Humanism and Human Rights Who or what is the ‘human’ of human rights and the ‘humanity’ of humanitarianism? The question sounds naïve, silly even. Yet, important philosophical and ontological questions are involved. If rights are given to beings on account of their humanity, ‘human’ nature with its needs, characteristics and desires is the normative […]
Geography Archives: Russia
UNESCAP: Food Prices Will Rise Again
JOHANNESBURG, 26 May 2009 (IRIN) — Food prices will rise again by 2015, when economies are expected to have recovered from the global recession, pushing up demand once more, says a recent UN report. 2008 is seen as the year of food crises, prompted in part by high fuel prices, but these started declining as […]
US Pakistan Policy Is Floundering
Aijaz Ahmad and Paul Jay
Paul Jay: So, we left off the first segment of the interview with you suggesting that there really doesn’t seem to be any kind of sensible strategy of the US in Pakistan and Afghanistan. What would the sensible strategy be right now? Obama seems to have . . . it’s very strange, they assessed the […]
Tariq Ali: “Nobody in Washington Knows What the War Aim Is”
Tariq Ali says in an interview with Der Standard: To continue its war in Afghanistan, the US accepts the risk of destabilizing Pakistan. But only a regional diplomatic approach can help. STANDARD: How would you evaluate the danger often invoked today that Pakistan is collapsing and its nuclear weapons may fall into the hands […]
Antonio Giustozzi, Researcher, London School of Economics and Political Science: “The New Afghan Taliban Are Waging a Real Guerrilla War”
Antonio Giustozzi, a researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is one of the internationally recognized specialists on the Taliban. Author of Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (Columbia University Press, 2008) among other books, this academic divides his time between London and Afghanistan. Talking to Le Monde in […]
How Ideological Enemies Collaborated to Achieve Divergent Goals
Francis R. Nicosia. Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiv + 324 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88392-4. In his latest book, Francis R. Nicosia returns to and explores in greater detail one of the major topics of his important earlier book, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (1985): the complex […]
Energy (and Empire) in World History
Introduction Vaclav Smil’s Energy in World History (1994) provides an overview of global changes in human energy use from before the Neolithic Revolution to modern times. In various places in the book, Smil discusses the relationship between energy use and the rise of centers of economic and political power in world history. In explaining what […]
The Return of the Shadow
A talk given at a Left Forum panel, April 2009. It’s spring and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about reincarnation. If I’m a good adjunct can I come back as a tenured professor? If I stay a loyal Cub fan, can I come back as a Yankee fan? Actually, it’s political reincarnation that I’ve […]
Troubled Assets: The IMF’s Latest Projections for Economic Growth in the Western Hemisphere
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has published its latest projections for economic growth around the world.1 At first glance, the IMF projections for Latin America seem unlikely. The IMF has a lengthy record of biased projections of growth in the region2 and has been consistently underestimating growth in countries such as Argentina and Venezuela, which […]
The Baloch Question
The brutal murder of three nationalist leaders of Balochistan and the ensuing crisis has brought the issue of the Baloch national struggle to the forefront once again, only to be met with feigned surprises and arrogant dismissals by a major part of the rest of Pakistan. We in Pakistan — and particularly those of us […]
Rethink Afghanistan
Part 1: Afghanistan + More Troops = Catastrophe Part 2: Pakistan: “The Most Dangerous Country” Part 3: Cost of War Anand Gopal, Afghanistan Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor: The United States has only forces to go and control certain urban areas. . . . They don’t have the troop size, nor could they conceivably ever […]
Security Council Condemnation of North Korean “UFO” Deepens Korean Crisis
On 13 April (14 April East Asian time), Claude Heller, the Mexican president of the United Nations Security Council read a “Statement” on behalf of the Council. He condemned North Korea for something described as a “launch” it had conducted on 5 April, demanded it desist from any further such act, reaffirmed the principles of […]
The Making of a Marxist in Capitalist Crisis
Four Lectures on Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 1981). Reprinted by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur, West Bengal. ISBN 978-81-88401-17-8. Rs 55. pp 97 Back in the dog days of the Great Depression, “a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student” (as he would describe himself in a letter to a friend decades later) from Harvard landed in […]
Patterns of Adjustment in the Age of Finance: The Case of Turkey as a Peripheral Agent of Neoliberal Globalization
Abstract Following the 2000-01 crisis, Turkey implemented an orthodox strategy of raising interest rates and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate. But, contrary to the traditional stabilization packages that aim to increase interest rates to constrain domestic demand, the new orthodoxy aimed at maintaining high interest rates to attract speculative foreign capital. The end result was […]
Wrestling with the Past
Sonya Huber. Opa Nobody. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. xvi + 358 pp. Illustrations. ISBN 978-0-8032-1080-6; $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-1080-6. In recent years, scholars have grappled with the specific manner in which recent generations of Germans and Austrians have confronted their own familial complicity in Nazism. The narratives revealed by these studies […]
Moldova in the Russian Media
Boris Kagarlitsky: “Moldovan Turmoil Grew Out of Unresolved Social Problems” Moldova Blames Romania for Riots Opposition Promises Larger Protests Violence Escalates in Moldovan Capital Mikhail Chernov: “Defeat of Moldovan Democracy” Kirill Koktysh: “Those Taking Part in Moldovan Protests Are Mainly Migrant Workers Who Had to Return Home amid the Financial Crisis” Aleksandr Fomenko: “Protest in […]
The G20 and the HIRCs
A group of seven highly indebted rich countries (HIRC) of the world have organized a meeting of twenty nations in London in order to discuss the future of the world’s finances. They have invited some creditors among developing countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, some Arab countries, China, and India, leaving aside all the […]
The Obama Stimulus — A View from Cincinnati, Ohio
People in Cincinnati, like others around the country — either having lost their jobs or fearful of losing them — have been waiting anxiously, some desperately, for news that President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan would help them. Now the news has arrived, and the news is that help is coming. Help for the banks and […]
On Land Day
Dear friends, Today was Land Day in Palestine and around the world. Hundreds of events were being held in honor of our Land that so many trespassers now live on. The first land day in 1976 set a trend of defiance and resistance. Different groups mark the day differently. Demonstrators in Hebron were attacked by […]
Yugoslavia
The dark Danube is covered with White flowers, white flowers, white flowers. And the melody asks for memory Of the past, the past, the past. But like a flock of birds Our songs’ simple words vanish. You are walking into the fire, Yugoslavia Without me, without me, without me. For that night under a […]
