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Diary

Michael Taussig: In Colombia, 5 October 2006

... and now in its sixth edition, it has recently been adapted as a telenovela. Meanwhile, Uribe’s Bush-friendly government, enamoured of free-market economics, shreds the health service. ‘The Ministry of Health basically does not exist,’ a British journalist long resident in Colombia tells me as he pulls a long revolver from his coat before examining a ...

Like a Mosquito

Mattathias Schwartz: Drones, 4 July 2013

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield 
by Jeremy Scahill.
Serpent’s Tail, 642 pp., £15.99, May 2013, 978 1 84668 850 8
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... were swept away by the attacks of 11 September. In October 2001, the Washington Post reported that George W. Bush had signed a ‘presidential finding’ that effectively lifted a 25-year ban on assassinations. Although Bill Clinton had previously claimed the authority to mount covert attacks on al-Qaida, ...

Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?

Slavoj Žižek: Love Thy Neighbour, 23 May 2002

... Poland, ‘Concentration Camp’ Erhardt (in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be) snaps back: ‘We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.’ A similar distinction applies to the Enron bankruptcy, which can be seen as an ironic comment on the notion of a risk society. Thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed ...

Check out the parking lot

Rebecca Solnit: Hell in LA, 8 July 2004

Dante's Inferno 
by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders.
Chronicle, 218 pp., £15.99, May 2004, 0 8118 4213 4
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... lose your recent memory after a blow to the head is that you haven’t had time to edit it yet. We edit, but life lies also in the outtakes. And they get grimmer and grimmer. Perhaps what’s terrifying about these new urban landscapes is that they imply the possibility of a life lived as one long outtake. The world seems to be made more and more of stuff ...

Who started it?

Jonathan Steele: Who started the Cold War?, 25 January 2018

The Cold War: A World History 
by Odd Arne Westad.
Allen Lane, 710 pp., £30, August 2017, 978 0 241 01131 7
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... thus came from Washington. In his important 1997 book based on the newly opened Soviet archives, We Now Know, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis took a post-revisionist approach. He argued that Cold War studies should focus on the battle of ideas, and not just on military power, since the Soviet Union fell not as a result of military defeat or an economic ...

In America’s Blood

Deborah Friedell, 24 September 2020

The NRA: The Unauthorised History 
by Frank Smyth.
Flatiron, 295 pp., $28.99, March 2020, 978 1 250 21028 9
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... knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans. According to one of its founders, George Wingate of the New York National Guard, ‘the Civil War had demonstrated with bloody clarity that soldiers who could not shoot straight were of little value. This situation, and the general ignorance concerning marksmanship which I found among our ...

The Big Con

Pankaj Mishra, 4 May 2023

... a months-long curfew. McKinsey’s global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, recently said that we may be living in ‘India’s century’. Praising Modi for ‘implementing policies that have modernised India and supported its growth’, the economist and consultant Nouriel Roubini described the country as a ‘vibrant democracy’. But it is becoming ...

How did Blair get here?

Conor Gearty, 20 February 2003

... British public (on Kosovo). In each of these cases, he has a claim to having been proved right. We should remember this when we ask why he is so eager to fight a war that appears to the majority of his electorate to be unnecessary, highly dangerous and potentially very bloody (including on the home front). Let us suppose ...

I need money

Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
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... get right down to it, I need money quickly. Please get in touch with me this weekend so that we can make some definite arrangements and I can get myself out of the hole.’ Just out of law school, Biden had borrowed money from his father-in-law and bought three houses, renting out one to students (‘you fellows’) from the University of Delaware. Biden ...

Preacher on a Tank

David Runciman: Blair Drills Down, 7 October 2010

A Journey 
by Tony Blair.
Hutchinson, 718 pp., £25, September 2010, 978 0 09 192555 0
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... the Munich conference in 1938. Blair is struck by how unfairly history has treated Chamberlain. ‘We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness.’ Chamberlain knew, according to Blair, that he was dealing with a madman. So why did he try to appease him? How could he get it ...

One Screw Short

Owen Bennett-Jones: Pakistan’s Bomb, 18 July 2019

Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb: A Story of Defiance, Deterrence and Deviance 
by Hassan Abbas.
Hurst, 341 pp., £25, January 2018, 978 1 84904 715 9
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... lacked direct knowledge of what was going on). Having received these assurances, President George H.W. Bush told Bhutto that the US would certify Pakistan as not having a nuclear weapon, in 1989 at least: more progress would be needed to ensure the same certification in 1990. But when 1990 came round, President Ishaq ...

Leur Pays

David Kennedy: Race, immigration and democracy in America, 22 February 2001

Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy 
by Desmond King.
Harvard, 388 pp., £29.95, June 2000, 0 674 00088 9
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... helped to reduce the California Republican Party’s electoral base. Wilson’s example inspired George W. Bush to pursue an altogether different political strategy in Texas, where he actively cultivated the Latino vote. Manifestations of nativism such as Governor Wilson tried to exploit would seem to conform to the model ...

War Therapy

Chase Madar: Victors’ Justice, 22 April 2010

Victors’ Justice: From Nuremberg to Baghdad 
by Danilo Zolo, translated by M.W. Weir.
Verso, 189 pp., £14.99, October 2009, 978 1 84467 317 9
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... aggression, many leading to more fatalities than the invasion of Iraq, is long and depressing. Yet we continue to talk about international law as if we believed in its global, god-like authority. It is a habit that Danilo Zolo would like us to forgo. ‘No one expects the United Nations, or the international criminal ...

The Me Who Knew It

Jenny Diski, 9 February 2012

Memory: Fragments of a Modern History 
by Alison Winter.
Chicago, 319 pp., £19.50, January 2012, 978 0 226 90258 6
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... you may have noticed, see myself. My observation point is from the top of the wall opposite where we are sitting, just below the ceiling, looking down across the room towards me and my father in the chair. I can see me clearly, but what I can’t do is position myself on my father’s knee and become a part of the picture, even though I am in it. I can’t in ...

Omnipresent Eye

Patrick Wright: The Nixon/Mao Show, 16 August 2007

Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao 
by Margaret MacMillan.
Murray, 384 pp., £25, October 2006, 0 7195 6522 7
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... collected after the visit by an official. Zhou eventually came clean about all the rigging: ‘We admit that this was wrong.’ Perhaps there was some imperial precedent for these tricks, but they were surely also descended from earlier Communist ‘techniques of hospitality’, as when the first Western delegations to visit Bolshevik Russia were accused ...

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