Geography Archives: Vietnam

Howard Zinn.  The Historic Unfulfilled Promise.  Foreword by Matthew Rothschild.  San Francisco: City Lights, 2012.  256 pages. Howard Zinn was called a lot of different names: anarchist, socialist, and communist.  He called himself a lot of different names, too: anarchist, socialist, and communist.  No one ever seems to have called him Zen, but maybe it’s […]

Aijaz Ahmad: Since the Vietnam War the United States has been developing what they then called the “automated battlefield.”  Now, after about 40 years, we are now seeing some very, very advanced expressions of that, where the entire battlefield is being automated, to use the whole spectrum of technologies that they have . . . […]

Intersectionality as a key concept in women’s studies has up until the present proven rather durable.  Feminist journals are peppered with it and feminists use it pretty much without having to explain what they mean, the term’s affinity with feminism taken for granted and its import unquestioned.  Attend any women’s studies meeting, and sooner or […]

One state or two?  Boycott of Israeli goods or goods from the settlements?  Is the lobby the genesis of American wrongdoing in Palestine or is it imperialism?  The questions — regarding vision, strategy, and analysis — produce sharp cleavages on the Left.  Indeed, generally ones much deeper than they need to be.  And they remain […]

  During Barack Obama’s visit to Australia in November 2011, the US and Australian governments announced the establishment of a permanent Marine presence in Darwin, located on South East Asia’s doorstep.  By 2014, some 2, 500 Marines plus associated hardware such as military aircraft, tanks, artillery, and amphibious assault vehicles will be based near the […]

Eric Mann.  Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer.  Beacon Press, 2011. “Agonizer” was the term an old girlfriend of mine from my vanguard organization days used to describe the branch organizer for the party.  An apt description for someone tasked to do the thankless job of running meetings, setting schedules, and seeing […]

“The people’ democratic struggle and the struggle for the environment should be intimately tied together.” — Fred Magdoff Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and adjunct professor of crop and soil science at Cornell University.  He is a co-author of What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know […]

World Peace Forum Teach-In, Vancouver, Canada, November 12, 2011 (Modified from Notes) We are at what social theorists call a “historic moment,” in which real change suddenly seems possible.  It is therefore all the more important to learn from past struggles.  One of the first lessens of a long history of dissent from the early […]

The Occupy Wall Street uprising has taken the nation by storm, beginning in the Financial District in Manhattan and then spreading to cities and towns in every part of the country and around the world.  The anger over growing inequality and the political power of the rich that has been bubbling under the surface for […]

1) Not long ago I heard a writer claim that her publisher had demanded that the word “manifesto” be replaced in the title of her novel.  This is an Asian American woman who is feisty and strong-willed and political, who during readings calls out “blond boys” for flaunting the privileges of their maleness and their […]

Most Western Marxists suffer from a deep resentment: they have never experienced a successful communist revolution.  For some unaccountable reason, all of those successful revolutions have happened in the ‘East’: Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, Vietnam and so on.  And none of the few revolutions in the ‘West’, from Finland to Germany, […]

  Daphne Berdahl.  On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany.  Edited by Matti Bunzl.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.  xx + 166 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35434-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22170-4. On the Social Life of Postsocialism; Memory, Consumption, Germany is a posthumous collection of Daphne Berdahl’s essays, written over the course of […]

With all the advocacy efforts expended over the last 20 years, it might be reasonable to expect some results by now for the Single Payer (SP) movement.  Of course, SP would be a great way to provide health insurance in America.  Instead of thousands of private insurance companies (payers for healthcare services) competing with each […]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez called on peoples of the world last Wednesday to speak out for peace and against the imperial madness of the countries attacking sovereign nations. “May the peoples of the United States, of Europe, speak out against war.  Let us raise our voices, our chants, against war, for peace and life,” President […]

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism is a short, accessible introduction to the ecological crisis that is intended for a wide audience — why did you decide to write a book like this, and why now? In the fall of 2008 I attended a conference where discussion of the environment was prominent, although […]

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the chemical warfare program in Vietnam without sufficient remedial action by the U.S. government.  One of the most shameful legacies of the Vietnam War, Agent Orange continues to poison Vietnam and the people exposed to the chemicals, as well as their offspring. H.R. 2634, the Victims […]

Behind every good man, one finds a good woman, or so we’re told.  In this year’s contest for the Teamster presidency, that traditional gender-based relationship has been reversed — at least in Sandy Pope’s campaign.  In Las Vegas last Thursday night, it was a small band of good men (plus a handful of their union […]

An advertisement for America’s nuclear industry from the 1970s Seymour Hersh, the acclaimed journalist who, in 1970, won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and has subsequently broken many other important stories dealing with America’s foreign and national security policies (e.g., prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib), has published his most […]

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York.  The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth.  Monthly Review Press, 2010.  544 pages. Climate change is often called the greatest environment threat facing humanity.  The threat is very real.  Unless we cut carbon pollution fast, runaway climate change will worsen existing environmental and social problems, and […]

Norman Gottwald belongs to a rare breed — an American Marxist biblical scholar.  More than one jarring juxtaposition in that epithet!  Unfortunately, he is less well known outside the relative small circle of biblical scholars than he should be.  In order to introduce him to a wider audience, let me say a little about his […]