This essay discusses the frontier borderlands of East Asia from the seventeenth through nineteenth century. I analyze Chinese dynastic political practice, its legacy on early twentieth and twenty-first century geopolitics, as well as the need for American progressive positioning regarding the Uyghurs. In my view, commentary on this issue needs to be firmly rooted in leftist opposition to international human rights abuses, (Pukr) while resisting Sinophobia, US militarism, and Cold War exaggeration and intervention. I highlight these borders by looking at multiple frontiers geographically and thematically. Generally speaking, the regions discussed are covered in terms of the following respective evolving institutional zones: (1) the northeast, Manchuria, eastern Mongolia and Chosŏn Korea, (2) the southwest, Yunnan, Tibet and India (3) the northwest, Turkestan and Xinjiang, and (4) the north, and Outer and Inner Mongolia. I will show how each area had its own set of social, political and economic implications of environmental territory and history “across forest, steppe and mountain.”[1] To understand the problematic nature of American imperialism and Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” is to understand China’s own borderlands and how Uyghurs today, or “people in the middle” get in the way of uncompromising nation-building. More

We are led to believe that history is being made in Israel following the formation of an ideologically diverse government coalition which, for the first time, includes an Arab party, Ra’am, or the United Arab List.

If we are to accept this logic, the leader of Ra’am, Mansour Abbas, is a mover and shaker of history, the same way that Naftali Bennett of the far-right Yamina Party, and Yair Lapid, the supposed ‘centrist’ of Yesh Atid, are also history makers. How bizarre! More

Biden and the Dems may figure they can abandon workers, because who will they turn to? Ignominious Trump? The would-be Republican Reich devoted to worker destruction? Not likely. But they could stay home during the mid-terms and, even more devastatingly for Dems, in 2024. Then we’ll have a one-party autocracy, as one twitter wag put it, with giant bronze statues of Trump everywhere. Remember: Obama’s betrayal of tens of millions of workers to bail out bankers ultimately gave us Trump. And that demagogue waits in the wings. Biden’s broken promises may just give him the opening he needs. More

Antiracism and antisegregation songs cropped up in some very unusual places, not just among urban bohemians, radicals, artistes, and literati, but also in the Southern Appalachians, something I know a little about from having spent 17 years in East Tennessee, just an hour down the road apiece from the Southwest Virginia home of the Carter Family, a main, if not the main, source of both country and folk music. The Carters, as evangelical Christians who believed in the equality of all souls, were no racists, and A. P. Carter formed an unusual friendship with Lesley Riddle, a Piedmont-style guitarist from nearby Kingsport, TN, with whom A. P. traveled the South in search of traditional songs to Carterize. More