The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt's conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the "disturber of the peace" that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings.

In 1945, in one of her...

As President Bush prepares to deliver his last State of the Union address tomorrow night, a legion of pundits, politicians and, yes, historians is already assigning the 43rd president his final place in history. These commentators, and especially those who confidently assert that Bush is the "worst president in history," would do well to remember the British historian C.V. Wedgwood's observation: "History is written backward but lived forward. Those who know the end of the story can never know what it was like at the time." We all know -- or think we do -- what things are like in our union now, with an economy hitting a rough patch and a foreign war grinding on with no end in sight. But we don't know how the story will turn out.

Bush is admittedly so unpopular that even Republican presidential candidates rarely mention him, preferring instead to compare themselves to the GOP's great icon, Ronald Reagan. We both actually think that Bush bears some...

[Professor Timothy Daniels teaches anthropology at Hofstra University. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia and Malaysia.]

Former President Suharto, long-time dictator of Indonesia, has passed away on January 27, 2008. He came to power during a shadowy “coup” in 1965 which resulted in the charismatic first president, Bung Sukarno, being unseated and imprisoned and in the massacre of thousands of people in what came to be known as the “year of living dangerously.” Bung Sukarno was a leader of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War era and architect of an unifying ideology (nasakom) which sought to include nationalists, religious organizations, and communists—the three main streams of the anti-colonial movement—within national governing units. US political officials viewed Bung Sukarno as a threat to the “free” and “democratic” First World and Suharto, an opportunistic lower-ranked colonel, as the military strongman to keep Indonesia under western...

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American Empire Project series by Metropolitan Books in March 2008.]

Nguyen Van Tu asks if I'm serious. Am I really willing to tell his story -- to tell the story of the Vietnamese who live in this rural corner of the Mekong Delta? Almost 40 years after guerrilla fighters in his country threw the limits of U.S. military power into stark relief -- during the 1968 Tet Offensive -- we sit in his rustic home, built of wood...

[Brantly Womack is Professor of Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia and author of China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry.]

In 1944 President Franklin Roosevelt dispatched vice president Henry A. Wallace to meet with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and offer him the “return” of Indochina to China. Chiang wisely declined the offer. [1]

Although the idea was as far from the history and realities of East Asia as a comet passing overhead, it was not without its reason. The idea stemmed from Roosevelt’s general anti-colonial views and his awareness that the Second World War would provide an opportunity to transform world political geography. Moreover, relations between China and Vietnam had never been so close as in the previous half century. Oppression by Western imperialism had for the first time in their long intertwined history given China and Vietnam a common threat. Vietnam provided the base for most of Sun Yat-sen’s numerous unsuccessful...

[Nakazawa Keiji interviewed by Asai Motofumi, Translated by Richard H. Minear. Nakagawa Keiji is the creator of the original Barefoot Gen manga series. Four volumes are available in English. Asai Motofumi is President of the Hiroshima Peace Institute. Richard Minear is Professor of History, UMass Amherst and a Japan Focus Associate. He edited and translated Hiroshima: Three Witnesses.]

In August 2007 I asked Nakazawa Keiji, manga artist and author of Barefoot Gen, for an interview. Nakazawa was a first grader when on August 6, 1945 he experienced the atomic bombing. In 1968 he published his first work on the atomic bombing—Struck by Black Rain [Kuroi ame ni utarete]—and since then, he has appealed to the public with many works on the atomic bombing. His masterpiece is Barefoot Gen, in which Gen is a stand-in for Nakazawa himself. His works from Barefoot Gen on convey much bitter anger and sharp criticism toward a postwar Japanese politics that has never sought to affix...

[This passage is taken from Mary L. Dudziak, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2008). Cross-posted at Balkinization.]

Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday is celebrated today, and civil rights litigator Thurgood Marshall, were rivals in the 1960s, and are often thought of through the lens of conflict within the civil rights community. But there were important moments when the two came together. It was not just that the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund represented King, for example during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1964, Marshall, who generally supported legal change rather than civil disobedience, himself demonstrated on behalf of King’s philosophy of social change.

The occasion was the 1964 triennial national convention of the Episcopal Church, held in St. Louis, Missouri. Marshall was the first African American delegate from the New York diocese to attend. The conference honored Martin...

[Giovanni Arrighi is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, his books include The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times.]

One of the great myths of Western social science is that national states and their organization in an interstate system are European inventions. In reality, except for a few states that were the creation of European colonial powers (most notably, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines), the most important states of East Asia–from Japan, Korea, and China to Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Kampuchea–were national states long before any of their European counterparts. What’s more, they had all been linked to one another, directly or through the Chinese center, by trade and diplomatic relations and held together by a shared understanding of the principles, norms, and rules that regulated their mutual interactions as a world among other worlds....

For more than three decades, historical memory controversies have been fought over Japanese school textbook content in both the domestic and international arenas. In these controversies, Japanese textbook contents, which are subject to Ministry of Education examination and revision of content and language prior to approval for use in the public schools, repeatedly sparked denunciations by Chinese and Korean authorities and citizens with respect to such issues as the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women, and coerced labor. In 2007, the most intense controversy has pitted the Ministry of Education against the residents and government of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa. The issue exploded in March 2007 with the announcement that all references to military coercion in the compulsory mass suicides (shudan jiketsu) of Okinawan residents during the Battle of Okinawa were to be eliminated. The announcement triggered a wave of anger across Okinawan society leading to the mass demonstration...