South Africa and the internationalization of mineral extraction Duncan Money At the 2025 African Mining Indaba, leaders from across the Continent met representatives from multilateral lending institutions, energy companies, and US national security agencies to discuss how to “position mining as the continent’s foremost industry, driving sustainable investment and fostering economic growth.” The conference location, in… Read More After the Diamond Rush
Dilip Simeon NB: This is part of a paper that I wrote in October 2023. Trump’s new declaration that he intends to complete the process of ethnic cleansing is merely the latest and most brazen declaration of the murderous impulses of American imperialism. He and his cronies will meet the same fate of the Presidents… Read More Nation-states as national homes; and Sir Edwin Montagu’s views on Zionism (1917)
Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for five years by the armies, the censorship and the mutual hatred of the warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union, but to make of it a new union more… Read More Declaration of the Independence of the Mind (1919). Manifesto Signed by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Rabindranath Tagore, Jane Addams and Others
It is difficult to imagine today how strongly the reaction in the public was against Fischer’s challenge of a deeply entrenched national myth… the warning he wanted to give to younger historians was to avoid national partiality and not to identify the writing of history with nationalist causes or government politics. He lived his advice.… Read More Professor Fritz Fischer (1908 – 1999)
Democracy doesn’t exist in the United States As Donald Trump returns to the White House, many are raising concerns about the possible decline of liberal democracy. What then would a second Trump term mean for the next four years for the United States? And what impact will the president’s foreign policy have on the Middle… Read More Chris Hedges: Democracy doesn’t exist in the United States
Demands expressed in the Resolution of the General Meeting of the Crews of the Ships of the Line, Kronstadt Original Source: Pravda o Kronshtadte (Prague: Volia Rossii, 1921), pp. 46-7 Having heard the report of the representatives of the crews dispatched by the General Meeting of the crews from the ships to Petrograd in order to… Read More Demands of the Kronstadt Insurgents; February 28, 1921
A brief history of the Italian Biennio Rosso (two red years) and the mass factory occupations of 1920 where half a million workers ran their workplaces for themselves. The reformist unions then negotiated an end to the conflicts, clearing the path for the fascist reaction – the Biennio Nero (two black years) of 1921-22. After… Read More 1918-1921: The Italian factory occupations and Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years)
First posted July 21, 2016 During the early hours of 18 July 1936, General Francisco Franco declared a state of war and his opposition to the Second Spanish Republic. In undermining the Republican government’s ability to keep order, the ensuing coup d’état precipitated unprecedented open violence. Thus began the Spanish Civil War. From April 1939… Read More Julián Casanova: The Spanish Civil War, 80 years after
Cherien Dabis’s drama, spanning nearly 75 years in one Palestinian family, is a heart-wrenching, if sometimes blunt, portrait of displacement… The framing for this Arabic-language family saga, spanning from 1948 to the near-present, evinces the film’s primary modes – lived-in, propulsive, multifaceted drama with a fraught, ardent sense of place, and heart-on-its-sleeve, direct plea for… Read More All That’s Left of You review – deeply moving epic of Palestinian intergenerational trauma
An excerpt from Adman Madman by Rupangi Sharma and Prahlad Kakar NB: Prahlad and I go back sixty-three years, so he is among the few l can classify as chaddi dost. I first saw him in knickers and hairy legs when his mum, a friend of my parents, brought him to the Sainik School Kunjpura… Read More Memoir: Prahlad Kakar and Dilip Simeon: A Friendship in the Shadow of the Naxals
