On the night of 15-16 July, Turkey went through a cataclysm that stunned the world: a huge section of the armed forces of the country (TSK in its Turkish acronym) attempted to take power from the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP, came very close to its objective, but was ultimately defeated. Official […]
Geography Archives: Pakistan
For a “Third Reconstruction”: An Interview with Bill Fletcher, Jr.
As the 2016 electoral game here ratchets up to nasty polemics, the US media is mainly focused on the carnival atmosphere of the Republican Party candidates. (The Democratic Party infighting is only now beginning to boil over.) Meanwhile, the Obama administration, free from scrutiny, continues its airstrikes in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and […]
P(h)ew: The “Nonpartisan” Embrace of Narendra Modi by the Pew Research Center
The Pew Research Center released a new survey that reveals a very favorable perspective of Narendra Modi among Indians. In fact, the header for the report reads: “The Modi Bounce: Indians Give Their Prime Minister and Economy High Marks, Worry about Crime, Jobs, Prices, Corruption.”1 According to the results 87% of Indians have a “favorable […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
Samir Amin on the Charlie Hebdo Murders: Imperialism and International Terrorism
The Western errors and neo-liberal damages: Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi knew how to contain the Islamist drift, but they were slaughtered. In Libya, Paris and Washington have it all wrong. We reached Samir Amin — philosopher, economist, and director of the Third World Forum based in Dakar — in Paris by phone, to […]
Je Suis Charlie — But I Have Other Names as Well!
Monday evening I had planned to write about the PEGIDA movement in Germany. Although in Dresden, their city of origin, the number of bitter marchers protesting the “Islamization” of the West had increased stubbornly to 18,000, I began to report happily that everywhere else in Germany they had been greatly outnumbered. In Berlin, only 300 […]
The “Responsible Nuclear State”: The United States and the Bomb
In light of the revelations that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons in the event of war between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea, it may be worth revisiting the idea that America represents a “responsible” nuclear power, in opposition to countries like Iran and […]
“A Guernica of Political Prose”: Ashok Mitra’s Calcutta Diary
Ashok Mitra. Calcutta Diary. Kolkata: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, 2014 (first published in 1977 by Frank Cass, London). pp xxvii + 300. Rs 395. They do not trumpet their inspiration from the rooftops: “their identification with the cause is nevertheless total”. Amal Sen, the homeopath, was one such sympathiser. A dreamer of socialist dreams, he medicated, […]
Bhagat Singh: Eighty-Three Years On
Chaman Lal. Understanding Bhagat Singh. Delhi: Aakar, 2013. pp. 245. Left Traditions in South Asia Bhagat Singh is to South Asia what Che Guevara is to Latin America — a popular iconic figure who continues to inspire generations of youth in the subcontinent in their struggles against imperialism and the trajectory of national politics after […]
Gujarat 2002, India 2014: ‘Numbers Sanctify’
“Numbers sanctify”. The context is very different, but I couldn’t keep my mind off that quote from Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. After all, the alleged mastermind of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat will soon be sworn in as India’s prime minister, at the head of a government in which his party, the BJP, will […]
Tarek Mehanna: His Tragic Immoderation
I have become a card-carrying, tax-paying moderate, thanks to a study I found in Politico.com. In this study, psychologists Kaitlin Toner and Mark Leary discovered that the more extreme politicians’ views are, the more they think they’re right. In fact, politicians’ “belief superiority” — the certainty that their own viewpoints are correct — was linked […]
Do What You Must (Tum Apni Karni Kar Guzro)
Laal is a revolutionary band from Pakistan. Lyrics by Faiz Ahmad Faiz (13 February 1911-20 November 1984). Directed by Taimur Rahman. | Print
