Geography Archives: Vietnam

Fidel Castro was right.  The West was planning an attack on a sovereign third world nation imminently: Libya.  Nothing like a good old war against brown and black people in Libya by the West to remind oneself of what Western civilisation is all about.  Many of us who have been politically active since the 1990s […]

Why, of all possible commodities, did you choose to write a book on rubber? The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber” width=”260″ height=”393″ border=”0″ title=”BUY THIS BOOK”>THE DEVIL’S MILK: A Social History of Rubberby John Tully BUY THIS BOOK The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber Book Launch with author John Tully Tuesday, […]

In a speech attacking ‘multiculturalism’ Prime Minister David Cameron argued for a “muscular liberalism” that would actively confront “extremist” ideologies — principally radical Islamism — that fail to conform to “Western values”.  The problem is not with Islam per se, he argued, but with those “distortion[s]” of Islam that reject “democracy, the rule of law, […]

GEB Statement on Recent Attacks on Civil Liberties On September 24, 2010, the FBI carried out coordinated raids on the homes and offices of fourteen anti-war activists in Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan.  During the raids, the FBI confiscated everything from computers and mailing lists to children’s drawings and photos of Martin Luther King. Ten of […]

The Crash of 2008 and its ghastly aftermath was not just an economic crisis but also a crisis aided and abetted by economics. Previously I have written about the Econobubble (the handmaiden of the “real” Bubble) and the toxic theories of economists who were very recently rewarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.  Following […]

Phases of Imperialism Lenin dated the imperialist phase of capitalism, which he associated with monopoly capitalism, from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the process of centralization of capital had led to the emergence of monopoly in industry and among banks.  The coming together (coalescence) of the capitals in these two spheres led to […]

This is not the first time thousands of classified documents have been “liberated,” revealing to a stunned public how their government has waged a concerted war of disinformation against them for the purposes of bending their will to the demands of a pointless war: a war on the altar of which the deceived public are […]

  It is commonly reported in the international press, and widely believed, that the government of President Hugo Chávez controls the media in Venezuela.  For example, writing about Venezuela’s September elections for the National Assembly, the Washington Post‘s deputy editorial page editor and columnist, Jackson Diehl, referred to the Chávez “regime’s domination of the media. […]

Acclaimed philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He shared his perspectives on international affairs, economics, and other themes in an interview conducted at his office in Boston on September 14, 2010. Keane Bhatt: Your new book Hopes and Prospects begins with the story of […]

  This letter invites you to join what will be the largest veteran-led civil resistance to U.S. wars and occupations in recent history, Washington, D.C., December 16: <www.stopthesewars.org>. During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King called our government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  That was true then — and is even […]

I gave this talk at a very good conference, New Deal/No Deal, at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, on October 29.  The panel chair was Michael Reich, who was the main organizer of the conference along with Richard Walker of the geography department.  The dual themes were reflecting on the New Deal […]

Over the years Gore Vidal has spilled a lot of ink telling readers how the mass media murdered serious book culture in the United States, but he is the only living US novelist to have his own coffee table book.  Snapshots in History’s Glare is a photo album of fine design and no small expense […]

As we stated at the outset of Part 1,1 there is no better test of the independence and integrity of the establishment U.S. media than in their comparative treatment of Iran and Honduras in 2009 and 2010. Iran held its most recent presidential election on June 12, 2009.  This followed a typically short three-week campaign […]

  The 2010 Edward Said Memorial Lecture, the Palestine Center, Washington, DC, 7 October 2010 Thank you all for coming today, and, to those of you who are watching, thank you for viewing this talk.  Those of you who live in Washington, who are subjected to the American media, will probably be relieved to hear […]

Jean Bricmont is professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and is a member of the Brussels Tribunal.  He is the author of Humanitarian Imperialism and co-author, with Alan Sokal, of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.  He has written critically about ‘humanitarian interventionism’ since the Kosovo war in 1999.  In […]

The mass media remains, in the 21st century, one of the most powerful forces blocking social and economic progress.  It is because of the mass media that tens of millions of Americans are convinced that budget deficits are more important than the lives ruined by unemployment, or that Social Security won’t be there for them […]

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking military secrets to the public.  This week, his supporters are holding rallies in 21 cities, seeking Manning’s release from military custody.  Manning is in the brig for allegedly disclosing a classified video depicting U.S. troops shooting civilians from an Apache helicopter in Iraq in July 2007.  The […]

DIE LINKE (the Left Party) has initiated a debate on its draft party program, which it wishes to officially adopt in Autumn 2011.  Neues Deutschland is joining this debate with a series of articles.  In the Neues Deutschland article published on 9 August 2010, Michael Heinrich tackles the issue of the relationship between capital and […]

From the late summer of 1985 into the early spring of 1986, the small town of Austin, Minnesota, figured prominently in the national news.  The dramatic themes and issues, twists and turns, of a labor conflict there captured the national imagination.  This interest was not merely passive, as more than thirty support committees formed across […]

Like Gerald Caplan’s hostile “review” of our book, The Politics of Genocide, Adam Jones’s aggressive attack on our response to Caplan can be explained in significant part by Jones’s deep commitment to an establishment narrative on the Rwandan genocide that we believe to be false — one that misallocates the main responsibility for that still […]