Three Monkeys Online has always had a problem in terms of categorising, and nowhere is this more evident than with our current affairs section. Originally, way back in 2004, it was termed ‘politics’, then it moved to ‘current affairs’ for wont of a more inclusive term – but here you’ll find articles and interviews on politics, economics, human rights, feminism, church and state relations, philosophy, and protest. There’s a healthy dose of essays and opinion pieces focused in particular on Irish, Italian, and Spanish politics – as TMO started out as a magazine based in Ireland, Italy, and Spain – but as the magazine has grown, so has our writing base. So, whether you want to call it ‘current affairs’, ‘politics’, ‘alternative culture’ or some other term, we hope you’ll find plenty to interest you here.
Sins of the Flesh: The Mislabeling of Surf and Turf
“The flesh is the surface of the unknown.” – Victor Hugo On January 15th, The Food Safety Authority of Ireland announced the discovery of horse meat tainted beef being produced, packed, and shipped from slaughterhouses in the UK and Ireland. ABP Food Group, the company deemed responsible, suspended production in its Co. Monaghan plant. As [...]
Free Ride – Robert Levine on copyright, piracy, and culture
It’s an extremely cold (but not, we insist rainy) day in Dublin and I am sitting down in Hodges Figgis Bookshop on Dawson St. I am not alone. There are a couple of other likely and some unlikely audience candidates dotting the seats which have been set up for tonight’s main event- a talk by [...]
The Port Huron Statement – Fifty Years On
As we wait for the definitive manifesto of Occupy Movement to be written – if that is possible given the diverse range of opinions and voices that are associated with it – this is arguably an opportune moment to look back 50 years at another radical grouping , which did succeed in putting together and [...]
Che Guevara & Ireland’s Quisling Capitalism
The controversy over Galway City Council’s proposal to erect a statue to Che Guevara to commemorate his family links to the city (his mother Anna Elizabeth was a Lynch and born in the city), is indicative of a wider discourse in Irish society. There is already a controversial – and popular – Che Guevara Festival in [...]
Poland’s Recipe for Wealth: Work till you Drop
“That pension systems are unable to finance the retirement of ever increasing numbers of longer-lived pensioners nobody in aging Europe doubts,” writes Joanna Solska in Poland’s biggest selling, influential current affairs magazine Polityka1. Meanwhile Prime Minister Tusk insists that, “the aim of the pensions bill is to bring pleasure.” The proposed bill raises the retirement [...]
5 Things You Can Do To Honour International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day is at once a problematic and worthy idea; Shoe-horning half the world’s population into a day on the UN’s calendar, along with other hard-pressed categories like migratory birds (14-15 May) and world intellectual property (26th of April) should make you more than a little uneasy, as should the fact that more than [...]
Women Under Siege – the use of rape as a weapon of war
The International Criminal Court made legal history in February 2002, when it ruled in what has become known as the’rape camp‘ case that the systematic rape of women in the town of Foca constituted a crime against humanity. In Slavenka Drakulić’s book They Would Never Hurt a Fly – War Criminals on Trial in the [...]
Writing the Riots – Paul Goodman and Growing up Absurd
In 1959, at a time of violent unrest among American youth, a publisher commissioned a study of juvenile delinquency from Paul Goodman. The resulting volume, Growing up Absurd, was an immediate if unlikely success. Goodman had already written more than twenty books, none of which had made any great impression. And fifty years on he is [...]
Translating Egypt’s Revolution
As is so often the way with beginnings, I was looking for someone and something else completely when I stumbled on the class Samia Mehrez is teaching. Professor of Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo, she came up with the idea of Translating the Revolution and organised its schedule within weeks of Mubarak’s [...]
Rocco Buttiglione Responds – The Moral Maze Part II
Professor Rocco Buttiglione, Italian parliamentarian (currently Minister for Culture in Berlusconi's outgoing government), hit the global headlines in October 2004 when his proposed candidature for the position of European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security was blocked after M.E.P's objected to his conservative, catholic views on homosexuality and abortion. In an interview with Three [...]
Iraq Death Toll in Third Year of Occupation is Highest Yet
The civilian death toll has risen inexorably for the entire duration of the US-led military presence in Iraq following the initial invasion. That is the grim reality uncovered by ongoing tracking of media reports by the Iraq Body Count project (IBC). Figures released by IBC today [March 9th], updated by statistics for the year 2005 [...]
Sexuality, Sin, and Sacrifice – Deconstructing the Patriarchy. An interview with Dr. Mary Condren
Censorship is not limited to totalitarian States. It can be a subtle thing, when disconcerting ideas are not banned, but, through various means, marginalised. Dr. Mary Condren’s groundbreaking work The Serpent and the Goddess, a study on women, religion and power in Celtic Ireland, was never placed on an index of banned books, and yet [...]
Benchmarking – a new religion?
Ireland, post-Celtic Tiger, is increasingly obsessed with competitivity, transparency,and best practices – in all sectors. Sue Norton sees benchmarking all around her, and wonders on the implications.
Entering the Moral Maze – A discussion on religion and ethics with Richard Holloway
Joan Bakewell wrote of Richard Holloway, the former Anglican Archbishop of Edinburgh, in the New Statesman, that “[he] has always been a radical living in the real world, ready to come to terms with its hectic demands and constraints”. The Anglican Archbishop of South East Asia, Moses Tay, described his 1999 book Godless Morality as [...]
Fallujah. Uncovering a massacre – interview with Maurizio Torrealta, co-producer of Fallujah – The Hidden Massacre
Since Fallujah – the hidden massacre [Fallujah - la strage nascosta] was broadcast by RAI News 24, part of the Italian State Broadcaster, in early November of this year much has come to light about the second battle for Fallujah (initially named Operation Phantom Fury, later changed to Operation al-Fajr). In particular, after various denials [...]
From Landscape to Manscape – Eduardo Chillida and Fuerteventura’s Tindaya Mountain
Nobody really knows what the Neolithic Majorero people were up to when they scratched their enigmatic signs into the sacred mountain, but the impulse stirring at the back of their minds may well have to do with what we now understand as art. A few thousand years go by and the scene is still Fuerteventura, [...]
N.A.T.O. Gladio, and the strategy of tension.
In August of 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed that a secret army, called Gladio, had existed in Italy throughout the Cold War period. His revelations were shocking, not simply because they admitted to something that had long been denied (including by Andreotti himself when speaking to a judicial enquiry in 1974 in his [...]
The New Turkey -Reflections from Istanbul.
"Well, it is worth pointing out that joining the EU is a long term process," comments Chris Morris, author of The New Turkey – The quiet revolution on the edge of Europe. Much of Morris’ tenure as BBC correspondent in Turkey [1997-2001] was spent, necessarily, examining the complexities and contradictions that surround Turkey’s proposed membership [...]
The Return of Moqtada al-Sadr
In the last week, the threat posed by Moqtada al-Sadr to the U.S.-led efforts in Iraq resurfaced during a bloody incident that occurred in Baghdad. On September 25, a patrol by U.S. and Iraqi troops in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad ended in violence as the troops engaged in a firefight with militia from al-Sadr’s [...]
