My Guardian book review appears this weekend: In October 2015 a Saudi prince was arrested at Beirut international airport accused of trying to smuggle… nearly two tonnes… of the… amphetamine drug Captagon… through the country. Two months later, Lebanese officials claimed to have confiscated 12 million Captagon pills heading to the Gulf. The synthetic drug, invented in 1961, has…
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Please support the Disaster Capitalism fund-raising campaign
For the last five years I’ve been working on the documentary, Disaster Capitalism, partly inspired by my book of the same name released last year. I’m working with film-maker Thor Neureiter and co-producers Media Stockade. It’s a truly international team; I’m based in East Jerusalem, Thor is in New York and Media Stockade are in…
Why I was asked to join Australians for War Powers Reform
Before the 2003 Iraq war, I feared the seemingly inevitable conflict would be a disaster. Based in Sydney at the time, I watched as the general public massively opposed the impending invasion while most politicians and many in the media celebrated the prospect of “shock and awe”. The last 15 years have seen untold bloodshed…
When politicians in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea attack critics (including me)
Over the last years I’ve visited the province of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG) to investigate how a polluting Rio Tinto mine caused a brutal civil war in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a major feature of my recent book, Disaster Capitalism, and film in progress of the same name. Locals oppose re-opening of…
Remembering Australian Greens MP John Kaye
A man who died too young. John Kaye was a New South Wales Greens MP and friend. I was asked to comment about him by Wendy Bacon in online magazine New Matilda: “John was a friend, a trusted, funny, witty and principled man who also happened to be a politician. It’s hard to find that…
South Sudan's death spiral
My feature in the Australian literary journal Overland: Flying into Bentiu, a town in northern South Sudan, is unnerving. The front of a broken plane, cockpit windows smashed, sits close to the dusty airstrip; long green grass sprouts around the cracked fuselage. Soldiers of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), a former guerrilla movement and…
Disaster Capitalism film asks key questions about aid and politics
The following article appears today in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age and is written by Garry Maddox. The headline is, “Australia’s foreign aid is largely wasted because of corruption, says documentary maker Antony Loewenstein”: Australian feature films have largely avoided hot political subjects… lately –… though that may… change with Matthew Saville’s planned film on the…
Drug cartel wars between Mexico and the US
My essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman Loera, known as “El Chapo,” was recaptured by Mexican marines in January. It was the latest in a long history of farcical escapes and imprisonments that have dominated the life of the world’s most infamous drug boss. His legacy is clear. Unmarked graves…
The nightmare of today's Western-backed Rwanda
My book review in The Australian: Rwandan President Paul Kagame is feted across the world, celebrated for rescuing his country after the 1994 genocide and bringing stability to a devastated nation. Kagame’s government has received billions of dollars in aid and weapons for more than 20 years from the US, Israel, Britain and the EU,…
What the Sanders and Corbyn movements say about Australia
My column in the Guardian: Charisma and persuasion matter in politics. Though neither trait guarantees fair policies or outlook – think Tony Blair… backing the catastrophic war… against Iraq, or Malcolm Turnbull hailing himself as a free speech champion before… pressuring the ABC… over its robust journalism – image is apparently more captivating than ever in the 21st century.…