Review of Douzinas and Zizek: The Idea of Communism

After the revelations of the outrages of the Cultural Revolution and the Gulag system, together with the 1989 collapse of the Soviet system, it seemed that Communism as a political force was ended. Even those who had proclaimed themselves Communists deserted what must surely be a sinking ship. The proclamation of the end of history was, fundamentally, the proclamation that Communism had finally been dispatched and the liberal or neoliberal consensus established around the world.

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Review of Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants

Chinese society has traditionally depended to a considerable extent upon the work of the philosopher Confucius (Gong-Zu to the Chinese). In something of a simplification of his work, Confucianism is presented as a series of relationships which govern every action an individual can perform within society and which regulate every aspect of life because Chinese, living in a heavily populated state, are constantly in interaction with other people. There are five such relationships and they cover spousal relationships, parents and children, ruler and subjects and so forth.

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Review of Zizek Presents Trotsky: Terrorism and Communism

Written and published in 1920 in the midst of the threat of invasion by dozens of counter-revolutionary powers and with the dislocation and desperation of the October Revolution scarcely having settled, Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism was a direct retort to the work of Karl Kautsky. Kautsky, though little known today, was then a figure of some power and authority who was the leading German social democrat of the day: Kautsky’s arguments were that a revolution could be effected within the existing parliamentary democracy, that there would be no need to pre-empt revolutionary action before it spontaneously erupted and that no violence or terror should be used against the counter-revolutionaries.

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Review of Mackay’s The Domino That Stood

Participants in the acts of history can have a unique perspective on events and provide details that would pass by outsiders. However, it is important when evaluating the accounts that they provide to take into account the biases that might have influenced those accounts and to analyse their relationship with objective assessments (if such things are possible) of the past.

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Review of Chynoweth’s Hunting Terrorists in the Jungle

I will preface this review by observing that I have always been grateful that no government of my country has ever forced (or even asked) me to hold a gun for them and, also, that no one has directly shot at me (although I have been in a few places where guns have been fired in anger). I am aware that one of the reasons for this is the sacrifices made by those who went before me, not least those who were obliged like my father to undergo national service in the years following the Second World War.

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Review of Past Continuous by Nguyen Khai

The achievements of the revolutionary war in Vietnam include not just self-determination after a century of oppression by foreign colonialists but the freeing of people to fulfil their potential and the provision of state support for education, health, childcare, and care for the elderly. In other words, just as is the case for most modern household technology, it freed women from the tyranny of domestic servitude.

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What Is Post-Colonialism?

Post-colonialism is a period of time occurring after colonization of a country by a foreign power has ended. Depending in part on the nature of the decolonization process, the immediate post-colonial period may be more or less traumatic for the people involved.

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Review of Bamboo Palace: Discovering the Lost Dynasty of Laos

One of the less well-publicized results of the Lao revolution of 1975 was the elimination of the country’s long-standing royal family. It was fairly well established that the king and his remaining associates had died in a prison somewhere in the remote north of the country but the exact details were not available. Determining these details and sharing them with the world becomes the self-appointed task of travel writer Christopher Kremmer in his book Bamboo Palace, which seems to occur to him after he had already arrived in Laos and was casting about for some theme to his writing.

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Vietnam’s Move towards the East Asian Economic Model

The collapse of the Soviet Union as a superpower and the emergence of China as an economic giant caused remaining Communist states in Southeast Asia to adopt economic opening programs of their own. In Vietnam, the policy was known as ‘doi moi’ and, as in China, it combines an open door approach to inward investment with retention of political control by the central Communist party

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Review of Zizek’s First as Tragedy, then as Farce

The bad boy of philosophy, Slavoj Zizek arouses strong emotions wherever he goes, relentlessly talkative and so full of provocative opinions they appear to burst out of him as if by some sort of mechanistic device beyond his control. When, as is often the case, he talks or writes about the psychoanalysis of Lacan or the philosophy of Hegel and Marx, his impact is somewhat limited to the now limited circle of people able and willing enough to understand what he is saying to be outraged or inspired.

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