Subjects Archives: History

Write a letter to Congress in support of real diplomatic engagement with Iran: . Join Stephen Kinzer, longtime New York Times correspondent and author of the book All the Shah’s Men, is now traveling across the nation to make the case for real diplomacy with Iran.  The tour coincides with a new publication of his […]

  THE BIG RED SONGBOOK Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Salvatore Salerno (eds.) BUY THIS BOOK The 2007 publication of The Big Red Songbook is long overdue.  Folklorist Archie Green has been in possession of 29 editions of the legendary Little Red Songbook of the IWW since Wobbly folklorist John Neuhaus entrusted them to […]

Le Parti communiste libanais participe à la résistance contre l’occupation israélienne, résistance politique, sociale, mais aussi armée, malgré le peu de moyens dont il dispose.  Nous avons passé une journée entière à Jamaliya, dans la vallée de la Bekaa, où 7 militants communistes sont tombés les armes à la main lors d’une opération israélienne en […]

  “The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. . . .  Politics, the politics of a democracy which entails disagreement, which promotes candor — has been replaced by psychotherapy. . . .” — Susan Sontag, 9/24/01 Another anniversary […]

Recientemente, aprovechando un nuevo aniversario del nacimiento de George Washington, el presidente George W. Bush aprovechó para comparar la Revolución americana del siglo XVIII con la guerra en Irak.  De paso recordó que el primero, como el último, había sido “George W.” La técnica de las asociaciones es propia de la publicidad.  Según ésta, una […]

When the chairman of Iran’s Jewish Council, Haroun Yashayaei, criticized President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a letter condemning his remarks on the Holocaust, he was supported by a range of Iranian intellectuals, artists, poets, and others both within the country and without.  For those amongst us with some understanding about the Jewish presence in Iranian history, […]

The present being a product of the past, our attempt to understand history is a part of our endeavor to understand ourselves and shape our world today.  However, it is also true that often our understanding of the present determines the way we look at history.  So, when it is popular imagination that is involved […]

  There’s a woman — some call her “Black Hawk Down” lady — who lives in a packed, squalid neighborhood in the middle of Mogadishu and runs a rather simple but grisly museum.  For under a dollar, visitors can view her prized possession, the mangled, mud-splattered nose of a US Black Hawk helicopter that was […]

The recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids that paralyzed Swift and Company across the heartland of America were part of Endgame, a massive immigration enforcement operation launched by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003.  Ultimately, it promises to be the biggest police operation in U.S. history.  The stated objective of Endgame is […]

Así como en teología el mismo Cristo sirve para justificar la acumulación de capitales o para suprimir al prójimo en nombre del amor, así también la historia de los oprimidos sirve para crear mitos e ideoléxicos incuestionables, a la medida del poder de turno: el patriotismo, la libertad, la salvación del mundo,nuestro derecho de aplastar […]

  GLADYS: Harry had a wonderful life! PERCY: And he had a wonderful death, too! GLADYS: We arrived in Burlington, Thursday evening, December 29th to be with Harry.  Taking care of Harry, in addition to his son Fred and daughter-in- law Amy, was his devoted home helper and amanuensis, Joan Ladoucer. I was with Harry, […]

  Madam President, Distinguished Heads of State and Government, Distinguished Heads of Delegation, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen I praise the merciful, all-knowing and almighty God for blessing me with another opportunity to address this Assembly on behalf of the great nation of Iran and to bring a number of issues to the attention of the […]

David Cronenberg‘s latest, A History of Violence, is a fine reworking of the Western and film noir in his “realist” turn. In a feminist twist of film noir, in this film it is a man, not a woman, who has a past. The past that the man (well played by Viggo Mortensen) thought he left […]

“Then came this battle called the Civil War, beginning in Kansas in 1854, and ending with the presidential elections of 1876, twenty awful years. The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again towards slavery. The whole weight of America was thrown to color caste.”1 — W.E.B. DuBois, Black […]

Referred to by The Wall Street Journal in 1972 as “the ‘dean’ of radical economists,” Paul M. Sweezy was, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, “the most noted American Marxist scholar” of the second half of the twentieth century.1 Sweezy’s intellectual influence, which was global in its reach, lay chiefly in two areas: as a leading radical economist (and sociologist), and as the principal originator of a distinct North American brand of socialist thought in his position as co-founder and co-editor of Monthly Review magazine. Like both Marx and Schumpeter, to whose thought his work was closely related, Sweezy provided a historical analysis and crtique of capitalist economic development, encompassing a theory of the origins, development and eventual decline of the system.

I know that you and I long for peace in the Middle East, but before you continue to talk about necessary conditions from an Israeli perspective, you need to know what’s on my mind.… Where to begin? How about 1964. Let me quote my own words during my trial. They are true today as they were then: “I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”