I defied my advanced age to board a special train, with a thousand mostly young people, and join in the big “Blockupy” demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s big banking city. The trip, though not the usual four and a half but seven hours, retained till well into the night a spirit of happy anticipation. […]
Geography Archives: Asia
Countries in the continent of Asia
A History of a Counter-Revolution
Gerald Horne. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. NYU Press, 2014. In the conventional, celebratory liberal historical narrative about the Founding Fathers, the post-revolutionary persistence of slavery in the United States, along with women’s lack of essential political and legal rights, has long been regarded as […]
On “Sweet,” “Yellow Head,” and “Two-Spirit”
The Pillager band was the advance guard in the mid-eighteenth-century Ojibwe migration into what would become the state of Minnesota a century later. According to Ojibwe mythology, the Great Spirit (gichi-manidoo) had told them to migrate to a place where “the food grows on water.” Minnesota, with its plentiful wild rice (a sacred plant to […]
Are Scotland’s Post-Referendum Politics Set to Challenge Austerity Britain?
First a bit of context on how we got here. Scotland was united with England to form Great Britain by the 1707 Treaty of Union, which was signed by a political elite with no democratic mandate who were largely bribed into agreement or, as Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns put it, “bought and sold for […]
The European Union’s Anti-People Strategy, with a Special Focus on Greece
. . . So, our party [Communist Party of Greece, KKE] was very clear — for many years now — that the European Union is a union of capital and an anti-people hornet’s nest. The parties of the plutocracy in Greece as well as other countries lied to the peoples, fostered illusions that they […]
American Exceptionalism, Working-Class Wars, and Working-Class Peace Movements
Christian Appy. American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. New York: Viking, 2015. Christian Appy is the author of two splendid previous books about the Vietnam War: Working-Class War and Patriots. Patriots was extraordinary in that it offered oral histories by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The main argument of Appy’s […]
Pentagon Marks 50th Anniversary of Viet Nam War with Multi-million Dollar Re-write of History; Veterans Respond with “Vietnam War Full Disclosure Project”
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the landing of U.S. ground troops in Da Nang, Vietnam, the beginning of the American War in Vietnam. To observe it, the Pentagon is undertaking a multi-million dollar campaign to rewrite and whitewash the history of that war. In response, Veterans For Peace (VFP) has announced the Vietnam […]
The Importance of the “Economic”
The world today is witnessing a rather novel phenomenon, namely a pervasive tendency towards political uprisings by the urban middle class. Not just the leaders, but even the bulk of the participants in such uprisings are educated, are reasonably well-off, and make extensive use of social media channels for keeping in touch with one another. […]
Europe Between the Pit and the Pendulum
If you have ever read Edgar Allen Poe‘s gruesome stories you may recall feelings of horror like those which made me, still a youngster, cringe and shudder. I have similar feelings when I hear of bloodthirsty, barely-hidden “concerts” by German Neo-Nazis, which too often lead to violence against subjects of their hatred: hippy-type leftist youngsters […]
PEGIDA, SYRIZA, and the Future of Europe
Recent events here in Germany remind me of a playground seesaw, with constant ups and downs of one side and the other. All autumn we watched the upward swing of PEGIDA, “Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West,” most rapidly but not only in Saxony’s capital Dresden. Its main features were a fast-talking, shady leader […]
Samir Amin on the Charlie Hebdo Murders: Imperialism and International Terrorism
The Western errors and neo-liberal damages: Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi knew how to contain the Islamist drift, but they were slaughtered. In Libya, Paris and Washington have it all wrong. We reached Samir Amin — philosopher, economist, and director of the Third World Forum based in Dakar — in Paris by phone, to […]
Je Suis Charlie — But I Have Other Names as Well!
Monday evening I had planned to write about the PEGIDA movement in Germany. Although in Dresden, their city of origin, the number of bitter marchers protesting the “Islamization” of the West had increased stubbornly to 18,000, I began to report happily that everywhere else in Germany they had been greatly outnumbered. In Berlin, only 300 […]
Black Lives Matter in the Best Films of 2014
More than 100 years after the birth of cinema, it sometimes feels like every story has been told. But the best films of 2014 dared to break out of their genres, explore new ways of filmmaking, and inspire viewers. Some of them even provided tools for popular understanding of our current political moment. This year, […]
An Early Activist Critique of Stalin’s 1934 Antihomosexual Law: “A Chapter of Russian Reaction” by Kurt Hiller
Introduction This article, titled “A Chapter of Russian Reaction,” translated into English here for the first time, was written in German by longtime homosexual activist Kurt Hiller (1885-1972) from London and published in the Swiss gay journal Der Kreis in 1946. Hiller had been active in Germany’s first homosexual-rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific […]
The “Responsible Nuclear State”: The United States and the Bomb
In light of the revelations that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons in the event of war between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea, it may be worth revisiting the idea that America represents a “responsible” nuclear power, in opposition to countries like Iran and […]
“Today Is the Day Democracy Is Murdered”: Wave of Repression Sweeps South Korea
On December 19, the South Korean Constitutional Court delivered a devastating blow against the progressive movement when it disbanded the Unified Progressive Party (UPP) with immediate effect. That act came as the culmination of a long campaign by South Korean President Park Geun-hye to shackle the labor movement and smash political opposition. The Constitutional Court […]
Imperialism and The Interview: The Racist Dehumanization of North Korea
The haze of political chaos in America surrounding the Ferguson protests, the Torture Report, and the “relaxing” of US-Cuba relations has been broken by a media spectacle almost too ridiculous to comprehend. A hacker group called the “Guardians of Peace” conducted a “cyber attack” on Sony Pictures Entertainment, leaking emails, documents, presentations, and information […]
The Political Economy of Austerity Now
Government austerity for the masses (raising taxes and cutting public services) is becoming the issue shaping politics in western Europe, north America, and Japan. In the US, austerity turned millions away from the polls where before they supported an Obama who promised changes from such policies. So Republicans will control Congress and conflicts over austerity […]
“A Guernica of Political Prose”: Ashok Mitra’s Calcutta Diary
Ashok Mitra. Calcutta Diary. Kolkata: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, 2014 (first published in 1977 by Frank Cass, London). pp xxvii + 300. Rs 395. They do not trumpet their inspiration from the rooftops: “their identification with the cause is nevertheless total”. Amal Sen, the homeopath, was one such sympathiser. A dreamer of socialist dreams, he medicated, […]
The Spectre of Social Counter-Revolution
5th Dr. BR Ambedkar Memorial Lecture, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, New Delhi, September 27, 2014 I I would like to use this occasion to dwell upon a point to which Dr Ambedkar had drawn attention in his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949. In that speech he had underscored a […]
