Subjects Archives: Imperialism

Recently, news reports in US and European newspapers have suggested that Washington and London are considering a major reduction in their forces in Iraq.  These reports usually fail to mention that those same forces were increased only last summer and that the rumored reduction is really not as large as advertised if you look at […]

Bombay, Our City Early on, in Anand Patwardhan‘s Bombay, Our City (1985), a passionate film made with the working people who live in Bombay’s slums and are coping with and organizing against their displacement by the police, the bureaucracy, and the business community, a woman reproaches the filmmakers. “Why do you take pictures of the […]

Until last Thursday, the ideological battle lines of the occupation of Iraq were drawn around a central question — to “stay the course” or withdraw the troops immediately.  Of course, the reality was more complicated, with many Americans who opposed the war arguing that to leave now would be “abandoning our responsibility” to Iraq, letting […]

“Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice, and we want answers.” — Cindy Sheehan, Camp Casey, Crawford, Texas “If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of […]

Over the course of the whole debacle, there was a lot of criticism directed against Mandeep and me — even from our purported supporters — for the way that we handled the public relations angle of our case. Much was made, particularly, of the so-called “Kafka Declaration” episode wherein, against the cool protestations of our […]

Lila Rajiva, the author of The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media, will discuss her book at the following venues. Wednesday, December 14 7:00 PM Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., T: 510-658-1448 OAKLAND, CA Thursday, December 15 7:30 PM The Marxist School of Sacramento, Sierra 2 Center, Curtis Hall, 2791-24th St., […]

Two URPE Insights First, I should start by assuring you that I have not gone round the bend. I am not about to suggest that we dust off our volumes of Capital, corner some poor unsuspecting soul, and then launch into some long-winded exegesis of the concept of commodity fetishism. That sounds more like a […]

John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, will join Roger Marheine, Sonali Kolhatkar, and Barbara Trent in the keynote plenary session at the Students and Educators to STOP THE WAR conference, Los Angeles, 19 November 2005. The conference is timely indeed. As William Ayers and Mike Ferner remind us, the No Child Left Behind Act, […]

(Patrick Resta is the New England organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War. He can be reached at .) I want to discuss Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), but first a little background on you. Can you tell us about your service in Iraq? When were you in Iraq? I served as a medic […]

  Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy against Empire by Peter McLaren (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy by Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) Teaching Peter McLaren: Paths of Dissent, by Marc Pruyn and Luis M. Huerta-Charles (New […]

The Israeli occupation of Gaza Strip didn’t end — it merely changed form. With the completion of the Israeli army withdrawal from Gaza Strip, and the eviction of all the settlers from there, its occupation has seemingly ended. And indeed, if by “occupation” we mean, as the Israeli establishment wants us to understand, a mere […]

  In “new imperialism,” it is said, the American economy needs more instability abroad to maintain the health of its capital at home. Long before discourse on “new imperialism” became popular in the West, Palestinian intellectuals in refugee camps arrived at this very conclusion by simply reflecting upon the wretched conditions of their own existence. […]

BLOOD ON THE BORDER: A Memoir of the Contra War by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizBUY THIS BOOK Most people think of the U.S.-sponsored war against the Sandinistas (that came to be called, simply, the “Contra War”) as having taken place on the northern border of western Nicaragua and Honduras and on the southern border with Costa Rica. […]

Today the planet is an immense gulag. The resources of the periphery of the empire — the great majority of human beings — are channeled towards the imperial centre — the richest countries — in the manner of a colossal funnel. There are now in the world two practical routes of resistance to the US […]

Washington, D.C. — In a pre-dawn civil disobedience action Monday morning, forty-one War Resisters League members and others sat down and were arrested at a pedestrian entrance to the Pentagon, slowing foot traffic at that location and prompting officials to close the U.S. military headquarters’ sole stop on Washington’s Metroline for a period. Protesters — […]

[The photographs below were taken by an MRZine.org reader. — Ed.]

  The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the […]

“I hope they kill each other . . . too bad they both can’t lose.” — Nobel laureate Henry Kissinger (on the U.S. arming both sides of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s) “Do not support dictators. Do not sell them weapons.” — Nobel laureate Jose Ramos Horta, East Timorese peace negotiator It’s not every […]

With god on our side we don’t need a conscience. The others are ripe for burning and burn them we will, the smoke of their flesh rising to heaven, an acceptable sacrifice. With god on our side there is no grey, no shading only glaring gorgeous white blinding with purity: beyond just blackness that could […]

In the increasing “heat” of labor reform issues — which is not always the same as “light” — it has been discouraging to see how little attention has been paid to labor’s foreign policy issues.  This is, in my opinion, the 500-pound gorilla that no one wants to touch.  Yet, I argue it is absolutely […]