In November 2004, Irish Academic Press published Irish Women and Nationalism: Soldiers, New Women and Wicked Hags, a book co-edited by Margaret Ward and Louise Ryan. In an e-mail interview with Toward Freedom, Irish historian Ward recently discussed her new book.
I went to Bretton Woods, but all I got was this lousy t-shirt. Amazingly, it's not a 'one size fits all' and it's not full of holes.
Walking through the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods two years ago, in the New Hampshire mountain resort and official birthplace, in July 1944, of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and of plans for an international trade organization - eventually embodied by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/World Trade Organization (WTO), I thought about the genocide of Indigenous Peoples in that part of the USA, now called "New England", perpetrated by Puritans and other settlers who viewed them, as historian Douglas Leach put it, as a "graceless and savage people, dirty and slothful in their personal habits, treacherous in their relations with the superior raceĀ fit only to be pushed aside and subordinated"(i).
The on-going conflicts in the provinces of Darfur in western Sudan are a textbook example of how programmed escalation of violence can go out of control. It is increasingly difficult for both the insurgency and the government-backed forces to de-escalate the conflict which has been called with reason "genocide". It will be even more difficult after the war to get the pastoralists and the settled agriculturalists to live together again in a relatively cooperative way.
Amjad Aljawhary is the North American Representative of The Federation of Worker Councils and Unions in Iraq. In this interview he discusses his union's main objectives, the US government's response to union organizing in Iraq, how the money for reconstruction is being spent, public opinion in Iraq regarding the presence of US troops there and what activists and workers outside of the country can do in solidarity to help Iraqi workers.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, military man gone peace-loving hippy, is unilaterally "disengaging" from the Gaza Strip. The hardships Israel is enduring are plastered all over the television, play by play. Scenes of Israeli soldiers, emotionally and physically struggling to remove the 8500 settlers from the Gaza Strip is displayed while CNN anchors utter soft, shocked words in the background. Images of Israeli soldiers painstakingly carry flailing settlers who are protesting the move. Their government once spent billions to protect and contain the animosity of 8500 people who once turned to them for help. But as the old saying goes, you break the law, you pay the price.
In June, 2005 I visited the
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