The Anti Empire Project with Justin Podur

Stan Cox is back for In Real Time episode 7, where we track the climate crisis and do other environmental talk. Stan reports back from some interviews he did with activists who are working locally on the climate crisis as we head towards two touchstones in November – the COP 27 conference in Egypt, from … Continue reading "In Real Time with Stan Cox 7: A Thousand Rebellious Communities"

How do you turn a local conflict into a world war? Create an intricate set of alliances that guarantees it! Dave takes us on a tour of the construction of the alliance system from the Emperors’ Leagues to the Congress of Berlin to the Triple Alliance to the Reinsurance Treaty and more. How British and … Continue reading "WWC 2 – Causes of World War 1 pt2 – The Alliance System"

CO2 pipelines are proof of the principle that “the greatest source of problems is solutions”. Stan Cox is back to shoot down the notion that CO2 pipelines are going to save us. Justin, meanwhile, has finally read Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic Silent Spring, which as an environmental prof he should have read decades ago. Find … Continue reading "In Real Time with Stan Cox 6: Challenging CO2 Pipelines"

The Scramble for Africa is over. Greedy European powers can now only expand at one another’s expense. Du Bois and Lenin both thought this made a big European war inevitable. But others at the time thought it impossible. After two years we are ready to begin the 20th century with something your history classes never … Continue reading "World War Civ 1: The Intro"

Democracy means “the people rule”. But do the people rule in the “democratic” systems that form governments all over the world? Are these democratic governments less repressive or authoritarian than those without the democratic certification? And does the democratic system of frequent multiparty elections deliver the developmental goods? Talking to Vik Sohonie, former journalist who … Continue reading "AER 114: Why Democracy (TM) Fails the Global South"

An update on the unfolding post-coup in Pakistan. Talking to Waqas Ahmad again about the threat to arrest Imran Khan, the remarkable result of the election in Punjab where PTI won 15/20 seats, the arrest and torture of Shehbaz Gill and many others, the articles in the NYT and Time Magazine about how the coup … Continue reading "AER 113: Pakistan government threatens to arrest Imran Khan"

At the peak of global colonialism no island however small was exempted from European greed. We conclude our Scramble for Oceania series with the scrambles for the many islands in the Pacific. Many of these are still colonies today, given names like “special overseas territory” to hide the fact. ALSO: I’m trying to do loudness … Continue reading "Scramble for Oceania 3: Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia"

Our August 2022 dispatch with Stan Cox. Stan presents us this month with a discussion of the “Inflation Reduction Bill” – is climate change solved? Can Stan finally relax? We also get into a discussion of optimism and pessimism and which one is called for at this moment.

We take advantage of some new scholarship of New Zealand history (Keenan, Wars Without End; Belch, New Zealand Wars; Simons, Soldiers, Scouts and Spies) to give you a hopefully fresh look at the 19th century scramble for colonies in New Zealand, which took the form of British wars against the Maori. Also featured – comparisons … Continue reading "Scramble for Oceania 2: The Land Wars of New Zealand"

The fourth discussion with Stan Cox about his latest dispatch, “They’ll Show Up Armed – Countering Policy Murder and the Rising Violence of the Right”. We talk about a nonviolent march Stan participated in and a few of the historic movement debates about violence and nonviolence that we’ve seen over the decades. And we conclude … Continue reading "In Real Time with Stan Cox 4: A discussion of violence and policy murder"