Macedonia’s Foreign Policy Between Two Suns

• by: Biljana Vankovska

North Macedonia – en.wikipedia.org

03-15-2025 ~ At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Macedonian Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski was the only European to applaud the speech by US Vice President JD Vance. From Munich, Mickoski went to Washington, DC, for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). At CPAC, he said that Macedonia could be used by the United States to manoeuvre against Russia and China. A small country, in other words, offered itself as the battlefield for the great powers.

Upon his return to Skopje, journalists asked whether this marked a shift in Macedonia’s foreign policy, which had so far been dictated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU). His response was: ‘We are among the first to take to the pitch. That is my style; there is no second chance to make a first impression. We are on the pitch, and others can come behind us. We must find a place for ourselves in the new normal.’

But what exactly is the ‘new normal’ for a country on the periphery of Europe? Until recently, Macedonia had no major foreign policy dilemmas simply because it had no foreign policy! Elites followed Brussels’s directives. NATO and EU membership became substitutes for the former socialist ideology – more than that, they became a secular religion, a dogma that no one dared to question. Just before joining NATO, following an unconstitutional and imposed change of the country’s constitution and name, a representative of the ruling coalition (later a deputy prime minister) stated: ‘For us, the sun rises in the West!’ But now, it seems there are two suns – both rising in the West – leaving small and dependent states facing an impossible choice.

Trump’s ‘second coming’ has shattered the illusion of Western unity, exposing deep fractures within what was once considered a monolithic Atlantic bloc. His (still hypothetical and undeveloped) peace plan for Ukraine has thrown NATO into disarray—if not outright paralysis. Some analysts already speak of a post-NATO world. Others describe the alliance as a ‘zombie’ structure, a relic of the first Cold War, while still others predict its partial or complete transformation. NATO’s fate, like so much else, now hinges entirely on the will of the United States. Read more

Trump’s Address To Congress Highlights The Absence Of Opposition

• by: John P. Ruehl

John P. Ruehl – Source: Independent Media Institute

03-12-2025 ~ The relentless resistance that defined Trump’s first term has faded into an unsettling quiet. A perfect storm of factors has granted him relatively unchecked power to push drastic domestic and international changes.

During his address to Congress on March 4, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump faced brief heckling from Democratic Representative AI Green and scattered jeers from his colleagues. But the overwhelming response was silence, reflective of the reality that opposition to Trump has sharply weakened, even as his administration pushes sweeping domestic and international policy upheaval.

The opening weeks of his first term in January 2017 were met with fierce resistance, and not just from combative Democrats. People came together to protest against Trump’s immigration policies and his proposed travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. Republican politicians openly defied him amid constant media scrutiny. Clashes with the so-called “deep state” due to intelligence leaks escalated when the FBI publicly confirmed an investigation into the Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election. These combined tensions defined his first term, culminating in him being temporarily banned from most major social media platforms and leading to widespread condemnation and isolation after the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

Now, at the start of his second term, opposition is notably subdued. The Women’s March that drew millions in 2017, becoming “the largest single-day public demonstration in U.S. history,” according to the New York Times, seems to have “lost its luster” during his second term. The February 5 protest against Trump and Elon Musk’s policies drew a low turnout, mostly confined to liberal enclaves, and the 2025 Oscars—once a stage for political grandstanding—avoided directly critiquing the president. Even Green’s disruption caused dissent within his own party, with 10 Democrats censuring him the next day.

Political and institutional fatigue, shifting cultural dynamics, and strategic alignment by corporations, billionaires, politicians, and other public figures have blunted resistance, leaving the Trump administration with fewer obstacles as it pushes forward with its agenda.

One major factor is the weakness and division within the Democratic Party, preventing grassroots progressives from working with top-level establishment Democrats. After years of Biden attempting to balance the party’s competing factions, tensions rose significantly following his response to the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas. Trump’s victory a year later—securing both the electoral college and popular vote—has only deepened these fractures, fueling a blame game that contrasts with the unity following Trump’s narrower 2016 election victory. Read more

What Was It Like For Our Sapiens Ancestors To Meet And Mix With Cousin Species?

• by: Deborah Barsky

Deborah Barsky

03-12-2025 ~ Between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago in Eurasia, the disappearance of hominin species or their biocultural assimilation with anatomically modern humans is one of the biggest questions in prehistory today.

Until now, at least 14 different species have been assigned to the genus Homo since it emerged in Ethiopia some 2.8 million years ago revealing branching evolutionary stories of survival, intermixing, and extinctions. Archaeology is increasingly allowing us to glimpse into one of those epochs, from 50,000 to 35,000 years ago—the period of transition between the Middle and the Upper Paleolithic eras when modern humans emerged as the last representative of our genus on the planet.

In 2017, new finds from the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco were published, indicating that our species—H. sapiens—appeared on the scene as early as 300,000 years ago. Spreading into Eurasia l00,000 years later, these early anatomically modern humans rubbed shoulders with Neandertals and Denisovans, and may also have had encounters with five other distinct hominin populations that have only very recently been identified, including H. floresiensis, H. luzonensis, H. longi, and H. juluensis in Asia and Nesher Ramla Homo in the Levant.

Given what we know from historical events that chronicle human population exchanges through time, many archeologists question whether the “disappearances” of these other human lineages might have had anything to do with their coming into contact with modern humans.

Taking an example of human interactions that took place more than half a millennium ago helps us to understand how these interactions can deeply impact the human condition on multiple levels, many of which would be incomprehensible in the prehistoric archeological record without written documents. Read more

Practicing Civility In the Face Of Fascism Is Like Signing One’s Own Death Warrant

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

C.J. Polychroniou

03-12-2025 ~ One confronts fascism head-on and based on solidarity and from a position of strength.

The United States is a country with a long history of violence and oppression against poor people, women and minorities. And by extension, with authoritarianism. The fact that the Trump presidency poses today a fundamental threat to democracy and social progress is not an unprecedented phenomenon in U.S. history. There have been many other U.S. presidents with anti-democratic approaches while a strong case can be made that minority rule has been the rule rather than the exception in the governing of the nation.

Indeed, for the most part, oligarchy has always had the upper hand in U.S. politics and the economy. After all, this is a nation that was founded on settler colonialism and the elimination of the native and relied on slavery as an engine of economic growth while it never managed to get rid of its racist roots. By the same token, resistance by enslaved people and struggles for emancipation and movements fighting for civil and social rights have also shaped the course of U.S. history. But history is not a linear progression. Every time social progress was made, the forces of reaction plotted to turn back the clock. This is the most obvious underlying intent of the Trump phenomenon and of the far-right movements and parties surging all over the world, now with the support of the world’s richest person, Trump’s Nazi-buddy Elon Musk.

At this point, the key question is this: what can be done to defeat right-wing extremism? In the U.S., defending democratic values and the rights of people from Trump’s neo-fascist politics, especially with the return of white supremacy to mainstream politics, a philosophy of resistance and rebellion needs to operate mainly outside the confines of the liberal political establishment. It is crystal clear that the Democratic Party is incapable of fighting Trump. The sight of Congressional Democrats to Trump’s joint address to Congress holding pathetic little signs and appearing in pink as signs of protest should speak volumes of the devastating failure of the Democratic Party to stop the rise of Trumpism, let alone of coming up now with a fight back strategy against the Führer.

It is obvious that a new style of political action is needed in the United States today. The balance of de jure power has shifted dramatically toward an elite characterized by the fusion of wealth and power in the political system that plain resistance alone is not enough. What is needed, even beyond anti-fascism strategies and tactics, is the adoption of new ways to democracy and citizenship. Read more

How Tourism Could Actually Help African Wildlife In One of Kenya’s Important National Reserves

• by: David Blanton

https://serengetiwatch.org/friends-of-serengeti/

03-08-2025 ~ Unsustainable tourism threatens Africa’s wildlife and ecosystems, particularly in the Maasai Mara. The travel industry can help tourists contribute to the solution.

The Serengeti ecosystem is regarded as one of our planet’s greatest natural treasures, where one can witness“the largest remaining unaltered animal migration in the world,” according to UNESCO.

Kenya’s share of the Serengeti plains includes the Maasai Mara National Reserve (583 square miles) and the Greater Mara, a wildlife and human-inhabited area of about 2,500 square miles. The Mara seamlessly joins with Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park (around 5,700 square miles), which is surrounded by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and several other reserves, including the Maswa Game Reserve, the Ikorongo and Grumeti Game Reserves, and the Loliondo Game Control Area.

Tourism has long been seen as a way to protect this ecosystem by providing income for development. But now, tourism has joined a growing list of issues threatening the area, which include agriculture, development such as housing and roads, poaching, invasive species, water security, and human-wildlife conflict. The travel industry needs to take stock and determine its next steps to ensure a sustainable model that helps protect the ecosystem and wildlife.

The Mara: A Case Study in Overtourism
After independence in 1963, Kenya saw the slow but steady beginnings of its tourism industry. Media reports gush about African wildlife and safari lodges hosting celebrity guests. The Swahili word safari became synonymous with adventure. The Oscar-winning 1985 film Out of Africa helped supercharge an influx of tourists, and Kenyan tourism was firmly on its way.

Unfortunately, tourism in Kenya, especially at the Maasai Mara National Reserve, has followed a familiar scenario: It began with a few intrepid travelers, the word got out, and mass tourism arrived, often corrupting the experience that attracted people in the first place.

“Kenya earned about… $1.8 billion from tourism in 2022. It’s pivotal to the economy, contributing 10.4 percent to the national GDP and accounting for 5.5 percent of formal employment,” stated a 2024 article by Joseph O. Ogutu, a Kenyan senior wildlife researcher and statistician at the University of Hohenheim in Germany.

Without thought of guardrails or limits, the Mara has become overgrown with lodges and camps, some of which have been built without legal permits. By the 1980s, the reserve suffered from corruption and mismanagement, benefitting a few politically connected elites. In her 1999 book Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, Martha Honey, co-founder and director emeritus of the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST), called the Mara “Kenya’s poster child for tourism overdevelopment.”

The impacts on wildlife have been devastating. Joseph O. Ogutu wrote in a 2024 article for the Conversation that Kenya lost nearly 70 percent of its wildlife between 1977 and 2013. The Mara has been hard hit: Giraffe populations declined 95 percent, warthogs 80 percent, and hartebeest populations saw a 76 percent decline between 1989 and 2003, stated a Guardian article. These numbers, based on a study by the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), blamed the “explosion in human settlement around [the] reserve” for the dwindling populations of the wildlife living on the reserve. Read more

What Are The Origins Of The Money We Use Today? Revisiting Heinrich Schurtz’s Groundbreaking Research

• by: Michael Hudson

Heinrich Schurtz 1863 – 1903 – Ills.: eng.wikipedia.org

03-07-2025 ~ The pioneering research by one of the founders of economic anthropology is essential for understanding the social and institutional processes that gave rise to money as we know it.

The late 19th century saw economists, mainly German and Austrian, create a mythology of money’s origins that is still repeated in today’s textbooks. Money is said to have originated as just another commodity being bartered, with metal preferred because it is nonperishable (and hence amenable to being saved), supposedly standardized (despite fraud if not minted in temples), and thought to be easily divisible—as if silver could have been used for small marketplace exchanges, which was unrealistic given the rough character of ancient scales for weights of a few grams.[1]

This mythology does not recognize government as having played any role as a monetary innovator, sponsor, or regulator, or as giving money its value by accepting it as a vehicle to pay taxes, buy public services, or make religious contributions. Also downplayed is money’s function as a standard of value for denominating and paying debts.[2]

Although there is no empirical evidence for the commodity-barter origin myth, it has survived on purely hypothetical grounds because of its political bias that serves the anti-socialist Austrian school and subsequent “free market” creditor interests opposing government money creation.

Schurtz’s Treatment of Money as Part of the Overall Social System
As one of the founders of economic anthropology, Heinrich Schurtz approached the origins of money as being much more complex than the “economic” view that it emerged simply as a result of families going to the marketplace to barter. Surveying a wide range of Indigenous communities, his 1898 book, An Outline of the Origins of Money, described their trade and money in the context of the institutional system within which members sought status and wealth. Schurtz described these monetary systems as involving a wide array of social functions and dimensions, which today’s “economic” theorizing excludes as external to its analytic scope.

Placing money in the context of the community’s overall system of social organization, Schurtz warned that anyone who detaches “sociological and economic problems from the environment in which they emerged… their native land… only carries away a part of the whole organism and fails to understand the vital forces that have created and sustained it.” Read more