Subjects Archives: Revolutions

  Address to the 66th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 26 September 2011 Excerpt: As early as the 21st of February, Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz had warned that NATO was inexorably preparing a war against Libya.  Since then, Cuba has indefatigably engaged in the defense not of a government […]

  The Western and Arabic press is full of stories about Al Jazeera and the new direction it will inevitably follow with the selection of a new director-general for its operating networks.  The ouster (the official statement did not mention resignation) of Waddah Khanfar has opened doors for speculation.  No one really knows what goes […]

Steve Brouwer.  Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conceptualization of Health Care.  New York, Monthly Review Press, 2011.  245 pp.  $18.95. As Venezuela becomes the first country to reproduce the Cuban medical model on a massive scale, it is doing so in ways that are unique in both form and process.  […]

Democracy, democracy.  Don’t we just love it?  Don’t we love it as a pretence for furthering our international ambitions?  Don’t we love it when it means cheaper oil and cosy partnerships? In the case of Libya, the façade of supporting a democratic movement has fallen from even our most blatant sources of propaganda.  To quote […]

  The Syrian uprising which erupted nearly six months ago seems to be settling into a dangerous deadlock with neither side — the regime or the opposition — willing to budge from its stated position.  The daily toll of deaths and injuries climb ever higher with no resolution in sight.  The regime seems insistent on […]

  Luc Duhamel.  The KGB Campaign against Corruption in Moscow, 1982-1987.  Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.  312 pp.  $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8229-6108-6. Luc Duhamel’s study of an extensive anticorruption campaign in Moscow in the mid-1980s is riveting.  At multiple levels, this work provides new information and perspectives on a period of stalemate, factional competition, […]

The election of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, on the back of a mass rebellion that overthrew successive governments, has stirred great interest in this small Andean nation.  Given that the Evo Morales government recently celebrated its 2000th day in power — a feat in its own right for a country that has had around 180 […]

  The way Egyptian scholar and researcher Samir Amin sees it, nothing will be the same as before in the Arab world: protest movements will challenge both the internal social order of Arab countries and their places in the regional and global political chessboard. Hassane Zerrouky: How do you see what’s happening in the Arab […]

  Hama has suffered for the (at least) past three weeks from lawlessness and nearly complete absence of the entire state and its organs, and from control by groups of armed teenagers and criminals who (left without any other choice, in the opinion of the US and French ambassadors) actually erected roadblocks and expropriated the […]

Iran is a different case because the country already had a revolution in 1979.  Even those Iranians who are in the opposition called for reform within the system rather than revolution.  It is not a climate of fear that explains the survival of the Islamic Republic but the absence of revolutionary fervour.  No state can […]

Corrupt men in charge of mass media and corporations, abandoning the sinking ancien régime, climb onto the ship of the Egyptian revolution (whose slogan was “Leave!”), threatening to capsize it. . . . Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 22 April 2011; it is reproduced here […]

Syrians for BHL Rami Zurayk (Land and People, 8 July 2011): “Is there anyone who follows politics and champions the Arab and Palestinian causes who does not know Bernard Henri Levy? . . .  He was one of the first to enter the shattered remains of Jenin on board a Zionist tank to express his […]

  Now that Swaziland is on the verge of far-reaching change, with the Tinkhundla system teetering on the brink of collapse, we are seeing a scramble by reactionary forces to try to take the initiative in the name of the pro-democracy movement and set the agenda for Swaziland’s future. These forces, which have received backing […]

  An international flotilla of nine ships and hundreds of crew and passengers is a huge undertaking, in Gaza as much as anywhere.  Mahmoud Elmadhoun knows this better than most.  A member of Gaza’s Higher Government Committee, as well as the Governmental Committee for Breaking the Siege and Receiving Delegations (GCBS), which is tasked with […]

  I am confused by the analyses of the Anglophone left with regard to the social revolts in Libya.  The only thing folks seem able to muster is a series of bifurcated abstractions.  Thus certain metaphors in the analyses of Libya prevail, such as “greed and grievance”, “patron and client”, “rapacious rule vs innocent population […]

Elias Muhanna: Since when have Middle Eastern governments, or any governments for that matter, managed to stifle religious parties in the Middle East by preventing them from coming to the fore?  If they pass a political parties law in Syria but they don’t allow religious parties, don’t you think that’s just gonna blow up in […]

The parties involved in the revolt in Syria so far have not made their programs public.  Undoubtedly, the drift of the Ba’athist regime, won over to neoliberalism and singularly passive in the face of the Israeli occupation of Golan, is the reason for the uprising of people.  However, the CIA’s intervention must not be ruled […]

There is no doubt about it.  The wind that has electrified the Arab world in recent months, the spirit of the repeated protests in Greece, the student struggles in Britain and Italy, the mobilizations against Sarkozy in France . . . has come to Spain. These are not days of “business as usual.”  The comfortable […]

  “All of the Egyptian people are behind you and anyone who wants to make a revolution, anyone who wants to achieve something.  There is a saying: If the people want life, destiny should give it to them.” Hamdy Reda is an Egyptian visual artist.  Artellewa Space for Contemporary Art in Giza, established in 2007, […]

  The movement, which I’d call a popular movement for a Syrian revolution, has sought the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad since it first began in the southern city of Daraa when [two teenagers were arrested for painting a slogan on the walls] that has been the main one at every demonstration ever since: “The people […]