Geography Archives: Australasia

Not only did conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard lose the election last Saturday in a landslide, he may have lost his seat as well. The Australian Labor Party now controls all nine Australian governments: State, Territory and federal. Industrial relations was the key issue in the election. Years of campaigning against the anti-Aboriginal and […]

After practicing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands, Nauru, and East Timor, the Australian Government is invading and occupying outback Aboriginal communities with soldiers and police. Conservative Prime Minister John Howard declared a “national emergency” on June 21 over sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory.   The trigger was said to be […]

  Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd and his deputy Julia Gillard are performing three different and sometimes discordant tunes as they ride high in the polls and promote their industrial relations policy.  This is not just a matter of vote maximising; it tells us a lot about the nature and transformation of the Australian Labor […]

  The first round of East Timor’s presidential election, held on 9 April 2007, was inconclusive, yet it brought some issues into sharp focus. Voters punished the ruling party Fretilin for presiding over a collapse in social order; but they showed little enthusiasm for the free-market polices of rival candidate Jose Ramos Horta.  A sizeable […]

Most of The Pursuit of Happyness (Dir. Gabriele Muccino, 2006) is about hard times hitting a good, smart, and hard-working man.  As the result of bad luck, mistreatment, disloyalty of friends, low wages, and high costs of housing, Chris Gardner (played by Will Smith) and his young son wind up homeless.  The film is so […]

  Annual Fundraising AppealFriends 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 […]

I. Three Metropoles, Four Peripheries Many of us on the Left have pondered what would replace the Cold War division of the planet into the First, Second, and Third World.  Though the three worlds thesis was arbitrary at best — the social divisions within nation-states are often more significant than the distinctions between nation-states — […]

To the Government of India, Members of the Judiciary, and All Citizens, To build a truly democratic and plural India, we must collectively fight against laws and policies that abuse human rights and limit fundamental freedoms. This is why we, concerned Indian citizens and people of Indian origin, support the overturning of Section 377 of […]

  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 […]

The demo in Perth on 18 March 2006 was attended by about a thousand people, down substantially from the size of demos before the beginnng of the Iraq War. The majority of people out in downtown Perth on Saturday were shopping. They weren’t hostile — rather, openly indifferent or mildly curious about the people who […]

Jyllands-Posten stood Clausewitz on his head.  Its now infamous cartoons of Mohammed are not so much speech as acts.  Acts of provocation and belligerence.  They are the latest round of politics as war by other means. Make no mistake.  Jyllands-Posten is not in the business of promoting the freedom of speech.  Nor are the European […]

What has been left out of reports and analysis in both the mainstream press and among anti-imperialists and leftists about the triumph of Evo Morales’ election as President of Bolivia is the role played by the three-decade international indigenous movement that preceded it.  Few are even aware of that powerful and remarkable historic movement, which […]

Andre Vltchek Andre Vltchek is a Czech-born American writer who has written for Der Spiegel, Asahi Shimbun, the Guardian, and many other international papers.  He has reported on the violence of the neo-liberal order from all over the globe,  but especially from Indonesia, about which he has made a ground-breaking documentary: Terlena: Breaking of a […]

The number of films on national figures like Gandhi, Ambedkar, Savarkar, and Bhagat Singh, as well as films like Lagaan and Gadar, in recent years point to an interest in revaluation and reinterpretation of history, especially that of the freedom struggle, in India. That this has happened in the last few years needs an explanation. […]

The farmed salmon industry has recently been dealt yet another blow as the world learns about the contaminated product it offers for the public’s dinner plates.  In June, 2005, a multi-national aquaculture company, Stolt Sea Farms, confirmed that nearly 320,000 of its farmed salmon from British Columbia were contaminated with the illegal fungicide “malachite green” […]

Anyone interested in politics should at least occasionally read what Right-Wing Think Tanks (RWTTs) are proposing, for what they advocate shows up as Administration policies. Reading the RWTTs enables us to identify and respond to the same ideas that eventually trickle out of the mouths of Administration spokespeople. Right-Wing Think Tanks want to eliminate the […]

For years, U.S. political and economic leaders saw themselves in mortal combat with communist nations for the allegiance of peoples at home and abroad. The pressure of being in competition with an alternative economic system set limits on how thoroughly Western leaders dared to mistreat their own working populations. Indeed, during the Cold War, pains […]