NATO’s Expansion Into Asia Is the Mother of Bad Ideas

NATO’s Expansion Into Asia Is the Mother of Bad Ideas

US lawmakers say the alliance’s movement into Asia is “inevitable.” It’s actually a completely avoidable, completely bad idea. Branko Marcetic September 15, 2023 A little over a century ago, rising inter-imperial tensions coupled with a complicated, evidence board–like set of alliances pulled Europe into the most disastrous, pointless war the world had ever seen up […]

Saving Orwell

Saving Orwell

Peter Ross From invading Afghanistan to dismantling Confederate monuments, George Orwell has been pressed into the service of all sorts of causes. But the real Orwell remains unknown. August 31, 2023 “It was a bright cold day in April,” said Richard Blair, “and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Blair is seventy-three and the son of […]

Rampant Russophobia takes us down a dangerous path

Rampant Russophobia takes us down a dangerous path

Joint demonstration of the trade unions on May Day in Berlin under the slogan Unbroken Solidarity. Photography K.M.Krause via Reuters Anatol Lieven & George Beebe August 23, 2023 Demonizing Russian culture and people only makes peace in Ukraine harder to achieve and plays into Putin’s propaganda A deeply sinister and dangerous tendency has made its appearance in […]

The great transition: Non-alignment and the rise of the global south

The great transition: Non-alignment and the rise of the global south

Khalid Malik* August 8, 2023 In the 17th century, Ming China represented roughly one-third of global output, and Mughal India a little less. Together the two countries accounted for more than half of the world’s output, with a corresponding size of populations (as a proportion of the total global population). By the 1950s, Mao China […]

Enough of the Blaming Game: Let’s For Once Try Talking To Each Other

Enough of the Blaming Game: Let’s For Once Try Talking To Each Other

Ger van Elk, Symmetry of Diplomacy, 1975, Groninger Museum   Alfred de Zayas   July 31, 2023   The blaming game has always been counter-productive. In the UN Human Rights Council, the practice is known as “naming and shaming”, as if the States engaging in “naming” would possess a higher moral authority over those “named”, […]

Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change

Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change

Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash Maria Popova August 3, 2023 “This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.” “There is no love of life without despair of life,” wrote Albert Camus — a man who […]

How I lost faith in established media

How I lost faith in established media

By Helmut Scheben* July 18, 2023 Mass media are often unreliable, but hardly anyone has time to check the news. If news reports later turn out to be false, they are usually already burned into the hard drive of collective memory as “historical truth”. Originally published at Zeit-Fragen After the Gulf War of 1991, it […]

How So Many Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nukes

How So Many Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nukes

Edward Curtin July 19, 2023 Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, RD Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.” He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world […]

Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.

Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.

June 26, 2023 New York Times About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or […]

Demonisation and the US encirclement of China

Demonisation and the US encirclement of China

Alex Lo & Daniel Bell June 24, 2023 “It’s quite clear from recent policies that the US aims to curb China’s economic development and encircle the country with military bases in unfriendly (from China’s viewpoint) countries. Such demonisation only reinforces repressive trends in China and benefits security-obsessed hardliners in China’s political system. That’s why “de-demonisation” can help […]

1 2 3 19