Subjects Archives: Imperialism

  • Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the American Empire

    Narrated by Viggo Mortensen.  Art by Mike Konopacki.  Video editing by Eric Wold.  The video is based on Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle, A People’s History of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2008). | | Print

  • The Fires Within: Sri Lanka at War

      Click on the image to go to the video. Cf. Nermeen Shaikh, “Photographing Conflict to ‘Give a Voice’: Ron Haviv Discusses Recent Sri Lanka Project,” Asia Society, 12 June 2008. This video was released on the Web site of Asia Society. | | Print

  • U.S. Conference of Mayors to Consider Iran Resolution

      It’s a Slippery Slope to War: Ask Your Representative to Oppose H. Con. Res. 362Over the last three weeks 77 House Democrats and 92 Republicans have agreed to cosponsor a new resolution against Iran that demands that President Bush “initiate an international effort” to impose a land, sea, and air blockade on Iran to […]

  • A Region in Chaos: An Interview with Dr. Mohssen Massarrat

      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 […]

  • The Delusion of the “Clash of Civilizations” and the “War on Islam”

    The rhetoric about a “clash of civilizations” and a “war on Islam” has found its way easily into Arab intellectual discourse, where it has taken solid root, along with other similar “concepts” (or what I’d rather call “non-concepts” — like the term “terrorism” — since they are extremely vague and yet ideologically loaded) that were […]

  • Lessons the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Hold for the War in Iraq?

      David A. Bell.  The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.  x + 420 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.  ISBN 978-0-618-91981-9. The concept of “total war” is not a new one to historians, particularly those of the twentieth century.  For many, the […]

  • CPR for the Anti-War Movement

    It is fair to say that the anti-war movement in the US is moribund.  A movement that put a million people in the streets a month before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has drawn as many as half-a-million protesters to protests as recently as January 2007 has failed to mobilize anything even near […]

  • Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa

      ONGOING XENOPHOBIC ATTACKS Nehawu joins all progressive minded South Africans and ordinary people in expressing their disgust at the current attacks against African brothers and sisters from the North.  What is happening in Alexandra is completely unjustifiable, immoral and short sighted. POVERTY UNEMPLOYMENT AND SLOW SERVICE DELIVERY More than 40% of South Africans are […]

  • Voices for Peace: Iranian Americans against War

      Schauleh Sahba is an Iranian American who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.  This film is the final cut of a public service announcement about Iranian Americans that she made, featuring fifty Iranian Americans speaking up about who they are, what they believe in, and why they are against attacking Iran.  Her goal […]

  • Don’t Bomb Iran!

      To contact Make Films Not War, go to <makefilmsnotwar.org/comm/comm.php>. | | Print

  • What Kind of War Does Neoliberalism Make?

    James A. Tyner.  The Business of War: Workers, Warriors, and Hostages in Occupied Iraq.  Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006.  viii + 152 pp.  Bibliography, index.  ISBN 978-0-7546-4791-1. In The Business of War, James A. Tyner provides an engaged and readable synthesis of scholarship and informed polemic produced in response to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation […]

  • Longshore Workers Are Standing Down at West Coast Ports:”We’re Standing Up for America, We’re Supporting the Troops, and We’re Telling Politicians That It’s Time to End the Iraq War Now!”

      (SAN FRANCISCO, CA) More than 25,000 longshore workers at 29 west coast ports are exercising their First Amendment rights today by taking a day off work and calling for an end to the war in Iraq. “Longshore workers are standing-down on the job and standing up for America,” said ILWU International President Bob McEllrath.  “We’re […]

  • Preparing for War with Iran?

    As Israel prepares to celebrate its 60th anniversary, the weak and internally divided government of Ehud Olmert persists in pursuing counterproductive policies detached from all regional and global realities except the guaranteed support of the United States.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice soldiers on in her starring role keeping the theatrical performance known as “the […]

  • The Third Side Also Exists: Regarding the Likely American Attack on Iran

      In the current conflict over Iran, the most important question is what America’s real goal in Iran and the Middle East is.  Why?  Because, as long as we don’t have a certain and reliable answer to this question, as long as we don’t know what the opponent’s hidden real purpose in this crisis is, […]

  • People’s History of American Empire

    Labor and political cartoonist Mike Konopacki — close friend and collaborator of UE’s cartoonist Gary Huck — has produced a brilliant book-length graphic adaptation of a major portion of Howard Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States. Created in collaboration with Zinn and historian Paul Buhle, Konopacki’s A People’s History of American Empire tells, in pictures and text, the story of U.S. government and corporate policies of controlling other people’s countries — from the seizure of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in the Spanish-American War, to George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But it also shows that U.S. foreign policy is and always has been inseparable from domestic policies that have stolen land from and massacred Native Americans, crushed workers’ movements, and employed racism and immigrant bashing to divide and conquer working people.

  • To Protest Indefinite Detention, Sami Al-Arian on Hunger Strike: New YouTube Video Describes His Case, Highlights His Plight

      April 2, 2008 — The Department of Justice under the Bush administration continues to manipulate the legal system to keep Dr. Sami Al-Arian imprisoned indefinitely. Sami Al-Arian, a computer engineering professor from Tampa, Florida, was arrested on charges of supporting a designated terrorist organization in 2003.  Al-Arian proclaimed his innocence and maintained the charges […]

  • Ask Ms. Liberty: Advice for the War-Torn

    Although it’s been over five years since the United States invaded Iraq, a few non-patriots among us refuse to understand or endorse our wartime zeitgeist.  I have, therefore, persuaded our noble, statuesque Icon of America to gas up her torch and shed some light on a few selfish queries posed by our huddled, recalcitrant masses. […]

  • No War: The Movement That Has Dissolved Itself [No war Il movimento che si è dissolto]

    Cos’è successo al movimento contro la guerra che esplose nel 2003 mobilitando milioni di persone in tutto il mondo occidentale, al punto da esser definito una volta dal New York Times come «la seconda superpotenza»?Il fatto è che esso non è mai stato un movimento vero e proprio ma solo lo spasmo di un giorno, […]

  • Basra Assault Threatens Trade Unionists

      28 March 2008 Basra Assault Confirms Presence of British Forces a Threat to Political and Trade Union Rights in Iraq In a series of telephone calls from Basra over the past 48 hours, Iraqi trade union activists appeal for solidarity and describe how the so-called ‘Security Plan’ started midnight 24 March with intense shelling […]

  • “European Universalism Is Used to Justify Imperialism”: An Interview with Immanuel Wallerstein

      Sociologist and historian at Yale University, Immanuel Wallerstein has described the globalization of capitalism, and today he criticizes Western “universalist” justifications of expansionism. In your book European Universalism, you revisit the 16th-century debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda on the American Indians.  In what respect does this debate seem to you particularly relevant to […]