In NLR 29, Alexander Cockburn:
‘The Year of Surrendering Quietly’ The correlative to a politics of ‘Anyone but Bush’ has become: not a word against Kerry! Alexander Cockburn on the great silence of progressive America as the Democratic candidate pledges more troops for Iraq, greater fiscal austerity and a strong hand in the war on terror.

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CONTENTS

  1. Alexander Cockburn: The Year of Surrendering Quietly The correlative to a politics of ‘Anyone but Bush’ has become: not a word against Kerry! Alexander Cockburn on the great silence of progressive America as the Democratic candidate pledges more troops for Iraq, greater fiscal austerity and a strong hand in the war on terror.
  2. Eduardo Galeano: Nothingland—or Venezuela? Reviled by Venezuela’s TV channels, survivor of a US-backed coup attempt and a two-month employers’ strike, Hugo Chávez has been given yet another popular mandate—to the ill-concealed dismay of the financial press. Eduardo Galeano’s miniature snapshot of a flourishing Latin American democracy.
  3. Gavan McCormack: Remilitarizing Japan Relations between Washington and Europe have been under the spotlight since 2001; less so those between the US and Japan. Koizumi’s constitution-breaking dispatch of SDF units to Iraq, and American strategies for containing China and re-arming the East Asian rim.
  4. Yoav Peled: Profits or Glory? The Israeli business class’s recipe for a New Middle East—their leader-ship and high-tech sector, fertilized by Gulf oil money and low-cost Arab labour—was premised on a Palestinian settlement, bitterly opposed by an ethno-nationalist Jewish working class. How did Sharon break the deadlock?
  5. Michael Witt: Shapeshifter Formal rigour, social interrogation, poetic intensity: Jean-Luc Godard stands in the premier rank of contemporary artists. In this striking reconceptualization of his work, the movies take their place among sound compositions, TV, texts, videotape and graphic art, as elements of an ongoing multimedia installation.
  6. Benedict Anderson: Jupiter Hill Political education in the dungeons of Barcelona, and the converging tracks of Filipino and Cuban revolutionaries as the 400-year-old Spanish empire enters its final throes. Benedict Anderson concludes his exploration of the late 19th-century world setting of José Rizal’s explosive anti-colonial novels.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Andrew Bacevich on Tommy Franks, American Soldier. Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on the account of their senior field commander, as object lesson in a wider strategic failure.
  2. Michael Löwy on Claude Cahun, Écrits. Breton’s stylish collaborator on the left wing of the Surrealist movement, and her guerrilla art in the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands.
  3. Alan Milward on Jacques Delors, Mémoires. How the birth of a social Europe was thwarted by French Socialists and English Thatcherites alike, as the riptide of marketization headed east.
  4. Achin Vanaik on Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place. Why did India’s post-Independence planning not produce a South Korean economic take-off?