Palestine and the Great Games
At the Periphery and in the Centre

In this wide ranging and far reaching examination of the role of Palestine in the Great Games, the metaphor for grand geopolitical strategy involving nations and peoples first introduced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his 1998 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and It's Geostrategic Imperatives, author and journalist Eric Walberg paints a broad canvas putting Palestine both at the centre and the periphery of 100 years of modern and postmodern colonialism. Drawn from extensive travels and research outlined in his most recent book, Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Game, Walberg shows how Palestine, despite its helplessness, is in a sense the most powerful player in the Great Games and its fate holds the key to the endgame.

About
Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s.

He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for Cairo's foremost newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeerah and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio. Eric Walberg served as a moderator and speaker at the Leaders for Change Summit in Istanbul in 2011.

Copies of Walberg's book, Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Game, (published by Clarity Press) will be available for sale before and after the talk. See comments on the book below.

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Need to know:
- Doors open at 6:50
- $5 admission minimum
- Accessible on demand via portable ramp; washrooms not accessible
- Please avoid using strong-scented products due to sensitivities

Tasty refreshments (non-alcoholic) and Zatoun oliveoil+za'atar dipping.

 

Praise for Postmodern Imperialism

"In his brilliant and newly released book, “Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Game”, Eric Walberg astutely charts NATO’s role following the end of the Cold War. NATO “has become the centerpiece of the (US) empire’s military presence around the world, moving quickly to respond to US needs to intervene where the UN won’t as in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya.”"
RAMZY BAROUD, Al-Arabiya

“The best introduction to geopolitics that I have seen” KEVIN BARRETT, Veterans Today “Eric Walberg’s treatise on the Great Games, on Empire, is an excellent read. It is not a blow by blow account of the rise and fall of empires involved with the Great Games, but an accounting of their methods and raison d’etre. It is a dense read, provocative, bold, touching on ideas that seldom appear in mainstream presentations. It is a significant and important addition to the geopolitical and political-military thinking of the global cultural environment of finance and wars.”
JIM MILES, Foreign Policy Journal and Palestine Chronicle

“Those who think that the “Great Game” played for control of Central Asia is a superannuated relic of Europe’s imperial past must read Walberg’s epic corrective to their egregious error. In extensive, richly textured and carefully documented detail he reveals the evolution of this competition into the planetary quest for dominance it has become, as well as the imperatives animating its new “players,” among whom many will find, to their surprise or consternation, tiny Israel and its symbiotic liaison with America Inc. Prime imperial architect, Zbigniew Brzezinski actually called the blood-soaked playing field The Grand Chessboard, but like all his rapacious forebears omitted to mention the pawns. Walberg places them at the heart of this much needed remediation of the sinister falsehoods propagated in a political culture manufactured from above and offers hope that this anti-human playboard may yet be overturned."
PAUL ATWOOD, American Studies, University of Massachusetts and author of War and Empire: The American Way of Life (2010)