For me, to join the Party of Proletarian Revolution was not just a simple matter of signing up with a political organisation; it meant a conversion, a complete dedication. Those were still the days when to declare oneself a Socialist or a Communist was equivalent to throwing oneself to the winds, and meant breaking with one’s parents and not finding a job. (More…)
I spent a term at the University of Washington as a teaching assistant in an undergraduate course on the history of the wars in Vietnam. It was outside my PhD research and an eye-opening experience. (More…)
Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centred around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews. (More…)
In the fascist and semi-fascist countries, the militant students (a minority of the students everywhere) find support among the industrial and agrarian proletariat; in France and Italy, they have been able to obtain precarious (and passing!) aid from powerful leftist parties and unions; in West Germany and in the United States, they meet with the vociferous and often violent hostility of “the people” and of organised labour. (More…)
Long ago, while earning a library science degree, I worked as a manuscripts processing archivist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I handled letters and materials from the 17th century up through modern times. (More…)
In Walla Walla, Washington during the early 1980s I could count the punks on the fingers of one hand. We felt like we had it pretty tough. There was the ever-present possibility that some random person would decide they wanted a piece of you. (More…)
It is now more than 30 years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, bringing at least a nominal close to one of the most brutal and intractable conflicts in European history. The major paramilitary organizations decommissioned their stockpiles of weapons, the savage tit-for-tat rhythm of atrocity and reprisal ended. People in England, the Republic, and Northern Ireland moved on. Except for those who didn’t. (More…)
‘If you’re not busy being born you’re busy buying’. All the sales girls in the flash boutiques are made to dress the same and have the same make-up, representing the 1940’s. In fashion as in everything else, capitalism can only go backwards. We’ve nowhere else to go. We’re dead. (More…)
Turkey will never be the same again. The papers are filled with news of the crisis in Iraq, Soviet intrigues in Turkey, the persecutions of Christians, fears of a Turkish-Italian war, the hanging of opposition members of the Grand National Assembly, Turkish women demanding votes and claiming complete emancipation, and the Kurds rising in rebellion against the new “infidel,” Kemal Pasha. (More…)
Italy’s fascist movement was built up and installed in power by the most powerful and reactionary sections of the ruling class as their chosen means of perpetuating their profits, power, and class rule. (More…)
Even after 30 years, Salman Rushdie will forever be associated with the fatwa against him. The Satanic Verses still divides opinion today, but what more can be said about the controversy? (More…)
Northern Ireland is a small region within a rich nation-state, but the strength of the economic union has now become a source of instability. The threat is that the Northern Irish business community has not seen a consistent “reduction of uncertainty”, as it depends on the prospect of stability. (More…)