Geography Archives: Soviet Union (USSR)

  • The United States, Iran, and the Middle East’s New “Cold War”

    The absence of US-Iranian rapprochement will perpetuate the new Middle Eastern Cold War, imposing costs on the United States, Iran and other regional and international players.  However, in strategic terms, the heaviest costs of continued US-Iranian estrangement are likely to be borne by the United States.  In particular, lack of productive relations with Tehran will […]

  • Militarizing Latin America

    The United States was founded as an “infant empire,” in George Washington’s words.  The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture, much like the vast expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow.  From the earliest days, control over the Western Hemisphere was a critical goal.  Ambitions expanded during World War II, as […]

  • The Iran Threat in the Age of Real-Axis-of-Evil Expansion1

    It is intriguing to see how whoever the United States and Israel find interfering with their imperial or dispossession plans is quickly demonized and becomes a threat and target for that Real-Axis-of-Evil (RAE), and hence their NATO allies and, with less intensity, much of the rest of the “international community” (IC, meaning ruling elites, not […]

  • Greenspan’s Nightmare

    Alan Greenspan had a dream, or rather a nightmare.  Greenspan seems to have woken up in a cold sweat one morning in fear that the period of “disinflationary pressures” that had kept inflation low since the 1990s was about to end.  This was 2007, when he published his autobiographical economic treatise, The Age of Turbulence. […]

  • Spring Thunder Anew

      The white man called you Bhagat Singh that day, The black man calls you Naxalite today. But everyone will call you the morning star tomorrow. — Excerpt from the Telugu poem ‘Final Journey: First Victory’ by Sri Sri 1 It has been a long and tortuous route.  Forty-three years ago, a group of Maoist […]

  • An AfPak Star over Central Asia

    United States AfPak special representative Richard Holbrooke enjoys a fabulous reputation, no matter the current prospects of the Afghan war.  The Eurasian space knew him as a potential Nobel winner who evicted Russia from the Balkans.  The world at large expects him to take over if and when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton steps down […]

  • Israel Stole $2 Billion from Palestinian Workers: 40-year Deception Exposed

    Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than $2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have revealed. A new report, “State Robbery,” to be published later this month, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian […]

  • After the Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, What Next?

    John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and author of The Great Financial Crisis (2009, with Fred Magdoff) and The Ecological Revolution (2009) — both from Monthly Review Press.  This interview was conducted from Dhaka by Farooque Chowdhury (editor of Micro Credit: Myth Manufactured, 2007) for MRzine and Bangla Monthly Review.  It is part […]

  • Socialism without Jails

    Q. What is your philosophy? I believe, I suppose, in the one that could be called democratic socialism because I believe that we need a society where the motive for the economic system is not corporate profit but the motive is the welfare of people — healthcare, jobs, childcare, and so on — where that […]

  • Colored Revolutions in Colored Lenses: A Comparative Analysis of U.S. and Russian Press Coverage of Political Movements in Ukraine, Belarus, and Uzbekistan

      This study compared The New York Times‘ and The Moscow Times‘ coverage of the political movements in three former Soviet republics.  Data analysis revealed a clear pro-movement pattern in The New York Times’ reporting.  The U.S. newspaper used more pro-movement sources than pro-incumbent sources.  Overall, The New York Times depicted the protesters favorably and […]

  • The Oliver Kamm School of Falsification: Imperial Truth-Enforcement, British Branch

    An important and perhaps growing feature of official and strong-interest-group propaganda is the resort to personal attacks and flak to keep dissidents at bay and inconvenient thoughts out of sight and mind.  This has been notable over many years in the case of pro-Israel propaganda, where we can observe a positive correlation between upward spikes […]

  • Washington’s Two Lost Wars

    The United States has already lost the war in Afghanistan, just as it has lost the war in Iraq. President Barack Obama’s vast expansion of the Afghan war announced Dec. 1, and the extension of the violence into neighboring Pakistan, are intended to camouflage the reality of defeat, as was the Bush Administration’s “surge” in […]

  • The Future as History

      A Historical Perspective We all know that when a glass of tea is three quarters full, it is also one quarter empty.  I would like to dismiss the empty part of this dialectic first, the history that pertains to the self, to me, and then to talk a bit more of the history concerning […]

  • Why Are We in Afghanistan?

    Take a look at the map.  Afghanistan is next to or near Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan, and India.  These are all countries that are vitally important to the United States as key allies or enemies, and as potential economic and political competitors.  Afghanistan is also next to Turkmenistan and other Central Asian Republics that are […]

  • The Crisis of Identity in the Postcolonial State

      Farzana Shaikh.  Making Sense of Pakistan.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.  ix + 274 pp.  $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14962-4. Farzana Shaikh offers a scholarly and erudite study of the competition to define and establish a “national” identity for Pakistan.  The author argues that contested visions of the religious nature of the postcolonial state […]

  • We Cannot Shop Our Way Out of the Problems

      John Bellamy Foster is the editor of the socialist magazine Monthly Review and teaches sociology at the University of Oregon.  He has written on numerous subjects, from political economy to Marxist theory.  This year Foster published The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace With the Planet. Max van Lingen is a student of political philosophy and […]

  • Reviving Keynesianism: A Critique

    The global crisis has undermined the neo-liberalist phase of capitalism that dominated the last 30 years of the world economy.  It has likewise challenged the hegemony of neo-classical economics as the theoretical rationale of neo-liberalism’s celebration of private enterprise and markets.  The form this challenge takes is a revival of Keynesian economics.  As the crisis […]

  • Chavez’s Historic Call for a Fifth Socialist International

      Addressing delegates at the International Encounter of Left Parties held in Caracas, November 19-21, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez stated: “the time has come for us to convoke the Fifth International.”  Face with the capitalist crisis and the threat of war that is putting at risk the future of humanity, “the people are clamoring for” […]

  • Lynne Stewart: An American Story

      Just what good is freedom if no one is free, And folks go to jail if they dare disagree? And lawyers get punished for doing their jobs? And folks are afraid of the White House lynch mob? Lynne Stewart was doing what she had to do Protecting her client and civil rights, too. She […]

  • The Politics of Freedom: Geopolitics, Minority Rights, and Gender

      The Sixth Annual Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture, Barnard College, 5 November 2009 The right to religious freedom is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular liberal democracies, one that guarantees the peaceful coexistence of religiously diverse populations.  Enshrined in national constitutions and international laws and treaties, the right to religious liberty promises […]