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HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER:  David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted  attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'India'
At Least One Half the Earth
Vijay Prashad
Main ek Darwaza thi Mujhe jitna peeta gaya Main utna khulti gayi. I was like a door. As I was beaten, I kept opening more. – Anamika, Darwaza. Delhi. ...
India and Pakistan: a Perpetual War?
FARZANA VERSEY
Mumbai. Are India and Pakistan at war? If we take a pragmatic view, then there has never been peace between the two nations. Does this translate into war? Should crossing the border, killing soldiers, infiltrating be treated as war during peacetime? ...
When did India Become Part of Israel’s Stable?
DR. PAUL LARUDEE
Amazing stuff, India ink.  A few drops spread vigorously with a roller for several minutes on an iron plate are enough for eight sets of fingerprints and two sets of handprints on four ancient double-sided and folded Indian police fingerprint forms.  By contrast, the mu...
The Cultures of Delhi
VIJAY PRASHAD
Delhi. Far from the center of the city, in an industrial area, on the first of January each year, the theatre group Jana Natya Manch (Janam) anchors a remembrance celebration. In 1989, they performed at that very place for the election campaign of Ramnand ...
India and Its Moral Crisis
DEEPAK TRIPATHI
London. The year 2012 ended very badly for India. The violent and sustained rape of a 23-year-old woman by a gang of youths in Delhi before the eyes of someone who, according to reports, she was to marry is a particularly gruesome act. That it happened in ...
Sexual Violence, Protests, and Neo-Colonial State Control
JESSICA NAMAKKAL
The rape and subsequent death of an unnamed 23-year-old Delhi woman has sparked an important conversation in India about patriarchy, sexual politics, and the rights of women to live without fear of sexual assault or violence, on the streets and in the home. Many of the ed...
The Asian Pivot: Four More Years
CONN HALLINAN
In March 1990, Time Magazine titled an article “Ripples in The American Lake.” It was not about small waves in that body of water just north of Fort Lewis, Washington. It was talking about the Pacific Ocean, the largest on the planet, embracing over half of...
Police State India
ANDRE VLTCHEK
In the middle of December 2012, New Delhi was once again choking on a thick stratum of smog. Everyone around me was coughing, while I was supposed to be filming, for one of my documentaries. But in such conditions, filming became almost impossible, unless one was yearning...
What the Beatles Missed About Ravi Shankar
TARIQ ALI
Ravi Shankar was a virtuoso sitar player long before he became a cult for a drug-fuelled hippy g...
My Encounters with Cruelty and Kindness Toward Animals in India
ANTENEH ROBA
In November 2012, I spoke at the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations (FIAPO) conference in Goa, India. Realizing that I had some time to spare, I decided to take a side trip to Chennai, India. There, I embarked on an unplanned visit of the Blue Cross of I...
Lessons From the Sino-Indian War
PETER LEE
China is looking for a “Western” pivot to counter the United States’ diplomatic and military inroads with its East Asian neighbors such as Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Myanmar. For China’s strategists, as an interesting analysis in t...
Sentimentalizing Gandhi
PRAFUL BIDWAI
An outstanding Marxist scholar, historian and essayist, and editor of the New Left Review since 1962, Perry Anderson is known for a rich, incisive body of work spanning European history, the contemporary world, the Western Marxist tradition and intellectual history. T...
Outsourcing in India and the US Election
JYOTI SARASWATI
When Romney criticized outsourcing in his election campaign, he broke with Republican tradition.[i] Outsourcing had been one of the few topics in which both parties appeared to genuinely disagree on, the one issue in which the underlying clas...
Indian Children of the Migration
PRADEEP BAISAKH
Khageswar Benya and Panchami Benya from Muribahal block of Balangir district of Odisha, an Indian state, are the children of regularly migrating parents. For last five years they have been accompanying their parents almost regularly who have migrated to w...
Mo Yan and Joseph Anton
FARZANA VERSEY
Mumbai. If Mo Yan had chosen to live in a swanky hideout in the nowhere space offered as asylum, there would be much jubilation over his being awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Instead, he lives in China, was educated in the People’s Libe...
Romney and Churchill’s Bust
VIJAY PRASHAD
In the Mandarin Oriental Hotel at the edge of Hyde Park in London in late July 2012, Mitt Romney raised $2 million over drinks. His remarks were wistful. “As I drive past the sculpture of Winston Churchill,” he said, “it tugs at the heart strings to remember the kin...
India’s Baciles
FARZANA VERSEY
Mumbai. Nothing can be more potent than ‘Sam Bacile does not exist’. It is the invisibility and the stories surrounding his identity that expose ingrained and acquired hatred like the word of god revealed. We should thank him, for he stands for the man...
Class Attack at Maruti
PRATYUSH CHANDRA
Recent years have seen militant labour unrests in Indian industries which have startled not just the management and the Indian state, but also the established unions. This article analyses the most recent and perhaps most significant of these struggles that happened i...
A Major Victory for Bhopal Gas Victims
N. D. JAYAPRAKASH
Delhi, India. The eagerly awaited judgment in Writ Petition No.50 of 1998 was delivered by the Supreme Court of India on August 09, 2012. The background of this petition has already been explained in detail in the piece titled ...
The South Gathers in Tehran
VIJAY PRASHAD
Tomorrow, perhaps, the future. – W. H. Auden. Next week, representatives from one hundred and eighteen of the world’s one hundred and ninety two states will gather in Tehran, Iran for the 16th Non-Aligned Movement ...
Breaking Free of the US-Israeli Shadow
VIJAY PRASHAD and PRABIR PURKAYASTHA
The Arab Spring changed the political topography of the Middle East. Stalwart regimes of the old order gave way to democratically elected governments. Since 1979, these old regimes have provided an element of “stability” that favoured the aims of the United States and...
The Crisis in Pakistan-US Relations
SOHAIL MAHMOOD
Islamabad. On November 26, 2011 in a brazen incident NATO attacked the Salala post on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed. Pakistanis were shocked at the incident since it was unprovoked. The Government of Pakistan re...
A Mikoyan from the Middle Ages
NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
“From Ilyich to Ilyich, no stroke, no heart attack”, the Ukrainian gentleman muttered.  We were chatting at a wedding reception a few decades ago. He had emigrated from the Soviet Union, and somewhere along our conversation I had happened to mention Anastas M...
Asia’s Mad Arms Race
CONN HALLINAN
Asia is currently in the middle of an unprecedented arms race that is not only sharpening tensions in the region, but competing with efforts by Asian countries to address poverty and growing economic disparity. The gap between rich and poor—calculated by the Gini coeffi...
The Austerity of the Affluent
P. SAINATH
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s stirring call for austerity tugs at the national tear ducts.  Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pleaded for it in the past and watched his flock embrace it creatively. With the finance ministry even acting on Dr. Singh’s call in 20...