ANDREW KORYBKO—
Mexico is therefore in a conundrum because it must urgently deal with the cartels yet there’s no perfect solution for doing so, as the existing “hard” policy has evidently failed while the “soft” one could amount to surrendering the state to their clutches. These groups are also much too enticing of a lever of possible influence against the Mexican government for US intelligence agencies to willingly abandon them, especially since they might one day want to exploit them as Hybrid War instruments against AMLO if his foreign policy becomes too multipolar.
CULTURE & HISTORY
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—But humanising the literal Hitler-lover Eva Braun? For one thing – that is not feminism at all. It is no more pro-feminist than this week’s absurd article from The New York Times: Was This Powerful Chinese Empress a Feminist Trailblazer? No, Empress Cixi (reign 1861-1908) was not. At all. Empress Cixi was a disaster for China during her 50-year rule. Drugs, foot-binding, colonial domination (for which she was the willing puppet), social disarray – all were rampant under her reign. Not every woman in power is a feminist, nor good to nor good for women…but this is simply not the view of the West in 2018.
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JIM MILES—We – the human we – are a single species, all closely related, a large family of 7.5 billion people trying to live on our one habitable planet. Yet we endanger/threaten both ourselves and most of the rest of the planet with extinction in spite of our supposed intelligence and technological wizardry that has helped produce the recent spectacular increase in both the human population and the degradation of the environment.
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GAITHER STEWART—And here, in order to get a handle on Matteo Salvini and the history taking place today in Italy, in Europe, the observer must first step back and consider the context in which political events are unraveling, not only in Italy, but in all of Europe and much of the world. Non-Europeans are familiar with the Catalan bid for autonomy from Madrid; readers will also recall the bloody fight of the Basques for the same, the same battle which over a half century ago shook Belgium as Flemish people fought for independence from Francophone Belgium. The Lega Nord was founded on a similar political demand: secession from Italy and Rome.
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ANDRE DAMON—With one of the world’s most famous political prisoners facing such intolerable conditions, and confronted with such imminent danger, one would expect that all political organizations that consider themselves left-wing would rush to his defense. However, despite initially voicing opposition to Assange’s hounding by US authorities, the entire gamut of the middle-class “left” has either ignored, downplayed or supported Assange’s persecution.