Geography Archives: Iraq

As I was driving through Ithaca, New York, on the weekend of the Grassroots Folk Festival, a guy with long curly hair and a beard — the sort of ‘sixties revenant common in college towns — strode into traffic on a red light.  I stopped my car, momentarily annoyed, and he grinned and flashed me […]

Activist Brian Bogart asked himself: “Our top industry has been the manufacture and sale of weapons — and we’re a peace-loving nation?” Inspired by this paradox, Bogart created Strike for Peace . . . described on its website as an attempt “to highlight for everyone’s sake the dominant role of the military industry in America’s […]

  In “new imperialism,” it is said, the American economy needs more instability abroad to maintain the health of its capital at home. Long before discourse on “new imperialism” became popular in the West, Palestinian intellectuals in refugee camps arrived at this very conclusion by simply reflecting upon the wretched conditions of their own existence. […]

Everything has changed! Nothing has changed! Barring unexpected difficulties, a new coalition has been formed in Berlin. Gerhard Schroeder, confident, even arrogant until his final days as leader, has been replaced by the first woman in German history to head a government, and she’s an East German at that, though she has never yet pushed […]

Today the planet is an immense gulag. The resources of the periphery of the empire — the great majority of human beings — are channeled towards the imperial centre — the richest countries — in the manner of a colossal funnel. There are now in the world two practical routes of resistance to the US […]

Retired U.S. Army Lt. General William Odom is a Vietnam Veteran who, in the late 1970s, helped Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski use mujahedeen zealots to “give the Soviets their Vietnam” in Afghanistan.  In the mid-1980s, Odom worked for Ronald Reagan as Director of the National Security Agency. One week ago, this very same General […]

“Then came this battle called the Civil War, beginning in Kansas in 1854, and ending with the presidential elections of 1876, twenty awful years. The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again towards slavery. The whole weight of America was thrown to color caste.”1 — W.E.B. DuBois, Black […]

Going Global Supporters and even critics of the European Monetary Union (EMU) often see its policies — its rejection of Keynesian demand management that was written into the Maastricht Treaty and later transformed into the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), as well as its monetarist belief in the priority of anti-inflationary policies over any other […]

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at his most radical, the year before he was assassinated, said: “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” That was four decades ago, yet it is perhaps more true today. The greatest purveyor of violence on this earth is my own government. For those […]

Jerry Tucker The founding convention of the Change-to-Win labor federation held in St. Louis on September 27, 2005 was, if nothing else, filled with enthusiasm and efficiently managed.  The founding unions’ top leaders put forward a lean and specifically organizing-focused agenda, and it was adopted without even a hint of dissent.  The longer-term question is […]

An Italian-born former law student, Gabriele Zamparini moved to the States in 1998 where he worked as an Italian teacher and freelance journalist. It was post-9/11 when Zamparini got the idea to make a documentary about “the fast growing, grassroots peace movement” he was witnessing in America. The result was a seven-part film series called […]

  We gather provisions. In my pockets are only a key to the house, $50, and an energy bar — somehow in my careful adherence to the recommendations I have neglected to bring my driver’s license — and in my shoe are a pen and a makeshift notebook. I am ready for this. We drink […]

[The following was delivered, by Paul Buhle, to an audience of 150 Brown undergraduates preparing to watch the first night of the Dylan special directed by Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, 26 September 2005.] In my young political lifetime, from being your age to twice your age, there were three great individual singers […]

After a hiatus of more than a year, the anti-war movement surged back into the streets on September 24, 2005. Diverted into the cul-de-sac of the Kerry campaign, which saw the fervently anti-war let their equally fervent anti-Bush sentiments overwhelm a rational look at the pro-war Kerry Democrats, “the other super-power” has been re-ignited into […]

[John S. Saul is professor emeritus of politics at York University in Toronto. He is the author of many highly-acclaimed books on the politics of southern Africa, including Recolonization and Resistance: Southern Africa in the 1990s, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword, The Crisis in South Africa, and A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism […]

Washington, D.C. — In a pre-dawn civil disobedience action Monday morning, forty-one War Resisters League members and others sat down and were arrested at a pedestrian entrance to the Pentagon, slowing foot traffic at that location and prompting officials to close the U.S. military headquarters’ sole stop on Washington’s Metroline for a period. Protesters — […]

On March 17, 2003, Saint Patrick’s Day, only days before “Shock and Awe,” four Catholic Workers entered the U.S. Military Recruiting Station in Ithaca, NY, and spilled their blood to protest the imminent invasion of Iraq. They knelt, read a statement in opposition to the war, prayed, and waited to be arrested. Ithaca is home […]

It had been five years since I last set foot in China as a graduate student doing research on Chinese workers’ protests of privatization in Zhengzhou City, the (ironic) site of the February 7th incident memorial that commemorates the repression of the first general strike against colonial administrators of the rail system in 19231  In […]

Cindy Sheehan has breathed new life into the U.S. antiwar movement. The Vacaville, CA mother did so — alone then with others — by protesting outside the Crawford, Texas ranch of a vacationing President Bush, dubbed “Camp Casey” for her son who died in oil-rich Iraq. Sheehan’s demand to speak with Bush about the “noble […]