Cold War

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In early June, the Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of “DEI-related content.” Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post‘s reporters were able to find reproduced on […]

Arab World

The Making of the Modern Middle East: Juan Cole on History, Politics, and Today’s Turmoil – Tamooda Interview

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Juan Cole interviewed by Martin Asser at Tamooda : “The Making of the Modern Middle East: Juan Cole on History, Politics, and Today’s Turmoil” According to LinkedIn, “ TAMOODA is a new digital, independent, liberal, and secular platform in the Arab world for opinion. It is is a non-profit initiative […]

Cold War

Trump, an American Stalin? Massive Population Transfers were a Feature of Communist Dictatorship

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its 2.3 million Palestinians constitutes a profound reversal of post-1945 U.S. norms, which condemned such mass relocations of indigenous populations. It is the sort of thing Soviet dictator Josef Stalin used to do, and Trump has to decide if he wants his legacy […]

Central Intelligence Agency

The Origins of the West’s Iran Crisis: Oil, Autocracy and Coup

Marc Martorell Junyent

Review of David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The figure of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, is an uncomfortable one for both sides […]

Cambodia

How War Criminal Kissinger paved the Way for a Genocidal Total War on Gaza’s Civilians

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Henry Kissinger’s death at 100 is an opportunity to consider the ways in which his lawlessness helped undermine International Humanitarian Law, the laws of war that responsible leaders attempted to erect to prevent the horrors of WW II from recurring. In his single-minded calculation of supposed “national” interest, which he […]

Authoritarianism

Kissinger and Walt Disney v. Salvador Allende: Who will win our Souls?

Tomdispatch

By Ariel Dorfman | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in […]

Cold War

When Politicians get involved in Science: The marble statue of Gregor Mendel

Anne-Ruth Wertheim

It is 2022, the bicentenary of the birth of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, and this is being celebrated in all kinds of ways. In 1955, as a biology student, I travelled with a group of young people to Brno (then part of Czechoslovakia), where he had done his experiments with […]

Afghanistan

Historian Adam Michnik: Putin’s Invasion Of Ukraine Will End Like Brezhnev’s Afghan War, And Spark A ‘New Wave’

Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty

By Vadim Dubnov | – ( RFE/RL ) – Vladimir Putin “has driven Russia into a trap” by invading Ukraine, the former Polish dissident Adam Michnik has said, predicting ultimate defeat for the Russian leader and a chance for much-needed liberal reforms afterward. “In Russia, changes took place after wars were lost — after the […]

Cold War

I may have failed as a Tax Resister, but Corporate America is Hugely Successful at it

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com) – Every April, as income-tax returns come due, I think about the day 30 years ago when I opened my rented mailbox and saw a business card resting inside. Its first line read, innocently enough, “United States Treasury.” It was the second line — “Internal Revenue Service” — that took my breath away. […]