1000 Days of Revolution: Chilean Communists on the Lessons of Popular Unity 1970-73

1000 Days of Revolution: Chilean Communists on the Lessons of Popular Unity 1970-73
Author: Kenny Coyle
Publisher: Praxis Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2018-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781899155071

1000 Days of Revolution contains nine chapters, each one written by a prominent Chilean communist as part of their party's attempt to self-critically analyse the reasons for the defeat of President Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government from 1970-1973. The Chilean experience was a sustained attempt to advance to socialism through a non-armed revolutionary strategy based on a constitutionally elected government. The conclusions reached in this volume reject both these extremes. Specifically, they stress the confirmation of two fundamental insights of Marxism. First, that the left cannot simply take over the existing machinery of government and the state from the existing ruling class and use it for different ends. Second that no successful revolutionary movement can succeed unless it can consolidate and maintain a political majority in society. Key economic changes by Popular Unity, above all the nationalisation of the copper industry, sent shockwaves to Wall Street and the White House, where they feared that the Chilean experiment would be repeated elsewhere unless it was stopped - at any cost. Starting with just 36% of the vote in the 1970 presidential elections, Popular Unity faced constant challenges to create and sustain a political majority and at the same time overcome the resistance from within the army, political elite and big business. It also faced the economic and political sabotage by the United States, leading to the coup on 11 September 1973, that cost Allende and thousands of his supporters their lives.

Days of Revolution

Days of Revolution
Author: Mary Elaine Hegland
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804788855

Outside of Shiraz in the Fars Province of southwestern Iran lies "Aliabad." Mary Hegland arrived in this then-small agricultural village of several thousand people in the summer of 1978, unaware of the momentous changes that would sweep this town and this country in the months ahead. She became the only American researcher to witness the Islamic Revolution firsthand over her eighteen-month stay. Days of Revolution offers an insider's view of how regular people were drawn into, experienced, and influenced the 1979 Revolution and its aftermath. Conventional wisdom assumes Shi'a religious ideology fueled the revolutionary movement. But Hegland counters that the Revolution spread through much more pragmatic concerns: growing inequality, lack of development and employment opportunities, government corruption. Local expectations of leaders and the political process—expectations developed from their experience with traditional kinship-based factions—guided local villagers' attitudes and decision-making, and they often adopted the religious justifications for Revolution only after joining the uprising. Sharing stories of conflict and revolution alongside in-depth interviews, the book sheds new light on this critical historical moment. Returning to Aliabad decades later, Days of Revolution closes with a view of the village and revolution thirty years on. Over the course of several visits between 2003 and 2008, Mary Hegland investigates the lasting effects of the Revolution on the local political factions and in individual lives. As Iran remains front-page news, this intimate look at the country's recent history and its people has never been more timely or critical for understanding the critical interplay of local and global politics in Iran.

A Thousand Days

A Thousand Days
Author: Arthur Meier Schlesinger (Jr.)
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin
Total Pages: 1112
Release: 1965
Genre: Politics, Practical
ISBN:

"The Special Assistant to President Kennedy describes the historic events in which John F. Kennedy participated during his three years in the White House." --

Days of God

Days of God
Author: James Buchan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1416597824

A myth-busting insider’s account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that destroyed US influence in the country and transformed the politics of the Middle East and the world. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was one of the seminal events of our time. It inaugurated more than thirty years of war in the Middle East and fostered an Islamic radicalism that shapes foreign policy in the United States and Europe to this day. Drawing on his lifetime of engagement with Iran, James Buchan explains the history that gave rise to the Revolution, in which Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters displaced the Shah with little diffi­culty. Mystifyingly to outsiders, the people of Iran turned their backs on a successful Westernized government for an amateurish religious regime. Buchan dispels myths about the Iranian Revolution and instead assesses the historical forces to which it responded. He puts the extremism of the Islamic regime in perspective: a truly radical revolution, it can be compared to the French or Russian Revolu­tions. Using recently declassified diplomatic papers and Persian-language news reports, diaries, memoirs, interviews, and theological tracts, Buchan illumi­nates both Khomeini and the Shah. His writing is always clear, dispassionate, and informative. The Iranian Revolution was a turning point in modern history, and James Buchan’s Days of God is, as London’s Independent put it, “a compelling, beautifully written history” of that event.

A Thousand Days

A Thousand Days
Author: Arthur M. Schlesinger
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 1117
Release: 2002-06-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0547524501

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner: “Of all the Kennedy books . . . this is the best.” —Time Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy throughout his presidency—from the long and grueling campaign to Kennedy’s tragic and unexpected assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. In A Thousand Days, Schlesinger combines intimate knowledge as one of President Kennedy’s inner circle with sweeping research and historic context to provide a look at one of the most legendary presidential administrations in American history. From JFK’s battle with Nixon during the 1960 election, to the seemingly charmed inaugural days, to international conflict and domestic unrest, Schlesinger takes a close and fond, but unsparing, look at Kennedy’s tenure in the White House, covering well-known successes, like his involvement in the Civil Rights movement; infamous humiliations, like the Bay of Pigs; and often overlooked struggles, like the Skybolt missile mix-up, alike. Praised by the New York Times as “at once a masterly literary achievement and a work of major historical significance,” A Thousand Days is not only a fascinating look at an American president, but a towering achievement in historical documentation.

Lenin 2017

Lenin 2017
Author: V. I. Lenin
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2017-09-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 178663189X

One hundred years after the Russian Revolution, Žižek shows why Lenin’s thought is still important today V. I. Lenin’s originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, in this new study and collection of Lenin’s original texts, Slavoj Žižek argues that his true greatness can be better grasped in the last two years of his political life. Russia had survived foreign invasion, embargo and a terrifying civil war, as well as internal revolts such as the one at Kronstadt in 1921. But the new state was exhausted, isolated and disorientated. As the anticipated world revolution receded into the distance, new paths had to be charted if the Soviet state was to survive. With his characteristic brio and provocative insight, Žižek suggests that Lenin’s courage as a thinker can be found in his willingness to face this reality of retreat unflinchingly. In today’s world, characterized by political turbulence, economic crises and geopolitical tensions, we should revisit Lenin’s combination of sober lucidity and revolutionary determination.

The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran

The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran
Author: Charles Kurzman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2005-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674039834

The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a top-secret CIA analysis issued in October 1978. One hundred days later the shah--despite his massive military, fearsome security police, and superpower support was overthrown by a popular and largely peaceful revolution. But the CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Charles Kurzman reveals in this penetrating work; Iranians themselves, except for a tiny minority, considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred. Revisiting the circumstances surrounding the fall of the shah, Kurzman offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general. As one Iranian recalls, The future was up in the air. Through interviews and eyewitness accounts, declassified security documents and underground pamphlets, Kurzman documents the overwhelming sense of confusion that gripped pre-revolutionary Iran, and that characterizes major protest movements. His book provides a striking picture of the chaotic conditions under which Iranians acted, participating in protest only when they expected others to do so too, the process approaching critical mass in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Only when large numbers of Iranians began to think the unthinkable, in the words of the U.S. ambassador, did revolutionary expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A corrective to 20-20 hindsight, this book reveals shortcomings of analyses that make the Iranian revolution or any major protest movement seem inevitable in retrospect.

Beyond the Vanguard

Beyond the Vanguard
Author: Marian E. Schlotterbeck
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2018-05-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520970179

For a thousand days in the early 1970s, Chileans experienced revolution not as a dream but as daily life. Alongside Salvador Allende’s attempt to democratically bring about a socialist regime, new understandings of the meaning of revolutionary change emerged. In her groundbreaking book Beyond the Vanguard, Marian E. Schlotterbeck explores popular politics in Chile in the decade before Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and provides an in-depth account of how working-class people transformed the existing social order by embracing radical politics. Schlotterbeck eloquently examines the lost opportunities for creating a democratic revolution and the ways that the legacy of this period continues to resonate in Chile and beyond. Learn more about the author and this book in an interview published online with Jacobin.

Year One of the Russian Revolution

Year One of the Russian Revolution
Author: Victor Serge
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 554
Release: 2017-01-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1608466094

An eyewitness account of the world-changing uprising—from the author of Memoirs of a Revolutionary. “A truly remarkable individual . . . an heroic work” (Richard Allday of Counterfire). Brimming with the honesty and passionate conviction for which he has become famous, Victor Serge’s account of the first year of the Russian Revolution—through all of its achievements and challenges—captures both the heroism of the mass upsurge that gave birth to Soviet democracy and the crippling circumstances that began to chip away at its historic gains. Year One of the Russian Revolution is Serge’s attempt to defend the early days of the revolution against those, like Stalin, who would claim its legacy as justification for the repression of dissent within Russia. Praise for Victor Serge “Serge is one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes.” —Susan Sontag, MacArthur Fellow and winner of the National Book Award “His political recollections are very important, because they reflect so well the mood of this lost generation . . . His articles and books speak for themselves, and we would be poorer without them.” —Partisan Review “I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be found in his attitude to the truth.” —John Berger, Booker Prize–winning author “The novels, poems, memoirs and other writings of Victor Serge are among the finest works of literature inspired by the October Revolution that brought the working class to power in Russia in 1917.” —Scott McLemee, writer of the weekly “Intellectual Affairs” column for Inside Higher Ed

Maternal and Child Nutrition

Maternal and Child Nutrition
Author: Jatinder Bhatia
Publisher: Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2013
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3318023876

How to prevent and manage low birth weight Growth and nutrition during the fetal period and the first 24 months after birth are important determinants of development in early childhood. Optimal nutrition and health care of both the mother and infant during these first 1000 days of an infant's life are closely linked to growth, learning potential and neurodevelopment, in turn affecting long-term outcomes. Children with low birth weight do not only include premature babies, but also those with intrauterine growth restrictions who consequently have a very high risk of developing metabolic syndrome in the future. Epidemiology, epigenetic programming, the correct nutrition strategy and monitoring of outcomes are thus looked at carefully in this book. More specifically, two important nutritional issues are dealt with in depth: The first being the prevention of low birth weight, starting with the health of adolescent girls, through the pre-pregnancy and pregnancy stages and ending with lactation. The second point of focus concerns the nutritional follow-up and feeding opportunities in relation to dietary requirements of children with low birth weight.