Geography Archives: Middle East

Over the course of the whole debacle, there was a lot of criticism directed against Mandeep and me — even from our purported supporters — for the way that we handled the public relations angle of our case. Much was made, particularly, of the so-called “Kafka Declaration” episode wherein, against the cool protestations of our […]

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example —
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Nazim Hikmet, “On Living,” 1947

To the Public Editor: I think the Times owes a response to James Bamford’s reporting (“The Man Who Sold the War”) on Judith Miller in Rolling Stone (17 November 2005). Miller, encouraged by the Rendon PR firm (which had largely created Chalabi‘s Iraqi National Congress) boosted the claims of Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri about Iraq’s […]

“Arlington Midwest,” a memorial of over 2,000 tombstones on display on the grounds of the Immaculate Heart of Mary motherhouse, in Monroe, Michigan, November 18-19. The IHM national headquarters building is in the background. Inspired by VFP Santa Barbara’s “Arlington West,” this memorial has been displayed three times in the Toledo area since the second […]

Lila Rajiva, the author of The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media, will discuss her book at the following venues. Wednesday, December 14 7:00 PM Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., T: 510-658-1448 OAKLAND, CA Thursday, December 15 7:30 PM The Marxist School of Sacramento, Sierra 2 Center, Curtis Hall, 2791-24th St., […]

On November 4, 2005, Democratic Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts introduced a bill whose purpose is to “prohibit the use of funds to deploy United States Armed Forces to Iraq.” This bill, numbered HR 4232, is co-sponsored by twelve other representatives, including Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Barbara Lee (D-CA). The bill was […]

  “There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using ‘outlawed’ weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.” — U.S. Department of State, 9 December 20041 “But I repeat the point made by my […]

In recent decades, many well-meaning thinkers and activists have peddled or purchased the idea that class conflict has somehow waned or been “de-centered” in the richer nation-states.  As workers in these countries have lost more and more power, and as vast tides of wealth have sloshed around in the form of automobiles, shopping malls, and […]

Military bands played and choirs of sweet-voiced children sang today at Arlington National Cemetery, as President George W. Bush officially commemorated nearly a century of anticommunist hysteria in a stirring ceremony consecrating the Tomb of the Unknown Red-Baiter. “We Americans owe so much to communist witch-hunts,” declared a tearful President Bush, exhibiting an uncharacteristic degree […]

David Cronenberg‘s latest, A History of Violence, is a fine reworking of the Western and film noir in his “realist” turn. In a feminist twist of film noir, in this film it is a man, not a woman, who has a past. The past that the man (well played by Viggo Mortensen) thought he left […]

John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, will join Roger Marheine, Sonali Kolhatkar, and Barbara Trent in the keynote plenary session at the Students and Educators to STOP THE WAR conference, Los Angeles, 19 November 2005. The conference is timely indeed. As William Ayers and Mike Ferner remind us, the No Child Left Behind Act, […]

[Lisa N. contributed all photographs below that illustrate Remi Kanazi’s essay. Lisa came back to the United States from her nine-month sojourn in Palestine two months ago. Over the last several years, she spent twenty-seven months in Palestine, working with Palestinians and Israelis struggling to end the Israeli occupation. She took some of the photographs […]

  “I’ve always loved George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, those kinds of guys,” said Kevin’s smiling, catastrophically Caucasian father from his overstuffed recliner, as I waited for the boy to come down the wide, oak stairway with the sheets of music he had scribbled his ideas down onto, but which he had mistakenly left upstairs in […]

(Patrick Resta is the New England organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War. He can be reached at .) I want to discuss Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), but first a little background on you. Can you tell us about your service in Iraq? When were you in Iraq? I served as a medic […]

The disconnect between Bush regime deed and American public need grows: in Iraq, in New Orleans, on global warming and off-shore oil drilling, from Social Security to selecting Supreme Court Justices, the gulf widens. The choice of Dr. Benjamin S. Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve Board Chairman follows the pattern. Just as […]

On October 6, 2005, Carla Del Ponte, prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), gave a talk before an audience at Goldman Sachs in London that throws light on the role of the ICTY as well as the character of Ms. Del Ponte and qualities of her efforts.1 Speaking before this […]

FDR’s New Deal changed the tone and shape of US politics into a kind of moderate social democracy. Desperate to end the Great Depression nightmare, US voters secured FDR and the Democrats in power. The right wing, in and out of the Republican Party, dove into decline, agonized for years, slowly regrouped, and then revived. […]

Industrial salmon farming corporations have learned an important lesson from their corporate cousins about what to do with their tarnished images of ecological and social injustice: simply pour money into a public relations campaign and overwhelm dissent.  After years of bad publicity, the salmon farming industry is adopting a damage control PR campaign. A recent […]

Continuing turmoil in Germany since the elections on 18 September 2005 suggests a turning point in European politics, with implications for global politics: the European Left may have finally ceased its steady retreat. It all began with stunning election results, so stunning that even normally glib liberal commentators seem to be taken aback. The German […]

Not only Washington but Berlin, too, has a new crisis, and no one can predict how it will end! The dramatic factor, almost totally ignored by the media, has been the crucial importance of Germany’s new Left Party. When neither Gerhard Schroeder’s ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Greens nor the right-wing Christian Democrats and […]