Paranoid Reflections: What’s going on?

Slavoj Žižek, 3 April 2003

Everyone fears the possibility that the US attack on Iraq will have a catastrophic outcome – an ecological disaster of gigantic proportions, high American casualties, a terrorist attack in...

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Short Cuts: Boycotting Bristol

Thomas Jones, 20 March 2003

Pupils at the Albert Einstein Middle School in Sacramento, California are not allowed to wear sandals without socks. Einstein himself would have been sent home to change, sandals without socks...

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The prospect of a second war on Iraq raises a large number of questions, analytic and political. What are the intentions behind the impending campaign? What are likely to be the consequences?...

Read more about Casuistries of Peace and War: The assumptions the Bush Administration and its critics share

Short Cuts: Long Haul

Thomas Jones, 6 March 2003

It had been announced that the troops were leaving Heathrow; the withdrawal seemed to be complete by the time I arrived on Tuesday evening. There wasn’t a machine-gun to be seen all the way...

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How did Blair get here?

Conor Gearty, 20 February 2003

Tony Blair is the most successful politician of his generation. He has transformed the Labour Party from a protest coalition into Britain’s natural and (it seems these days) perpetual...

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Old Europe: Britain in Bosnia

Jeremy Harding, 20 February 2003

In 1992, the UN Security Council opened a dossier on breaches of humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions in the former Yugoslavia. Paragraph 5 of UNSC Resolution 771 called on all states or...

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Short Cuts: Dodgy Latin

Thomas Jones, 20 February 2003

Charles Clarke’s reservations about the usefulness of studying classics were more or less on a par with the old schoolboy assertion that ‘Latin’s a dead language,/As dead as...

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In the fifth circle of Dante’s Paradiso, the poet and his guide Beatrice encounter the spirit of his Florentine Crusading ancestor Cacciaguida. Together they discourse on the contrasts...

Read more about The Gold Mines of Kremnica: From Venice to Visa

Two days before the general election at the end of January, Israel again imposed a full closure on the Occupied Territories. It was done in the name of normality, which in itself has become a...

Read more about Who shall we blame it on? Lament for the Israeli Left

Operation Overstretch: Unfair to the Army

David Ramsbotham, 20 February 2003

Thirty-eight years ago my regiment was ordered to Sarawak, in Borneo, to help in the defence of Eastern Malaysia, which was under threat from President Sukarno of Indonesia. This...

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At 6 a.m. on 12 June 2002, four FBI agents barged into the SoHo loft of Samuel Waksal, the former CEO of the biotech company ImClone Systems Inc, and led him away in handcuffs: he was charged...

Read more about Towards the Precipice: The Continuing Collapse of the US Economy

Who’s in charge? The Addiction to Secrecy

Chalmers Johnson, 6 February 2003

The subject of Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir is the decadence of American democracy. The conditions he began fighting in 1969 are much worse today and far more dangerous to many more people. Yet...

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Short Cuts: War Talk

Thomas Jones, 6 February 2003

As Tony Blair prepares to consolidate his place in the history books as Britain’s greatest wartime Prime Minister since John Major, shipping our boys out to the Gulf, boots or no boots, his...

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The sudden death of Roy Jenkins took us all by surprise. He was over eighty, of course, and with a heart problem that had required major surgery. This latterly gave him a good excuse to sit down...

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Pakistan has been described as ‘the most dangerous place on earth’, yet Owen Bennett Jones’s title is appropriate, for though storms rage all around Pakistan, the country itself...

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The Cardoso Legacy: Lula’s Inheritance

Perry Anderson, 12 December 2002

For two decades – more or less since the Falklands War, and the end of the military dictatorships that had become an international byword for counter-revolutionary ferocity – South...

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Diary: My Egyptian Cousin

Jonathan Lethem, 12 December 2002

I have never travelled further from New York than Western Europe; Saad Eddin Ibrahim is an advocate of democracy imprisoned in Egypt. But Saad and I are both outlying members of the same sprawling...

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The resignation of Estelle Morris surprised most people: not just because of its timing but because she resigned on grounds of incompetence – to outsiders she seemed more unlucky than...

Read more about Nothing More Divisive: The Great Secondary School Disaster