On the 17th anniversary of the spectacular international plot on Feb. 15, 1999, in which Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was captured, civil war is tearing northern Kurdistan and Turkey apart. Well-aware of Öcalan’s power to direct politics in war and peace, the Turkish state has been isolating him completely from the outside world since April 2015.
The term “nation” has had many different meanings across the centuries. But these days, and ever since the French Revolution more or less, the term has been linked to the state, as in “nation-state.” In this usage, “nation” refers to those who are members by right of the community that is located within a state. The issue is why states create nations, and what should be the attitude of the “left” to the concept of the nation.
Benjamin Dangl is the editor of Toward Freedom. He has worked as a journalist throughout Latin America for over a decade, and is the author, most recently, of Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (AK Press). He teaches journalism at Champlain College and is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history at McGill University.
Below are the collected articles Dangl has written for Toward Freedom:
After Empowering the 1% and Impoverishing Millions, IMF Admits Neoliberalism a Failure
At the February 11 Democratic Debate, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had a spirited exchange about an unlikely topic: the 92-year old former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Sanders berated Clinton for saying that she appreciated the foreign policy mentoring she got from Henry Kissinger. “I happen to believe,” said Sanders, “that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”
Source: Truthout
In this excerpt from What Kind of Creatures Are We?, Noam Chomsky discusses the historical embedding of an elite “guardian class” in US society going back to the framers of the Constitution.
I mentioned that [John] Dewey and American workers held one version of democracy, with strong libertarian elements. But the dominant version has been a very different one. Its most instructive expression is at the progressive end of the mainstream intellectual spectrum, among good Wilson-FDR-Kennedy liberal intellectuals. Here are a few representative quotes.
Source: Salon.com
In April 2014, ESPN published a photograph of an unlikely duo: Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Yankees-Red Sox season opener. In fleece jackets on a crisp spring day, they were visibly enjoying each other’s company, looking for all the world like a twenty-first-century geopolitical version of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The subtext of their banter, however, wasn’t about sex, but death.
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