Cold War

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. […]

Cold War

Washington Should Think Twice Before Launching a New Cold War: A History Lesson for Our Desperate Moment

Tomdispatch

By >William D. Hartung, Nick Cleveland-Stout, and Taylor Giorno | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – A growing chorus of pundits and policymakers has suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new Cold War. If so, that means trillions of additional dollars for the Pentagon in the years to come coupled with a […]

Cold War

America’s Disastrous 60-Year War: Three Generations of Conspicuous Destruction by the Military-Industrial Complex

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In my lifetime of nearly 60 years, America has waged five major wars, winning one decisively, then throwing that victory away, while losing the other four disastrously. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as the Global War on Terror, were the losses, of course; the Cold War being the solitary win […]

Central Intelligence Agency

Yes, America overthrew the Democratically Elected gov’t of Iran in 1953 and Ray Takeyh is wrong on the History

Fariba Amini

Newark, Del. (Special to Informed Comment) – It is likely that, if the elected government of Iran’s Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh had stayed in power, the Middle East or at least Iran would look very different now. But, in history, we cannot reach satisfactory conclusions based on ‘ifs‘. We have to consider only the facts and […]

Afghanistan

How US-Soviet Cold War Competition led to Fall of the Afghan Left and Collapse of the Country into Fundamentalism

Middle East Monitor

By Luis Edel Abreu Veranes | – From the turbulent 1970s ( Middle East Monitor) – With its geographic centrality on the Asian continent, Afghanistan has historically become a corridor and civilisational interstice between Persian and Hindustani empires and peoples flowing in from the north. Some were Turkic-speaking, who marked and shaped the ethnic synthesis […]