Subjects Archives: Revolutions

John Bellamy Foster.  The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.  328 pp. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously urged the world’s workers to unite because they had a world to win, and nothing to lose but their chains.  Today, the reality of climate change and worsening environmental breakdowns […]

  February 2009 marked 10 years since Hugo Chavez took office, following a landslide election victory, and launched his revolution to bring radical change to Venezuela.  While wildly popular with many in the country, Chavez’s policies and his outspoken criticisms of the U.S. government have made him powerful enemies, both at home and abroad, especially […]

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which began with a dispute over the 21 November 2004 run-off vote between the leading presidential candidates, ended by installing Viktor Yushchenko, the Western favorite who cried fraud, into presidency on 23 January 2005.  Ian Traynor of the Guardian put the price tag of the Orange Revolution at about $14 […]

  In the 1970s, when Iran’s Fedayeen and Mojahedin1 groups were engaged in an urban guerrilla struggle against the former Shah’s dictatorial regime, a faction of the Iranian Student Association (ISA) in the United States called Ehyaa2 had managed to convince some in the US Left, in particular America’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), that a […]

According to Ervand Abrahamian, a scholar of Iran’s contemporary history, George Rudé’s observation that “perhaps no historical phenomenon has been so thoroughly neglected by historians as the crowd” is particularly true about the Middle East.1  While European journalists have invariably portrayed oriental crowds as “xenophobic mobs” hurling insults and bricks at Western embassies, local conservatives […]

  David Jan Sorkin.  The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.  xv + 339 pp.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-13502-1. On January 14, 1791, the Comte de Mirabeau delivered a speech to the National Assembly in defense of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the controversial project […]

Even before the crisis over the election outcome broke, the prognosis for Iran in the coming year was not good.  Back in October oil prices had started to fall and the contractionary measures taken by the Central Bank several months earlier to rein in inflation had slowed the economy.  Last year, Iran’s imports had soared […]

Three days ago, in the evening of Thursday 25th, I wrote in my Reflections: “We do not know what will happen tonight or tomorrow in Honduras, but the courageous behavior adopted by Zelaya will go down in history.”

Political power is never good or bad, never really just or unjust; political power is arbitrary, discriminatory, and most of the time violent.  In Iran, the ongoing demonstrations sparked by the election results in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicate that such power can never really be monopolized by the state.  Iran’s civil society is fighting; […]

Yesterday on May 31st, an AFP dispatch read: “Cuba has accepted to reopen negotiations with the United States about migration and direct mail service, a new signal of the thaw that is happening just before an Organization of American States (OAS) Summit where the Cuban situation will dominate conversations.

If I said that chaos prevails in the United States it would be considered an overstatement; it would be said that that country is a democracy where there is justice, respect for human rights and a division of powers based on the principles of Montesquieu and the Philadelphia Declaration.

  This is the first in a series of articles on “Ideas for the Struggle” by Marta Harnecker. 1.  The recent popular uprisings at the turn of the 21st century that have rocked numerous countries such as Argentina and Bolivia — and, more generally, the history of the multiple social explosions that have occurred in […]

There are not two different opinions on the issue of A H1N1.

Click here to read the transcript of “India’s Maoist Revolution.” This program was aired by Australia’s SBS Dateline on 23 July 2008.

Forty eight years ago mercenary troops in the service of a foreign power invaded their own homeland, escorted by a United States squadron, including an aircraft carrier and dozens of fighter planes. That date cannot be forgotten. The great power to the North can apply the same recipe to any Latin American country. It has already happened many times throughout our hemisphere’s history. Is there any declaration guaranteeing that such an action will never repeat again, either directly or through the very armies of other countries, as it occurred in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela and others?

  After a day of chaos and violence, Bangkok is currently in a tense stand off. Thousands of Red Shirt protesters are in control of a large geographic area around Government House. They have armed themselves and have erected a number of roadblocks around the city. In response to this challenge, the government has declared […]

Yesterday Reuters headed the list of the international news agencies that mention Pedro Miret and Osmany Cienfuegos as two historical figures who have been dismissed from their posts by Raul Castro.

“Religious despotism is most intransigent because a religious despot views his rule as not only his right but his duty.” — Abdolkarim Soroush The French philosopher Michel Foucault, at the request of one of Italy’s biggest dailies Corriere della Sera, went to Iran to cover the growing unrest and protests against the increasingly despotic regime […]

  Gauging from the events in Iran’s bazaars, October 2008 had an uncanny resemblance to October 1978.  During the Islamic revolution, bazaaris, responding to the ancien régime’s misconceived scheme to address rampant inflation by identifying and prosecuting alleged profiteers, had organized nationwide closures.  Three decades later, bazaaris in Isfahan and subsequently in Mashhad, Shiraz, Tabriz, […]

  Sitting in the shadow of an elegant carbet, feeling the trade wind, Roger de Jaham, age 60, lets his Creole accent lilt, talking about the blow that he recently suffered: “For the first time in my life, a man whom I greeted told me: ‘I don’t shake the hand of a béké.”  The man […]