Subjects Archives: History

Today I had the privilege of appreciating the impressive parade with which our people commemorated the 50th anniversary of the socialist nature of the Revolution and the Bay of Pigs victory.… Also, on this same day, the 6th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba began.

  A tribute to Yuri Gagarin and his first human spaceflight, 12 April 1961. . . . Music by Zemlyane (“The Grass at Home”).  Cf. <www.roscosmos.ru/main.php?id=87>, <english.ruvr.ru/tag_45875342/>, <ciudad-futura.net/2011/04/05/soyuz-gagarin-2/>, <www.yuriesfera.net>. | Print  

  Juliano Mer-Khamis embodied the uncompromising struggle for freedom and for dignity.  With his brutal murder the Palestinian struggle has lost a brilliant, charismatic, and courageous fighter for justice and freedom.  Both parts of his life’s work were seamlessly joined.  His art was inseparable from his political commitment.  The dignity and humanity which his art […]

Latin Americans are not born-criminals nor did they invent drugs. The Aztecs, Maya and other pre-Columbian human groups in Mexico and Central America, for example, were excellent farmers and didn’t even know about growing coca. The Quechua and Aymara were capable of producing nutritious foods on perfect terraces that followed the mountain level curves. On […]

Yesterday was a long day. From midday I paid attention to Obama’s vicissitudes in Chile, as I had done the day before with his adventures in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In a brilliant challenge, that city defeated Chicago in its aspiration to host the 2016 Olympics, when the new President of the United […]

  In his 1994 book entitled The Location of Culture, post-colonial theorist Homi Bhaba writes that “cafes are part of the social phenomena of the ‘third place’ [which] . . . people occupy outside of the home and work.  It’s a place to relax, to be alone, to socialize, to read, to gossip, to meet […]

When Gaddafi, aged just 28 and a colonel in the Libyan army, inspired by his Egyptian colleague Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Idris I in 1969, he implemented important revolutionary measures such as agrarian reform and the nationalization of oil. The growing income was dedicated to economic and social development, particularly educational and health services for […]

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, […]

  “They gave them bribes to beat us, to beat us here. . . .  My friends here, my friends, my daughter and son, who are here among the people, who are here together, they want me to go home.  I said no.  I have to stay here, because . . . we have to […]

I shall relate a bit of history. When the Spanish “discovered” us five hundred years ago, the estimated population on the Island was no more than 200,000 inhabitants who were living in harmony with nature. Their main sources of food came from the rivers, lakes and seas rich in protein; they were also carrying out […]

  Asʻad Ghanem.  Palestinian Politics after Arafat: A Failed National Movement.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.  x + 208 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35427-3; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22160-5. November 2010 marked the sixth anniversary of the death of Palestinian National Authority (PNA) president Yasser Arafat.  For the last two years of his life, the once […]

Yesterday I analyzed the atrocious act of violence against U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, in which 18 people were shot, six died and another 12 were wounded, several seriously, among them the Congresswoman with a shot to the head, leaving the medical team with no alternative other than to try to save her life and minimize, […]

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  Table 14 summarizes the main technical characteristics of the debt restructurings studied in this paper: the size of the exchange, the participation rate, the numbers of instruments tendered and new instruments issued, the options available to investors, etc.  Table 15 contains the main results, both in terms of the level and dispersion of NPV […]

This is what the G-20 meeting that started yesterday in Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea, has been turned into. Many readers, saturated with acronyms, may wonder: What is the G-20? This is one of the many miscreations concocted by the most powerful empire and its allies, who also created the G-7: the United States, Japan, […]

  Scott A. Sandage.  Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.  x + 362 pp.  $16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-02107-5. In the epilogue of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Scott A. Sandage quotes a pivotal line from Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, that haunts his […]

That’s terrific! So I exclaimed when I read down to the last line about the revelations of the famous journalist Seymour Hersh, printed in Democracy Now! and collected as one of the 25 most censored news items in the United States. The material is entitled “The War Crimes of Stanley McChrystal, U.S. General” and it […]

When the Crash of 2008 hit Wall Street, European capitalism was thrown into disarray.  With the demise of the export-absorbing monster that was the US consumer market, what in 2003 Joseph Halevi and I called “The Global Minotaur” (see Monthly Review, Vol. 55), Europe not only lost a critical source of aggregate demand but also […]

In yesterday´s Reflection there appears a key paragraph taken from Woodward´s book: “One important secret that has never been reported in the media, or anywhere else, was the existence of a covert army of 3,000 men in Afghanistan, whose objective was to kill or capture Taliban and sometimes venture into the tribal areas to pacify them and get support.” That army, created and handled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), trained and organized as a “special force” has been made up on tribal, social, anti-religious and anti-patriotic bases; its mission is the follow-up and physical elimination of Taliban fighters and other Afghans, described as extreme Moslems.A Saudi recruited and funded by the CIA to fight against the Soviets when their troops were occupying Afghanistan has nothing in common with Al Qaeda and Bin Laden.When Vice President Biden traveled to Kabul at the start of 2009,David Mckiernan, chief of American troops in Afghanistan told him in answer to a question about Al Qaeda that he hadn´t seen one single Arab in two years there. Despite the relatively brief and ephemeral importance that the principal international press gave to “Obama´s Wars”, without a doubt these did not shirk from recording this revealing piece of news.

  Historical Materialism has extended the deadline for proposal submissions to its special issue on the Middle East, conceived broadly to include: the Arab world from the Atlantic to the Gulf, Israel/Palestine, Iran and Turkey.  The new deadline for abstracts is the 10th of November 2010. HM is a Marxist journal, appearing four times a […]