Smells hover just below our conscious awareness, conjuring up emotions and memories that shape how we perceive and navigate the world. An unexpected whiff of a long-forgotten snack or a dusty book can transport a person to years past — enabling a kind of time travel that makes hazy memories more vivid. It’s puzzling then that… Read More The smell of history
Adam Tooze Saddam’s attack on Iran in the early 1980s indicated his violent ambition, but as far as Iraq’s economy is concerned it was the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the US-led riposte that delivered the first devastating shock. After a measure of recovery under the more relaxed sanctions regime of the late… Read More Iraq’s economic impasse twenty years after the invasion
Letter to the readers, Mainstream, March 25, 2023 India: Lurches Closer to “Opposition-Mukt Democracy”!? | Sukla Sen Budgets 2023-24 Punjab Haryana compared | Sher Singh Sangwan Upcoming 2023 Karnataka Assembly Elections | PS Jayaramu Regenerating The Forest Ecosystem: Few Concerns | Suranjita Ray Saffron Clad Babas in Odisha’s Politics | Radhakanta Barik A Discourse on State of India’s Democracy | Arup… Read More Mainstream, March 25, 2023
First posted June 10, 2014 “When we killed the sea whales,” Roddy Morrison, from Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, remembers, “they used to make a noise, like a crying noise. They seemed so friendly, and they’d come round and they’d make a noise, and when you hit them, they cried really… It is difficult to recover… Read More South Georgia: The lost whaling station at the end of the world
NB: George Bush and Tony Blair are as culpable for war crimes as is Vladimir Putin. If we can’t see this and say it, we are at an advanced level of Orwellian doublespeak. DS Sinan Antoon In early 2003, I was living in Cairo and carrying out research for my doctoral dissertation on a famous… Read More A million lives later, I cannot forgive what American terrorism did to my country, Iraq
Peter Beaumont n 20 March 2003, as bombs and missiles from the US-led coalition rained on Iraqi cities in the opening “shock and awe” campaign against Saddam Hussein, the tectonic plates of the post-Second World War international order shifted permanently. For those of us who covered the run-up to the war, the invasion and the long… Read More The invasion of Iraq was a turning point on to a path that led towards Ukraine
Paris Commune: The revolt dividing France 150 years on Over 150 years after the Paris Commune, rival passions flare over how to remember the city’s brief and much-romanticised experiment in power to the people. The first act of the city’s famous insurrection came on 18 March 1871, when crowds stopped troops from requisitioning cannons parked… Read More March 18, 1871: Revolt of the Paris Commune; March 18, 1921: The Bolsheviks crush the Kronstadt sailors’ rebellion against tyranny
NB: Will George Bush & Tony Blair ever be held accountable for war crimes? DS We have a saying that captures the devastation of our country: ‘Saddam has gone, but 1,000 more Saddams have replaced him’ Balsam Mustafa Twenty years ago, around this time, the US-led military operation to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s… Read More We Iraqis had survived Saddam Hussein. It was the US invasion that destroyed our lives
Tobias Rupprecht Journal of Contemporary History: Vol. 51, No. 1, Special Section: The Dark Side of Transnationalism (January 2016) Numerous references to the Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet run through Soviet and Russian political discourse from the 1970s to the late 1990s. Official representations of Pinochet, a carefully constructed bogeyman of Soviet domestic and foreign… Read More Formula Pinochet: Chilean Lessons for Russian Liberal Reformers during the Soviet Collapse
First posted July 04, 2018 In Chile, a fascist junta in two years, wiped out 30,000 of the population, imprisoned 200,000 and left 22,000 widows and 66,000 orphans…the operation under the management of Augusto Pinochet, was fired off by a collective comprising the CIA, the State Department and American business interests. Read about Milton Friedman’s contribution here.… Read More Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
After the truth-shower 