[Marxism] Fw: China scare campaign ignores greater threat (Green Left Weekly)

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*


https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/china-scare-campaign-ignores-greater-threat

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Closure of Harland & Wolff and terminal decline of unionism in north-east Ireland

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

On August 5th, 2019 Harland and Wolff went into administration after almost
160 years of continuous operations in Belfast.   Many column inches were
subsequently filled with regurgitated pap about the building of The
Titanic, the iconic yellow cranes that dominate the Belfast skyline and a
generally sanitised history of the shipyard.

For their part, the workers and the trade unions rightly called for the
nationalisation of the company - a call that will almost certainly be
ignored by a Thatcher-channeling Boris Johnson.

In the month since the closure it has been reported that the administrators
are considering a number of offers for the company.  These offers appears
to relate to the possible future manufacturing of wind turbines and other
renewable energy technology, which has been the core business of Harland
and Wolff for the best part of the last decade.  The fate of the once
mighty shipyard, and the valuable lands upon which it stands, will soon be
decided by the stroke of an accountant’s pen.

Wind turbines, not ships, have been the core business of Harland and Wolff
for a number of years.
Wind turbines, not ships, have been the core business of Harland and Wolff
for a number of years.

Regardless of what that final decision will be, the placing of Harland and
Wolff into administration has huge symbolic importance in the context of
the slow gradual death of unionism as a political force in Ireland - a
process which cannot be understood or judged in the timescale of months,
years or even decades.   Instead it must be measured in quarter, half and
full centuries.

The roots of today’s unionism lie in the brutal plantation of Ulster, which
began in. . .

full at:
http://eirigi.org/latestnews/2019/8/26/harland-amp-wolff-a-potential-symbol-of-unionism-in-terminal-decline
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] White Supremacy Tried to Kill Jazz. The Music Triumphed. | Interview with Gerald Horne | Anton Woronczuk | Truthout via Portside

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*


https://portside.org/2019-09-05/white-supremacy-tried-kill-jazz-music-triumphed


Sent from my iPhone

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Imperialism and your cup of coffee

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

*Over the next week or two we will be running three synopses of parts of
the opening chapter of John Smith’s *Imperialism in the 21st Century (New
York, Monthly Review Press, 2016)*.  The synopsis and commentary below is
written by Phil Duncan.*

Marx began *Capital* not with a sweeping historical survey but with an
examination of the humble  commodity.  He did this because the commodity is
the cell of capitalism and within a single commodity can be found the key
contradictions of capitalism as a whole socio-economic system of
production.  Especially the contradiction between value (which takes the
form of exchange-value) and use-value.

In his work on imperialism today, John Smith begins in a similar way.  Not
with the humble, single generic commodity but with three specific
commodities: the cup of coffee, the t-shirt and the iPhone.  He chooses
these three because they are good examples of the globalisation of
commodity production today.  Specifically, these are commodities produced
in the Third World and largely sold in the First World, and the companies
that exercise domination over their production, distribution and exchange
are First World companies.

They are emblematic of the internationalisation of commodity production,
distribution and exchange.
full at:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2019/09/04/imperialism-and-your-cup-of-coffee/
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Syrian students ‘put off’ attending UoE by lecturer accused of spreading pro-Assad propaganda

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://thetab.com/uk/edinburgh/2019/09/05/syrian-students-put-off-attending-uoe-by-lecturer-accused-of-spreading-pro-assad-propaganda-58786
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] What Marx Understood About Slavery

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/slavery-united-states-civil-war-marx
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Past Wars and The Future--a Conversation

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

http://daydreamsunset.blogspot.com/2019/09/past-wars-and-where-o-we-go-from-here.html

-- 
Check out my newest books *Still Tripping in the Dark

*,* Capitalism
,
and Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s
 *
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] 'Expelled, but Communist' by Boris Souvarine - COSMONAUT

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://cosmonaut.blog/2019/09/05/expelled-but-communist-by-boris-souvarine/
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] The Original Evil Corporation

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times Op-Ed, Sept. 5, 2019
The Original Evil Corporation
By William Dalrymple

The rise and rise of giant oil and tech companies, with their campaign 
contributions, commercial lobbying, predictive data harvesting and 
surveillance capitalism, has lent a certain urgency to old questions: 
How are we to cope with the power and perils of multinational 
corporations and how can a nation-state protect itself and its citizens 
from corporate excess?


As the international subprime bubble and bank collapses of 2007-09 
demonstrated, just as corporations can enrich and positively shape the 
destiny of nations, so they can also drag down their economies. The 
Federal Reserve’s bank bailout has been estimated to be $7.77 trillion 
dollars. The collapse of all three of Iceland’s major privately owned 
commercial banks brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy.


Corporate influence, with its fatal blend of power, money and 
unaccountability, is particularly potent and dangerous in frail states 
where corporations are insufficiently regulated, and where the 
purchasing power of a large company can outbid or overwhelm an 
underfunded government.


The lobbying power of the largest corporations can even make and break 
governments: The Anglo-Persia Oil Company was able to induce a coup that 
toppled the government in Iran in 1953; United Fruit Company which owned 
42 percent of Guatemala’s land, lobbied to bring about a C.I.A.-backed 
coup a year later in 1954. The International Telephone and Telegraph 
Corporation campaigned for the ouster of Chile’s Salvador Allende in the 
1970s, while more recently Exxon Mobil has lobbied the United States to 
protect its interests in Indonesia and Iraq.


The roots of this predatory corporate culture go back 400 years to the 
foundation and the global rise of the East India Company. Many modern 
corporations have attempted to match its success at bending state power 
to their own ends, but the Company remains unmatched for its violence 
and sheer military might.


The East India Company, which was established in London in 1599, was 
authorized by its charter to wage war, and from its maiden voyage in 
1602, it used corporate violence to enhance its trade. In the mid-18th 
century, the Company began seizing by brute military force great chunks 
of the most prosperous provinces of the Mughal Empire, which then 
embraced most of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and half of Afghanistan.


In 1765, in the Mughal fort of Allahabad, in northern India, the 
defeated Mughal emperor Shah Alam was forced into what we would now call 
an act of involuntary privatization. He had to replace his own revenue 
officials in Eastern India with a set of English traders.


The collecting of Mughal taxes was henceforth subcontracted to a 
powerful multinational corporation whose operations were protected by 
its own private army. Within a few months, 250 company clerks backed by 
a force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers had become the 
effective rulers of the richest Mughal provinces. An international 
corporation was, for the first time, transforming itself into an 
aggressive colonial power.


Using the looted wealth of Mughal Bengal, the Company started ferrying 
opium east to China, then fought the Opium Wars to seize an offshore 
base at Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics. To 
the west, it shipped Chinese tea to Massachusetts.


Such was the reputation of the East India Company that in the cold 
winter of 1772-3, a panic spread across the 13 Colonies that the Company 
would be let loose on America. John Dickinson, the “Penman of the 
Revolution,” feared that the soldiers of the Company, having plundered 
India, were now “casting their eyes on America as a new theater whereon 
to exercise their talents of rapine, oppression and cruelty.”


As a result of this panic, and the slapping of British taxes on tea, 
some 90,000 pounds of Company tea, worth £9,659 (more than $1.2 million 
today), was dumped in Boston Harbor. The Revolutionary War broke out 
soon after.


The Company had become, as one of its directors said, “an empire within 
an empire,” with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the East. It 
had also by this stage created a vast and sophisticated administration 
and Civil Service, built much of London docklands and come close to 
generating a quarter of Britain’s trade. Its annual spending within 
Britain alone equaled about a quarter of total British government annual 
expenditure. Its armies were larger than those of almost all nation- 
states and its power now encircled the globe.


The Company’s lawyers and lobbyists and 

[Marxism] The Former Slave Who Sued for Reparations, and Won

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times Op-Ed, Sept. 5, 2019
The Former Slave Who Sued for Reparations, and Won
By W. Caleb McDaniel

The debate over reparations has re-entered American politics. At 
congressional hearings, primary debates and across social media many 
people are talking about what reparations could look like and who might 
get them.


But the story of Henrietta Wood, a formerly enslaved woman who sued for 
restitution and won, is missing from the discussion. Her little-known 
victory offers lessons for today, both about the impact restitution can 
make and about the limited power of payment alone.


In 1853, Wood was a free black woman living and laboring as a domestic 
worker in Cincinnati when she was lured across the Ohio River and into 
the slave state of Kentucky by a white man named Zebulon Ward. Ward sold 
her to slave traders, who took her to Mississippi. A cotton planter 
bought her there and later took her to Texas, where she remained 
enslaved through the Civil War.


Wood eventually returned to Cincinnati, and in 1870 sued Ward for 
$20,000 in damages and lost wages. In 1878, an all-white jury decided in 
Wood’s favor, with Ward ordered to pay $2,500, perhaps the largest sum 
ever awarded by a court in the United States in restitution for slavery.


Though largely forgotten, even by historians, Wood’s case was widely 
covered by newspapers in 1878, including by The New York Times in an 
article headlined, “An Unsettled Account.” It was understood at the time 
that the case raised the question of what formerly enslaved people in 
general were owed. As The Times put it, “Who will recompense the 
millions of men and women for the years of liberty of which they have 
been defrauded?”


Freed people asked that question from the beginning. Present-day demands 
for reparations build on a long history of struggle that predates Wood’s 
suit. Yet her victory also stands out as exceptional in that history, a 
testament to both the revolutionary possibilities created by the Civil 
War, and their limits.


Wood’s lawsuit would not even have been possible without the 
Reconstruction Amendments that abolished slavery and expanded 
citizenship. But Reconstruction also ended without reparations, and by 
1878, white Democrats had used force and fraud to overthrow Republican 
state governments across the former Confederacy. The counterrevolution 
robbed black citizens of the political power they could have used to 
pursue reparations laws back then, while former slaveholders and their 
immediate descendants still lived.


This left the judiciary as one of the few arenas in which former slaves 
could have advanced restitution claims. Yet that way, too, was riddled 
with difficulty. A court recognized Wood’s standing to sue because she 
had been kidnapped, “wrongfully enslaved.” For the millions of people 
who had been enslaved legally, the courts did not offer clear paths to 
reparations and Wood’s victory did not result in a wave of other suits.


The story of Callie House, another formerly enslaved woman, shows what 
happened when black citizens turned from the courts to Congress for 
relief. In the 1890s, House led a national grass-roots organization that 
pressured the federal government for pensions for former slaves. As the 
historian Mary Frances Berry has shown, however, House’s movement was 
killed by federal officials who falsely accused her of fraud. The Times 
dismissed House’s movement in 1903 as a “swindle.”


The real fraud was the false story that white Americans increasingly 
accepted about slavery and the Civil War. By the time Wood died in 1912, 
paradoxical myths — that slavery was benevolent, but that Confederates 
had only fought for states’ rights, not to defend it — were widely 
embraced by white Americans all over the country.


Meanwhile, lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement created new 
obstacles for reparations and new harms needing redress. Today, 
supporters of reparations cite the crimes of slavery, as well as 
20th-century housing discrimination and racist laws for which the 
federal government was culpable.


This later history only makes Wood’s achievement during the small window 
of opportunity opened by Reconstruction more remarkable. Now, another 
window of opportunity may be opening, this time for policies that seek 
reparations through legislation, not litigation.


Still, the struggle for reparations remains an uphill battle, and not 
just because of the emboldened forces of white nationalism in the United 
States. Some fair-minded critics concede that the nation should 
acknowledge past wrongs, but doubt that any amount of restitution can 
redress evils so great. 

[Marxism] The Brilliant Immanuel Wallerstein Was an Anticapitalist Until the End

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/immanuel-wallerstein-world-systems-theory
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] MR Online | The U.S. footprint in Bolivia’s incipient colour revolution

[MM via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

> On Sep 5, 2019, at 9:13 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> https://mronline.org/2019/09/05/the-u-s-footprint-in-bolivias-incipient-colour-revolution/
>  
> 
> 
> MR Online posts an article that fails to mention that the Bolivian land 
> management authority itself estimates that 87 percent of the fires originated 
> from illegal fires set by farmers.


The author is also promoting text-book conspiracy speculation about the 
protests in Hong Kong on Twitter:

“What's up in Hong Kong? Actors, strategy and objectives of the new battlefield 
between China and the United States.” 

https://twitter.com/brunosgarzini/status/1169024896866881537

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] How Amazon Hooked America on Fast Delivery While Avoiding Responsibility for Crashes

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://features.propublica.org/amazon-delivery-crashes/how-amazon-hooked-america-on-fast-delivery-while-avoiding-responsibility-for-crashes/
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] MR Online | The U.S. footprint in Bolivia’s incipient colour revolution

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*


https://mronline.org/2019/09/05/the-u-s-footprint-in-bolivias-incipient-colour-revolution/

MR Online posts an article that fails to mention that the Bolivian land 
management authority itself estimates that 87 percent of the fires 
originated from illegal fires set by farmers.


---

Here's the NYT reporting:

Mr. Morales’s opponents attribute the wildfires on the government’s 
landmark campaign to hand out free land to peasants and open up new 
areas to agribusiness.


Those policies won Mr. Morales broad support among the poor while 
placating the country’s conservative business groups. But they came at 
the cost of leaving swaths of previously virgin jungle and bushland 
exposed to uncontrolled slash-and-burn farming, critics say.


Bolivia’s land management authority estimates that 87 percent of the 
wildfires now started as illegal fires set by farmers.


Political analysts said Mr. Morales’ response was partly driven by a 
desire to maintain the votes of core supporters among small-scale 
indigenous farmers, who often lack the machinery and capital to clear 
the land without resorting to fire.


“If the small families don’t burn their plots, how are they going to get 
by?” Mr. Morales said on the campaign trail Tuesday. “The small producer 
has just half a hectare for yuca and a hectare for corn to eat. That’s 
their situation.”


---

Here is the FT reporting on the "agrarian revolution" in Bolivia's most 
impacted area:


https://www.ft.com/content/d9b4953a-50d3-11e5-b029-b9d50a74fd14

How soya wealth is changing the Bolivia’s Santa Cruz province
Its vast soya crop puts Santa Cruz province on the front line of an 
agrarian revolution


Benedict Mander OCTOBER 26, 2015

Hopping off a horse-drawn cart in the isolated Mennonite community of 
Manitoba, Johan Peters admits it is inconvenient that farmers like him 
are forbidden to use rubber tyres on their tractor wheels, fitting them 
with metal teeth for grip instead.


Even so, the ultra-conservative religious group in Bolivia’s eastern 
lowlands is thriving. Struggling to express himself in Spanish, Peters 
resorts to a virtually extinct dialect of German that survives in a 
handful of Mennonite communities in the fertile plains of Santa Cruz 
province to explain the reason for their success: soya.


“This is the most productive farming area in Bolivia,” says Jacob Fehr, 
the vice-president of the more liberal neighbouring Mennonite colony of 
Chihuahua, founded 26 years ago. Over the past decade, his community of 
about 220 families has more than doubled the amount of land they own and 
farm to 25,000 hectares, largely thanks to the recent boom in commodity 
prices.


These farmers are on the front line of an agrarian revolution in Bolivia 
that in recent decades has attracted Japanese and Russian immigrants as 
well as large-scale investments from Brazil and Argentina. This has 
driven explosive growth in the economy and population of Santa Cruz 
province, whose eponymous capital is one of the fastest-growing cities 
in the world and now the largest in the country, with around 2m 
inhabitants — nearly a fifth of the national population.


Santa Cruz is the powerhouse of Bolivian agriculture. It represents 
about 60 per cent of national farming yield, with soya accounting for 
more than half of the province’s production. With neighbouring 
Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay already saturated with soya crops, the 
potential for expansion in Santa Cruz, where much land is underutilised, 
has led some to see it as South America’s next agricultural frontier.


Such hopes have only been strengthened by the fall in global oil prices, 
which has forced energy-producing countries such as Bolivia to seek 
alternative and more sustainable forms of income. With soya alone 
representing Bolivia’s third-biggest source of foreign exchange after 
gas and mining, the government has announced ambitious plans to boost 
the area of land under cultivation from 2.7m hectares last year to 4.5m 
hectares by 2020.


“There is enormous potential here,” says Gabriel Dabdoub, a prominent 
businessman in Santa Cruz, who believes the agricultural sector cannot 
flourish without support from the government to boost productivity 
levels, which lag far behind the agricultural giants of Brazil and 
Argentina. But doubts remain as to how committed the government is to 
promoting agriculture, and what kind. “It is the million-dollar 
question,” says Dabdoub.


René Orellana, Bolivia’s planning minister, said in an interview that of 
$48bn in planned public investments by 2020, the government is aiming to 
invest more than $5bn in agriculture, and about $2.5bn will be 

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-War]: Buck on Fredholm, 'Afghanistan Beyond the Fog of War: Persistent Failure of a Rentier State'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*



Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
- - -
Subscribe to the Washington Babylon newsletter via 
https://washingtonbabylon.com/newsletter/

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
> Date: September 5, 2019 at 8:39:45 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Cc: H-Net Staff 
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]:  Buck on Fredholm, 'Afghanistan Beyond the Fog 
> of War: Persistent Failure of a Rentier State'
> Reply-To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> 
> Michael Fredholm.  Afghanistan Beyond the Fog of War: Persistent 
> Failure of a Rentier State.  Copenhagen  NIAS PRESS, 2018.  368 pp.  
> $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-87-7694-251-9.
> 
> Reviewed by Brandan Buck (George Mason)
> Published on H-War (September, 2019)
> Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
> 
> A bevy of works on Afghanistan's political, economic, and security 
> issues have been published since 9/11. Traditional histories of 
> modern Afghanistan are typically written episodically, treating 
> events as a series of conflicts predicated by a succession of 
> invasions and coups. Similarly, most works in the field focus on the 
> country's immeasurable security issues and reason their way 
> backwards, seeking answers on how to curb violence while overlooking 
> Afghanistan's core political issues. Historian Michael Fredholm 
> addresses both shortcomings in _Afghanistan__ Beyond the Fog of War: 
> Persistent Failure of a Rentier State. _An exhaustive and sober 
> examination of Afghanistan's recent history, this book argues that 
> the country's political economy was irrevocably guided by Abdur 
> Rahman Khan. Rahman, also known as the "Iron Amir," was Afghanistan's 
> first modern ruler and initiator of a governing model centered on 
> security, modernization, and economic reform. Fredholm examines how 
> the amir sought to implement his model by centralizing power through 
> Pashtunization, the creation of a modern, centralized military, and 
> coopting local power brokers, particularly rural imams. Fredholm 
> further argues that this method of governing impacted and, 
> ultimately, ruined Afghanistan's political development. He claims 
> that Afghanistan's rulers--be they strongmen, Soviet, or 
> Western-backed leaders--have since sought to implement Abdur Rahman 
> Khan's model, rather than pursuing more accommodationist political 
> arrangements. This desire for centralization has inflamed 
> Afghanistan's ethnic tensions, exacerbated rifts between religiously 
> conservative rural areas and more secular urban centers, and 
> furthered Afghanistan's dependence upon foreign aid, which has 
> undermined its independence.  
> 
> Fredholm's content is expansive, consisting of ten chapters that 
> stretch from the rule of Abdur Rahman Khan (who reigned between 1880 
> and 1901) through the coalition troop drawdown in 2014. A final 
> chapter speculates as to Afghanistan's future. Chapters 1 and 2 set 
> up Fredholm's argument by describing Rahman's early state-building 
> efforts. They then examine tactics by Rahman's immediate Barakzai 
> dynasty successors through the first half of the twentieth century 
> and the genesis of Afghanistan's status as a rentier state. The 
> author outlines how Afghanistan's succession of kings wrangled with 
> various local power brokers, foreign interests, and rural religious 
> leaders.   
> 
> Chapters 3 through 5 cover Afghan political history and foreign 
> relations during the 1960s, political turmoil during the 1970s, the 
> Soviet invasion, and subsequent Soviet-Afghan War. The strongest 
> material in these chapters is in Fredholm's treatment of 
> Afghanistan's domestic political fracturing prior to the bloodless 
> 1973 coup initiated by Mohammed Daoud Khan. The author interestingly 
> internationalizes the growth of Afghan political radicalism during 
> the 1960s, illustrating that the Afghan Marxist Left and Islamic 
> Right drew inspiration from abroad. As to the latter, Fredholm argues 
> that Afghanistan's turn toward political Islam was rooted in its own 
> experience with student radicalism and academic connections to 
> Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (p. 97). Fredholm effectively argues that 
> the ideological core of Afghanistan's Islamic modernist movement was 
> urban and internationally inspired, both of which force a 
> reexamination of common conceptions of Islamic radicalism within the 
> country. While other works (such as Thomas Barfield's _Afghanistan_, 
> 2010) have highlighted these phenomena, Fredholm shows how these 
> nascent Islamic movements interacted with traditional conceptions of 
> a nominally secular state and traditional, rural religious interests. 
> 
> 

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-War]: Eichhorn on O'Connor, 'American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832-1863'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*



Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
- - -
Subscribe to the Washington Babylon newsletter via 
https://washingtonbabylon.com/newsletter/

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
> Date: September 5, 2019 at 8:34:35 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Cc: H-Net Staff 
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]:  Eichhorn on O'Connor, 'American Sectionalism 
> in the British Mind, 1832-1863'
> Reply-To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> 
> Peter O'Connor.  American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 
> 1832-1863.  Baton Rouge  Louisiana State University Press, 2017.  280 
> pp.  $47.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-6815-8.
> 
> Reviewed by Niels Eichhorn (Middle Georgia State University)
> Published on H-War (September, 2019)
> Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
> 
> "We may be for the North or the South; but we have no doubt of 
> this--that Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders have 
> made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made 
> what is more than either--they have made a nation."[1] These famous 
> words by Chancellor of the Exchequer William Ewart Gladstone in 
> Newcastle upon Tyne are the linchpin upon which Peter O'Connor 
> constructs his argument. 
> 
> Engaging the growing literature of US in the world and transnational 
> Civil War scholarship, O'Connor faults scholars for focusing too 
> narrowly on the Civil War years, which skews their understanding of 
> British public opinion.[2] By looking at leading British 
> intellectuals and their writings about the United States, especially 
> travelogues, O'Connor argues that the prewar discourse regarding 
> politics, slavery, and sectionalism influenced British attitudes 
> concerning the secession crisis and Civil War, leading to a 
> reluctance to support either section. He closes the book in 1863 when 
> the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation permanently 
> changed British opinion in favor of the United States. Divided into 
> two sections, the book starts with the Nullification Crisis of 1832, 
> tackling "issues of race, slavery, and labor" in chapter 1, 
> perceptions of "US ethno-cultural regional identity" in chapter 2, 
> and "political policy, political culture, and states' rights" in 
> chapter 3 (pp. 8, 9). 
> 
> British observers frequently reported the paternal attitude southern 
> planters had toward their chattel, thus downplaying the human carnage 
> of slavery. Furthermore, to these Britons, guilt for slavery did not 
> rest solely at the door of the plantation mansion but with the entire 
> country that tolerated and profited from slavery's products. In a 
> long-overdue nuanced fashion, O'Connor explains that British 
> perceptions that the southern identity centered on slavery did not 
> translate automatically to a pro-northern attitude. This part of 
> O'Connor's argument is reminiscent of what Duncan A. Campbell 
> illustrates in his works on British public opinion (_English Public 
> Opinion and the American Civil War_ [2003] and _Unlikely Allies: 
> Britain, America and the Victorian Origins of the Special 
> Relationship_ [2007]): anti-southern views did not automatically mean 
> an embrace of the other section. 
> 
> Next, O'Connor engages ethnicity and geography as Britons looked for 
> an image of themselves in the United States. Observers frequently 
> invoked a Puritan New England and Cavalier South to illustrate the 
> distinctive characters of the two sections. Complicating matters was 
> that the northern parts of the country included a diverse immigrant 
> population, diluting its British heritage. Therefore, pure 
> Britishness was located in the Cavalier, ethnically cohesive southern 
> parts. Confounding things was the Irish population in cities like New 
> York, O'Connor argues. British anti-Irish and anti-Catholic attitudes 
> translated into concerns about the northern section. Finally, 
> O'Connor's subjects indicated a detailed understanding of politics in 
> the United States that escalated sectional divisions. In the course 
> of this discussion, O'Connor notes how Britons continued to perceive 
> of the democratic system in the United States as mob rule and even 
> more how some, but certainly not all, viewed democracy as a northern 
> phenomenon and saw an aristocratic society in the southern states. 
> However, the detailed engagement Britons had with the states' rights 
> issues in the United States caused many to view the growing crisis 
> from a constitutional point of view, rather than a moral 
> slavery-based argument. Thus, O'Connor provides an important overview 
> of antebellum British opinions about the United States. 
> 
> In the 

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-War]: Roselaar on Lomas, 'The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*



Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
- - -
Subscribe to the Washington Babylon newsletter via 
https://washingtonbabylon.com/newsletter/

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
> Date: September 5, 2019 at 8:35:42 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Cc: H-Net Staff 
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]:  Roselaar on Lomas, 'The Rise of Rome: From 
> the Iron Age to the Punic Wars'
> Reply-To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> 
> Kathryn Lomas.  The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic 
> Wars.  Cambridge  Harvard University Press, 2018.  432 pp.  $35.00 
> (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-65965-0.
> 
> Reviewed by Saskia Roselaar (Independent Scholar)
> Published on H-War (September, 2019)
> Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
> 
> This book is one of a new series by Harvard University Press on the 
> history of the ancient world. It is one of the first books to offer a 
> comprehensive overview of the early development and rise of Rome for 
> a general public--particularly undergraduates, as well as interested 
> laymen. 
> 
> Lomas gives an admirable overview of a period for which very few 
> primary sources exist, at least not in the form of written accounts 
> by eyewitnesses. Lomas therefore has to fully engage with the 
> available archaeological and epigraphic materials, and does so 
> excellently. It is always difficult to bring such a poorly documented 
> period to life, especially if even the most basic events and 
> developments of the period are under debate. However, Lomas manages 
> to draft a lively sketch of life in the regal and early republican 
> period, supported by a large variety of color plates and 
> black-and-white drawings. 
> 
> Part 1 focuses on early Italy and the foundations of Rome. In the 
> ninth century, when this book starts, Rome was just of the many 
> settlements in Latium, perhaps located at an exceptionally 
> well-chosen location, but with no particular claim to regional 
> dominance. Lomas therefore starts by sketching the histories of the 
> peoples, within and outside Italy, that played an important role in 
> the peninsula at this time: the archaeologically attested Etruscans, 
> Greeks, and Phoenicians as well as the mythical involvement of the 
> Trojans and the Sabines. Throughout the volume, Lomas clearly 
> articulates the involvement of the Italian peoples with the history 
> of Rome. In doing so, she rightly points to the great amount of 
> migration that occurred in ancient societies in general, thus 
> dismissing any simplistic ideas about conquest of one people by 
> another--the Etruscans did not outright conquer Rome or Campania, as 
> has been suggested, but their cultural influence was nevertheless 
> large. 
> 
> Next, Lomas discusses the _"_orientalizing revolution_"_ of the 
> seventh century. In this period, rapid social and economic change 
> occurred in Italy. A wealthy international elite emerged, connected 
> through ties of marriage and friendship, which displayed its status 
> through conspicuous consumption. At this time, the city of Rome had 
> converged from a number of small settlements into an urban center of 
> regional importance. 
> 
> The second part of the volume covers the period 600-400, in which 
> many crucial developments in state structures and power relations in 
> central Italy occurred. In the sixth century, the city-state became 
> the predominant type of state organization throughout Italy. Many 
> cities saw investment in their layout and public buildings in this 
> period; Rome in the late sixth century looked very different than a 
> century before. After the fall of the kings--in a period that saw 
> political and economic disruption in many areas of Italy--the fifth 
> century was a period of change in Rome and Italy, connected to the 
> rise of the Samnites as a clearly distinguished ethnic group. 
> 
> Next, Lomas gives a detailed but very readable account of the 
> _"_struggle of the orders._"_ At the heart of the conflict between 
> patricians and plebeians was access to power: political, social, 
> religious, and economic. This was a period of experimentation in many 
> regards, both political--for example, the number of magistrates and 
> their functions--as well as legal, with a number of new laws coming 
> into force in the fifth and fourth centuries. At the same time, 
> conspicuous consumption by the elite focused more and more on the 
> sponsorship of public and religious buildings rather than private 
> houses and tombs, emphasizing the growing importance and power of the 
> state in Roman society. 
> 
> Part 3 focuses on the Roman conquest of Italy. From the late fifth 
> century, 

[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] FBI snooped on Dylan and Rotolo (Dylan's girlfriend)

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Rotolo’s main reason for sustaining a file was her travel to Cuba. A 
good amount of the dossier is spent on her trip with the Student 
Committee for Travel to Cuba in 1964, in defiance of the government’s 
ban on travel to that country — a matter still with us 55 years later. 
Not only was Rotolo a passionate spokesperson during the trip, her sin 
was compounded by the fact that the Maoist-inclined Progressive Labor 
Party was involved in organizing the visit — thus garnering Rotolo the 
FBI-subject moniker SM-PL (Security Matter-Progressive Labor). All of 
this was enough for the Bureau to add her to its Security Index — a list 
of people marked for detention in the event of a “national emergency.” 
Rotolo would stay on that list until January 1971, after she had been 
living in Italy for several years. The FBI removed her “in view of 
subject’s lack of activity in this country since 1965.”


full: 
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1CZG-1ifEppuoNFiaq-cBB6rj8Diz7vJeYar6fGw8ZgxRnTofwYVh0IHKIbqmZZez22QAs4XAiS-wIGyLoZ8IB68m7Aq8dTo33ZALb1mwQENgC_bmgk4TZ7sPAV5EtUU5Dx9EZayKXDafWWioctSDYUthqfgZLwMyVDlEo_-HhMfJbP8bvoPbYXLYYxg9AP8cSS7WnPkIYS_QYY8ceCgW6KzX1FWhKB7FKdHdPi1dbkTT_N0Yb9D2Ldr0k7rzqczuScZRgkFCsi_23Ir31LvFgAscwlnY2RtcMqxlUqUueoNZak0DXZT8x4DpNDRYuB75J9px-W6-ci_wr3JfJ95qBetPav-I3LZhvyanta1ZaJIB9zCXlRKcJAkotSV2FBzytgOHHkHSHYhx4eO30QZwmw/https%3A%2F%2Ftruthout.org%2Farticles%2Ffbi-tracking-of-bob-dylan-and-suze-rotolo-foreshadowed-future-abuses%2F



From Rotolo's memoir:

https://secure-web.cisco.com/1vKzv0O0R6lZybb6EVRY1e3YHxTRCZVhoN2D3CwOoxzAqHjddaVeWcWwrgiCUm02diJzXuFBt7kx52cgayqZFpd-u-ZYlZ1K-ApT4zqgLU38OFsLxjlxUS-cW3EIMeIUdl5RoOEfotW-DxdxfAAaNcmvF6HfeL8tQ3RbNI5ATl44WvAkeBpy59mrmgYk34HeFvkAX_gIqvgGpod3NhcXNLBgQZfO_Qh_mUoVRv2hWxAgcw4qyV5FXaH270eAHBGS6wKzbHsbs4miiG-r9o2cFTSnAjzFr93NwlJrBaGSxrvcN_qAMDs1MKG9loEVIw0nogrpdT74kAGTye1SdRvzjDlzHjsRfKCyGvcUM1hO3nDALQ8Gpa1XSN9xAWTNfuqNxx89pKhevgd8cYEj4wIKGXw/https%3A%2F%2Flouisproyect.org%2F2010%2F07%2F25%2Fsuze-rutolos-a-freewheelin-time%2F

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Media Reports on Major Event in Solidarity with Kashmir

[RKOB via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/kashmir-solidarity-event-in-tv-news/

--
Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG
(Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net)
www.rkob.net
ak...@rkob.net
Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314



---
Diese E-Mail wurde von Avast Antivirus-Software auf Viren geprüft.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com