Reflections

Will ‘Democracy’ Survive? How? Whether? Hard Questions in Dark Times
 

The Middle East is Heating Up — Again: An Interview with Richard Falk (with C.J. Polychroniou)
 

The Banality of Evil: Language Entrapment or Political Malevolence?
 
It seems a language game is being played. Or is it better understood as a political maneuver suffused with bad intentions?
 

Renaming the 1948 War: Partition, Dispossession, and Fragmentation- On the Politics of Language
 
Controlling the Discourse
 

The UN: Instrumental or Normative?
 
[Prefatory Note: A greatly modified version of this post was published in Middle East Eye on March 12, 2018, under the title, “The UN: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.”]
 
 A Renewed Crisis of Confidence
 

[Prefatory Note: The dysfunctionality of the Gulf Crisis, pitting a coalition of four countries, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt against tiny Qatar, is emblematic of the descent into multi-dimensional chaos, conflict, and coercion that afflicts much of the Middle East. Qatar may be tiny, but it is wealthy and has chosen for itself a somewhat independent path, and for this reason has experienced the wrath of the more reactionary forces operative in the region and world.

A Debate on Peacemaking: Ending Occupation or Apartheid
 

Book Launch: Revisiting the Vietnam War: The Views and Interpretations of Richard Falk, edited by Stefan Andersson, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
 
 
Why the Legal and Political Debate on the Vietnam War Still Matters
 
 

[Prefatory Note: With apologies for this long post, which attempts to situate the struggle for an ethically and ecologically viable political future for the United States and the world in the overheated preoccupation with Trump and Trumpism, which is itself a distraction from the species challenges confronting the whole of humanity at the present time. Many of us, and I include myself, have allowed the side show to become the main attraction, which is itself a reason for struggle against the enveloping darkness.]