In the middle of the seventeenth century, the United Provinces (more or less today’s Netherlands) was the hegemonic power of the capitalist world-system, which was then geographically smaller. Within this world-system, it was the wealthiest country with the most efficient industrial enterprises.
Source: Jacobin Magazine
Today, as the US military increasingly sees Africa as a “battlefield” against Islamist extremism, a significant number of its operations there have taken on the form of a textbook hearts-and-minds campaign that harkens back to failed US efforts in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s and more recently in the greater Middle East.
In Vietnam, the so-called civilian half of the war — building schools, handing out soap, and offering rudimentary medical care — was obliterated by American heavy firepower that wiped out homes, whole hamlets, and whatever goodwill had been gained. As a result, US counterinsurgency doctrine was tossed into the military’s dustbin — only to be resurrected decades later, as the Iraq War raged, by then-Gen. and later CIA Director David Petraeus.
Source: TeleSUR English
History has shown that countries that refuse to pay their debts fall harder but recover faster than those that do not. So why does Greece’s left-led government not simply get it over with?
As the Greek debt drama finally comes to a head these weeks, with the Syriza-led government quietly warning the U.S. Treasury Secretary and the chief of the International Monetary Fund that its last-remaining cash reserves are now all but depleted and the government will not be paying the Fund if it does not receive an infusion of new cash before early June, a critical question arises: why do the radical leftists not simply get it over with and declare a default on the outstanding debt? What do they care about their creditors?
A real sense of the ongoing clash between American/Chinese interests can be found in Africa. What's marked African politics in recent years is the growing competitiveness of the far-off Chinese with a seemingly omnipresent US imperialism.
Women have been the primary growers of food and nutrition throughout history, but today, food is being taken out of our hands and substituted for toxic commodities controlled by global corporations. Monoculture industrial farming has taken the quality, taste and nutrition out of our food.
Source: Foreign Policy in Focus
A growing movement among Roma activists looks to celebrate their ancestors’ resistance to persecution — and to pick up where they left off.
On May 16, 1944, the Nazis scheduled the extermination of the Roma in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau’s Zigeunerlager. But the transfer of the Roma to the gas chamber met with vigorous resistance. Approximately 6,000, Roma alerted to the Nazis’ extermination plans, barricaded themselves in the Zigeunerlager buildings and prepared to fight back against the German SS. The guards withdrew in the face of this uprising.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019