This is a reconstruction from notes of a keynote address delivered to the Power Shift West Conference, Eugene, Oregon, November 5, 2011. All of us here today, along with countless others around the world, are currently engaged in the collective struggle to save the planet as a place of habitation for humanity and innumerable other […]
Subjects Archives: Revolutions
Indignant, in Revolt, and Mobilizing against a Totally Illegitimate G20
Over 10,000 demonstrators marched on the streets of Nice on the first of November, to denounce the illegitimacy of G20 and the injustice of economic policies that it advocates. Indignant Spaniards and others, Wall Street occupiers, Greek and Senegalese rebels, Tunisian and Egyptian revolutionaries, Latin American, Italian, English, German, and French alterglobalization activists — all […]
Call-Out for Solidarity with Egypt: Defend the Revolution
A letter from Cairo to the Occupy/Decolonize movements & other solidarity movements. After three decades of living under a dictatorship, Egyptians started a revolution demanding bread, freedom and social justice. After a nearly utopian occupation of Tahrir Square lasting eighteen days, we rid ourselves of Mubarak and began the second, harder, task of removing his […]
This Is My Will
This is my will. I, Muammar bin Mohammad bin Abdussalam bi Humayd bin Abu Manyar bin Humayd bin Nayil al Fuhsi Gaddafi, do swear that there is no god but God and that Mohammad is God’s Prophet, peace be upon him. I pledge that I will die as Muslim. Should I be killed, I […]
Global Revolution
Iván Lira is a Venezuelan artist. | Print
The “Convergence of Interests” in the Arab Revolts
In the wars currently waged on the backs of the Arab revolutions, one particular term stands out in the lexicon of Arab politicians and their columnist and media acolytes: the phrase “convergence of interests,” which has made a big comeback. In Tunisia, liberals of the worst kind, and Islamists of the opportunist variety, have […]
How to Make an Ecosocialist Revolution
Meetings such as this play a vital role in building a movement that can stop the hell-bound train of capitalism, before it takes itself and all of humanity over the precipice. Building such a movement is the most important thing anyone can do today — so I’m honored to have been invited to take part […]
MINUSTAH: Keeping the Peace, or Conspiring against It?
Nou dwe sèl mèt bout tè sa a: We should be the only owners of this land. From an anti-MINUSTAH protest last month. Photo by Ansel Herz. This was Haitian protesters’ message at a demonstration last month against the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known by its French acronym, MINUSTAH. October marks an upswing […]
The American Revolution (#OWS Remix)
Has Wall Street become the site, the space, the barricaded-yet-porous position of the next American Revolution? Is Zuccotti Park, the 33,000-square-foot privately owned yet publically accessible sliver of real estate across the street from the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan the new streets of Chicago (October 1968) or the new streets of Seattle […]
Bahrain’s al-Wefaq, Pressured by Regional Players to Compromise
Bahrain’s largest opposition group is resisting grassroots demands for renewed full-scale street protests amid regional pressure to strike a compromise solution with the regime. Al-Wefaq and other Bahraini opposition groups boycotted the country’s parliamentary by-elections last Saturday. But al-Wefaq did not support the latest calls for demonstrations at Pearl Square and may be pushing […]
The Military Intervention in Libya and the Growing Threat against Syria
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 […]
Change at Al Jazeera
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 […]
Practicing Revolutionary Medicine in Cuba and Venezuela
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. […]
Libya, Egypt: Fashioning Democracy, Packaging Revolution
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 […]
Syria: What Kind of Revolution?
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 […]
Corruption and Party Politics in the Late Soviet Period
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, […]
Separating Fact from Fantasy in Bolivia: A Review of Jeffery R. Webber’s From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia
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 Future of Arab Revolts: Interview with Samir Amin
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 […]
Syria: What Is Going On in Hama?
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 […]
Revolt in the Arab World, But Not in Iran — Why?
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 […]
