Feudalism

I see the athletes' anti-racist revolt in the U.S. as a remarkable democratic moment, like the Potemkin rebellion of Russian sailors in 1905, or the night of August 4, 1789, when French nobles voted to abolish feudalism. Why? You can see a political process unfolding in the players' minds as they work through this.…

By most accounts, the Cold War came to end in 1991. Soviet defeat equaled the victory of the West. The Washington consensus set the economic terms. Democracies were proliferating after 1991, and on the horizon a rules-based liberal international order was more and more clearly emerging, a global analog to…

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.1. Lynsey Hanley in The Guardianon the route to victory for StarmerLabour will win by changing minds – not pandering to rightwing voters“Since succeeding Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in April,…

The US Federal Reserve currently owns roughly 30 percent of America’s GDP and is on track to own 100 percent, Max Keiser says. “How is that different than feudal lords of the middle ages, who owned a 100 percent of the economy, and everyone living there was basically peasants?”Max talks…

As I am writing this article, South Africa is predicted, following the coronavirus crises, to have an unemployment rate of 50% i.e. 1 in 2 working adults .The country’s lockdown has now been longer than the one in authoritarian China and to make matters worse, South Africa’s credit rating has…

Throughout the ages there has prevailed a distressing symbiosis between religion and violence. The histories of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam are heavily laced with internecine vendettas, inquisitions, and wars. Again and again, religionists have claimed a divine mandate to terrorize and massacre heretics, infidels, and other sinners. Some people…

From the beginning, California promised much. While yet barely a name on the map, it entered American awareness as a symbol of renewal. It was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.—Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream: 1850–1915 In the eyes of both those who live here and…

The director will discuss Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, current developments in the US and the controversy around Gone With The Wind Meena Kumari’s splendid performance as the lovelorn Chhoti Bahu caught in a bad marriage with a zamindar, the indefinable relationship between her and simpleton Bhootnath (Guru Dutt) who has come to…

In the past, fears of job losses from automation were often overstated. Technological progress eliminated some jobs but created others, and often better-paying ones. In the early days of the high-tech revolution, many of the pioneering firms—such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and IBM—were widely praised for treating their lower-level workers as…

Like so many before them, our recent disorders have been rooted in issues of race. But in the longer run, the underlying causes of our growing civic breakdown go beyond the brutal police killing of George Floyd. Particularly in our core cities, our dysfunction is a result of our increasingly…