The German media, always happy about another juicy anniversary, has for days been marking the date, sixty years ago, when the “Berlin Wall” was constructed - August 13 1961 – proof that the ”real-socialist” system in East Germany was a failure.
New biography of Mildred Harnack, born in Milwaukee. She was a central part of the anti-Nazi resistance movement inside Nazi Germany, until her capture in 1942. Sentenced to hard labor, she was re-tried under Hitler's order, and executed.
The Soviet experience of Nazi invasion inspired many powerful works of cinema. Soviet filmmakers avoided triumphalist images of warfare, depicting the conflict as a brutal necessity that should never be repeated.
With Victory Day here again, World War II historical revisionism kicks back into gear. The reason this is becoming such a hot issue once again is that the debate over the past has serious implications for today’s geopolitics.
Reader Comments: Palestine, U.S. Must Pursue Peace; Creation of Israel, Soviet Union and U.S. Communists; Police Unions; Financial Transactions Taxes; Puerto Ricans in NYC; DC Labor Film Festival; Art of Ralph Fasanella; more....
John le Carré died Saturday at eighty-nine. His novels rejected the glamor and ritz of Cold War–era spy fiction. Instead, he portrayed espionage as a dreary, disturbing machine that ground up innocents for a goal that didn’t justify the human cost.
The use of the atomic weapon must be seen as a continuation and a start: the nuclear continuation of the conventional terror bombing of Japanese civilians, and the start of a new “cold war.”
Vietnam is building on the internationalist traditions of Ho Chi Minh. True patriotism, is quite different from narrow, selfish nationalism - it should always respect the rights and interests of other nations without harming common interests...
A look back on the key revolutionary more frequently worshiped on the left than read, Ali's Lenin biography includes his last years' observation that "we knew nothing," insisting that the revolution had to be renewed lest it wither and die.
Reviewing a volume that amply clarifies the legacy of martyred Pan African historian and militant Walter Rodney, the Guyanese intellectual who emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution.
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