Archive | May, 2009

  • N’Dimagou — “Dignity”

    First of all, we would like to ask you where the story that you tell in your movie comes from.

    The idea was born from the complexity of the theme proposed: dignity. I think it’s very difficult to deal with such sweeping concepts as justice and dignity in the allotted two or three minutes, so I looked for an idea that actually asked the question ‘What is dignity’ rather than answering it.

  • Samieh Jabbarin Still under House Arrest

      Dear friends, The solidarity struggle with Palestinian theatre-artist and activist Samieh Jabbarin, who is still under house arrest in Um Al Fahm, has gained significant resonance in the past two weeks thanks to the publication of journalist Aviva Lori’s extensive coverage of the affair in Haaretz weekend supplement in Hebrew (22.5.09) and English (28.5.09).  […]

  • El Salvador: The Beginning of a New Era

      On Monday, June 1, 2009, El Salvador will turn a new page in its history with the inauguration of the country’s first left government, joining the ranks of the majority of Latin America.  Representing the FMLN (Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional), Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez Ceren, president and vice-president elect, will face […]

  • Obama’s Guantánamo Appeasement Plan

    Two days after his inauguration, President Obama pledged to close Guantánamo within one year.  The Republicans, led by Senators John McCain, Mitch McConnell, and Pat Roberts, immediately launched a concerted campaign to assail the new president.  They claimed his plan would release dangerous terrorists into U.S. communities and allow released terrorists to resume fighting against […]

  • Justice in the United States

    If I said that chaos prevails in the United States it would be considered an overstatement; it would be said that that country is a democracy where there is justice, respect for human rights and a division of powers based on the principles of Montesquieu and the Philadelphia Declaration.

  • Lessons in Imperialism from Iraq’s Past

      Peter Sluglett.  Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country.   New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.  318 pp.  $24.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-14201-4. The current war in Iraq has had many ironic consequences, the least sordid being perhaps the belated interest in Iraq’s history.  As Peter Sluglett confesses in the opening pages of the reissue […]

  • Parsa

      Here is Parsa.  He is ten months old.  He is my nephew and I love him with all my heart and soul.  Parsa was born just eight days after the second sanction resolution against Iran. Parsa has learned a few things since he was born ten months ago.  He points to everything that seems […]

  • Mr. Abbas Goes to Washington

    May 28, 2009 If the Oval Office guest list is an indicator, President Obama is making good on his commitment to try to revive the long-dead Arab-Israeli peace process.  On May 18 President Obama received Israel’s new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; today he met with Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. As […]

  • The Indefatigable Educator

    Chavez is an indefatigable educator. He does not hesitate in describing what capitalism means. One by one he takes apart all its lies. He is relentless.

  • Chinglish Lessons

    “It’s hard,” says an American in Rachel DeWoskin’s Repeat After Me, “to know much about someone whose language you don’t speak.” Communication is not the only difficulty experienced by the people in this nimble first novel.  Whether from the United States or from China, they are angry, guilty, distrustful, insane.  Lovers singe themselves with suspicion […]

  • Dislodging Comfortable Fictions

      Celia E. Naylor.  African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens.   The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.  Illustrations, maps.  xii + 360 pp.  $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3203-5; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-5883-7. Debates about the citizenship status of Cherokee freedmen […]

  • Interview with Bahman Ghobadi, Director of Nobody Knows about the Persian Cats

      Bahman Ghobadi, born in Baneh on 1 February 1969, is a Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker.  Nobody Knows about the Persian Cats, his latest film, won the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.  Roxana Saberi, his fiancée, is credited as one of the scriptwriters of the film.  Ghobadi’s […]

  • The Many Faces of Humanitarianism

      Humanism and Human Rights Who or what is the ‘human’ of human rights and the ‘humanity’ of humanitarianism?  The question sounds naïve, silly even.  Yet, important philosophical and ontological questions are involved.  If rights are given to beings on account of their humanity, ‘human’ nature with its needs, characteristics and desires is the normative […]

  • Gross Domestic Product and Corporate Profits, 1st Quarter 2009 (Preliminary)

    Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 5.7 percent in the first quarter of 2009, (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to preliminary estimates released by the Bureau of […]

  • Interview with Farian Sabahi

      Here we publish an interview with Farian Sabahi, an Italian-Iranian professor at Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Turin.  A professional journalist, Sabahi has been writing for Corriere della Sera for several months.  She was a guest of LibrInTerra on the 26th of March, presenting her two books Storia dell’Iran [A History […]

  • The Renewal of Democracy: An Interview with Paul Ginsborg

    Paul Ginsborg is Professor of Contemporary European History, University of Florence and a frequent public commentator on politics and life in Italy.  His books include A History of Contemporary Italy, Society and Politics 1943-1988, Italy and Its Discontents: Family, Civil Society and the State, 1980-2000, and the bestselling biography Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony. He […]

  • Ten Years Teaching and Learning

    “Hello President” began broadcasting on May 23, 1999. That day this year, Chavez was in Ecuador celebrating the 187th anniversary of the Battle of Pichincha. Tomorrow the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the program will begin.

  • Torture can never be justified

    On Sunday, while putting the finishing touches to the Reflection on Haiti, I was listening to the television report on the ceremony commemorating the Battle of Pichincha that took place in Ecuador on May 24, 1822, 187 years ago. The background music was beautiful.

  • Socially Conscious Art and Its Social Contexts

      Hazel Dickens, Bill C. Malone.  Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens.   Music in American Life Series.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.  Illustrations.  ix + 102 pp.  $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03304-9; $17.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-07549-0. One of the foremost voices on behalf of working people in country music recently […]

  • Sociologist of the Heart

    C. Wright Mills created the concept of a “power elite;” he imported the term “New Left” from Europe to the United States, and he was among the first to catch the phrases “paradigm” and “postmodern.”  A global thinker in a square era, he was everything postwar America was not: radical, original, and hip.  His work […]