President Obama is coming under attack from the Right for his reluctance to grant the request of General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, for more U.S. troops. On the other side of the equation sits the majority of the American people, who are against sending more troops and in fact oppose […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
An Open Letter to Mahmud ‘Abbas on the Goldstone Report
We are a diverse group of Palestinians, solidarity activists, and supporters of human rights and international law. We write to join the Palestinian political parties, civil society groups, trade unions, and citizens that have condemned the recent decision at the UN Human Rights Council to withdraw Palestinian support for a resolution endorsing the report of […]
Honduran Resistance to EU: Declare Current Electoral Process Illegitimate
Erasto Reyes, trade unionist and representative of the Honduras Resistance Front returned this Wednesday to the European Parliament as part of his European solidarity visit. Reyes requested concrete support from the Parliament. In a press conference he declared that: “Parliament must denounce and vigorously condemn the coup which took place in Honduras. We ask […]
Germany: Turn Left or Right?
October 7th marked the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, and the media let no one forget it! Sarcasm prevailed, the attacks were all-embracing and almost interrupted, the only GDR relics spared in the attacks were the TV Sandman broadcasts for children, the jolly green and red figures on traffic lights […]
Betrayal in Geneva
The news coming out of Geneva these days is indeed very shocking and depressing. The Abbas government, whose term in office expired long ago, has succumbed to pressure being exerted by Hillary Clinton and Avigdor Lieberman to defer any and all discussion of the Goldstone report on the war crimes in Gaza until next […]
Unstable Equilibrium
I don’t want to serve. . . . I think that in fighting in the cinema, through our movies, for a freer, more authentic expression, with weapons that can include joie de vivre and comedy, we are waging the same war as those who fight on the barricades. — Dušan Makavejev (1971) Infamous Yugoslavian […]
Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men
Maria Charles and David B. Grusky. Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men. Stanford University Press, 2004, 400 pp. $US 55.00 hardcover (0-8047-3634-0). There is a substantial body of literature showing that, across time periods and nations, men and women have tended to do different types of work. While many studies suggest that […]
Geneva: Victory for Everyone?
The Geneva meeting — despite the furious anti-Iranian spin by the Western media and the House vote for gasoline sanctions against Iran right before the talk — turned out to be, for once, a happy surprise: it resulted in an agreement that all sides can hail as a victory for them. Iran claims that it […]
Key Facts to Keep in Mind While Opposing War against Iran
Representatives of Iran and six of the world’s most powerful countries are scheduled to meet this week in Geneva, one of a series of events that increasingly looks like a rerun of the build-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. As we prepare for a barrage of anti-Iranian media spin, it would be good […]
Iran, Etc.
Hooman Majd Answers the Nuclear Question Question: How do you respond to concerns over Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Majd: Stop worrying. Don’t learn to love the bomb, but stop worrying. First of all, Iran is so far away from having a nuclear weapon. I know there are all these reports, these alarmist reports: Iran has enough […]
Obama Plays Medvedev against Putin and Iran
“Medvedev-watching” graduated from pure science to applied science during the four-day visit by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to New York and Pittsburgh last week. The Western perception that the famous Prime Minister Vladimir Putin-Medvedev “tandem” in Moscow would inevitably transform and the Russian president would incrementally create his own power center in the Kremlin received […]
Germany: The Chancellor Wins; So Do the Ragamuffins
Much of the media complained that the German election campaign was dull; after all, the two main opponents had worked together in a coalition for four years and generally agreed or compromised on most issues. Dull or not, however, it had three important results. Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will remain in […]
Give ‘Em Hell
In my video work, entitled Give ‘Em Hell (2008), I abruptly reveal today’s situation regarding migration in the UK. During the course of several days in the summer of 2008, I positioned protest banners on the streets of London and secretly recorded the unfolding scene with a hidden camera from the opposite side of […]
Haitian Narration
Laurent Dubois. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. 384 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-01304-9; $20.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-01826-6. Laurent Dubois’s Avengers of the New World builds on a body of Caribbean scholarship that has been torn between trying to place Haiti’s independence from France […]
Why Should Russia Bail Out America?
The Obama administration’s decision to scrap the Bush era anti-missile defense plans in Eastern Europe was actually expected. Nonetheless, this was a very pragmatic move on the part of Washington. However, the immediate talk and plans for a different American-led “stronger, smarter, and swifter” anti-missile strategy was not helpful. I will reserve judgment on […]
Nationalism and “Existential Schizophrenia”: Comparing Greece and Turkey
Umut Özkırımlı, Spyros A. Sofos. Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. viii + 220 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-70052-8. Tormented by History by Umut Özkırımlı and Spyros A. Sofos provides a comparative approach to Turkish and Greek nationalisms from the late nineteenth century to the present. The […]
Religion for Radicals: An Interview with Terry Eagleton
Literary critic Terry Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.” He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room. Nathan Schneider: Rather […]
A Winnable Fight: No More U.S. Troops to Afghanistan
The stars are aligning for a winnable and worthwhile fight on U.S. policy in Afghanistan in the next several weeks: stopping the Obama Administration from sending more troops. It should be winnable, because the public is against sending more troops, the overwhelming majority of Democrats are against sending more troops, key Democrats in Congress have […]
The Financial Crisis and Imperialism
BMR:What is the likely impact of the present financial crisis on geopolitics, especially if the crisis is considered in the context of the energy crisis including the peak oil issue, the food crisis, The Great Hunger, the environmental crisis, and the declining dollar? Will the world experience war(s) as an effort to survive? Will monopoly-finance […]
Class War
US workers’ real wages (money wages adjusted for the prices workers actually pay) have not risen from their levels in the 1970s. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that real wages continued to stagnate through 2009. Across the same 30-year period, the productivity of labor kept rising: the average worker produced ever more output […]
