Geography Archives: Middle East

WASHINGTON — President Hillary Clinton, making good on her 2008 threat to “totally obliterate” Iran, celebrated her first week in office by ordering a nuclear strike on Iran’s capital city of Tehran.  As a squadron of F-35s streaked through the sky toward the Mideast metropolis of over eight million, President Clinton outlined her foreign policy […]

  The Left upsurge in Latin America appears to be abating.  In October 2015 Jimmy Morales, the conservative candidate in Guatemala, defeated the Left-leaning Sandra Torres in the presidential elections.  On November 22, Mauricio Macri, the conservative presidential candidate in Argentina, defeated Daniel Scioli, his Peronist rival, by a narrow margin, to bring to an […]

The Turkish state has effectively condemned its citizens in Sur, Silvan, Nusaybin, Cizre, Silopi, and many other towns and neighborhoods in the Kurdish provinces to hunger through its use of curfews that have been ongoing for weeks. It has attacked these settlements with heavy weapons and equipment that would only be mobilized in wartime. As a result, the right to life, liberty, and security, and in particular the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment protected by the constitution and international conventions have been violated.

  2016 began here with an icy chill, not only with the weather but far worse, with human relations.  It also offered some, like myself, at least a few warm rays of hope. First the larger scene.  The huge influx of immigrants and asylum seekers, over a million in 2015, saw Germany effectively split in […]

This paper was presented at “Color Revolution and Cultural Hegemony,” the 6th World Socialism Forum in Beijing, China, October 16-7, 2015. The term “color revolution” is code.  It is a code for regime change, and the term is often treated as synonymous with activities of the CIA and its assorted vehicles such as the National […]

It was a day to remember, a date for the record books!  It marked a surprising development in German politics!  And who said Germans don’t like protest marches or demonstrations?  The organizers counted 250,000, a quarter of a million.  Of course the police scaled that down — to 150,000.  But who’s counting?  It was definitely […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]