GLOBALISM These are articles previously published by Toward Freedom related to this category.
With the US presidential campaign preliminaries beginning in the Democratic and Republican parties, it is useful to recall one of the most innovative of campaign strategists, Russell Davenport, the spirit behind those chanting "We want Willkie" at the 1940 Republican convention in Philadelphia.
Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. On February 9, Michael Shank interviewed him on the latest developments in U.S. policy toward Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Venezuela. Along the way, Chomsky also commented on climate change, the World Social Forum, and why international relations are run like the mafia.
Nepalese PM Girija Prasad Koirala has vowed to amend the country's constitution to meet the key demands of Madheshi protesters from the country's southern plains, BBC News reported on February 8. He pledged to introduce a federal system of governance and more representation of the southern plains in the parliament.
The United Nations " spells – and it ought to spell – the end of the system of unilateral action, exclusive alliances, and spheres of influence, and the balances of power and all the other expedients which have been tried for centuries and have always failed" said President Roosevelt after the Crimean Conference where plans for the UN were laid. Yet today most of the expedients that Roosevelt said had always failed are back in full force. We see this clearly in the field of human rights.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for urgent actions to address the disastrous impact of cluster munitions – warheads that scatter scores of smaller bombs, especially when used in populated areas as happened in this summer’s conflict in Lebanon.
Mr Annan was addressing the start of the Review Conference on the Convention on Prohibitions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects – the "Inhumane Weapons’ Convention" to its friends – on 7 November 2006 in Geneva. He stressed that "Recent events show that the atrocious, inhumane effects of these weapons – both at their time of use and after the conflict ends – must be addressed immediately so that civilian populations can start rebuilding their lives."
Hegemony or Survival reminds me of another book by Chomsky that I read in 1960, my first year of graduate school in linguistics. Syntactic Structures had been published the year before, and it was setting off a revolution in the study of language, for Chomsky had shown linguists how to describe language from a radically different point of view.
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