A television news program opens with a clip of marching soldiers, an obligatory image when the subject is North Korea. A voiceover intones: “A bold, ambitious plan apparently sanctioned by Kim Jong Un. Is he in league with the women’s group to promote peace between North and South Korea?” The program in question is the […]
Geography Archives: United States
A History of a Counter-Revolution
Gerald Horne. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. NYU Press, 2014. In the conventional, celebratory liberal historical narrative about the Founding Fathers, the post-revolutionary persistence of slavery in the United States, along with women’s lack of essential political and legal rights, has long been regarded as […]
On “Sweet,” “Yellow Head,” and “Two-Spirit”
The Pillager band was the advance guard in the mid-eighteenth-century Ojibwe migration into what would become the state of Minnesota a century later. According to Ojibwe mythology, the Great Spirit (gichi-manidoo) had told them to migrate to a place where “the food grows on water.” Minnesota, with its plentiful wild rice (a sacred plant to […]
The People of Vieques Join in the Call to Resist Military Aggression Against Our People
Communiqué from La Voz de Vieques on behalf of a people in struggle The general silence was strange in the face of the thinly veiled simulation exercises for a military occupation to crush the potential popular insurgency as a result of the fall of the colony. No one doubts that the colonial farce imposed […]
Possibility of Escape
“That is also us, the possibility of us, if the wonderful accident of our birth had taken place elsewhere: you could be the refugee, I could be the torturer. To face that truth is also our burden. After all, each of us has been the bystander, the reasonable person who just happens not to hear, […]
History of an Infamy
Translator’s Note: David Ravelo, arrested on September 14, 2010 and imprisoned in La Picota Prison in Bogota, is serving an 18-year sentence. Appeals have failed, although Colombia’s Supreme Court has been considering his case. His words below attest to a lifetime of, as he puts it, defending human rights. Beginning in the late 1980s […]
Netanyahu, Censored Voices, and the False Narrative of Israeli Self-Defense
On March 3rd, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an impassioned plea to Congress to protect Israel by opposing diplomacy with Iran. Referring to “the remarkable alliance between Israel and the United States” which includes “generous military assistance and missile defense,” Netanyahu failed to mention that Israel has an arsenal of 100 or 200 nuclear […]
American Exceptionalism, Working-Class Wars, and Working-Class Peace Movements
Christian Appy. American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. New York: Viking, 2015. Christian Appy is the author of two splendid previous books about the Vietnam War: Working-Class War and Patriots. Patriots was extraordinary in that it offered oral histories by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The main argument of Appy’s […]
Wolinski’s Last Cartoon?
A little over a week ago we celebrated the advent of the new year, but not like the rest of the world. The three Cuban anti-terrorist heroes imprisoned in the United States had returned to our country several weeks before. #CharlieHebdo Wolinski président d’honneur de Cuba Si France était tous les ans à la […]
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 […]
An Early Activist Critique of Stalin’s 1934 Antihomosexual Law: “A Chapter of Russian Reaction” by Kurt Hiller
Introduction This article, titled “A Chapter of Russian Reaction,” translated into English here for the first time, was written in German by longtime homosexual activist Kurt Hiller (1885-1972) from London and published in the Swiss gay journal Der Kreis in 1946. Hiller had been active in Germany’s first homosexual-rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific […]
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 […]
Imperialism and The Interview: The Racist Dehumanization of North Korea
The haze of political chaos in America surrounding the Ferguson protests, the Torture Report, and the “relaxing” of US-Cuba relations has been broken by a media spectacle almost too ridiculous to comprehend. A hacker group called the “Guardians of Peace” conducted a “cyber attack” on Sony Pictures Entertainment, leaking emails, documents, presentations, and information […]
On the Relations Between Cuba and the United States
Havana, 17 December 2014 Fellow countrymen, Since my election as President of the State Council and Council of Ministers I have reiterated on many occasions our willingness to hold a respectful dialogue with the United States on the basis of sovereign equality, in order to deal reciprocally with a wide variety of topics without detriment […]
An Interview with Dawn Paley, Author of Drug War Capitalism
Dawn Paley is a Canadian author. Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, November 2014) is her first book. We conducted an e-interview as protests grew against police and military policies in Mexico and the U.S. The drug war on both sides of the border has played no small role in generating such dissent. Seth Sandronsky: Can […]
Fracking Patria, Fracking Humanity: Capitalism and Its Doubles
Many Venezuelans think that fracking — the dangerous extraction of oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing of sedimentary rocks — is a conspiracy on the part of the United States to drive them into ruin. That is not the case, but it is an understandable error, in part because of the US’s long history of […]
Senator Sanders and the Impossibility of Reviving Democratic Party Liberalism
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont released a 12-step economic agenda on December 1, 2014. Cyber Monday at the start of the holiday commercial frenzy is not the best time to capture public attention, but Sanders probably has a strict timeline as he decides whether to run for president. The goals of Sanders’ agenda are worthy. […]
“I Have No Real Politics”: Susie Day Talking Trash
“[S]urviving evil doesn’t make you a good person: Surviving evil and not passing it on does,” writes Susie Day in her recent book Snidelines: Talking Trash to Power. One possible way to not pass on evil is to laugh about it. Day, through her comedic ability and shrewd observations reveals (with a giant spotlight) […]
Ferguson: The Evils of the Grand Jury System
Over the last 17 years I have represented dozens and dozens of clients who were subpoenaed to testify as witnesses at state and federal grand juries regarding government investigations. A grand jury is a secret tribunal where a citizen is forced to answer questions by a prosecutor, often against their will. Those subpoenaed are not […]
The Wobblies in Their Heyday, a Hard-headed History of the IWW
Eric Chester. The Wobblies in Their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014. The Wobblies are back. Many young radicals find the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) the most congenial available platform on which to stand in trying […]
