The debate continues over whether the people of East-Central Europe have benefitted economically from the post-1989 transition. But this discussion of economic winners and losers largely ignores a key demand of the people in the region. Yes, they wanted bananas and travel to the West and propaganda-free media. But they also wanted an end to… Continue reading And Justice for All?
As people near retirement age, they enter the twilight years. Sometimes, they rebel against retirement. They want to keep working. They’re not interested in shuffling out of their office never to return. And if they’re in fact the owner of the workplace, conflicts often ensue. Those who have power rarely want to give up that… Continue reading Retiring the American Empire
When people praise or criticize the centralized planning of the Communist era in East-Central Europe, they focus most of their attention on the “planning” side. The chief vice – or virtue – of this system was its claim to replace the market with a state that could determine prices, dictate supply and demand, own much… Continue reading The Center Holds (Too Much)
In her book Oni (Them), the journalist Teresa Toranska profiled Poland’s hardcore Stalinists, what the Poles used to call beton or concrete. When the book came out in 1985, it became an underground classic. The world of the “true believers” was in its twilight years, and soon it would be extinguished altogether. But with her… Continue reading Them
The Occupy movement began in the United States – at a statue of a bull standing in the heart of Wall Street in New York City. It spread quite rapidly to other places around the country and around the world. In many locations, it built on or connected to pre-existing movements that had been working… Continue reading Occupy Slovenia
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Peter Peters returns as a ruthless politician in a full-length show that combines last year’s Fringe hit The Pundit with its thrilling sequel. “Deflates its target with a sharp satiric pin,” said The Washington Post of last year’s sold-out run. Written by John Feffer Directed by Doug… Continue reading The Politician
Germany, it seems, is in a constant process of debating its own history. In fact, there’s a word in German, historikerstreit, that means “the historians’ dispute.” It refers specifically to a debate at the end of the 1980s about the crimes of Nazi Germany, often in comparison to those of Stalin’s Soviet Union. But the… Continue reading Confronting History
I like my politics the way I like my baseball. I prefer to wait for the highlights reel. Like baseball, political events in Washington, D.C. tend to be long and boring, punctuated by the occasional home run speech or graceful double-play legislative maneuver in Congress. Have you ever wondered why, when you turn on C-Span,… Continue reading American Politics Needs More Drama
I was nearly at the end of a presentation on the North Korean prison camp system, when the last person in the audience grasped the microphone to ask a question. His question was so unexpected that I was literally blindsided. Up to that point, I’d already described the conditions inside North Korea’s prison camps as… Continue reading Competitive Suffering
In April, Serbia and Kosovo signed a landmark normalization treaty. The deal, in what might seem a paradoxical quid pro quo, gives Kosovo authority over the Serbian pocket in the north and greater autonomy to the Serbs living in that region. Despite protests from some Serbs in that area as well as their supporters in… Continue reading Making the Jump Together