Search

As more information about the virus emerged in the early months of 2020, it struck me that in some respects the pandemic more resembled a polio epidemic on a world scale than the 1918-19 Spanish flu outbreak to which it was often compared. Simple methods of combating the two viruses, such as handwashing, are the same: When Queen Elizabeth II visited Australia during a polio epidemic in 1954, there were fears that the crowds of schoolchildren assembling to greet her might pass the virus to one another and maybe even to the young monarch herself. Few people realized - certainly I didn't - that if polio epidemics were a product of modernity and not of backwardness, then the way might be open for other epidemics of equal or greater severity to appear. FEATURES I MUST HAVE BEEN UNLUCKY TO CATCH POLIO IN CORK, IRELAND, IN 1956, AS THIS was one of the last polio epidemics ever in Western Europe and the US. [Extracted from the article]

Outsiders generally find it hard to grasp an essential truth about the US military machine, which is that war-fighting efficiency has a low priority by comparison with considerations of personal and internal bureaucratic advantage. FEATURES Innumerable wars originate, wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 6, "entirely in private passions; in the attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears of leading individuals in the communities of which they are members." In other words, the military is not generally interested in war, save as a means to budget enhancement. [Extracted from the article]

The article presents reprints of articles, images, book reviews, and quotations from the publication between the years 1985-1995, including “Terrorism and Its Discontents” by Christopher Hitchens from the August 3, 1985 issue, “For Jesse Jackson and His Campaign” by Andrew Kopkind from the April 16, 1988 issue, and “What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?” by Alice Walker from the May 22, 1989 issue. A timeline of U.S. events for this period is also presented.

Presents letters to the editor related to American labor laws. Actions taken by politician Alexander Cockburn; Description of several labor unions; Implication of being neo-Stalinist.

In this article, the authors focuses on the changing views about capitalism with the changes in conditions in the world. According to the authors the surrender by Russia of any weighty adversarial role seemed, in the hopes of strategists in Washington, to announce a congenial era in the economic arrangements of the world, with leadership by the major capitalist powers disposing planetary capital, resources and trade opportunities. The economic idiom of the free-marketers is now one of prolonged sacrifice, and the presumptive rewards of free-market capitalism promise to be outstripped by its penalties as the real living standards for peoples supposedly basking in its blessings continue to fall.

In Iraq's case the concept of bombing as an essentially wholesome liaison between morality and Western technological prowess goes back to 1919, when the Royal Air Force asked British statesman Winston Churchill for permission to use chemical weapons "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment." It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses; gasses can be used which would cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected. Chemical weapons, according to Churchill represent the application of Western science to modern warfare.

The little town of Rio Branco, capital of the western Brazilian state of Acre, saw a meeting, the first of its kind, between rubber tappers, Indian tribal groups and various forest dwellers. There were old hatreds still smoldering. Indians remembered relatives pushed from their land by agents of the rubber barons, with uncles killed and sisters raped. Rubber tappers remembered Indian raids. But today Indians and rubber tappers alike face the same threat, in the destruction of their forest and way of life in the Amazon. The rubber tappers had gathered from Acre, nestled beside the Andes; from Amapa, bordering the Atlantic Ocean 2,000 miles to the east. INSET: A 2 percent chance to live (narration by Osmarino Rodriguez)..

Presents letters to the editor about the report of a contra rebel attack on the towns of Siuna, Bonanza and La Rosita in Nicaragua.

Presents letters to the editor. Criticism of the article "Money, Drugs and the Contras," written by Jonathan Kwitny which was published in the journal "The Nation"; Discussion on the linkage between contras and drug smuggling.

The article focuses on the flow chart found in Colonel Oliver North's White House safe. The flow chart published in Appendix C of the Tower commission's report portrays the network of foundations and companies spliced together to hold profits from the Iran arms sales, to send money and arms to the Nicaraguan contras, to lobby domestically for the U.S. President Ronald Reagan's policies and attack his opponents. Among the twenty-three boxes on the chart are the initials of some bodies with which one has become familiar: the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty and the American Conservative Trust, both established by the right-wing fund-raiser Carl Channell.

By far the biggest scandal in town, entirely unreported, is the new Alaskan oil rush. It is a multibillion-dollar giveaway reminiscent of the Teapot Dome fiasco, when Albert Fall, President Warren Harding's Interior Secretary, secretly leased off a naval oil reserve north of Casper, Wyoming, to oilman Harry Sinclair. For his efforts, Fall received as much as $400,000 from Sinclair and a year in the federal penitentiary. Following the standard script for the U.S. Government, it is a story of special access and special rights, greased by well-placed lobbyists, secured by corporate campaign disbursements and involving the transference on an almost unfathomable scale of public wealth into private hands.

The onslaught on the Zapatistas by the Mexican Army was announced by Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon on February 9, less than a month after the Chase Bank, which has billions at stake in Mexico, issued a peremptory call for the extinction of Subcomandante Marcos and his comrades. The eagerness of the Mexican elites and military high command to end the Zapatista insurgency goes without saying, but the pressure on Zedillo from the big U.S. investors was probably decisive. The memorandum, which was circulated by the bank's Emerging Markets Group to major investors, said it is in the best interests of Mexico's ruling party, to fix crucial state elections over the next few months. The collapse of the Mexican peso and subsequent events offers a record, as detailed as tremors on a seismograph, of the stress points in U.S. relations with boom economies in the Third World and the fantastic plunder such relations involve.

Three days after the election Representative Mike Synar faced a group of grass-roots greens in Missoula, Montana, and delivered a grim review of the Democrats' defeat. Rebukes from Synar's audience swiftly followed. They pointed out that the Bill Clinton-led Democrats abandoned their core constituencies of labor and greens early, with appropriately lethal consequences. "Two years ago your party held all the cards," said Michael Donnelly, an environmental organizer from Salem, Oregon. Although national green leaders would sooner perish than admit it, they see a silver lining to the sable clouds.

Politician Bill Clinton's career and the larger historical agenda most momentously intersect on the terrain of labor. The U.S. is on the edge of a free trade agreement with Mexico, following an earlier one with Canada. With democratic procedures and sovereignty annulled, workers in all three countries will be locked into a downward spiral of low-wage, low-skill jobs, with uninhibited movement of capital and a ratcheting down of social welfare provisions and environmental standards. Not a few voters will, in their solitary communion with the future in the voting booth, no doubt cheer themselves up with the thought that Clinton has thus far been cramped by the constraints of a backward conservative state. On the national stage, perhaps he will lift his eyes to higher things.

The electoral system in the U.S. is now being convulsed by the broadest, fiercest voter insurgency in perhaps 140 years, and is watching from the sidelines. Worst of all, the receptacle of these volatile political humors is Presidential candidate Ross Perot. Despite the mayhem he can inflict on an unresponsive system, Perot is a catastrophe for the progressive/activist spectrum. Insurgent labor, minorities, feminists, lesbians and gays, environmentalists, community organizers, peace internationalists, the coalition that once made up the Rainbow, are in varying degrees offended by Perot's campaign but, more important, excluded from it on any terms but his.

As Rio de Janeiro prepared for the Earth Summit by paving the road to the airport and placing in detention the abandoned children regularly preyed upon by death squads, the inhabitants of a city mangled by a disintegrating national economy braced themselves for the windfall of some 30,000 visitors. The brute realities of the Rio summit are briskly résuméd in its sociopolitical geometry. At issue are agreements on carbon dioxide emissions, forest conventions, the preservation of biodiversity and intellectual property rights.

The article presents the interview of the U.S. politician Jerry Brown related to his election campaign as the presidential candidate in the U.S. Brown's victory in the Connecticut primary transformed the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. What had been a protest candidacy was suddenly a powerful part of the electoral equation. On being asked about flat tax, Brown says " Everybody this year wants to know what to do about taxes, and I thought all the tax games were just pure gimmicks. Originally, I started with idea of reducing the payroll tax, but that didn't seem very effective. But to revamp the whole thing struck me as an idea that would have impact in terms of stimulus, savings, investment and also relate to reform."

The U.S. Supreme Court will rule on Pennsylvania's restrictive abortion law in time for Election Day. Ironically, this announcement, which fast-tracks the inevitable gutting of Roe v. Wade, counts as a pro-choice victory. It is the Supreme Court, historically, that has been the last line of defense for hotly contested civil liberties. No one who cherishes a right would wish to see it voted up or down every four years, or worse, subjected to fifty annual recertifications by state pols elected for their views on taxes or highway repairs. Today is the time to demonstrate, to donate, to lobby, to join the clinic defense lines and to swear a solemn oath to withhold votes from all politicians, no matter how lowly, no matter what their other virtues, who do not explicitly support abortion rights, including those of teenagers and poor women.

Reports that the bulk of the surviving U.S. left has joined the Democratic Party center, without the will to inflect debate, the influence to inform policy or the leverage to share power. Negation of the reasons for the left's own existence; View that Jesse Jackson represented an opportunity for the left in the Democratic Party.

Interviews Paul Sweeney and Harry Magdoff, editors of the 'Monthly Review,' regarding capitalism and socialism in the postwar era. Political situation in 1949 when the 'Monthly Review' started; Economic downturn in 1948; Start of the recovery before the Korean War; Observation that capitalism adapted brilliantly in the late 1940s and the 1950s; Strategies of saving capitalism.

Focuses on military threat from the Soviet Union to the U.S. Reason for issuing pamphlets by the U.S. Department of Defense; Information about content of the pamphlet; Details of military equipment available with the Soviet Union; Additions made to the U.S. Air Defense; Role of intelligence services in increasing the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Former Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley J. Liebeler's defense of his résumé building work is almost refreshing in its transparency. Abetted by politician Alexander Cockburn's total ignorance of the subject at hand, he improvises, freely associating sources and figures and offers his opinion that the Warren Commission did a great job, except they got "the entrance wounds in the wrong place." What is seen in the interview is a merging of the far right and the far left for entirely different agendas.

Historians differ on whether former U.S. President John F. Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam, continued limited assistance or escalated the war by committing massive numbers of U.S. combat troops. That position, while largely accurate about Kennedy's early years in office, ignores crucial evidence. As the author John Newman shows in his book "JFK and Vietnam," Kennedy turned down numerous requests from his advisers and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send troops to either Laos or Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs and others in the Pentagon felt Kennedy had caved in to the Communists in October 1962 by reaching, over their objections, a secret agreement with Khrushchev not to invade Cuba in exchange for withdrawal of Soviet missiles from the island.

In this article, the authors talk about the article "Beat the Devil," published in the journal "The Nation," which attacked Amnesty International organization for its reporting on Iraqi abuses in Kuwait. Amnesty and Middle East Watch organization both reported that Iraq committed severe abuses, killing hundreds of Kuwaiti civilians. This information was obtained by sending investigators to interview large numbers of refugees. One of the authors has only admiration for Amnesty's efforts to maintain the highest possible standards of accuracy and reliability. Another author also says that all charges against Amnesty are unfounded.

The article presents views of readers of this journal on the comments of America's radical journalist Alexander Cockburn on the role of the U.S. in Iraq's annexation of Kuwait. Cockburn calls for "the conversion of the forces confronting Iraq in the region into a genuinely multilateral force--with diminished U.S. presence--under a genuine U.N. command." This is basically the position of cost-conscious Secretary of State James Baker as he flies around the globe asking for Soviet mine-sweepers, Syrian airplanes and Japanese jeeps. He claims that by confining itself to a call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the gulf, the left implicitly endorses Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

This article presents views of readers on the articles published in the previous issue of the periodical. According to the reader, in its backhanded defense of Stalinism, Alexander Cockburn's March 6, 1989 "Beat the Devil"column resorted to a questionable brand of journalism. Cockburn began by misrepresenting Soviet historian Roy Medvedev, against whom the column directs its main criticism. To another reader, the article on the casualties of Stalinism suggests that a figure of circa 20 million deaths is only put forward by cold warriors or factious Russians.

The article looks at conditions in Iraq as of 2013, ten years after the start of the Iraq War. It cites numerous problems, including violent attacks on civilians, ongoing sectarian conflict between the Sunni and Shiite groups, and government corruption. It says despite the funds allocated by the U.S., relatively little infrastructure reconstruction has taken place. It discusses the 2007 surge by the U.S. military, which the author says was less effective than commonly believed. Topics include the effects of international sanctions on the country in the period before the Iraq War, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and unemployment.

Presents letters to the editor. Readers comment on musician Frederic Chopin's capability of conducting an orchestra with his left hand; Attempt at passage of a bill for granting right to citizenship for Japanese in the United States; Analysis of immigration restrictions on Jews in Palestine.

Presents two letters to the editor regarding appointment at the Pacifica radio network. Denial of any kind of conspiracy; Criticism of Pacifica.

The article reports on some events related with the economic policy of the U.S. At the conference organized by the U.S. Democratic Leadership Council in mid-December in Williamsburg, Virginia the council unfurled a "working draft" of its economic plan for the nation's future. There were talks about the Japanese challenge, the high-tech future and democratic capitalism. Three weeks earlier the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, voted its final approval of "Economic Justice for All," a pastoral letter six years in gestation. Grappling with the realities of the U.S. economy in the mid-1980s the bishops discussed the problems of high structural unemployment, increasingly lopsided income distribution, spreading poverty and depressions.

The article presents information on several socio-political issues. U.S. President Ronald Reagan has shown the decisiveness that has been one of his most admirable features. With the appointment of a bipartisan council of wise men and women, he could emerge from his present difficulties with his political credit not diminished but increased. In the past six years, Reagan has done much to renew the U.S. Lieut. Col. Oliver North's quivering emotion on taking the Fifth was solemnly acknowledged by many on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and some Democrats were ready to join with Reagan in honoring a man who has spent the past few years arming men whose favored pursuit is the raping of women and the disemboweling of infants.

This article presents information about the book "The Character Factory: Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire," by Michael Rosenthal. The anxieties and preoccupations of the imperial nation into which Robert Baden-Powell introduced the Boy Scout movement some seventy-five years ago have a familiar look to them. To the gifts of demagogy and plagiarism Baden-Powell added a keen political sense of alliances. The usefulness of a movement inculcating patriotism and obedience did not escape the generals, politicians and newspaper proprietors who backed Baden-Powell to the hilt.

Given the number of spies who, according to their triumphant captors, have been inflicting immeasurable damage on the United States for the past forty years, it's amazing that the Republic has survived. Of the current batch of espionage suspects none has produced more diverting news coverage than Jonathan Jay Pollard, who achieved a feat previously considered by seasoned observers to be impossible, being arrested on charges of spying for Israel. Hardly had the handcuffs been slapped on his wrists before U.S., newspaper correspondents in Israel were reporting the "shock" and "consternation" of the Israeli government that such a breach of mutual trust should have been wrought.

Presents letters to the editor related to several literary issues. Comments on the article "Beat the Devil," by Alexander Cockburn, published in the July 26, 1993 issue of the journal "The Nation"; Criticism of the books "The Observer," and "The Satanic Verses," by Salman Rushdie; Views on the discussion of the article "Village Voice," by Robert Friedman, discussed by Cockburn.

The article presents information on the Indian leader Paulinho Paiakan and his trial. Paiakan has become a familiar figure far beyond the borders of Brazil. He has toured the world raising money for indigenous causes. He has received a U.N. award for his environmental work. But now Paiakan's stature as an indigenous and environmental leader is under attack. On September 15 in a courtroom in the Amazon town he faces charges of rape. There are in fact many reasons to question the case. The version given by the victim Silvia Ferreira is questionable. The couple to whose house Ferreira made her way immediately after the incident say she was without the mutilations described in the journal Veja.

Presents letters to the editor on several issues. Opinion that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) is like any other army and should be judged by the circumstances surrounding its creation and by the recognized rules of war; Response of the author that the reader is wrong about the IRA; Information that there is only one grant to the Funding Exchange.

The article presents several letters to the editor in response to the article "From Nicaea to Copenhagen," by Alexander Cockburn in the January 4, 2010 issue.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles from past issues such as "Unions, Disunited," "Iraq's Invisible Refugees," and "Beat the Devil," from the March 9, 2009 issue.

The author reflects on Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's assault on radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Basra, Iraq on March 25, 2008. The author comments on Maliki's miscalculating the strength of the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist movement. The author recalls Iraqi's former government minister Ali Allawi, who tried to explain the importance of Sadr to U.S. envoy Paul Bremer in 2004, claiming he represented the Shiites whose lives were ruined.

Two letters to the editor are presented regarding articles in previous issues: "Beat the Devil" by Alexander Cockburn in the July 30/August 6, 2007 issue (a response is also included), and "A War in the Heart of India" by Ramachandra Guha in the July 16/23, 2007 issue.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in previous issues including "Surviving the Climate Crisis," in the May 7, 2007 issue and for two "Beat the Devil" columns that appeared in the May 14 and May 28, 2007 issue whose author, Alexander Cockburn, wrote a response that is included in this issue.

Letters to the editor are presented on articles in previous issues, including "The Myth of Microloans," by Alexander Cockburn, in the November 6, 2006 issue, and a letter from Tom Flynn in the January 1, 2007 issue.

Presents letters to the editor in response to article published in previous editions of "The Nation." Response to the column "Beat the Devil," by Alexander Cockburn in the October 17, 2005 edition; Response to the article "Bread, Roses and the Flood," in the October 3, 2005 edition; Response to the article "The Power of Fusion Politics," by Alyssa Katz, in the September 12, 2005 edition.

Presents letters to the editor in response to article and topics discussed in previous issues. "Beat the Devil," which discussed the support of Democrats for free-trade agreements; Reaction of several readers to the April 18 issue's cover art featuring a cartoon of the late Terri Schiavo.

This article presents letters to the editor referencing articles or topics discussed in previous issues. "Plumb Tuckered," which responds to a Eric Alterman's criticism of Carson Tucker in the August 30/September 6 issue; Alterman's response to the criticism; "Chávez Packs His Court," which responds to Alexander Cockburn's defense of Venzuelan President Hugo Chávez in the July 12 issue; Cockburn's response.

Presents letters to the editor in response to articles that appeared in previous issues of the magazine. Letter commenting on Alexander Cockburn's "Beat the Devil" column, in the April 19, 2004 issue, and a reply by Cockburn; Letter commenting on David Moberg's "A Union of Unions," in the April 19 issue, and a reply by Moberg; Letters commenting on Frances FitzGerald's "The Goldwater Parallel," and a reply by FitzGerald; Letters commenting on John Palatella's book review, "Water's Edge," in the April 12 issue.

Presents letters to the editor in response to articles that appeared in previous issues of the magazine. Letters commenting on Alexander Cockburn's "Beat the Devil" column on the film "The Fog of War," in the February 9, 2004 issue; Reply by Cockburn; Letters commenting on Immanuel Wallerstein's "Soft Multilateralism," in the February 2 issue; Reply by Wallerstein.