Geography Archives: Yugoslavia

The “Iranian people” have not spoken. What’s happening in Iran today is a developing conflict between two forces that each represent millions of people.  There are good people on both sides and the issues are complicated.  So before U.S. progressives decide to weigh in, supporting one side and condemning the other, let’s take a little […]

Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation.  Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has […]

“Serbia is one of the few European countries with a protracted refugee population.  More than 90,000 refugees from Croatia and from Bosnia and Herzegovina remain there, victims of wars that erupted after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in 1991.” — UN High Commissioner for Refugees Serbia: Dreams of a Better Life Serbia: Far from […]

Francis R. Nicosia.  Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany.  Cambridge University Press, 2008.  xiv + 324 pp.  $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88392-4. In his latest book, Francis R. Nicosia returns to and explores in greater detail one of the major topics of his important earlier book, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (1985): the complex […]

  Conor Foley, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, Verso, 2008. All is not well within the world of humanitarian aid organisations.  In his new book, The Thin Blue Line, Conor Foley, an experienced aid worker, discusses many of the problems associated with the burgeoning relationship between contemporary aid organisations and recent […]

  On March 24, 1999, NATO began an aerial bombing campaign against what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  For 78 days, bombs rained down on military targets and civilian infrastructure under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention.’  Operation Allied Force precipitated the displacement of over one million people and directly resulted in the deaths […]

  The dark Danube is covered with White flowers, white flowers, white flowers. And the melody asks for memory Of the past, the past, the past. But like a flock of birds Our songs’ simple words vanish. You are walking into the fire, Yugoslavia Without me, without me, without me. For that night under a […]

On Tuesday, December 9, the anti-immigrant lobbyists at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) held a press conference in downtown Washington, DC to promote their “Immigration Reform Agenda for the 111th Congress.” The press conference followed the new line that groups like FAIR have adopted since the financial crisis broke out last September.  Undocumented […]

Hamas cannot be defeated, so it must be brought to heel. Ever since Hamas triumphed in the Palestinian elections nearly three years ago, the story in Israel has been that a full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip was imminent.  But even when public pressure mounted for a decisive blow against Hamas, the government backed […]

“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]

Introduction Indigenous peoples in Indo-Afro-Latin America, especially Bolivia and Ecuador, are rising up to take control of their own lives and act in solidarity with others to save the planet.  They are calling for new, yet ancient, practices of plurinational, participatory, and intercultural democracy.  They champion ecologically sustainable development; community-based autonomies; and solidarity with other […]

Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, New York, 2008. Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War is an uncompromising attack on the US ruling class and its course in the world from 1917 to the present.  He says that US foreign policy today is “headed inexorably for an American Dienbienphu” (p. 423). […]

Anyone looking for a good movie about traitors can skip the new Don Cheadle vehicle Traitor.   Despite all the action movie hype, it won’t be around long, anyway. Traitor is not a movie about traitors, or a sensitive post-mortem on why people might become “traitors.”  That old chestnut “The Man without a Country” is […]

The world has been witness this month to a mini-war in the Caucasus, and the rhetoric has been passionate, if largely irrelevant.  Geopolitics is a gigantic series of two-player chess games, in which the players seek positional advantage.  In these games, it is crucial to know the current rules that govern the moves. Knights are […]

Perhaps some governments are unaware of the concrete facts, and so for that reason Raúl’s message setting Cuba’s position seemed to us to be very timely.  I shall be generous in the aspects that cannot be dealt with in a brief and precise official statement. The government of Georgia would never have launched its armed […]

“Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity must be respected.”  Had George Bush said what he said about Georgia from Beijing about Serbia as well, this is how he would have approached the so-called independence of Kosovo.  The truth, of course, is far from this.  The US was the first country to recognize […]

3 August 2008 — The Fundación Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM), in contribution to the necessary debate on how to build the kind of socialism we want, announces the publication of two important contributions to this debate: El camino al desarrollo humano: ¿capitalismo o socialismo? (The Road to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?) by Michael A. […]

The USA and the EU planning to escalate confrontation with Iran.  A military blockade discussed. In the conflict over Iran’s civilian nuclear program, the United States and Europe are intensifying confrontation.  At the top of the measures that are now being discussed is an international naval blockade by a “coalition of the willing.”  As in […]

  Mohssen Massarrat, born in Tehran in 1942, is Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at Universität Osnabrück.  Deutsche Militärzeitung: Professor Massarrat, William Fallon, US Commander responsible for the Middle East, unexpectedly resigned after just one year.  A cause for his resignation is obviously the US policy toward Iran.  Admiral Fallon criticized the US […]

One of the most important developments in Cuban Marxism in recent years has been increased attention to the writings of Ernesto Che Guevara on the economics and politics of the transition to socialism. A milestone in this process was the publication in 2006 by Ocean Press and Cuba’s Centro de Estudios Che Guevara of Apuntes […]