by MATTHEW WILLS

How the ban on D. H. Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterley’s Lover was reversed.

In 1960, D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was charged with being obscene under British law. The book had originally been published privately in 1928 and then in France in 1929. There had been no legal publication in the UK until the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, which made literary merit a defense against charges of obscenity, emboldened Penguin to issue an inexpensive, unexpurgated paperback.

Literature scholar Christopher Hilliard notes that the new law’s backers were surprised by the action the Crown took in challenging Penguin. The Crown fell back on the century-long informal precedent of “variable obscenity,” which held that obscene books should be kept out of the hands of children, women, and the working classes, who were all susceptible to works likely to “deprave or corrupt.” Upper-middle-class male readers, on the other hand, could generally be trusted with suspect books. It was precisely Penguin’s paperback—cheap and mass-produced—that was the trouble.

“Material the authorities would ban if it was produced for a mass audience did not necessarily warrant prohibition if it was directed toward a privileged readership in whose judgement the courts could have more faith,” Hilliard writes.

But it was now 1960. The prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who had represented the British at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, asked the jury, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?” In response, members of the jury broke out in laughter. Three of the jurors were women. The jury pool also included a cross-section of workers, including teachers, dockworkers, drivers, and salesmen. It was unlikely that any of them employed live-in domestic servants.

JSTOR Daily for more

by ABDULLA MOASWES

A new Israeli-linked initiative exposes how liberation movements are being co-opted for colonial aims.

As Israel loudly beat the drums of war one day before its unprovoked surprise attack on Iran, a small but significant piece of news slipped by almost unnoticed: The announcement of a new research project on the website of a Washington, DC think tank. On June 12, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) announced the launch of the Balochistan Studies Project (BSP). Significantly, in addition to mentioning Balochistan’s abundance of natural resources “such as oil, gas, uranium, copper, coal, rare earth elements and the two deep seaports of Gwadar and Chabahar”, MEMRI’s statement justifies the project’s necessity by identifying the region as “the perfect outpost to counter and keep under control Iran, its nuclear ambitions, and its dangerous relations with Pakistan, which may provide Tehran with tactical nukes”.

MEMRI is well known for its selective translation of snippets of Arabic, Persian and Turkish-language media, screenshots from which often end up being shared as memes on social media platforms. Originally founded in 1998, the think tank has consistently peddled a pro-Israel agenda, with its founder, Colonel Yigal Carmon, having served in the Israeli Military Intelligence Corps for more than 20 years. Additionally, MEMRI has been involved “unofficially” in intelligence gathering for the Israeli state since at least 2012.

Given this context, MEMRI’s creation of the BSP can be seen as an indication of an Israeli attempt to co-opt the Baloch national struggle against both Iran and Pakistan for Israel’s geopolitical objectives. Given the strategic advantages that a successful co-optation of the Baloch cause would grant Israel, and the potential ramifications it would bear upon the resistance of stateless peoples within the region, including Palestinians as well as the Baloch, themselves, there is a need to examine the limitations of geopolitical thinking within national liberation movements.

MEMRI’s announcement of the BSP is riddled with logical inconsistencies and misinformation regarding the reality of exploitation and resistance in Balochistan. For example, centring the fact that the states of both Iran and Pakistan are currently fighting counterinsurgency campaigns in Balochistan, MEMRI’s website calls for “the international community” to “understand that Balochistan is a natural ally of the West” – ignoring the fact that Western companies such as Barrick Gold and BHP Billiton have played key roles in enabling colonial resource extraction and ecological destruction in the region.

Another example relates to the personnel involved in the project. One article on the BSP on MEMRI’s website welcomes a “renowned Baloch writer, scholar, and political scientist” called Mir Yar Baloch, whose X account “has been defined as one of the most influential in the Subcontinent”, as a “special adviser”. In May of this year, Baloch made headlines for unilaterally declaring the independence of Balochistan in a series of posts on X, where he also announced to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that India had “the backing of 60 million Baloch patriots” after it launched Operation Sindoor against Pakistan.

More than for his grand proclamations, Mir Yar Baloch is interesting for the amount of mystery that surrounds him, given his supposed status as an important and influential Baloch intellectual. Despite being profiled by a variety of news outlets – notably all Indian – none have deviated from regurgitating a biography for him as limited as that published in the MEMRI article. Significantly, however, more well-known Baloch activists have been quick to distance themselves from him. Niaz Baloch of the Baloch National Movement, for example, posted on X that there exists no consensus for a declaration of independence among Baloch leaders. Crucially, he also listed four “fake accounts”, including that of Mir Yar Baloch, that he stated “should be reported and unfollowed immediately”. Baloch activists therefore speculate that Mir Yar Baloch is a fake persona created by a state with interests in the region to support its objectives.

Balochistan is a region that spans the border between Iran and Pakistan, where both states are engaged in counterinsurgency campaigns that often spur tensions between them. Each has accused the other of fostering instability by sheltering militant groups across the frontier. Crucially, many Baloch people on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border view themselves as marginalised and systematically oppressed by the states that govern them.

Al Jazeera for more

by KIM PETERSEN

A review of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery

“But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jew; it was created for the salvation of Western interests.”

— James Baldwin, “Open Letter to the Born Again” (September 29, 1979). Quoted in Hamid Dabashi, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarket Books, 2025): 159.

Baldwin’s assessment is shared by many others, such as Noam Chomsky, who discussed in his book (The Fateful Triangle, 1999 edition) Israel’s role as a “strategic asset.” (p. 69, 70, 103, 137) However, others, such as Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone countered that assessment in a 2024 article, “The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East.” They write:

But the crucial evidence, totally missing from their analysis, is the slightest example of Israel actually serving American interests in the region.

If no examples are given, it’s simply because there are none. Israel has never fired a shot on behalf of the United States or brought a drop of oil under U.S. control.

We can start with a common sense argument: If the U.S. is interested in Middle East oil, why would it support a country that is hated (for whatever reasons) by all the populations of the oil producing countries?

Bricmont and Johnstone attribute the unstinting US support of Israel as being influenced by money injected into the US political arena by the Jewish lobby, in particular AIPAC.

The question of which side leads in determining US support for Israel is debatable. What is indisputable is that the US and Israel are in lockstep despite all the violations of international law by Israel (US is a serial violator of international law, as well), despite several massacres carried out by Israel, and despite the mightily ramped up genocide being perpetrated by Israeli Jews against Palestinians currently.

Genocide and the understanding of what unleashes the bloodshirtiest of human actions is the subject of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery, scheduled for release by Haymarket Books on 30 September — while the savagery is ongoing. The urgency for a worldwide response calls for informing those unaware or those insouciant to the Jewish Israeli genocide that is being perpetrated on Palestine (It is not just a genocide in Gaza, as a 1 July 2025 Al Jazeera headline makes clear: “Israel has killed 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023.”). After Savagery, however, is not just about the genocide in Gaza, it is about why some humans commit genocide. So After Savagery is also about “before savagery.” What are the conditions that lead to savagery today. And most importantly, how genocide can be prevented from happening.

Dabashi quotes many sources to attest to the genocide that is happening now in Palestine.

“What we are seeing in Gaza is a repeat of Auschwitz,” says the Burmese genocide expert and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Maung Zarni. “This is a collective white imperialist man’s genocide,” he further explains. (154-155)

Asked to describe what he witnessed in Gaza, Dr. Perlmutter replied, “All of the disasters I’ve seen, combined—forty mission trips, thirty years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined—doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.” And the civilian casualties, he said, are almost exclusively children. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said. “I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week … missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice.” (103-104)

“Yes, it is genocide,” has affirmed Amos Goldberg, a professor of Holocaust history at the department of Jewish history and contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion.” (142)

Dabashi traces the roots of Zionism to a longstanding settler-European colonialism. And the author lays bare the insidiousness of Zionism and how this racism impacted Palestinians:

Today, the birth of Palestine as a “question” rather than a nation-state marks precisely the birth of Palestine as a constellation of refugee camps. The land was stolen from Palestinians, the state stealing the land was a European settler colony garrison state that rules over Palestinians with cruelty, the rules for the inscription of life were dictated to Palestinians in draconian terms, and the camps as the fourth inseparable element are precisely where generations of Palestinians are born and raised, before being killed by the Israeli military. (127-128)

Part of this racism towards Muslims, of which the majority of Palestinians are, is the use of the term “Muselmann[1].” Writes Dabashi, “This is perhaps a mini encyclopedia of European ignorance, Islamophobia and antisemitism all wrapped up in an attempt to unpack the word ‘Muselmann,’ but in fact loading it with more racist dimensions.” (120) And the new Muselmann, is the Palestinian, “the Untestifiable, the human animal, as Israeli warlords have said.” (xxvi)

Dissident Voice for more

by ALEX WHITE

Alex Haley co-wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X but Haley left out some profound elements of Malcolm’s political thought

In June 1963, Malcolm X and Alex Haley began working on the book that would define both their lives. The arrangement was simple. Malcolm usually arrived at Haley’s New York apartment at nine in the evening, exhausted after a day’s work. The two men then talked late into the night, discussing politics, religion and race over an endless stream of cheap coffee. The next morning, a bleary-eyed Haley would adapt his notes into a rough manuscript, trying to recreate Malcolm’s distinctive voice. This draft would eventually become The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) – a landmark of American literature and one of the best-selling biographies of all time.

This success gave the Autobiography a lasting cultural impact. Malcolm’s words have inspired protests and political campaigns across the world, and been incorporated into music and artworks from New York to Nairobi. In recent years, however, historians have begun to criticise his ghostwriter’s influence over the text. Haley claimed to be a ‘dispassionate chronicler’ but, they point out, he exaggerated parts of Malcolm’s life and ignored others. As Malcolm’s career began to move in unexpected directions, Haley even turned to plagiarism and invention to fill gaps in the narrative. The result is a memoir that is neither entirely Malcolm’s, nor entirely Haley’s, a testament to their difficult relationship and the complicated circumstances of the book’s creation.

The Autobiography emerged from one of the most dramatic moments of the civil rights struggle. In June 1963, as Malcolm and Haley sat down in New York, Congress was debating the first draft of the Civil Rights Act – a historic piece of legislation that promised to end segregation and outlaw racial discrimination. Activists and campaigners across the country were busy preparing for the March on Washington, an unprecedented rally in support of civil and economic rights. White supremacists, in response, escalated their own campaigns of intimidation and violence. In Alabama, the state’s governor George Wallace protested in front of a state university in an attempt to prevent Black students from attending the first day of classes. In Mississippi, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered at his home by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Aeon for more

Leading scholar Abdulla Moaswes joins Ramzy Baroud to trace the shared tactics of colonial control from Gaza to Srinagar.

In the latest episode of the FloodGate podcast, Palestinian journalist and author Ramzy Baroud speaks with leading scholar Abdulla Moaswes to explore the deepening ties between India and Israel, and how those alliances impact the lived realities of people in occupied Kashmir and Palestine.

The discussion delves into the historical and political parallels between the two struggles, exposing how frameworks of settler colonialism, surveillance, and militarized control are being replicated and shared between the two states. 

Moaswes also traces the evolution of the India–Israel alliance, including arms trade, ideological convergence, and shared counterinsurgency tactics.

This timely conversation challenges dominant narratives and highlights the global architecture of repression and resistance.

Palestine Chronicle for more

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE

French psychologist worked to end colonialism

Frantz Fanon is regarded as a crucial figure of early anti-colonial and anti-racist theory. For Algerians, he is one of the heroes of the country’s struggle for independence.

Yet his role during the war against France and his writings remain largely unknown to a wider public, reports DW.

July 20, 2025, marked the 100th anniversary of his birth. Fanon was not granted a long life: At just 36, he died of leukemia in 1961 without ever witnessing Algerian independence, a goal he devoted his life to.

His work is “a reflection on the concept of solidarity, understanding what solidarity means in a moment of war, of resistance,” Mireille Fanon Mendès France told DW. She is Fanon’s eldest daughter and co-chair of the international Frantz Fanon Foundation.

She says she barely knew her father and retains few childhood memories of him, but as a teenager, she immersed herself in her father’s literary work.

Fanon’s writings made it clear that the struggle for Algerian independence not only benefited Algeria, but was also about African unity. “And this African unity is still not there,” his daughter explains.

In her Paris apartment, Alice Cherki goes through old documents from her youth during Algeria’s war of independence against France: “I knew then that it was colonialism,” she recalls. Now 89, she knew Frantz Fanon well. She worked alongside him in the 1950s as an intern at the psychiatric clinic in Blida, Algeria.

Fanon was the head of the psychiatric department and not only cared for the sick but also helped Algerian nationalists. “We took in the wounded, the fighters who came here,” Cherki said. Fanon set up a supposed day clinic within the hospital, only for show. In reality, he secretly took in the wounded and those who needed to recover, Cherki told DW.

Committed to the cause

Born in the French colony of Martinique, Fanon grew up in a French colonial society and was deeply influenced by his experiences: He volunteered for World War Two for France at the age of 17. As a Black man though, he experienced daily racism in the French army. After the war, he studied medicine and philosophy in France and later moved with his wife Josie to Blida in French-Algeria, where he became chief physician of the psychiatric clinic.

From the beginning of the war in 1954, Fanon was helping Algerian nationalists while continuing to work as a psychiatrist. He established contacts with several officers of the National Liberation Army as well as with the political leadership of the National Liberation Front (FLN), especially its influential members Abane Ramdane and Benyoucef Benkhedda. From 1956 on, he was fully committed to the “Algerian cause.”

Fanon wrote some of the most influential texts of the anti-colonial movement, like his early work Black Skin, White Masks about the psychological effects of racism and colonialism on Black people.

His most important book though was The Wretched of the Earth where he focuses on revolutionary action and national liberation. The book was published with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre shortly before his death in 1961.

On July 5, 1962, Algeria gained independence after an eight-year armed struggle against the then-colonial power, France. Historians estimate the number of Algerian deaths at 500,000; according to the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, approximately 25,000 soldiers lost their lives.

Anissa Boumediene is a writer, lawyer, and former First Lady of Algeria. She was the wife of President Houari Boumediene, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1978. “Frantz Fanon is part of Algerian history. He defended independence. He was truly an infinitely respectable person,” she told DW.

Two new films – Fanon by Jean-Claude Barny, released in April 2025, and Frantz Fanon by Algerian director Abdenour Zahzah, released in 2024 – are intended to keep his memory and his anti-colonial theories alive.

The Express Tribune for more

Yes, The New York Times is committing genocidal journalism

by BELEN FERNANDEZ

In his latest column for the NYT, Bret Stephens tries to excuse a uniquely horrific crime with uniquely horrific journalism.

The Israelis certainly owe Bret Stephens a favour.

Yesterday, The New York Times opinion columnist took to the pages of the United States newspaper of record to promote his latest deranged argument, headlined: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza”.

Never mind that numerous global institutions, ranging from various United Nations bodies to Amnesty International, have determined that Israel is committing just that. These are organisations that hardly throw the G-word around lightly, but Stephens knows better. And he will tell us why.

In the very first paragraph of his Times intervention – which should perhaps come accompanied by a trigger warning for readers prone to aneurysms – Stephens demands defiantly: “If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal – if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans – why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?”

It would seem, of course, that the Israeli military’s near-comprehensive conversion of much of the Gaza Strip into rubble – via the bombardment of homes, hospitals, schools, and everything else that can be bombed – would be rather “methodical”. As for the perceived insufficient deadliness of Israel’s ongoing “actions”, Stephens cites the official Palestinian death count of “nearly 60,000” in less than two years, and wonders why there are “not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths”.

He goes on to proclaim that “the first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher?”

Among the many questions that Stephens himself needs to answer, meanwhile, is why he thinks slaughtering 60,000 people is no big deal. As of November 2024, Israel had killed at least 17,400 children in Gaza – but even this is apparently not “malevolent” enough. Furthermore, according to a study published in the Lancet medical journal more than one year ago, the true death toll in Gaza was already potentially set to exceed 186,000. How’s that for “hundreds of thousands”?

In lieu of waiting for an answer from the “anti-Israel genocide chorus”, Stephens presents his own, which is that “Israel is manifestly not committing genocide.” Citing the UN genocide convention’s definition of the term as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”, Stephens proceeds to announce that “I am aware of no evidence of an Israeli plan to deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians.”

Objectively speaking, this is the equivalent in terms of ludicrousness of claiming that there is no evidence of a plan by the operators of a chicken slaughterhouse to deliberately end the lives of the poultry therein. You don’t kill 17,400 children in 13 months by accident; nor do you repeatedly bomb hospitals and ambulances if you aren’t, you know, deliberately aiming to kill civilians.

But it’s not just about bombs. Forced starvation is genocide, too. And on that note, another question Stephens might answer is how intentionally depriving a population of two million people of the food and water that is necessary for human survival does not constitute an “intent to destroy” that group. Yesterday alone, Gaza health officials reported that at least 15 Palestinians had starved to death, including four children.

Aljazeera for more

The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, genocide denier

by WILL SOLOMON

In a July 22 essay that is extraordinary even for someone as morally odious as he is, The New York Times columnist and Israeli propagandist Bret Stephens writes that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. His reasoning? Israel has the capacity to efficiently kill way more people than it has—if it wanted to.

You might call this an exercise in gaslighting if Bret weren’t sufficiently ideologically committed to plausibly believe this bullshit. The essay is, ostensibly, like much of what he has penned in recent years, a response to the increasing disgust toward and isolation of Israel internationally, and to the immediate reality of mass starvation in Gaza. It also comes only days after prominent Israeli-American genocide scholar Omer Bartov penned a long essay in the same opinion section, systematically explaining why Israel is in fact committing genocide; it also comes as over one hundred aid organizations issued a joint statement about Israel’s starvation campaign. Should we assume that Bret, a pathological Israeli devotee, is somehow more credible here?

Bret Stephens has one overarching goal in his writing, which I have described elsewhere: defend Israel. At various times this involves demonization of Israel’s enemies, obfuscation of Israeli crimes, endorsement of Israeli “successes,” false equivalences between Israel and other states, and maybe his favorite tactic, baseless and borderline defamatory accusations of antisemitism against Israel’s (or his) critics.

There’s much to pick apart in this offensive and essentially incoherent essay, as in everything he writes, but a few brief points. One: Bret demands to know why the death count isn’t higher. Cute question, but it is. Over six months ago the British medical journal The Lancet published a study estimating the death count was 40 percent higher than what was recorded at the time—which would put the number of dead at the start of this year around 64,000 people, higher than what it “officially” is now. But even this is probably nowhere near the actual toll, as The Lancet also published a correspondence one year ago estimating a death toll near 200,000. Earlier this year Ralph Nader plausibly estimated the death toll at over 400,000. The Gaza Strip has been completely destroyed; “conservative” couldn’t begin to describe the scale of the undercount.

Counterpunch for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

“At present, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.” When the American environmentalist Paul Hawken made this observation, he probably did not realise he was writing the tagline for humanity’s longest-running tragicomedy. Gross domestic product, or GDP, is the most trusted indicator of progress for governments, businesses, financial markets, policy forums, think tanks, and media outlets. The higher the number, the healthier the nation. Or so we are told. And this belief has remained mostly unchanged for nearly a century.

Ironically, it all began with a warning. In 1934, the Russian-born American economist, Simon Kuznets, presented the first set of national income estimates to the US Congress. These tables were designed to help understand the effects of the Great Depression and gave policymakers a new statistical tool: a way to quantify the total market value of goods and services produced within a country over a period.

Kuznets, who would later win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, understood the power of this invention and also its danger. He cautioned that this should not be mistaken for an index of national welfare. Economic activity and human wellbeing, he insisted, were not interchangeable. The Congress listened politely, then adopted the measure, ignoring all his warnings with juvenile enthusiasm.

By the 1960s, Kuznets was writing with increasing urgency. Growth, he argued, needed to be understood not merely in terms of volume but of purpose. More of what? For whom? To what end? His queries were rhetorical by then. The political appetite for a single, unambiguous number—one that could suggest the success of policies, the country’s potential, national dynamics, etc.—had become irresistible. GDP was simple to understand, it was scalable, and it was global. It was the Disney or McDonald’s of economic metrics; almost everyone has heard about it. It made countries legible to investors and intelligible to diplomats. It became, without debate or consensus, the shorthand for progress.

Once the framework was in place, it started dictating how power operated. In the decades following the Second World War, Western economies, especially those in Europe and North America, experienced sustained growth in GDP. This was seen as validation for the idea. The “economic miracles” of Italy, Germany, and Japan were purely statistical: high growth rates, surging output, and expanding industrial capacity. Italy’s miracolo economico, for instance—the rapid development from the late 1940s to the early 1960s—was taken as proof that state-led reconstruction and capitalist expansion could coexist fruitfully.

The fact that this growth also brought chronic air pollution, collapsing rural economies, the fall of sectors like agriculture, the decline of social security, and widening inequalities was treated as unfortunate but irrelevant background noise.

The American case was similar. During the post-war boom, petroleum flowed at prices lower than milk. Factories hummed, suburbs expanded, more and more workers were brought in (often at cheaper wages), and GDP rates climbed. The idea that infinite economic expansion might be neither possible nor desirable did not gain serious attention. Then, in 1973, the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries initiated an oil embargo against nations that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Prices quadrupled, supply chains broke down, and inflation soared. Economists were “reportedly” shocked. They had been charting the economy’s rise with all the confidence of a physicist plotting a parabola. Suddenly, the curve stopped.

What followed was a redirection. If growth could not be guaranteed through production, it would be chased through finance. In the 1980s, under US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, economic policy moved towards deregulation. The real economy—the production of goods and services—became subordinate to the financial economy: stocks, bonds, insurance, derivatives, etc. What mattered was not whether anything tangible was being made, but whether profits were being recorded. This shift was sold to the public as modernisation (reforms, to use a term we are familiar with), but it was better understood as abstraction. Capital moved faster. Transactions multiplied. GDP, ever adaptable, kept rising.

Frontline for more

by SOKSAMPHOAS IM

Both sides accuse the other of igniting the armed hostilities but Thailand’s fraught civil-military divide is largely to blame

It has been two months since tensions between Cambodia and Thailand flared up again. This most recent escalation was sparked by the death of a Cambodian soldier during a skirmish with Thai troops on May 28, 2025, at the disputed border area between Cambodia’s Preah Vihear province and Thailand’s Ubon Ratchathani province.

The incident reignited a long-simmering border conflict, culminating in an exchange of artillery and small-arms fire on July 24, 2025. This violence, however, cannot be understood through the lens of a single battlefield event—nor can it be reduced to the widely discussed 17-minute leaked phone call on June 15 between Cambodian Senate President and former Prime Minister Hun Sen and suspended Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra.

Three days after the phone conversation, Hun Sen published the recording on his Facebook page, raising alarm bells across the region. Yet, to understand the significance of this latest border crisis, we must go beyond these two headline-grabbing incidents and examine the internal political dynamics of both nations – and the deep historical legacies that continue to shape bilateral relations.

A key moment in the phone call focused on the Thai military’s unilateral decision to close border crossings and maintain troops near Ta Moan temple. Hun Sen pressed for the reopening of the border and the withdrawal of Thai troops, pointing to the failed bilateral talks on June 5 and a brief 10-minute skirmish near the Emerald Triangle.

Paetongtarn, however, expressed hesitation in issuing such orders. Despite holding the national leadership position, she admitted that doing so could worsen her political situation, as she was already under pressure from nationalist factions who accused her of being soft on Cambodia – due in part to the close ties between her family and the Hun family.

While she agreed in principle to Hun Sen’s requests, her tone betrayed uncertainty. Instead, she proposed that Hun Sen reach out to Thailand’s then-Minister of Defense and now acting Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai.

Hun Sen rejected this suggestion outright, insisting that since the Thai side initiated the provocation, it must resolve the issue on its own. Cambodia, he assured her, would reopen its border as soon as Thailand did.

This exchange revealed more than diplomatic posturing – it exposed the fractured nature of Thailand’s political system. Paetongtarn’s inability or unwillingness to overrule military decisions laid bare the reality that her civilian government lacks authority over the Thai armed forces.

If we assume that she did attempt, between June 16 and 17, to persuade the military to withdraw and was rebuffed, then it stands to reason that a coup – or something resembling one – may already be underway.

Some observers have dismissed Hun Sen’s decision to leak the call as a cunning political move, portraying him as the “old fox” taking a stab at a weakened rival. But perhaps his intent was not to manipulate public sentiment, but to document – on record – that both he and Paetongtarn had attempted to de-escalate tensions.

Asia Times for more

This past week, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives both passed Donald Trump’s signature budget bill, which Trump has dubbed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”.

Despite the hype surrounding Trump’s bill, this legislation will do nothing to ‘make America great again’. It will, however, do a great deal to enrich billionaires even more, and to increase economic pressures on workers and the poor.

To explore what this legislation will mean for ordinary Americans, Dimitri Lascaris spoke with Margaret Kimberly.

Margaret is the Executive Editor and Senior Columnist of Black Agenda Report and the current host of the Black Agenda Radio podcast, Her book, Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents, was published in 2020.

Dimitri and Margaret also discussed key elements of Trump’s foreign policy (including Palestine and Iran), the race for the mayoralty of New York City,, and the true significance of Independence Day in the United States.

Youtube for more