Early this month in Germany, a few thousand refugees from war-torn Syria and neighboring countries spilled out of a train station and into Munich. Rather than being tripped by the locals, or thrown inside cargo trucks, or sorted out according to skin color (as per quaint Old World custom), the migrants were actually welcomed by […]
Geography Archives: Middle East
#CizreyeSesVer / #GiveVoiceToCizre: Urgent Call for International Action
Turkey is increasingly drifting into a civil war. Politics of violence have escalated after the general elections of June 7 led by the AKP provisional government. Today, the peace and negotiation process between PKK and the Turkish state has come to a halt and war has started again. Just within the last month, severe clashes […]
Bombs for Peace: A Review
George Szamuely. Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013 (Distributed in the U.S. and Canada by the University of Chicago Press). Paper. Pp. 611. In Bombs for Peace, George Szamuely, a senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute at London Metropolitan University, has produced a revealing and sharply […]
Immigrants, Welcome and Unwelcome
A silent three-year-old, lying drowned on a Turkish beach; the tearful protest of a Syrian man as he, his wife and baby are torn from the tracks next to a locomotive by Hungarian police; desperate families jammed into tiny, leaky boats, hoping to reach Europe alive or, if they do, facing ever new obstacles from […]
German Know-Nothings Today
“I don’t know.” Those words, often repeated 160-odd years ago in the USA, earned the gang of those using them the nickname “Know-Nothing Party.” Those were no expressions of intellectual modesty; party doings were secret, so members were not supposed to disclose anything about them, but just say, “I don’t know.” Their patriotic title was […]
Vulliamy and Hartmann on Srebrenica: A Study in Propaganda
In their recent article on “How Britain and the US Decided to Abandon Srebrenica to Its Fate” (Observer, July 5, 20151), Ed Vulliamy, a veteran reporter for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and Florence Hartmann, a reporter and former spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia […]
ΟΧΙ!
For some in other lands and continents Greece may seem distant and marginal, a few narrow peninsulas and scattered archipelagos jutting out of the sea. Some may vaguely recall school knowledge about it. “Didn’t some fellow named Prometheus steal fire from the gods? Or was it Alexander the Great untying some “Gordian knot”? Or a […]
Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China
China’s leadership has called in recent years for the creation of a new “ecological civilization.” Some have viewed this as a departure from Marxism and a concession to Western-style “ecological modernization.” However, embedded in classical Marxism, as represented by the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was a powerful ecological critique. Marx explicitly defined […]
Changing Captains on the Left
Wealthy, powerful heads of state and other bosses high up in the Bavarian Alps, and the vigorous protests from opposing crowds kept out of earshot downhill, largely stole media thunder this past weekend. Far lower in altitude and attention, with almost no thunder from the media or otherwise, another meeting was held in less scenic […]
Kashmir — Hell of Internal Colonialism
When it comes to Kashmir, official mendacity in India seems to cross all bounds. So even a prominent member of the Indian Establishment felt that the Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar’s recent (May 22) open advocacy of “kaante-se-kaanta-nikaalte-hein” (a-thorn-to-remove-a-thorn) counterinsurgency tactics was “terrible” and that he should withdraw his out-of-line statement forthwith. “You have to neutralise […]
Mulberry, Respect Freedom of Association and Rehire the Dismissed Workers at SF Leather!
“90% of production at SF Leather is for Mulberry brand. Mulberry is producing luxury bags at SF Leather. But wages of workers at SF are minimum wage. Working time is very long.” — Makum Alagöz Appeal for support from workers in Izmir, Turkey – 13 May Sisters and brothers, We are the dismissed workers from […]
Misconceptions about Neo-Liberalism
Neo-Liberalism is often seen only as an economic policy. This per se might not matter, since a specific set of economic measures do, no doubt, fall under the rubric of neo-liberalism. But by reducing neo-liberalism only to a set of economic measures, a misleading impression is often conveyed that this set of measures are a […]
Challenging American Exceptionalism
President Barack Obama stood behind the podium and apologized for inadvertently killing two Western hostages — including one American — during a drone strike in Pakistan. Obama said, “one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional, is our willingness to confront squarely our […]
Remembering Robert Weil: Intellectual and Political Activist
Robert Weil, author of the powerful critique of Deng Xiaoping’s “reforms” entitled Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of Market Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996, republished in India by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur), quietly passed away in California on 12 March 2014. Almost a year after, on 15 February 2015 a […]
The Americas Summit on the Border of an Imperialist Abyss
Two features of contemporary imperialism are key to explaining the importance — or actually the relative unimportance — of the VII Summit of the Americas (organized by the OAS) recently held in Panama. One is that, in the post-World War II period, imperialism has operated in a context defined by the prevalence of relatively sovereign […]
PFLP Calls for United Palestinian Action Against ISIS in Yarmouk
Once again, the Yarmouk refugee camp is facing destruction, murder and slaughter at the hands of criminal gangs, following a remarkable development as they have seized the camp and seek to displace our people outside Syria, in order to undermine and attack the right of return. The invasion of the so-called ISIS in complicity with […]
Anatomy of a Hatchet Job: Regarding Women Cross DMZ in CNN’s Situation Room
A television news program opens with a clip of marching soldiers, an obligatory image when the subject is North Korea. A voiceover intones: “A bold, ambitious plan apparently sanctioned by Kim Jong Un. Is he in league with the women’s group to promote peace between North and South Korea?” The program in question is the […]
Blockupy the ECB, Blockupy the NATO
I defied my advanced age to board a special train, with a thousand mostly young people, and join in the big “Blockupy” demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s big banking city. The trip, though not the usual four and a half but seven hours, retained till well into the night a spirit of happy anticipation. […]
The Mad Activist Comes in from the Cold
You want to know why I’m nuts, Doctor? I’m part of the lunatic left, that’s why. My delusions of intellectual grandeur are great enough to make me believe that I can actually comprehend the bombings, the embargoes, the torture — all wrought by the good old US of A — while everybody else goes shopping. […]
Netanyahu, Censored Voices, and the False Narrative of Israeli Self-Defense
On March 3rd, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an impassioned plea to Congress to protect Israel by opposing diplomacy with Iran. Referring to “the remarkable alliance between Israel and the United States” which includes “generous military assistance and missile defense,” Netanyahu failed to mention that Israel has an arsenal of 100 or 200 nuclear […]
