Noam Chomsky, the celebrated academic and political commentator, is perhaps the most famous left-wing public intellectual alive. Since rising to widespread prominence as a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, he has developed into something of an American Solzhenitsyn: a dissident bitterly denounced at home, but admired internationally (thankfully without the gulags.) (More…)
Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations are the biggest journalistic event in the past decade, and certainly the most important US leak since the Pentagon Papers. They have exposed practices that have been judged to be government privacy boards to be illegal, and by courts as an affront to the Constitution. And they have demonstrated that large amounts of state surveillance in the post 9/11 era have nothing to do with terrorism. (More…)
As much as I love New Zealand, it has been increasingly difficult to ignore disturbing strands within the dominant Pakeha (European) culture here. As a liberal British import to the land also known as Aotearoa, having traversed half the globe to another democratic first world country with a proud progressive history, I expected a similar level of tolerance as that which I had encountered in my former home, London. (More…)
It was my second visit to the town of Sittwe, in Burma’s western Rakhine state this year, and my third visit to the country itself in six months. Prompted as much by what seemed like fate as opportunity, I had journeyed once again to this part of the world in order to write about the plight of the Rohingya ethnic minority, a stateless people whose suffering and increasing proximity to disaster are not well-known in the West. (More…)
Apologists are always the same. Whether they’re rationalizing war crimes, or promoting reactionary ideologies, they always feign distance from what’s being defended. Why do they insist on appearing impartial? It never works for me. Rats always smell like rats. There’s no disguising them. I’m not the only journalist who feels this way. (More…)
Overnighting in Bangkok, I met an American aid worker who had spent many of his formative years in the city. My new friend, who could speak fluent Thai, was well-versed in the culture, recalled how he had learnt of a local prophecy concerning the country I was due to travel to the next day. I was intrigued, and asked him to tell me more. (More…)
While David Cameron’s recent wreath-laying ceremony in Amritsar was a welcome gesture, his failure to apologize sent an ugly message. Though the Prime Minister rightly acknowledged that the 1919 massacre by British forces was “deeply shameful,” such an act remains worthy of contrition. (More…)
Britain’s eternally uneasy political relationship with Europe is fast deteriorating, a rueful fact that Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech last week in Bloomberg’s London HQ will confirm. From the inescapable symbolism of the corporate setting to Cameron’s awkward affectations of sincerity, this was a particularly painful piece of theatre. (More…)
“When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the terrorist organisations build [sic] up from our own ranks.” So wrote Albert Einstein, in a letter to Shepard Rifkin in Spring, 1948. (More…)
On Sunday November 11th, people all over Britain pinned the famous blood-red emblem of remembrance to their clothing in honor of those who fought and died for the country. In particular, during a conflict few outside the UK remember quite the same way: the First World War. (More…)
Military occupations bring certain themes to mind: human rights abuses; poverty; crowded refugee camps, and so on. Geographic references are equally synonymous: Palestine, Kashmir or West Papua, to cite the most recent example. Rarely, if ever, is the miserable situation in the sparsely-populated province of Western Sahara cited. (More…)
It goes without saying that the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi is a crime that no offense can excuse. Yet those who perpetrated the killings (purportedly jihadists, who planned the killings in advance) probably number in the dozens, and felt plenty justified. (More…)