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Showing posts from April 24, 2022

Has ‘Globalisation’ Ended?

The claim was  global expansion and harmonious development of the productive forces and resources of the world .  The 2008-09 crisis, the Arab uprisings and social movements in the West itself, wars and civil wars, migration, fall in living standards for many people, environmental degradation, rise of neofascism and more racism, increase in inequality and corruption, the handling of the pandemic and vaccine apartheid … has exposed what ‘globalisation’ has really meant.

Huda’s Salon: a Review

Since nudity is not a central topic in the film, as the writers state, why is the headline Nudity Overshadows Betrayal in ‘Huda’s Salon’ ? Nudity overshadows betrayal is in the Arab critics reviews of the film, not in the film itself.

War as an ‘Absurdity’

“I see my granddaughters running away in panic,” Guterres said. “The war is an absurdity in the 21st century. The war is evil. There is no way a war can be acceptable in the 21st century.” One wonders what subject(s) Antonio Guterres studied at university. Political economy, security, war studies, international relations? None of  these subjects describes war as an absurdity. In fact, he was a student in engineering and telecommunications, not in the humanities. Apparently, the Portuguese Socialist Party never educated him in the subject of war or political economy. Leaving aside that UN secretary general is fundamentally wrong about what war is, has he ever said that what has happened in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia, for instance, are ‘absurdities’ in the 21st century? Isn’t he another Westerner shocked by a war in a ‘civilised’ country/region using different measurements and criteria?

The Plight of Egypt’s Female Prisoners

The French who voted for Macron and those before him, who dined, wined, and had a laugh with Egypt’s dictators from Mubarak to Sisi, did they have the complicity of the people they voted for and their own in mind or only their salaries, the cost of living and similar issues? Eyewitness: journalist and activist Solafa Magdy

The Battle for the Pacific

Contrary to what the headline states, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, South Korea and India are not competing for supremacy. They are subordinate states to the U.S. The latter has ‘supremacy’. And because the U.S. cannot control everything everywhere, forges alliances with subordinate states to protect the flow and accumulation of capital.  ‘The countries competing for supremacy’

There Is So Much Happening

–Ishmahil Blagrove, Facebook, 22 April 2022

The Sympathiser

This is a very good novel. Extracts from The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world. In this gloomiest of Aprils, faced with this question of what should be done, the general who always found something to do could no longer do so. A man who had faith in the mission civilisatrice and the American Way was at last bitten by the bug of disbelief. In those days, when the CIA was the OSS, Ho Chi Minh looked to them for help in fighting the French. He even quoted America’s Founding Fathers in his declaration of our country’s independence.  In this jackfruit republic that served as a franchise of the United States, Americans expected me to be like those millions who spoke no English, pidgin Engl...

American Movies

Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies. – Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathiser , 2015 ed., chapter 11