The long-awaited The Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick has arrived. It is powerful and moving, disturbing, enlightening, and challenging. But it is not without its omissions and distortions.
Geography Archives: Vietnam
How Employers Limit Worker Rights, Using the Power of Government and Market Forces
The escalating attack on worker rights in the United States has taken several forms in recent years. In some American states, right-wing politicians have passed laws denying public employees such as teachers, janitors, police, and firefighters the right to organize into unions and bargain collectively. Some of these laws strip recognition and power from existing […]
Job Loss, the Clintons, NAFTA, and a New Progressive Labor Rights Agenda
Today’s post discusses the way that neoliberal policies embraced by the Democratic Party resulted in job loss in key states. Bear with me: there are facts and figures here that make the case. Tomorrow, I will continue to discuss these issues in the context of “domestic” job displacement. The third post will discuss a progressive […]
The Lawyers’ Job Now — History and Strategy
Donald Trump and his allies have announced their agenda. It includes torture, denial of basic human rights, military action that violates the laws of war, racial injustice, misogyny, and xenophobia. What role and responsibility do we have? I am a lawyer, teacher, and writer. So I speak to those in my profession and those preparing […]
Are Sanders and Fair Trade a Threat to the Global Poor?
On April 24, 2013, some 1,134 people died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex outside Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The building housed factories where low-wage workers, largely women, stitched garments for the U.S. and European markets. For several years before the disaster a number of U.S. opinion makers — notably New York […]
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 […]
First Woman President Nukes Iran
WASHINGTON — President Hillary Clinton, making good on her 2008 threat to “totally obliterate” Iran, celebrated her first week in office by ordering a nuclear strike on Iran’s capital city of Tehran. As a squadron of F-35s streaked through the sky toward the Mideast metropolis of over eight million, President Clinton outlined her foreign policy […]
Marta Harnecker on New Paths Toward 21st Century Socialism
Introduction by Richard Fidler Among the many panels and plenaries at the Conference of the Society for Socialist Studies, which met in Ottawa June 2-5, was a Book Launch for Marta Harnecker’s latest English-language book, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism (translated by Federico Fuentes), Monthly Review Press. The featured speaker […]
The Writing Is on the Wall: Join Veterans For Peace’s Memorial Day Letter-Writing Campaign
The Pentagon is intent upon taking control of how we remember the American War in Vietnam. Their myth-making has already begun and will continue for a decade of fifty-year commemorations. Some of us are not going to stand by and let this happen. We are fighting back. We in Veterans For Peace are taking our […]
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 […]
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 […]
Pentagon Marks 50th Anniversary of Viet Nam War with Multi-million Dollar Re-write of History; Veterans Respond with “Vietnam War Full Disclosure Project”
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the landing of U.S. ground troops in Da Nang, Vietnam, the beginning of the American War in Vietnam. To observe it, the Pentagon is undertaking a multi-million dollar campaign to rewrite and whitewash the history of that war. In response, Veterans For Peace (VFP) has announced the Vietnam […]
The Importance of the “Economic”
The world today is witnessing a rather novel phenomenon, namely a pervasive tendency towards political uprisings by the urban middle class. Not just the leaders, but even the bulk of the participants in such uprisings are educated, are reasonably well-off, and make extensive use of social media channels for keeping in touch with one another. […]
PEGIDA, SYRIZA, and the Future of Europe
Recent events here in Germany remind me of a playground seesaw, with constant ups and downs of one side and the other. All autumn we watched the upward swing of PEGIDA, “Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West,” most rapidly but not only in Saxony’s capital Dresden. Its main features were a fast-talking, shady leader […]
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 […]
