Here is the full-text of what I said — as also, what I wanted to say but restrained myself because of the time constraint or because of my diffidence — at the book release of Gautam Navlakha’s Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion (Penguin Books, 2012), organised by Sanhati at the Gandhi […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
What’s Behind the Growth of Right-Wing Hatred in Germany?
No, it wasn’t shredded wheat. This shredding was not of breakfast food and has been much harder to digest; it was evidence on serial murder! The related biliousness is all the more painful due to a worrisome new survey of rightist hatred in Germany. But first some background. For a year now the case of […]
The Strike in Southern Europe
A storm is brewing in Southern Europe. In Greece on November 6 and 7 another general strike will take place. On November 14 Portuguese, Cypriot, Spanish, and Italian trade unions intend to go on strike in opposition to the austerity policies of the European Union. Belgian and British trade unions, as well as the European […]
What Have We Learned Since the “Forgotten Holocaust”?
Decent news to begin with: Near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate a memorial was finally unveiled to mark the murder of approximately 500,000 Roma people (often called Gypsies) in Nazi death camps. The decision to erect it was made in 1992, the year a pogrom in the East German city of Rostock was unleashed when Roma refugees […]
Whose War? The War of 1812
Centennials, bicentennials, and other historical anniversaries — not to mention annual holidays — play a major role in the legitimation of power relations. And they can be sharp ideological battlegrounds like Columbus Day. This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, an inconclusive two and a half-year war with Great Britain […]
Health Care Reform, Year Zero
The ideological ambiguity of health care reform during Obama’s first term concedes few absolute truths. The enterprise of reforming health care by way of corporate regulation ignites debate across the left spectrum about the Affordable Care Act’s place in the 2012 election and beyond. Like it or not, the rules of the ACA are now […]
“Collectivized Torture”: Drone Warfare and the Dark Side of Counterinsurgency
The recent Stanford University report on drone strikes in Pakistan, Living Under Drones, raises the possibility that the US is intentionally using drones, not merely as hi-tech assassination devices, but also as weapons of state terror intended to subdue unruly regions and populations. The appalling reality of drone warfare along the Afghanistan border closely resembles […]
The Sargasso Manuscript: Some Observations on Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
Susan Sontag. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. Edited by David Rieff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. I. David Rieff has played the last of Susan Sontag’s jokes upon the reader: to remain austerely cool, distant, and unsympathetic toward us even in “journals and notebooks.” The barbed wire of […]
Regarding “Creative Time Summit”: No Time for Creativity With Apartheid Israel
It has recently come to our attention that the Creative Time Summit has listed the Israeli Center for Digital Art (ICDA) as a major partner for this year’s summit. After discovering this, we cannot in good faith participate in the 2012 Creative Time Summit in adherence to the call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) […]
German Politics and Vitamin B
What has Vitamin B to do with politics? For the answer you must learn a little German, at least one key word. “Beziehungen” — with a capital “B” — means connections, especially good connections. It’s smart to have lots of “Vitamin B,” and not just the pharmacy kind! Now here’s a man whose pockets seem […]
Capitalism and “Human Nature”: A Rebuttal
In the celebrated section of The Wealth of Nations in which he discusses the advantages of the division of labor, Adam Smith advances the thesis that “common to all men” is a “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Smith hedges on whether this “propensity” is a matter of original human nature […]
Can Syria Avoid the Fate of Libya and Iraq? Interview with Issa Chaer
Dr Issa Chaer is a member of the Syrian Social Club (based in England). Carlos Martinez: Thanks very much for agreeing to be interviewed. You have been very active in spreading information about the Syria conflict. Can you explain why you have chosen to give so much time and energy to this cause? Issa Chaer: […]
Some Memories of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy
In 1949, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman created Monthly Review. In the same year, Paul Baran and I began to teach in the San Francisco Bay Area: Baran at Stanford, myself at UC Berkeley. As the years unfolded, we worked together politically in the area with the same social aims and values. Meanwhile, the two […]
Furor in France: Mission Civilisatrice and “Muslim Rage” in the Motherland
As Muslims around the world protest their contemptuous treatment by the West, catalyzed by the provocative, racist American film Innocence of Muslims, the French media added fuel to the fire of by publishing offensive cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Left-wing alt-weekly Charlie Hebdo ran cartoons that depicted a naked, turbaned Muhammad in profoundly racist and […]
The Story of a Ring
A small but moving episode marked the regular annual meeting of the German organization Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic 1936-1939 (Kämpfer und Freunde der Spanischen Republik 1936-1939). It was the first such meeting without a single veteran; the last volunteer in Germany, Fritz Teppich, died last winter, and none of the tiny, decreasing […]
All Sorts of Roguery? The ‘Financial Aristocracy’ and Government à Bon Marché in India
My voice is a crime, My thoughts anarchy, Because I do not sing to their tunes, I do not carry them on my shoulders. — Cherabandaraju, who was the lead accused in a “conspiracy case” involving poets and their poetry. It’s been two decades and a year since India’s elite embraced neo-liberalism. Money — the […]
A Little-Known Film Master, Kurt Maetzig
An extraordinary mensch, an extraordinary filmmaker who made extraordinary films and lived to the extraordinary age of 101, Kurt Maetzig, who died last week, was virtually unknown in the United States, indeed, in the western world generally. The reason: he lived and worked in East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, whose films — many mediocre […]
Tito’s Class-Conscious Classifieds
In a recent PBS interview with Bill Moyers, journalist Chris Hedges discussed protest for social change. “Revolt,” he said, apropos of salvaging a collapsing world, “is all we have. It is our only hope.” I agree. So would my friend Tito Gerassi, who believed all his life in revolution. And, since rising unemployment is part […]
Choosing Ryan, Embracing Austerity
Whatever electoral calculations drove Mitt Romney to choose Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate, the choice also has a deeper meaning. Ryan’s arrival at the top of the Republican Party represents the rise of the most vocal and visible proponent of austerity in US politics today. Ryan represents the US parallel to the regimes […]
Tadeusz Kowalik, 1926-2012
Professor Tadeusz Kowalik (1926-2012) was a noted Polish economist who played a major role in Polish economic debates for more than a half century. A graduate of the University of Warsaw, Kowalik was a student of the distinguished Polish Marxist economist Oskar Lange and like his teacher, was a prominent advocate of market socialism […]
