The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement: Libya: Stop the Aggression The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) strongly condemns the aerial bombardment by aircrafts and ship-based missiles on Libya by the Nato forces. The military strikes by the Nato forces comprising France, Britain and the United States […]
Geography Archives: Iraq
The Libyan Rebellion: The West’s Cloak over the Gulf
Fidel Castro was right. The West was planning an attack on a sovereign third world nation imminently: Libya. Nothing like a good old war against brown and black people in Libya by the West to remind oneself of what Western civilisation is all about. Many of us who have been politically active since the 1990s […]
The West’s Aim in Libya: Interview with Aijaz Ahmad
Prabir Purkayastha: If you really look at what is happening, what we have is a historical split between the east and the west, which could be the outline of what could emerge at least in the near future, unless Gaddafi has the strength to push his troops right up to Benghazi. Aijaz Ahmad The real […]
A System Turned Upside Down
The Tunisian revolution has wiped out the Ben Ali system, and the Egyptian revolution is about to eliminate the Mubarak system after the fall of the president. No doubt, the epoch of unlimited domination in the Arab world is coming to its end. After decades of despotic, patronage-based regimes, the Arab peoples seem determined to […]
Aslı Ü. Bâli and Ziad Abu-Rish on International Intervention in Libya: A Documentary Remix
In evaluating calls for intervention, the first question we might ask is how the Libyan case differs from recent events in Tunisia and Egypt, where intervention of this type was not invited. In both of those countries authoritarian leaders who were erstwhile Western allies were pushed out when their military institutions refused to turn on […]
The Bahraini Opposition Speaks
Press Conference of the Opposition Political Societies on the Reasons for the Call to Overthrow the Government A coalition of seven opposition political societies invites you to join the Bahraini masses to attend the grand march on Friday, 4 March 2011, entitled “Down with the Government.”1 The opposition coalition believes the current government must resign, […]
No Tahrir in Benghazi: A Racist Pogrom Rages On against Black Africans in Libya
American progressives and peace forces have been in a state of joyous delirium in recent weeks as they experienced vicarious, televised popular victories in Tunisia and Egypt. Watching unarmed crowds achieve tentative victories against entrenched, U.S.-backed regimes produced a kind of giddiness on this side of the ocean — an otherworldly feeling that, somehow, the […]
Imperialists Prepare for Military Intervention in Libya
The Libyan exiles and defectors begging for no-fly zones failed to get them at the United Nations Security Council on Saturday, but they are inching closer to lining up Western military support nonetheless. This just in from the Wall Street Journal today: The Pentagon is repositioning warships and planes in the waters off Libya to […]
What Does the Libyan Opposition Want?
As everyone knows, Muammar Gaddafi is an authoritarian dictator. Authoritarian dictators are a dime a dozen in world history, though, so that is not what would distinguish him from the rest of his kind in history books. What might make him stand out is this: in the twilight of his autocratic career, Gaddafi had become […]
Cynicism’s Danse Macabre
The politics of plunder imposed by the United States and its NATO allies in the Middle East is in crisis. This was inevitably unleashed with the high cost of grain, the effects of which are being felt with more force in the Arab nations where, despite their enormous oil resources, the shortage of water, arid […]
Madison Is Our Cairo
With the Koch Brothers footing his campaign, Scott Walker assumed the governorship of Wisconsin on January 7, 2011. Walker’s first action as Governor was obeisance to the corporate class that put him in office: he gave $140 million in tax breaks to businesses, including WalMart, and then screamed “budget crisis!” This move allowed him to […]
What Is Happening in Egypt
What is happening in Egypt is of immense importance, not only due to the importance of the country but also due to the radicality of the demand. The demand is not just that Mubarak should leave — that is a first step — but that the system be changed, putting an end to the neoliberal […]
A Glorified Military Coup in Egypt: An Aborted Revolution or the Genesis of a Genuine Revolution?
Millions of people in Egypt and all over the Middle East erupted in joy as Omar Suleiman announced on Friday that Hosni Mubarak had resigned. The Egyptian military decided to oust a widely-resented dictator as it witnessed the growing threat of a potential revolution being born in Egyptian streets. Had it been allowed to continue […]
What Does the Egyptian Revolution Mean for the United States Government?
The US has not supported democratization in Egypt, or really anywhere else in the Middle East, because US policymakers would not like the outcome of democratic processes. Policies made by governments that are freely elected by the people would not reflect, would not support, let alone enforce, the US polices that are unpopular, whether that’s […]
On the Egyptian Revolution and the American Strategy
7 February 2011 . . . Today we declare our solidarity. One of the forms of our solidarity is to defend this revolution, this intifada, this great historic popular movement. One of the responsibilities of defending this revolution is to reveal its true image as all data indicate. . . . We contact those on […]
Counter-Revolution Field Manual
In a speech attacking ‘multiculturalism’ Prime Minister David Cameron argued for a “muscular liberalism” that would actively confront “extremist” ideologies — principally radical Islamism — that fail to conform to “Western values”. The problem is not with Islam per se, he argued, but with those “distortion[s]” of Islam that reject “democracy, the rule of law, […]
Plan B for a Post-Mubarak Egypt?
“Freedom lies behind a door closed shut,” the great Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi wrote in the last century. “It can only be knocked down with a bleeding fist.” More than that is bleeding in the Arab world at the moment. The uprisings we are witnessing in Egypt have been a rude awakening for all those […]
Egyptian Protests, Grounded in Decades of Struggle, Portend Regional Transformation
Egypt is throbbing with resistance. Cairo is cloven between the forces of revolution and those of counterrevolution. Hundreds of thousands of people — on Tuesday, February 1, well over a million — have been streaming each day into Tahrir Square, the largest plaza in the Arab world, located in the heart of downtown Cairo. Army […]
Will There Be War on Iran? Two Divergent Views
In 2002 Iran was added to the neoconservative-designed ‘Axis of Evil’ and thus declared ripe for US military intervention. The threat of war in the ‘greatest crisis of modern times’ (John Pilger in the New Statesman, July 12, 2007) was at its height in 2006-2007. With President Obama assuming office in 2009, a great hope […]
On the Arab Revolt: Interview with Vijay Prashad
Vijay Prashad is a prominent Marxist scholar from South Asia. He is George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Connecticut. He has written extensively on international affairs for both academic and popular journals. His most recent book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the […]
