Geography Archives: Vietnam

When George Bush began trying to justify the occupation of Iraq by invoking the “lessons” of Vietnam, I had the urge to send him a copy of the new documentary War Made Easy featuring Norman Solomon.  That’s hardly surprising — no doubt we’ve all had the occasional desire to try to educate our president. Then […]

An argument at a summer fair in the small town of Muegeln, between Leipzig and Dresden, ended with a mob of fifty drunken young men wielding knives and other weapons and shouting “Foreigners Get Out!” chasing eight men from India — longtime residents in Muegeln — across the town square.  The Indians, some badly wounded, […]

St. Louis — A young man from Palestine and another from Israel riveted 400 U.S. military veterans to their seats last week in this city on the Mississippi River.  What captivated the audience was their recent decision to put down the guns they’d pointed at each other for years. The two members of Combatants for […]

“WAR . . . huh . . . yeah What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” — Edwin Starr‘s No. 1 Hit, “WAR,” 1970 Edwin Starr’s antiwar blockbuster hit Number 1 less than a year after the Vietnam Moratorium brought millions of us into the streets in October 1969. Nearly forty years later, we are […]

  Achievements of the Cuban Revolution are well known to Monthly Review readers.  What is striking about Raúl Castro Ruz’s address on 26 July 2007 (an excerpt from which is reproduced below), on the occasion of Cuba’s National Day of Rebellion, is not his tribute to them but his candid assessment of the “errors which […]

  The post-911 immigration regime originates in 2003 when immigration control shifted from the Department of Justice to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  The Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished March 2003, and its functions were transferred into the newly created DHS, in a merger of some 180,000 employees from 22 different agencies.  […]

Introductory Note: This essay is an adaptation and reworking of a historic 1963 document of the Students for a Democratic Society.  Its original was mimeographed in several thousand copies and distributed jointly by the SDS National Office and the newly-created Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP).  America and the New Era was intended to be […]

3 million Vietnamese people and tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers are affected by Agent Orange — a chemical weapon used by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War which causes cancer, other life-threatening illnesses, and serious birth defects in children — even those born several generations after the war. U.S. veterans received some compensation […]

I wrote this as a paper for a seminar in history during my first year of grad school at the University of Washington in 1984.  It was a labor of love for me because it gave me an opportunity to read every single issue of Monthly Review , all of which were carefully kept in […]

For the first time since its rise as a superpower the United States is facing a serious threat to its hegemony across the globe. In February this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a security conference in Munich that had 250 of the world’s top leaders and officials in attendance, including such luminaries as the […]

When I was in high school, I lived on a military base and socialized and worked with GIs opposed to the war in Vietnam.  These guys weren’t very different from me — we liked rock and soul music and we liked to get high — yet most of them had experienced war.  That was something […]

TODAY’S ANTIWAR DILEMMAS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE In March 1965, before ordering the first deployment of U.S. ground troops to Vietnam (U.S. “advisers” had been there for years) President Lyndon Johnson told Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: “I don’t think anything is gonna be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning.” […]

  Ron Jacobs is the author of the first comprehensive history of the Weather Underground: The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground.  His articles, essays and reviews have appeared in CounterPunch, Monthly Review,  MRZine, Alternative Press Review, Jungle World, Works in Progress, State of Nature, and a multitude of other places.  Ron […]

  Judging by the intensity of the debate that plagued much of the 2004 presidential election, the divisiveness of the Vietnam war has not been resolved.  If anything it has festered, inflamed by similar concerns and questions regarding the legality, morality, purpose, and necessity of the war in Iraq.  The continued polemic about a war […]

Boots Riley — The Coup‘s revered, thought-provoking MC — is hoping to utilize a post of his band’s incendiary, anti-war song “Captain Sterling’s Little Problem” on its MySpace Blog as a means to spark a G.I. Rebellion against the War In Iraq. Riley is encouraging The Coup’s 25,000 MySpace friends to download the “Pick A […]

From Protest to Resistance I didn’t make it to the march on the Pentagon.  The storm up and down the east coast of the United States knocked down a thirty foot tree in my yard in Asheville, North Carolina, messed up my flight from Asheville to Washington, DC, and left me with a choice of […]

We talk often of military service in war as a civic and patriotic duty.  But as the realities of combat and of the battlefield become apparent, patriotic sentiments, political ideologies, and mythologies fade quickly beneath the screams of the unbearable pain of the mutilated and the dying.  Ultimately, warriors fight, kill, and accept injury and […]

When people think of militant political action in the United States, their thoughts usually turn to cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.  The South and the Pacific Northwest probably don’t immediately spring to mind.  This is despite the rich legacy of militant labor protest in the filed, woods, and apple orchards of the […]

John Mage of Monthly Review and Bernard D’Mello. deputy editor of Economic and Political Weekly (“EPW”) of Mumbai, India, visited Nepal in February, and trekked into Rolpa, the original base area of the revolutionary “people’s war.”  The following account appears simultaneously on MRZine and in the current (March 17th) issue of EPW. Over the last […]

Raising the minimum wage and increasing the level of social assistance is a component part of challenging the large, low-wage multinationals that make up the vast majority employers of the working poor.  The largest of them all is Wal-Mart. For socialists, Wal-Mart is more than just a series of big retail stores that threaten our […]