Nearly four decades after his death, the legend of Che Guevara has grown worldwide. In this new book, Alvaro Vargas Llosa separates the myth from the reality of Che's legacy, and shows that Che's ideals were a re-hash of notions about centralized power that have long been the major source of suffering and misery in the underdeveloped world. With testimonies from witnesses of Che's actions, Alberto Vargas Llosa's detailed account of the "real Che" sets the record straight by exposing the delusion at the heart of the Che phenomenon. Vargas Llosa shows that Che's legacy--making the law subservient to the most powerful, crushing any and all dissent, and concentrating wealth under the guise of "social equality"--is not the solution to poverty and injustice but is the core of the problem.
Besides exposing the dark truths of Che's ideology and actions, "The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty" elaborates on attempts by both the left and right to suppress liberty and examines the manifestation of Latin American spirit throughout the ages, from early indigenous trade to today's enterprising communities overcoming government impediments. In so doing, the book points to the real revolution among the poor--the liberation of individuals from the constraints of state power in all spheres, public and private.
Whether you love or hate Che, "The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty" will not leave you untouched and will provide a powerful, new perspective on how to overcome the challenges facing the Third World.

From the Sons of Liberty to British reformers, Irish patriots, French Jacobins, Haitian revolutionaries and American Democrats, the greatest social movements of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions grew as part of a common, interrelated pattern. In this new transnational history, Micah Alpaugh demonstrates the connections between the most prominent causes of the era, as they drew upon each other's models to seek unprecedented changes in government. As Friends of Freedom, activists shared ideas and strategies internationally, creating a chain of broad-based campaigns that mobilized the American Revolution, British Parliamentary Reform, Irish nationalism, movements for religious freedom, abolitionism, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and American party politics. Rather than a series of distinct national histories, Alpaugh shows how these movements jointly responded to the Atlantic trends of their era to create a new way to alter or overthrow governments: mobilizing massive social movements.

In the forty years after the Revolution of 1789, the peasants and former seigneurs of the isolated and arid region of the Corbieres, Languedoc, fought a protracted battle over the consequences of revolutionary change. Central to this conflict was control of the rough hillsides or garrigues used as sheep pastures, which the poorer peasantry seized and cleared. This social conflict culminated in the murder of two nobles by a band of villagers in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1830. Professor McPhee's book highlights two significant new perspectives on the Revolution of 1789. First, the actions of poorer peasants in massive land-clearance occasioned an impassioned debate about the environmental consequences of uncontrolled tree-felling. Secondly, much of the cleared land was used for vineyards, suggesting the importance of far-reaching changes initiated by the poorest sections of the community.

At the German Armistice, small-scale Allied intervention in Russia (designed to thwart the Germans, save the Czechs, and overthrow the Bolsheviks) had completely failed. But the presence of Allied troops had enabled some White groups to come together, while Allied finance had kept others alive. Now the Great War was over. Were Allied troops to be withdrawn - or reinforced? All would be decided at the coming Peace Conference. But before it even met, Britain had already decided to supply the Whites in South Russia and Siberia, while France had actually launched a military invasion in the Odessa region. The Peace Conference never properly addressed the Russian problem. After President Wilson's final effort to make peace with Moscow had failed, and the Whites had started an advance in Siberia, and French troops, in open mutiny, had abandoned Odessa, the British were left to carry on single-handed. On the main South Russian, Siberian and Baltic fronts, Churchill and Lloyd George now turned the White forces into expendable British pawns in a temporary forward holding operation, designed to contain the Bolshevik inferno within Russia, and burn it out there, and thus give a prostrate Europe time to recover. This medium British intervention (which the Peace Conference had already been carefully warned was doomed to failure) was thus to prolong the Russian civil war, and cause a further 14 million Russian deaths - due not to the hap-hazard fighting, but to starvation, cholera and typhus, in turn due to the ever-growing dislocation within Russia, and its further ruin. Thus were sown the seeds of the Cold War.

The Innocence of Roast Chicken focuses on an Afrikaans/English family in the Eastern Cape and their idyllic life on their grandparents’ farm, seen through the eyes of the little girl, Kate, and the subtle web of relationships that is shattered by a horrifying incident in the mid-1960s.

Scenes from Kate’s early life are juxtaposed with Johannesburg in 1989 when Kate, now married to Joe, a human rights lawyer, stands aside from the general euphoria that is gripping the nation. Her despair, both with her marriage and with the national situation, resolutely returns to a brutal incident one Christmas day when Kate was thrust into an awareness of what lay beneath her blissful childhood.

Beautifully constructed, The Innocence of Roast Chicken is painful, evocative, beautifully drawn and utterly absorbing.

This book examines how the European environmental movement, as part of an emerging European civil society, has impinged on the problem definitions and solution strategies in the European politics of the environment. Examining core case studies in European environmental policy - biodiversity politics (Natura 2000), the politics of genetically modified organisms, Trans-European Transport Networks, and the European politics of climate change - this study, written at the crossroads of social movement, public sphere and political discourse theory, argues that a social movement's most important feature is its 'cognitive praxis', its ability to successfully challenge dominant conceptions of realty and to create new green public spheres. It examines whether 'ecological modernization' is able to solve the tension between economic growth and environmental protection, and to what extent European environmentalism has contributed to the emergence of a green 'normative power Europe'.

The Palestinian national liberation movement - or the Palestinian revolution as it is known in Arabic - emerged during the 1960s as an iconic cause of the global Left. This volume highlights the different practices of international solidarity that characterised this period, and how they shaped and were shaped by the global trajectory of the Palestinian movement. Bringing together scholars with versatile linguistic and interdisciplinary skills, Palestine in the World puts the Palestinian movement into conversation with the models of transnational politics that emerged through the revolutionary period. From participation in a vibrant sphere of intellectual and cultural production, the work of travelling revolutionaries as delegates, volunteers, and militants, and the connected mobilisations that took place in different corners of the world, international solidarity with and from the Palestinian movement was integral to its ascendance on the global stage. By treating the Palestinian revolution as a world phenomenon - with cases from Cuba, France, the US, the GDR, Japan and more - this volume reveals the forms of solidarity that shaped the rise of the movement and their afterlives today. It illuminates the rich connected histories of international solidarity that positioned the Palestinian movement as an iconic anticolonial struggle.

The Spanish Civil War became the pivotal political and cultural event of the 1930s and inspired a generation of writers and artists. This book brings together an unprecedented wealth of historical and literary documents -- British, French, German, North American -- many of which have never before appeared in English translation and offers a full and balanced representation of Nationalist writing. A chronological table of events and glossary of the leading political figures and organisations is included.

This book, first published in 1981, examines the issues inspiring working-class movements after 1848 in France, Germany and Britain, with some consideration also of Austria, Italy, Spain and Russia. It concentrates on the attitudes of the ordinary working men, rather than the ideologies and the leaders, and considers the many different forms and manifestations of their grievances and means of expression. What emerges is the complexity of the connection between economic circumstances and protest, and the existence of wide divergences of behaviour amongst the European working class.

Republicanism and the French Revolution provides a new interpretation of political thought and political economy in France from the death of Louis XVI to the July Revolution of 1830. The clash between modern republicanism and other theories of governing societies, typified by the antagonism between French and British intellectuals, is the background to a thorough reinterpretation of the life and writings of Jean-Baptiste Say, the most famous political economist of the post-revolutionary era.

This book explains Italy's endless political instability and its historical, cultural and economic roots. It also illustrates why, even after the creation of the Italian state, Italy was never really unified. Piero Gobetti described fascism once as the "autobiography" of the Italian nation. This book explains why today it is possible to describe "berlusconism" - a cultural, political and social phenomenon in Italy- as the most recent version of this country's autobiography.

The meaning of the American Revolution has always been a much-contested question, and asking it is particularly important today: the standard, easily digested narrative puts the Founding Fathers at the head of a unified movement, failing to acknowledge the deep divisions in Revolutionary-era society and the many different historical interpretations that have followed. Whose American Revolution Was It? speaks both to the ways diverse groups of Americans who lived through the Revolution might have answered that question and to the different ways historians through the decades have interpreted the Revolution for our own time. As the only volume to offer an accessible and sweeping discussion of the period's historiography and its historians, Whose American Revolution Was It? is an essential reference for anyone studying early American history. The first section, by Alfred F. Young, begins in 1925 with historian J. Franklin Jameson and takes the reader through the successive schools of interpretation up to the 1990s. The second section, by Gregory H. Nobles, focuses primarily on the ways present-day historians have expanded our understanding of the broader social history of the Revolution, bringing onto the stage farmers and artisans, who made up the majority of white men, as well as African Americans, Native Americans, and women of all social classes.

The Cartulary of Premontre offers a full critical edition, consisting of a transcription of the cartulary's 509 charters together with historical notes and apparatus. The thirteenth-century cartulary of the abbey of Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Premontre is one of the few manuscripts to survive from this monastery. Offering a window into daily life in medieval France and to contemporary documentary practices, the cartulary of Premontre is a rich source for the socio-economic and religious history of the Picardy and Champagne regions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The charters contained in the cartulary illuminate how this major northern French abbey functioned as a mother house for the Premonstratensian Order, and how it interacted with people - both elite and non-elite as well as secular and ecclesiastical. It also reveals the complexities of cartulary production within a larger institutional and archival context. In an introductory essay, Heather Wacha and Yvonne Seale consider not only the history of the manuscript and of the abbey of Premontre, but also the cartulary's materiality, its place within the broader field of cartulary studies, and what it shows us about women's roles in contemporary society. In doing so, this volume offers new connections between the field of cartulary studies and feminist studies.

For over a decade, Al Jazeera (Arabic) occupied an unprecedented position among Arab audiences and families. Its attractive and daring news coverage has inspired millions of Arabs, and led other news channels to follow suit by changing their reporting narrative and presentational style. However, in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings in 2011, the close adoption of the Arab uprisings in general, and the Egyptian one in particular, made the channel fall into the eye of the public storm through its extensive 24-hour coverage. This book assesses whether the channel systematically provided a platform for certain ideologies or ignored others, and if and how Al Jazeera's language had shifted after the 2011 Arab uprisings. It also explores the rationale behind adopting particular editorial principles featured in the analyses, and scrutinises the findings within the framework of media, religion and democratisation.

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals. In these they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement's afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society, in order to ask: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and indigenisation of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context; and, importantly, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Africa teach us about the practice of critical theory more generally?

The Middle East has been the arena of three cataclysmic events since 1979 - the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. All of these have brought about major changes in the inter-regional politics and relations between Middle East countries and the outside world. This book seeks to analyze the impact of these events on Iranian-Arab relations. The authors examine Iran's relations with the Arab states of the Gulf in detail and sheds light on the changing patterns of Iranian-Egyptian and Lebanese relations.

An Egyptian diplomat-turned-scholar provides a detailed analysis of events from the fall of Mubarak through the aftermath of the 2013 military move to oust Egypt's first democratically elected president. The Arab Spring caught the world by surprise and was truly inspiring. Then, many watched with bewilderment as the process unfolded in unforeseen directions. This lively and well-documented book tells the story of events in Egypt from the end of the Mubarak era in 2010 through the revolution in 2011 and the military interference in the summer of 2013. Written from an insider's perspective, it discusses what occurred and analyzes the motives of the parties involved, putting each incident in context so the reader can see-and understand-the big picture. The author's background as an Egyptian diplomat provides insights that fuel a nuanced and richly detailed study. Among other topics, the book sheds light on the Egyptian military and economy, the life and written opinions of the military leader Al Sisi, and ties between the United States and the Egyptian armed forces. It reveals evidence of a conspiracy against the first elected civilian administration in Egypt, details the conflict between the Islamists and the deep state, and examines the rise and fall of political Islam. A final chapter speculates about possible scenarios for the future of Egypt. Answers a broad array of questions posed by those who continue to be puzzled by the tangled web of events that occurred during this period Approaches the cause of Egypt's rebellion from multiple angles, including the military, domestic political parties, political Islam, and the greater context of the Arab Spring Looks at why the Islamists came out victorious and what precipitated a shift in public sentiment that induced Egyptians to take to the streets in opposition to the leader they'd elected one year earlier Analyzes whether the military interference was premeditated and whether there was a conspiracy against the nation's first civilian administration

Why did the 1917 American Red Cross Mission to Russia include more financiers than medical doctors? Rather than caring for the victims of war and revolution, its members seemed more intent on negotiating contracts with the Kerensky government, and subsequently the Bolshevik regime. In a courageous investigation, Antony Sutton establishes tangible historical links between US capitalists and Russian communists. Drawing on State Department files, personal papers of key Wall Street figures, biographies and conventional histories, Sutton reveals: the role of Morgan banking executives in funneling illegal Bolshevik gold into the US; the co-option of the American Red Cross by powerful Wall Street forces; the intervention by Wall Street sources to free the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whose aim was to topple the Russian government; the deals made by major corporations to capture the huge Russian market a decade and a half before the US recognized the Soviet regime; and, the secret sponsoring of Communism by leading businessmen, who publicly championed free enterprise. "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution" traces the foundations of Western funding of the Soviet Union. Dispassionately, and with overwhelming documentation, the author details a crucial phase in the establishment of Communist Russia. This classic study - first published in 1974 and part of a key trilogy - is reproduced here in its original form. (The other volumes in the series include "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler" and a study of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "1933 Presidential election in the United States").

The portrayal of Islamic movements as a tide of religious fanaticism threatening the West, and major participants in the coming "clash of civilizations", has provoked a multifaceted debate of great significance to the future of international relations. This text argues that political Islam's desire to restore a culture distorted by colonization does not necessarily compromise its progress to more democracy and greater tolerance. From Rabat to Gaza, through Algiers and Cairo, the author carried out his enquiry through interviews with prominent Islamists, and he allows them to speak for themselves in the book. Among the issues addressed are the relationship between Islam and modernity, Islamism and women, and questions of violence.

Political violence in Northern Ireland began in the late 1960s and has been part of life there and to a lesser extent in the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain for nearly three decades. The crisis has perplexed politicians, strained democratic institutions, and has placed British policies under the microscope of international scrutiny. The volume of up-to-date essays places recent developments in context. It looks at the ideology of republicans and unionists, the impediments to peace, problems of gender and citizenship, the impact of partition on the island's economy, how The Troubles have been filtered through the press, and the impact of overspill violence in the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain. This study adds an important fresh texture to the ongoing discussion of political violence and the problems in Northern Ireland.

'One the foremost writers and participants in the Kurdish women's movement' - Harsha Walia The Kurdish women's movement is at the heart of one of the most exciting revolutionary experiments in the world today: Rojava. Forged over decades of struggle, most recently in the fight against ISIS, Rojava embodies a radical commitment to ecology, democracy and women's liberation. But while striking images of Kurdish women in military fatigues proliferate, a true understanding of the women's movement remains elusive. Taking apart the superficial and Orientalist frameworks that dominate, Dilar Dirik offers instead an empirically rich account of the women's movement in Kurdistan. Drawing on original research and ethnographic fieldwork, she surveys the movement's historical origins, ideological evolution, and political practice over the past forty years. Going beyond abstract ideas, Dirik locates the movement's culture and ideology in its concrete work for women's revolution in the here and now. Taking the reader from the guerrilla camps in the mountains to radical women's academies and self-organised refugee camps, readers around the world can engage with the revolution in Kurdistan, both theoretically and practically, as a vital touchstone in the wider struggle for a militant anti-fascist, anti-capitalist feminist internationalism.