Geography Archives: Turkey

When is a “West Point” graduate no longer a “West Point” graduate?  That’s easy, according to the legal experts at the United States Military Academy.  Any time you have an organization using the term, West Point, of which they do not approve.  In fact, according to a letter received by us from these authorities, any […]

We mince no words.  Time is of the essence.  Iraq is a human and political catastrophe, stark testament to the deceitful behavior of the Bush administration.  The dangers are clear and present, and too many human beings are dying for an ignoble cause.  The preemptive war launched against Iraq on March 20, 2003 stands illegal […]

Dear Ms. Shirin Ebadi: The appeal you and Mohammad Sahimi addressed to “Western democracies” in the International Herald Tribune on January 19 disappointed this former admirer of yours.  Your invitation to the current and previous imperial powers to intervene for human rights in Iran fails precisely on grounds of the noble principles you invoked to […]

Few things are more frustrating than the doxa to which a hybrid and multifarious object such as “Islam” is all too readily reduced by formulaic provocation and paranoiac reaction.  The current “cartoon war” between “militant” Muslims and “militant” liberals in the “West” is a case in point.  Once again, people are led to view themselves […]

Andre Vltchek Andre Vltchek is a Czech-born American writer who has written for Der Spiegel, Asahi Shimbun, the Guardian, and many other international papers.  He has reported on the violence of the neo-liberal order from all over the globe,  but especially from Indonesia, about which he has made a ground-breaking documentary: Terlena: Breaking of a […]

“What started it?” “A blind man with a pistol.” “That don’t make sense.” “Sure don’t.” — Chester Himes Minorities and most poor people in the inner cities have always lived with the knowledge that (for them at least) the forces of unlawful suppression and misuse of power far too often masqueraded as the forces of […]

  In 1958 I wrote the following: There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do […]

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

“Pas de vacances pour les bourgeois!” (no vacation for the bourgeois) was a favorite slogan at the Sorbonne during the May 1968 nationwide revolt in France. Not supported by any established political parties (including the CPF), the movement which originally started among students who took over the universities came to include workers who occupied factories […]