Paul R. Hanson, Contesting the French Revolution. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. xii + 229 pp. Bibliography and index. $89.95 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-1-4051-6083-4; $34.95 U.S. (pb). ISBN 978-1-4051-6084-1. When Blackwell published a volume on the French Revolution in its Essential Readings in History series in 2001, Ronald Schechter began his introduction to […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
Is Iran Now a Nuclear Target for the United States?
Today — Tuesday, April 6, 2010 — the Obama Administration will proclaim, as a matter of declaratory policy, that the United States claims the prerogative to use nuclear weapons against the Islamic Republic of Iran, even as Iran remains a non-nuclear-weapons state. The Administration will make this declaration as part of its much anticipated Nuclear […]
“Israeli Nation” vs. “Jewish State”
A group of Jews and Arabs are fighting in the Israeli courts to be recognized as “Israelis,” a nationality currently denied them, in a case that officials fear may threaten the country’s self-declared status as a Jewish state. Israel refused to recognize an Israeli nationality at the country’s establishment in 1948, making an unusual distinction […]
Cuba Does Not Bow to Pressures
Address by Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, President of the State Council and the Council of Ministers and Second Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Central Committee, at the Closing Session of the 9th Congress of the Young Communist League, Havana, 4 April 2010, Year 52 of the Revolution Comrades, delegates, and guests: […]
The Ecological Revolution!
John Bellamy Foster. The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009. 288pp. $17.95 (pb). ISBN 9781583671795. This book is a major achievement. It combines enormous breadth of scholarship with consummate theoretical integration to produce a powerful political argument. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about […]
A Difficult Love Affair? On the Relation between Marxism and Theology
Abstract: From the moment Marx and Engels became involved with the League of the Just, Marxism has always had a long and often difficult relation with theology and the Bible. Some of the leading figures of the twentieth century were no exception — Althusser, Adorno, Gramsci, Lefebvre, Eagleton are just a few. And in our […]
Free Gaza Flotilla to Break the Blockade!
April 3, 2010 Istanbul, Turkey — Following months of preparation, a coalition bringing together a number of organizations and movements working to break Israel’s illegal blockade on Gaza was announced yesterday in Istanbul. The coalition, composed of the Turkey-based IHH (Insani Yardim Vakfi) organization, the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG), the […]
Occupied Washington DC
A photo essay on the military presence in our nation’s capital. . . . Stephanie Westbrook is a US citizen who has been living in Rome, Italy since 1991. She is active in the peace and social justice movements in Italy and traveled to Gaza in June 2009. She can be reached at . | […]
The United States, Iran, and the Middle East’s New “Cold War”
The absence of US-Iranian rapprochement will perpetuate the new Middle Eastern Cold War, imposing costs on the United States, Iran and other regional and international players. However, in strategic terms, the heaviest costs of continued US-Iranian estrangement are likely to be borne by the United States. In particular, lack of productive relations with Tehran will […]
“Progressive Exit” from the Eurozone
The crisis facing the eurozone looks at first sight as German efficiency clashing with Portuguese, Irish, Greek and Spanish sloppiness. But in many respects Germany has performed worse than the “peripheral” countries in the last decade. The largest economy of the eurozone has been marked by slow growth, poor domestic demand, weak investment, high unemployment, […]
Israel: The Global Pacification Industry
Jeff Halper: We’re one of the leading — I would say, modestly — peace and human rights organizations in Israel. We started about thirteen years ago. I’ve been involved for forty years in the Israeli peace movement. During the Oslo peace process, during the 90s, the Israeli peace movement also, like other Israelis, invested […]
Ambivalent Feminism: Romantic Socialism, Gender, and the Individual
Naomi Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism, Lanhan, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006. 210 pp. $66.00 (hb). ISBN 10-0739-108-441. In Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism, Naomi Andrews brings her readers into a complex conversation that touches on individualism and egoism, on the nature […]
Iran-US Standoff
“What is it that they have against Iran? If you look at it, it’s only that Iran is rising as a competitor of Israel. There is no other basis for this animosity.” — Aijaz Ahmad Aijaz Ahmad: The US is running out of all options. You mentioned this possible agreement. Iran has actually agreed […]
PIIGS Countries, Being Led to the Slaughter, Should Rethink Euro
As the EU summit meeting convenes, Greece is dominating the agenda much more than Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel had wanted. This week she has thrown cold water on the idea that Germany and other EU countries would take responsibility for helping Greece to roll over some of its debt, handing that job off to the […]
On the Greek Crisis
Jayati Ghosh: What’s happening to Greece is in an interesting way what many developing countries have gone through. It’s really an inability to have independent monetary and fiscal policies, combined with a fact that during the boom it was chosen as a favorite destination, which creates a situation where you then become uncompetitive. Suddenly […]
From Iraq to Iran: Is London Again “Helping” Washington Pursue Regime Change in the Middle East?
There are two countries in the world which are routinely described by American politicians across the political spectrum as having a “special relationship” with the United States — Israel and the United Kingdom. We have all grown more familiar than we probably like to acknowledge with Israel using its channels to Capitol Hill and in […]
A Cloward-Piven Strategy for Single Payer?
With the passage in the House of the Obama administration’s health care reform bill, it would seem at first glance that the movement for national, single-payer health insurance has been seriously derailed. After all, if all of the hype and adulation surrounding the bill’s passage is to be believed, the fight for universal health care […]
The Most Probable Endgame for New Iran Sanctions
The all too predictable dynamics surrounding a potential new Iran sanctions resolution in the United Nations Security Council continue to play out just as we have anticipated. As some commentators are leaping on media stories that one of China’s diplomats took part in a P-5+1 conference call yesterday about a possible resolution, the Wall Street […]
Travel Advice: Don’t Hand Over Your Passport to Israeli Officials (If You Can Avoid It)
UK passport holders should be aware of a recent Serious Organised Crime Agency investigation into the misuse of UK passports in the murder of Mahmud al-Mabhuh in Dubai on 19 January 2010. The SOCA investigation found circumstantial evidence of Israeli involvement in the fraudulent use of British passports. This has raised the possibility that […]
Belgrade Commemorates Victims of NATO Bombing
On Wednesday, eleven years after the start of the NATO bombing, Belgrade remembered the victims. There was mourning in churches (photo), and sirens wailed across the country. On 24 March 1999, the air war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began. At first, 430 bombers were deployed. The number climbed, by the tenth of June, […]
