last thirty years.  Eminent Marxist geographer David Harvey, author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2005), spoke earlier this year to Sasha Lilley, of the radical radio program Against the Grain, about […]

Even before Iran was rocked by the mass uprising of 1978-79, I understood that moralists of all stripes shroud certain tragedies with unique reverence as a means of discouraging dissent.  Three decades later, Iran’s opposition movement — and occasionally Human Rights Watch — are grounded in orthodoxies of their own even as they struggles against […]

2,500 US known dead, give or take a corpse or two  Untold tens of thousands of Iraqis. A new and more repressive crackdown in Iraq’s capital city titled, rather lamely, Operation Forward Together.  No Iron Fist this time.  No Desert Storm.  Just Forward Together into the fog or perhaps the abyss.  No one really seems […]

In one of her last essays published in the United Kingdom, the late Susan Sontag compared the pictures of tortured Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq with the photographs “of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, […]

  Australian troops are back in Timor.  But this time, their imperialist agenda is a lot more obvious. In 1999, the people of East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia.  The  Indonesian military and its puppet militias retaliated by wrecking the place and killing over 1,000 people.  Australian Prime Minister John Howard then sent in […]

STRANGE LIBERATORS: Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit by Gregory Elich (with Michael Parenti’s Introduction and Mickey Z’s Afterword)BUY THIS BOOK I first met Greg Elich more than two years when we were both speakers at the One Dance People’s Summit.  We’ve since become friends and I was proud to write the afterword for […]

[The following profile of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first appeared in Asia Times Online (www.atimes.com) on 19 May 2006.  It shows that the President of Iran is winning the right friends (the economically disenfranchised, ambitious men and women of younger generations who are denied political power by the current clerical rulers, ordinary Iranians of middling sorts who […]

WHO THE HELL IS STEW ALBERT? by Stewart Edward AlbertBUY THIS BOOK Stew Albert had one of his smart, funny ideas when he was thinking about a name for his memoir.  “My Sixties,” he said was going to call it.  He was in his late fifties when we kicked this one around and I thought […]

MAY 6, 2006, New York City Stew Albert Photo by Robert Altman © 2006 Stew Albert was our troubadour, poet, writer, our cherished moral center. On May Day 1971, in Washington DC during the May Day antiwar demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of activists to shut down the city, Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo […]