Section: Canadian Dimension (Canada)
President Trump: Nationalist Capitalism, An Alternative to Globalization
Image from Public Domain During his inaugural speech, President Trump clearly and forcefully outlined the strategic political-economic policies he will pursue over the next four years. Anti-Trump journalists, editorialists, academics and experts, who appear in the Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have...
“Trust, But Don’t Verify”: US Intelligence Agencies and the New Cold War
James Clapper at the LBJ Presidential Library, 2016 • Photo by Jay Godwin Just as the first casualty of war is said to be the truth, the first casualty of the New Cold War is irony. Our most prominent journalists seem to have missed the Orwellian irony of Senator John McCain asking Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper at...
Transnationalism and Italian anarchists in Canada, 1915-1940
Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 1915-1940 Travis Tomchuk University of Manitoba Press, 2015 There are numerous studies of the left in Canada. These studies range from social-democratic parties like the CCF, various socialists movements, and communists. Curiously there is a lack of studies into anarchist groups...
‘Tyrants across the world know now they can maintain power through mass slaughter’
Photo by Thierry Ehrmann Leila al-Shami, co-author of Burning Country, a writer who has worked with human rights movements in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, gave this interview to Ilya Matveev and Gabriel Levy on 29 November for OpenLeft (before the fall of Aleppo to the government forces). It sheds some light on the social and...
What’s left of neoliberal globalization?
Photo by Josh Edelson/Getty From a Canadian vantage point, it is easy to lose track of the sheer volume of discontent, if not outright resistance, around the world to the structures and policies of neoliberal globalization. People everywhere are chaffing at the limits imposed on their capacities to democratically shape and plan their own...
The Revival of the Working-Class Concept
Photo by Ted S. Warren/AP The polarization in the country following the Trump electoral victory is not what Karl Marx called the “class struggle.” But it reflects an underlying class struggle — what Marx called the “uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight” — which is a real thing, surely, in this country and globally. This struggle between...
Syria and the Antiwar Tradition
Photo by Alisdare Hickson There is major disorientation on the left in many Western countries when it comes to Syria and about how antiwar activists should respond to events on the ground in Syria and Iraq. The highly complex nature of the Syrian war involving a multitude of foreign states and non-state actors would, in the best of times, present...
The Anti-Russian Lynch Mob Fails
Photo by Thierry Ehrmann With an all-but official declaration of a new “Cold War” on Russia by the United States, the journalistic atmosphere in the US, the EU and the exiting UK has become poisonous. Dissent is hardly permitted. All evils are now assumed to be the work of Moscow until proven otherwise, even by the most liberal of publications....
Open Letter to NDP re: their support for White Helmets Nobel Peace Prize
Screenshot from Netflix promotional documentary Dear Mr. Cullen, Since it was you who made the public presentation regarding the NDP’s position on this matter, I am writing directly to you but please forward this letter to all NDP MPs since they have unanimously endorsed this highly questionable proposition. I am writing to alert you that...
The Neocon in the Oval Office
Photo by Brett Weinstein If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes US President, she will be the first neoconservative to actually occupy that office. The neoconservatives have been an ascendant force in policymaking since the Reagan administration, and remained (through Vice President Dick Cheney) an unsteady heartbeat from the presidency in the G.W....
