Norman Finkelstein is one of the world’s foremost public intellectuals writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is the author of many books on the topic, most recently Beyond Chutzpah, an exhaustive account of Israel’s human rights record, and This Time We Went Too Far (reviewed in New Left Project), an analysis of the Gaza massacre […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
The Publicist: Henry Luce, Time Inc., and “The American Century”
A starlet in a strapless dress smiles on the cover of the February 17, 1941, issue of Life. Then, there are ten pages of ads: Oldsmobile, Knox Gelatine, Bendix automatic home laundry, Birds Eye Frosted Foods. Further in, between one photo essay on iceboating and another on a woman racecar driver, there is an editorial, […]
Throwing Down the Gauntlet: A Review of Michael Lebowitz’s Socialist Alternative
Michael Lebowitz. The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Pp 192; $15.95 Only about ten or fifteen years ago, leftist theory was in a sorry state. It seemed as if socialism had ceased to be a viable project with the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead of an alternative […]
Paris, October 1961
Leïla Sebbar, The Seine Was Red. Paris, October 1961: A Novel (translated by Mildred Mortimer). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. xxiv + 116pp. $17.95 U.S. (pb). ISBN 10-0253-2202-38. The official French obfuscation of the police violence against Algerians in Paris in October 1961 has inspired long-term personal and collective memory retrieval that […]
The Theory of U.S. Foreign Policy — I
United States foreign policy has been generating defeats for well over a decade now but never at such a fast and furious pace as during the last few months. . . . What is the reaction in the American ruling class to this consistent and comprehensive failure of foreign policy? One might expect mounting criticism […]
Goodbye to Turkey or Goodbye to Good versus Evil?
The West is worried about Turkey. Its spokespeople fear that the West might have “lost” Turkey since its Prime Minister, Recep Erdoğan, associated himself with President Lula, proposed to act as intermediary between the West and Iran, and, later, reacted with determination against Israel’s violent raid on a boat sailing under the Turkish flag and […]
India: The Poverty of the Intellectual Mind and the Enlightened Mind of the Backward Adivasi
This is a rejoinder that the slain CPI (Maoist) spokesperson had penned in response to B.G. Verghese’s article in Outlook. Reading B.G. Verghese’s article Daylight at the Thousand-Star Hotel in Outlook (May 3), one is stunned by the abysmal poverty of thought and colonial mindset of this renowned intellectual. How is it that the […]
Apartheid South Africa’s Secret Relationship with Israel
Thank you for having me, Yousef [Munayyer], and thank you all for coming out on a day when it’s over 100 degrees. I know it wasn’t easy. I’m going to talk a little about the research that went into this book [The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa] and where my interest […]
Samandal: Picture Stories from Here and There
What is Samandal? Samandal is about comics, a trilingual publication dedicated to comics from the region and abroad that comes out quarterly in Arabic, English, and French. All the comics in Samandal are published under a Creative Commons license. And how does Creative Commons change commons? To answer that, we need to look at […]
Greek Debt: Default or Restructuring?
After Greece, what? Hungary? Or a low growth prospect for Europe? Or disappointment with American recovery? Or, still Greece? The international financial markets are always nervous and unstable — sometimes sad, sometimes euphoric, but always in a dialectic of rationality and irrationality. Despite our more “scientific” air, we economists make the same mistakes. So, perplexed […]
The Dollar Question: Where Are We?
The global crisis has led some to question the dollar’s place as the dominant currency. This column discusses three camps in the literature: those advocating a new synthetic global currency, those arguing that a new reserve currency will emerge, and those suggesting a return to sharing the role. It concludes that talk of the […]
End Times with Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2010. Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in […]
Exploiting “Crisis” to Crush Labor
One thing should be made clear about the situation in the Eurozone economies that is not clear at all if we rely on most of the news reports. This is not a situation where countries face a “dilemma” because they have overspent and piled up too much public debt. They do not face “tough choices” […]
Revolution and Public Debt: Britain and France
David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688-1789. xii + 210 pp. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Tables, figures, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index. $60.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 0-521-80967-3. In 1989, Douglass North and Barry Weingast published an article in the Journal of […]
Sanctions against Iran and the Next War
In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides relates how Pericles, in the fifth century BC, imposed economic sanctions against the city of Megara, which had allied itself with Sparta. Athens prohibited trade with this city state and sent a message: if Megara did not break its alliance with Sparta, it would be punished. Megara […]
Iran, Israel, and Air Defense: What, Exactly, Is the “Threat”?
A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had sent Syria a “sophisticated radar system that could threaten Israel’s ability to launch a surprise attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” The story cited reporting from “two Israeli officials, two U.S. officials and a Western intelligence source,” and was “confirmed . . . by […]
The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation
Shir Hever and Paul Jay
Paul Jay: So, in talking to people in Israel, one thing I hear constantly is the fight here is about national identity, it’s about the defense of the Jewish state. I don’t hear very much about economics of Israel or the economics of occupation. So how does national identity relate to the economics here? […]
A Nuclear Revival?
Justin Pemberton, dir. The Nuclear Comeback. DVD. New York: Icarus Films, 2007. 53 minutes. Are we on the brink of a nuclear revival? Should we be? The Nuclear Comeback, an absorbing documentary video, is titled declaratively but sprinkles question marks. The Nuclear Comeback embarks on a tour of some of the high and low […]
The Boss, the Union, and the Government
The boss commits a violent foul play against the union. See which side the government red cards. Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain. This cartoon was published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 14 June 2009. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi […]
Après moi, le déluge: War, Debt, and Revolution
Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. x + 415 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 U.S. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12499-5 (hb). The subtitle of Michael Sonenscher’s book calls to mind at least two different, and separate, historical problems. First, […]
