StephenKMackSD's Blog

Tehran Updates: New Call for March 1 March; Regime Pressed to Free Greens

by MUHAMMAD SAHIMI

26 Feb 2011 23:103 Comments

Video of recent verbal assault on Faizeh Hasehmi, daughter of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, apparently by plainclothes security agents. She is repeatedly addressed as “garbage” and several times as “whore.” The agents tell her, “We will get rid of you and your father,” and shout “Death to the hypocrite” and “Death to Hashemi.” Continue reading →

The uprising in Iran, which began as a protest against the rigged election of 12 June 2009, caught the world by surprise. No one can be certain where this uprising will lead. What is certain is that Iran will never be the same again. Continue reading →

Might we finally be able to dispel the myth of clashing civilizations to make room for new understandings of cultures of democracy? After the collapse of the Soviet Union and sudden vacuum of a political and ideological rival for ‘the west,’ some theorists predicted the end of history, or at least, of ideology. According to Francis Fukuyama, the triumph of liberal capitalism over communist authoritarianism concluded that the principles of human rights, liberal democracy and free markets would shape the destiny of the entire world. Others, however, argued otherwise. Samuel Huntington soon offered an alternative theory in the ‘Clash of civilizations’. Continue reading →

The Invisible Line

Review by Wilbert Rideau

Published: February 21 2011 02:09 | Last updated: February 21 2011 02:09

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, by Daniel J Sharfstein, Penguin, RRP$27.95, 416 pages

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act to allow slave owners to pursue and recapture runaway slaves in states that did not permit slavery. In practice, the Act allowed Southern-sympathisers in the North to swear out a slave warrant on any black person, thereby unintentionally terrorising even free people of colour by putting them at risk of being kidnapped and sold to plantation owners in the South. (Federal court commissioners were paid $10 for finding a defendant to be a slave but only $5 for declaring him free.) A second unintended consequence of the Act was to strengthen the resolve of abolitionists to defeat slavery and deny slave-catchers their quarry. Continue reading →