"The Kissinger Cables": Three Years After "Collateral Murder," WikiLeaks Explores U.S. Diplomacy
Democracy Now
The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has just published "the Kissinger Cables," 1.7 million U.S. diplomatic and intelligence documents from 1973 to 1976 that include many once-secret memos written by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. While the documents have been available to the public at the National Archives, WikiLeaks has created a searchable online database to allow anyone in the world to quickly search them. WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange reportedly did most of the work creating the database from his refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London. WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson joins us to discuss the documents’ release. Hrafnsson also comments on the recent anniversary of the release of the "Collateral Murder" military video, which shows U.S. forces killing 12 people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. After WikiLeaks obtained the video, Hrafnsson met with family members of the victims in Iraq.
To Watch the Interview
More resources:
Wikileaks: The Public Library of Diplomacy (Includes "The Kissinger Cables")
Amy Goodman -- WikiLeaks’ New Release: The Kissinger Cables and Bradley Manning (TruthDig)
Monday, April 08, 2013
Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)
Glenn Greenwald:
Margaret Thatcher and misapplied death etiquette -- The dictate that one 'not speak ill of the dead' is (at best) appropriate for private individuals, not influential public figures< (The Guardian)
Russell Brand: Remembering Margaret Thatcher, Britain's Unmaternal National Matriarch (Huffington Post)
Lynne Segal: Thatcher—neoliberalism’s “willing tool” (Verso)
Michael Hudson: Thatcher's Legacy of Failed Privatizations (Naked Capitalism)
Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers: The Queen Mother of Global Austerity and Financialization - Thatcher's Mean Legacy (Counterpunch)
Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013): Tariq Ali on Late British PM’s Legacy From Austerity to Apartheid (Democracy Now)
Hugo Young: Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared (The Guardian)
From Billy Bragg, Calgary, AB, Canada, on the death of Margaret Thatcher (Posted on his Facebook profile):
This is not a time for celebration. The death of Margaret Thatcher is nothing more than a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today. Of why ordinary working people are no longer able to earn enough from one job to support a family; of why there is a shortage of decent affordable housing; of why domestic growth is driven by credit, not by real incomes; of why tax-payers are forced to top up wages; of why a spiteful government seeks to penalise the poor for having an extra bedroom; of why Rupert Murdoch became so powerful; of why cynicism and greed became the hallmarks of our society.
Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none of this. The only real antidote to cynicism is activism. Don't celebrate - organise!
Will Elvis Costello Dance on Margaret Thatcher’s Grave? (TruthDig)
Russell Brand: Remembering Margaret Thatcher, Britain's Unmaternal National Matriarch (Huffington Post)
Lynne Segal: Thatcher—neoliberalism’s “willing tool” (Verso)
Michael Hudson: Thatcher's Legacy of Failed Privatizations (Naked Capitalism)
Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers: The Queen Mother of Global Austerity and Financialization - Thatcher's Mean Legacy (Counterpunch)
Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013): Tariq Ali on Late British PM’s Legacy From Austerity to Apartheid (Democracy Now)
Hugo Young: Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared (The Guardian)
From Billy Bragg, Calgary, AB, Canada, on the death of Margaret Thatcher (Posted on his Facebook profile):
This is not a time for celebration. The death of Margaret Thatcher is nothing more than a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today. Of why ordinary working people are no longer able to earn enough from one job to support a family; of why there is a shortage of decent affordable housing; of why domestic growth is driven by credit, not by real incomes; of why tax-payers are forced to top up wages; of why a spiteful government seeks to penalise the poor for having an extra bedroom; of why Rupert Murdoch became so powerful; of why cynicism and greed became the hallmarks of our society.
Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none of this. The only real antidote to cynicism is activism. Don't celebrate - organise!
Will Elvis Costello Dance on Margaret Thatcher’s Grave? (TruthDig)
Benjamin Kunkel: Dystopia and the End of Politics
Dystopia and the End of Politics
by Benjamin Kunkel
Dissent Magazine
IN retrospect, the nineties can seem an anomalous decade, the only one since the Second World War when technological civilization did not appear particularly bent on self-destruction. Of course, not everyone greeted the end of the cold war as the dawning of a millennium of capitalist democracy, but even dismayed leftists tended to forecast the coming century by extrapolating from current trends. These included increased liberalization of trade, increased commodification of natural resources (such as water) and human roles (such as fertilization, courtship, and the care of the elderly), the internationalization of culture, continual advances in digital technology and genetic science, the rolling back of governmental authority to its police powers, and regular elections to ratify it all. This vision, whether taken for a nightmare or a dream, was of a world integrated under a total market and consecrated to private as opposed to public life: the “private sector” of corporations, and the “private life” of households. You called this tendency globalization if you liked it, neoliberalism if you didn’t. Either way, the sense was that capitalism would, for the foreseeable future, consolidate its achievements rather than undermine them.
This notion of the future neglected certain facts. For one thing, it’s not as if no one knew about global warming during the nineties. Indeed, the end of the cold war and the first public awareness of climate change arrived almost simultaneously. In 1988, the Soviet Union declared it would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied countries, and in the same year the scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress that he possessed a “99 per cent” certainty that “global warming is affecting our planet now.” In December of 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved; the following summer, the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro produced the UN’s first climate change treaty, with its aim of “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate system.” And, though the connection was rarely noted, these developments were not quite unrelated: petroleum exports made up some 60 percent of the USSR’s foreign currency earnings, and the same high oil prices that buoyed the Soviet rivalry with the United States encouraged conservation in the West. When, in the mid-eighties, oil prices collapsed, it not only helped finish off the USSR but increased fuel consumption outside of the Soviet bloc, which in turn accelerated global warming, along with—something else to worry about—the depletion of the earth’s oil reserves. Many of our newer anxieties turn, in fact, on the idea that the oil-intensive planetary transportation system so vital to the functioning of contemporary capitalism ultimately abets climate change, the arrival of peak oil, and the circulation of viruses, while globalized financial markets are capable of spreading contagions (as in the “Asian flu” of 1998) of a different kind.
None of this was impossible to imagine during the nineties. But it may have been simply too much to take that the cold war should immediately be succeeded by awareness of a dangerously overheating planet. Part of this is simply that it’s not the same thing to know something yourself (you and your favorite periodicals), and to know something you know your neighbor also knows. As Susan Sontag noticed in an essay called “The Imagination of Disaster,” about the typical science fiction movie of the early cold war, the arrival of the new menace (monsters, aliens) was “usually witnessed or suspected by just one person, a scientist on a field trip.” That was phase one of the plot. Phase two involved the “confirmation of the hero’s report by a host of witnesses to a great act of destruction.”
As viewers of the old and many of the new disaster movies know, it’s in phase two, with its crowd of witnesses, that the feeling This is really happening dawns, and true panic begins. In the real world of history, things happen more slowly, and even a televised real-life version of that fundamental disaster movie set piece, the destruction of a great city—New Orleans, by Hurricane Katrina—hardly signifies the imminent end of life as we know it. Still, it changes one’s private mood to know the public mood has changed.
A VISIT to a bookstore or multiplex confirms the new strain of morbidity in the air. Every other month seems to bring the publication of at least one new so-called literary novel on dystopian or apocalyptic themes and the release of at least one similarly themed movie displaying some artistic trappings. (Artsy, but not quite aspiring to be art, films like 28 Days Later and Children of Men might be called, without scorn, “B+ movies,” to distinguish them from ordinary apocalyptic crowd-pleasers.) What is striking is not so much the proliferation of these futuristic works—something that has been going on for generations—but the wholesale rehabilitation of such “genre” material for serious or serious-seeming novels and movies. If ordinary citizens are taking their direst imaginings more to heart than before, so, it would appear, are novelists and filmmakers. The new cultural prestige of disaster will be worth returning to later on.
First, however, a distinction needs to be made between the dystopian and the apocalyptic, because these categories refer to different and even opposed futuristic scenarios. The end of the world or apocalypse typically brings about the collapse of order; dystopia, on the other hand, envisions a sinister perfection of order. In the most basic political terms, dystopia is a nightmare of authoritarian or totalitarian rule, while the end of the world is a nightmare of anarchy. (There is also the currently less fashionable kind of political dream known as utopia.) What the dystopian and the apocalyptic modes have in common is simply that they imagine our world changed, for the worse, almost beyond recognition.
Both versions of the future are plentifully on offer in recent literary fiction and B+ movies. In 28 Days Later (released 2002), an accidentally released supervirus transforms virtually all of Britain into a population of cannibalistic zombies. Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (published 2003) is a post-apocalyptic bestiary of genetically engineered species; among them, in a world half-drowned by rising seas, lives apparently the last surviving human. Michel Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island (published 2004) is narrated by a misanthropic contemporary of ours named Daniel, as well as numbers 24 and 25 of the successive clones made from this not-quite individual. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (published 2005) is another clone novel; it concerns genetic supernumeraries raised for purposes of organ harvesting. And cloning likewise furnishes subject matter for David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (also published 2005), where one of five braided narrative strands takes the form of a Q & A between a normally human historian and an imprisoned rebel “fabricant,” who—unlike Ishiguro’s clones, with their lamblike passivity—has escaped an underground world of slavery into horrified awareness of the genocidal nature of a “corpocracy” raised on the blood of clones. Mitchell has imagined the smoothest-running and most cynically organized of possible dystopias, in which business and government have melded with one another—perhaps for this reason the narrative is set in South Korea, notorious in the late nineties for its state-supported chaebols, or conglomerates, and “crony capitalism”—and the sole revolutionary movement abroad in the land is in fact sponsored by the corporate state to supply it with the fictitious enemy it requires.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Benjamin Kunkel
Dissent Magazine
IN retrospect, the nineties can seem an anomalous decade, the only one since the Second World War when technological civilization did not appear particularly bent on self-destruction. Of course, not everyone greeted the end of the cold war as the dawning of a millennium of capitalist democracy, but even dismayed leftists tended to forecast the coming century by extrapolating from current trends. These included increased liberalization of trade, increased commodification of natural resources (such as water) and human roles (such as fertilization, courtship, and the care of the elderly), the internationalization of culture, continual advances in digital technology and genetic science, the rolling back of governmental authority to its police powers, and regular elections to ratify it all. This vision, whether taken for a nightmare or a dream, was of a world integrated under a total market and consecrated to private as opposed to public life: the “private sector” of corporations, and the “private life” of households. You called this tendency globalization if you liked it, neoliberalism if you didn’t. Either way, the sense was that capitalism would, for the foreseeable future, consolidate its achievements rather than undermine them.
This notion of the future neglected certain facts. For one thing, it’s not as if no one knew about global warming during the nineties. Indeed, the end of the cold war and the first public awareness of climate change arrived almost simultaneously. In 1988, the Soviet Union declared it would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied countries, and in the same year the scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress that he possessed a “99 per cent” certainty that “global warming is affecting our planet now.” In December of 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved; the following summer, the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro produced the UN’s first climate change treaty, with its aim of “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate system.” And, though the connection was rarely noted, these developments were not quite unrelated: petroleum exports made up some 60 percent of the USSR’s foreign currency earnings, and the same high oil prices that buoyed the Soviet rivalry with the United States encouraged conservation in the West. When, in the mid-eighties, oil prices collapsed, it not only helped finish off the USSR but increased fuel consumption outside of the Soviet bloc, which in turn accelerated global warming, along with—something else to worry about—the depletion of the earth’s oil reserves. Many of our newer anxieties turn, in fact, on the idea that the oil-intensive planetary transportation system so vital to the functioning of contemporary capitalism ultimately abets climate change, the arrival of peak oil, and the circulation of viruses, while globalized financial markets are capable of spreading contagions (as in the “Asian flu” of 1998) of a different kind.
None of this was impossible to imagine during the nineties. But it may have been simply too much to take that the cold war should immediately be succeeded by awareness of a dangerously overheating planet. Part of this is simply that it’s not the same thing to know something yourself (you and your favorite periodicals), and to know something you know your neighbor also knows. As Susan Sontag noticed in an essay called “The Imagination of Disaster,” about the typical science fiction movie of the early cold war, the arrival of the new menace (monsters, aliens) was “usually witnessed or suspected by just one person, a scientist on a field trip.” That was phase one of the plot. Phase two involved the “confirmation of the hero’s report by a host of witnesses to a great act of destruction.”
As viewers of the old and many of the new disaster movies know, it’s in phase two, with its crowd of witnesses, that the feeling This is really happening dawns, and true panic begins. In the real world of history, things happen more slowly, and even a televised real-life version of that fundamental disaster movie set piece, the destruction of a great city—New Orleans, by Hurricane Katrina—hardly signifies the imminent end of life as we know it. Still, it changes one’s private mood to know the public mood has changed.
A VISIT to a bookstore or multiplex confirms the new strain of morbidity in the air. Every other month seems to bring the publication of at least one new so-called literary novel on dystopian or apocalyptic themes and the release of at least one similarly themed movie displaying some artistic trappings. (Artsy, but not quite aspiring to be art, films like 28 Days Later and Children of Men might be called, without scorn, “B+ movies,” to distinguish them from ordinary apocalyptic crowd-pleasers.) What is striking is not so much the proliferation of these futuristic works—something that has been going on for generations—but the wholesale rehabilitation of such “genre” material for serious or serious-seeming novels and movies. If ordinary citizens are taking their direst imaginings more to heart than before, so, it would appear, are novelists and filmmakers. The new cultural prestige of disaster will be worth returning to later on.
First, however, a distinction needs to be made between the dystopian and the apocalyptic, because these categories refer to different and even opposed futuristic scenarios. The end of the world or apocalypse typically brings about the collapse of order; dystopia, on the other hand, envisions a sinister perfection of order. In the most basic political terms, dystopia is a nightmare of authoritarian or totalitarian rule, while the end of the world is a nightmare of anarchy. (There is also the currently less fashionable kind of political dream known as utopia.) What the dystopian and the apocalyptic modes have in common is simply that they imagine our world changed, for the worse, almost beyond recognition.
Both versions of the future are plentifully on offer in recent literary fiction and B+ movies. In 28 Days Later (released 2002), an accidentally released supervirus transforms virtually all of Britain into a population of cannibalistic zombies. Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (published 2003) is a post-apocalyptic bestiary of genetically engineered species; among them, in a world half-drowned by rising seas, lives apparently the last surviving human. Michel Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island (published 2004) is narrated by a misanthropic contemporary of ours named Daniel, as well as numbers 24 and 25 of the successive clones made from this not-quite individual. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (published 2005) is another clone novel; it concerns genetic supernumeraries raised for purposes of organ harvesting. And cloning likewise furnishes subject matter for David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (also published 2005), where one of five braided narrative strands takes the form of a Q & A between a normally human historian and an imprisoned rebel “fabricant,” who—unlike Ishiguro’s clones, with their lamblike passivity—has escaped an underground world of slavery into horrified awareness of the genocidal nature of a “corpocracy” raised on the blood of clones. Mitchell has imagined the smoothest-running and most cynically organized of possible dystopias, in which business and government have melded with one another—perhaps for this reason the narrative is set in South Korea, notorious in the late nineties for its state-supported chaebols, or conglomerates, and “crony capitalism”—and the sole revolutionary movement abroad in the land is in fact sponsored by the corporate state to supply it with the fictitious enemy it requires.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Sunday, April 07, 2013
Dogtooth (Greece: Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
Dogtooth (Greece: Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009: 94 mins)
Benton, Michael. "Thoughts About Dogtooth (Greece: Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)." Dialogic (September 21, 2011)
Booth, Steven. "Essential Filmmaking: The Perverse Cuts of Dogtooth." Fandor (May 20, 2011)
Jameson, A.D. "A Review of the Relatively New Movie Dogtooth (Kynodontas)." Big Other (July 16, 2010)
Murphy, Bernice M. Dogtooth Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (June 2010)
Williamson, Ben. "On Parenting, Media, Education and Phobias." DML Central (February 14, 2011)
Saturday, April 06, 2013
Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal (USA: Stephen Vittoria, 2013)
Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal (USA: Stephen Vittoria, 2013: 120 mins)
Abu-Jamal, Mumia. "The United States Is Fast Becoming One of the Biggest Open-Air Prisons on Earth." Democracy Now (February 1, 2013)
Hanarahan, Noelle and Stephen Vittoria. "'Long Distance Revolutionary': Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Journey from Black Panthers to Prison Journalist." Democracy Now (February 1, 2013)
Hedges, Chris. The Unsilenced Voice of a 'Long-Distance Revolutionary.'" TruthDig (December 9, 2012)
Counterpunch: Darwin Bond-Graham -- It's a Banker's World
LIBOR Litigation to Recoup Damages After the Biggest Financial Fraud in World History has been Thrown Out
It’s a Banker’s World
by Darwin Bond-Graham
Counterpunch
Sixteen banks at the core of the global financial system —including JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup— scored a major victory last Friday when a federal judge dismissed nearly all the charges brought against them by a group of plaintiffs that includes municipal governments, pension funds, bondholders, and other investors who lost billions of dollars as a result of LIBOR rigging. The ruling is a major setback, both legally, and financially, for those harmed by the LIBOR manipulation conspiracy. Among the most damaged are are thousands of local governments that were played like ATMs during the Financial Crisis by the banks. Banks used their power to set 3-Month and 1-Month LIBOR rates so as to extract potentially billions in interest rate swap payments from the public. Countless small investors lost equally huge sums of money as investments indexing LIBOR were rigged to pay out less. The lawsuit’s dismissal ensures that the banks will keep billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. The ruling may also bolster the banks’ positions against ongoing investigations and settlements sought by government regulators in the US, Europe, and Japan.
Strangely, the judge’s order (available here) acknowledged the massive global fraud that caused financial damages to the public in favor a few wealthy institutions. However, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald relied on technical legal arguments to throw out the core claims of the lawsuit. In other words, the ruling doesn’t deny that the crime occurred and that the Plaintiffs sustained serious damages, but still dismisses the claims.
“We recognize that it might be unexpected that we are dismissing a substantial portion of plaintiffs’ claims, given that several of the defendants here have already paid penalties to government regulatory agencies reaching into the billions of dollars,” concluded Judge Buchwald in her 161 page order. She justified this position, however:
Government regulators have already proven through their own investigations that LIBOR was rigged to enrich the banks at the expense of their customers and counterparties who entered into LIBOR-linked derivatives contracts, or purchased LIBOR-referencing securities. Beginning as early as 2005 Barclays, a member of the British Bankers Association, submitted false quotes to Thompson-Reuters, the company responsible for calculating and disseminating the different LIBOR rates each day. The false quotes were designed to skew LIBOR upward, or downward, by precise amounts, so as to benefit the positions of Barclays traders against their counterparties. In doing so Barclays violated securities laws and committed a fraud that harmed countless other market participants relying on LIBOR to value their financial deals.
To Read the Rest
by Darwin Bond-Graham
Counterpunch
Sixteen banks at the core of the global financial system —including JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup— scored a major victory last Friday when a federal judge dismissed nearly all the charges brought against them by a group of plaintiffs that includes municipal governments, pension funds, bondholders, and other investors who lost billions of dollars as a result of LIBOR rigging. The ruling is a major setback, both legally, and financially, for those harmed by the LIBOR manipulation conspiracy. Among the most damaged are are thousands of local governments that were played like ATMs during the Financial Crisis by the banks. Banks used their power to set 3-Month and 1-Month LIBOR rates so as to extract potentially billions in interest rate swap payments from the public. Countless small investors lost equally huge sums of money as investments indexing LIBOR were rigged to pay out less. The lawsuit’s dismissal ensures that the banks will keep billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. The ruling may also bolster the banks’ positions against ongoing investigations and settlements sought by government regulators in the US, Europe, and Japan.
Strangely, the judge’s order (available here) acknowledged the massive global fraud that caused financial damages to the public in favor a few wealthy institutions. However, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald relied on technical legal arguments to throw out the core claims of the lawsuit. In other words, the ruling doesn’t deny that the crime occurred and that the Plaintiffs sustained serious damages, but still dismisses the claims.
“We recognize that it might be unexpected that we are dismissing a substantial portion of plaintiffs’ claims, given that several of the defendants here have already paid penalties to government regulatory agencies reaching into the billions of dollars,” concluded Judge Buchwald in her 161 page order. She justified this position, however:
“…these results are not as incongruous as they might seem. Under the statutes invoked here, there are many requirements that private plaintiffs must satisfy, but which government agencies need not. The reason for these differing requirements is that the focuses of public enforcement and private enforcement, even of the same statutes, are not identical. The broad public interests behind the statutes invoked here, such as integrity of the markets and competition, are being addressed by ongoing governmental enforcement.”
Government regulators have already proven through their own investigations that LIBOR was rigged to enrich the banks at the expense of their customers and counterparties who entered into LIBOR-linked derivatives contracts, or purchased LIBOR-referencing securities. Beginning as early as 2005 Barclays, a member of the British Bankers Association, submitted false quotes to Thompson-Reuters, the company responsible for calculating and disseminating the different LIBOR rates each day. The false quotes were designed to skew LIBOR upward, or downward, by precise amounts, so as to benefit the positions of Barclays traders against their counterparties. In doing so Barclays violated securities laws and committed a fraud that harmed countless other market participants relying on LIBOR to value their financial deals.
To Read the Rest
Four Corners: Wikileaks - The Forgotten Man
WikiLeaks - The Forgotten Man
by Quentin McDermott
Four Corners
Private Bradley Manning was the man U.S. authorities allege stole classified military files, providing them to WikiLeaks for publication.
While WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange battles to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom to Sweden, on the other side of the Atlantic Bradley Manning is facing a court martial. If found guilty he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
It's a case that has all the hallmarks of a spy thriller. Bradley Manning was a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq, when he allegedly downloaded classified files onto a disk storing Lady Gaga songs. It's alleged he then confided what he'd done to a computer hacker. A short time later the authorities arrested Manning and he's been in a military jail ever since.
Early last year reporter Quentin McDermott told the story of Bradley Manning and the people who'd helped the United States government build a case against him. Now Four Corners reprises the program, updating it with crucial new elements describing the ferocious battle between hackers and the U.S. government as they pursue Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
The program also talks to Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, about the treatment of Bradley Manning. Mr Mendez says Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment during his "excessive and prolonged isolation" at Quantico Marine Corps Base outside Washington.
The question remains: will Bradley Manning attempt to avoid a life sentence by turning against Julian Assange?
Link to the Episode
by Quentin McDermott
Four Corners
Private Bradley Manning was the man U.S. authorities allege stole classified military files, providing them to WikiLeaks for publication.
While WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange battles to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom to Sweden, on the other side of the Atlantic Bradley Manning is facing a court martial. If found guilty he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
It's a case that has all the hallmarks of a spy thriller. Bradley Manning was a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq, when he allegedly downloaded classified files onto a disk storing Lady Gaga songs. It's alleged he then confided what he'd done to a computer hacker. A short time later the authorities arrested Manning and he's been in a military jail ever since.
Early last year reporter Quentin McDermott told the story of Bradley Manning and the people who'd helped the United States government build a case against him. Now Four Corners reprises the program, updating it with crucial new elements describing the ferocious battle between hackers and the U.S. government as they pursue Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
The program also talks to Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, about the treatment of Bradley Manning. Mr Mendez says Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment during his "excessive and prolonged isolation" at Quantico Marine Corps Base outside Washington.
The question remains: will Bradley Manning attempt to avoid a life sentence by turning against Julian Assange?
Link to the Episode
Friday, April 05, 2013
Exit Through the Gift Shop (UK/USA: Banksy, 2010)
Exit Through the Gift Shop (UK/USA: Banksy, 2010: 87 mins)
Benton, Michael. "Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop." North of Center (March 2, 2011)
"Steve Martin, Famous Artists Appraise Stephen Colbert's Portrait (VIDEO) Huffington Post (December 12, 2010)
Haden-Guest, Anthony. "The Art of Mr. Brainwash." The Daily Beast (February 18, 2010)
Wallace, Rick. "What are we Watching, and Does it Matter? I'm Still Here and Exit Through the Gift Shop." Alternate Takes (April 1, 2011)
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Dario Llinares -- Adapting an Askance Perspective: Philip K. Dick on Film
Adapting an Askance Perspective: Philip K. Dick on Film
by Dario Llinares
Alternate Takes
This summer’s remake of Total Recall extends the list of films inspired by the writing of Philip K. Dick. His novels and short stories offer some of the most eccentric and imaginative conceits in American literature, and are designed to question the fundamental metaphysical realities upon which our perception of the world is based. To define PKD as merely a science-fiction writer fails to capture the intricacy of thought and unlimited possibilities that his stories evoke.
Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said, like many of his novels, envisages a technologically advanced dystopia where genetic engineering is the main tool of a repressive police state. Ubik and Valis display PKD’s interest in the transcendental mind and the human interpretation of God, and the classic The Man in the High Castle re-imagines a post-World War II era if the Nazis had been triumphant. The very strangeness of his titles reflect an author who looked at the world askance. It is not over-praising to mention him in the same breadth as Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury and Burgess; but while those authors are ostensibly influenced by the tumultuous events of the first half of the 20th century, PKD was more an évocateur-du-jour of the cultural turn of the 1960s and what has come to be termed postmodernism.
PKD’s somewhat tortured life contained episodes of paranoia and psychological uncertainty, which played out in the characters he created and the ephemeral situations they inhabited. His own experiences of drug use, religion, romantic relationships (he was married five times), and the tumult of the Nixon administration helped him to capture the dissolving vicissitudes of a shifting cultural zeitgeist. Loss of identity in an increasingly schizophrenic, technologically-led, drug-infused, media-saturated world underpins his allegorical stories, with protagonists searching for ‘truths’ that seem diffuse and ineffable. If there is one central theme running through his oeuvre it is the constant questioning of what constitutes a human being.
Although he was lauded in the esoteric sci-fi world, his books never achieved mainstream success and, in an almost conspiratorial twist of ‘fate’, he died of a stroke in March 1982, three months before the release of Blade Runner. PKD’s cinematic legacy is found not only in specific adaptations, but a wider saturation of his ideas through contemporary postmodern film aesthetics. David Cronenburg, The Wachowskis, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Christopher Nolan are just a few directors clearly influenced by the author’s writing.
In exalting such a visionary mind and its influence on contemporary cinema, however, a cautioning question somewhat inconveniently comes to mind. Why do so many PKD adaptations fail to live up to the intelligence, acerbic wit, strange imaginativeness or political insight of his original texts? For it is my contention that, even in the best examples of PKD-inspired cinema, much of the heteroclite themes, astute social representations and ambivalent outcomes are at best smoothed out, at worse omitted.
Of course, in the era of the CGI-laden blockbuster the futuristic speculative fictions of PKD are easily co-opted into the testosterone infused visual spectacle of event cinema. For example, John Woo’s Paycheck (2003) and Lee Tamahori’s Next (2007) would be highly contemptuous if they weren’t so forgettable. Both films, like most PKD stories, have the seed of an interesting scenario which links allegorically to contemporary issues. The former deals with intellectual property rights and industrial espionage, with corporations protecting knowledge by wiping the memory of employees who work for them. The latter deals with a staple PKD trope: the ability to see into the future and its consequences for free will and moral decision-making. Yet the ideas behind both films, rather than being explored with any philosophical imagination, are simply used as the skeleton for a premise, largely overlooked in favour of a series of formulaic and largely uninvolving action scenes.
Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, does fall into a similar category in reducing its interesting premise into formulaic action/chase movie. However, there is a subtle evocation of mood here, with the cool washed-out palette imbuing a neo-noir atmosphere, which fits well with the conspiratorial vision of the original short story. The film also works on the level of future prognosis regarding the impact of foreseeable technological advances. Yet the final morality tale invokes a notion that free will wins, with Jon Anderton (Cruise) making the existential decision not to execute the murderer of his son. In the short story there is a sense that the protagonist’s journey is a complex, morally relative maze, where free will’s relationship to morality is wholly arbitrary and contingent. This Hollywood adaptation prefers the security of Manichean heroism underpinned by physical action and easy use of violence, thus eliding any real sense of danger or weakness. PKD protagonists are often weak (in PKD's Minority Report Jon Anderton is a fat, balding 50-year-old), uncertain and insecure. This is often tied to the shadowy conspiratorial milieu that is woven around them, where agents of the state, sinister scientists and androids with artificial intelligence inhabit an often surreal external world. Such an environment feeds into the internal psychosis of his characters, often leading them (and the reader) to the point of asking “do I really exist”? You never get the sense that Cruise’s Jon Anderton suffers from such existential angst.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Dario Llinares
Alternate Takes
This summer’s remake of Total Recall extends the list of films inspired by the writing of Philip K. Dick. His novels and short stories offer some of the most eccentric and imaginative conceits in American literature, and are designed to question the fundamental metaphysical realities upon which our perception of the world is based. To define PKD as merely a science-fiction writer fails to capture the intricacy of thought and unlimited possibilities that his stories evoke.
Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said, like many of his novels, envisages a technologically advanced dystopia where genetic engineering is the main tool of a repressive police state. Ubik and Valis display PKD’s interest in the transcendental mind and the human interpretation of God, and the classic The Man in the High Castle re-imagines a post-World War II era if the Nazis had been triumphant. The very strangeness of his titles reflect an author who looked at the world askance. It is not over-praising to mention him in the same breadth as Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury and Burgess; but while those authors are ostensibly influenced by the tumultuous events of the first half of the 20th century, PKD was more an évocateur-du-jour of the cultural turn of the 1960s and what has come to be termed postmodernism.
PKD’s somewhat tortured life contained episodes of paranoia and psychological uncertainty, which played out in the characters he created and the ephemeral situations they inhabited. His own experiences of drug use, religion, romantic relationships (he was married five times), and the tumult of the Nixon administration helped him to capture the dissolving vicissitudes of a shifting cultural zeitgeist. Loss of identity in an increasingly schizophrenic, technologically-led, drug-infused, media-saturated world underpins his allegorical stories, with protagonists searching for ‘truths’ that seem diffuse and ineffable. If there is one central theme running through his oeuvre it is the constant questioning of what constitutes a human being.
Although he was lauded in the esoteric sci-fi world, his books never achieved mainstream success and, in an almost conspiratorial twist of ‘fate’, he died of a stroke in March 1982, three months before the release of Blade Runner. PKD’s cinematic legacy is found not only in specific adaptations, but a wider saturation of his ideas through contemporary postmodern film aesthetics. David Cronenburg, The Wachowskis, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Christopher Nolan are just a few directors clearly influenced by the author’s writing.
In exalting such a visionary mind and its influence on contemporary cinema, however, a cautioning question somewhat inconveniently comes to mind. Why do so many PKD adaptations fail to live up to the intelligence, acerbic wit, strange imaginativeness or political insight of his original texts? For it is my contention that, even in the best examples of PKD-inspired cinema, much of the heteroclite themes, astute social representations and ambivalent outcomes are at best smoothed out, at worse omitted.
Of course, in the era of the CGI-laden blockbuster the futuristic speculative fictions of PKD are easily co-opted into the testosterone infused visual spectacle of event cinema. For example, John Woo’s Paycheck (2003) and Lee Tamahori’s Next (2007) would be highly contemptuous if they weren’t so forgettable. Both films, like most PKD stories, have the seed of an interesting scenario which links allegorically to contemporary issues. The former deals with intellectual property rights and industrial espionage, with corporations protecting knowledge by wiping the memory of employees who work for them. The latter deals with a staple PKD trope: the ability to see into the future and its consequences for free will and moral decision-making. Yet the ideas behind both films, rather than being explored with any philosophical imagination, are simply used as the skeleton for a premise, largely overlooked in favour of a series of formulaic and largely uninvolving action scenes.
Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, does fall into a similar category in reducing its interesting premise into formulaic action/chase movie. However, there is a subtle evocation of mood here, with the cool washed-out palette imbuing a neo-noir atmosphere, which fits well with the conspiratorial vision of the original short story. The film also works on the level of future prognosis regarding the impact of foreseeable technological advances. Yet the final morality tale invokes a notion that free will wins, with Jon Anderton (Cruise) making the existential decision not to execute the murderer of his son. In the short story there is a sense that the protagonist’s journey is a complex, morally relative maze, where free will’s relationship to morality is wholly arbitrary and contingent. This Hollywood adaptation prefers the security of Manichean heroism underpinned by physical action and easy use of violence, thus eliding any real sense of danger or weakness. PKD protagonists are often weak (in PKD's Minority Report Jon Anderton is a fat, balding 50-year-old), uncertain and insecure. This is often tied to the shadowy conspiratorial milieu that is woven around them, where agents of the state, sinister scientists and androids with artificial intelligence inhabit an often surreal external world. Such an environment feeds into the internal psychosis of his characters, often leading them (and the reader) to the point of asking “do I really exist”? You never get the sense that Cruise’s Jon Anderton suffers from such existential angst.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Faultlines -- Anaheim: A Tale of Two Cities
Anaheim: A tale of two cities
Faultlines
Fault Lines examines the underlying causes of recent unrest and violence in Anaheim, the home of Disneyland.
If there is one city in the world where you might expect to find happiness, it is Anaheim, California. It is the home of Disneyland, the second most popular amusement park in the world.
From Anaheim Disney has for decades been selling an image of fantasy to millions of visitors every year.
But over the summer, anger that had been growing in communities living in the shadows of this multi-billion dollar tourist industry began spiralling out of control.
In July 2012, two young Latino men were shot and killed by Anaheim police. What followed was some of the worst civil unrest this city has ever seen.
Protests against police brutality were met with riot-clad gear police and rubber bullets, further fuelling violence and bringing national attention to the home of Disneyland.
The images shocked the country but left unanswered questions: Why did it happen? Will it happen elsewhwere in the US? And are there two Anaheims?
Fault Lines examines the underlying causes of the recent unrest in Anaheim.
To Watch the Episode
Faultlines
Fault Lines examines the underlying causes of recent unrest and violence in Anaheim, the home of Disneyland.
If there is one city in the world where you might expect to find happiness, it is Anaheim, California. It is the home of Disneyland, the second most popular amusement park in the world.
From Anaheim Disney has for decades been selling an image of fantasy to millions of visitors every year.
But over the summer, anger that had been growing in communities living in the shadows of this multi-billion dollar tourist industry began spiralling out of control.
In July 2012, two young Latino men were shot and killed by Anaheim police. What followed was some of the worst civil unrest this city has ever seen.
Protests against police brutality were met with riot-clad gear police and rubber bullets, further fuelling violence and bringing national attention to the home of Disneyland.
The images shocked the country but left unanswered questions: Why did it happen? Will it happen elsewhwere in the US? And are there two Anaheims?
Fault Lines examines the underlying causes of the recent unrest in Anaheim.
To Watch the Episode
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: Likely Largest Journalism Collaboration In History
Likely Largest Journalism Collaboration In History
By Gerard Ryle, Marina Walker Guevara and Michael Hudson
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists today launches the next part of a multi-year project aimed at stripping away the biggest mystery associated with tax havens: the owners of anonymous companies.
Drawing from a trove of 2.5 million secret files, ICIJ led what may be the largest cross border journalism collaboration in history.
ICIJ’s investigation opens the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts and nearly 130,000 individuals and agents, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con artists, and the mega-rich in more than 170 countries.
Secrecy For Sale: Inside The Global Offshore Money Maze is ICIJ’s largest investigative reporting project in its 15-year history.
It lifts the curtain on the offshore system and provides a transparent look into the secret world of tax havens and the individuals and companies that use and benefit from them.
The files identify the individuals behind the covert companies and private trusts based in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands, Singapore and other offshore havens. They include American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as Russia corporate executives, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Wall Street fraudsters, international arms dealers and families and associates of long-time dictators.
Among the key findings:
Government officials and their families and associates in Azerbaijan, Russia, Canada, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Mongolia and other countries have embraced the use of covert companies and bank accounts.
The mega-rich use complex offshore structures to own mansions, yachts, art masterpieces and other assets, gaining tax advantages and anonymity not available to average people.
Many of the world’s top’s banks – including UBS, Clariden and Deutsche Bank – have aggressively worked to provide their customers with secrecy-cloaked companies in the British Virgin Islands and other offshore hideaways.
A well-paid industry of accountants, middlemen and other operatives has helped offshore patrons shroud their identities and business interests, providing shelter in many cases to money laundering or other misconduct.
Ponzi schemers and other large-scale fraudsters routinely use offshore havens to pull off their shell games and move their ill-gotten gains.
To Read the Rest and to Access the Projects
By Gerard Ryle, Marina Walker Guevara and Michael Hudson
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists today launches the next part of a multi-year project aimed at stripping away the biggest mystery associated with tax havens: the owners of anonymous companies.
Drawing from a trove of 2.5 million secret files, ICIJ led what may be the largest cross border journalism collaboration in history.
ICIJ’s investigation opens the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts and nearly 130,000 individuals and agents, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con artists, and the mega-rich in more than 170 countries.
Secrecy For Sale: Inside The Global Offshore Money Maze is ICIJ’s largest investigative reporting project in its 15-year history.
It lifts the curtain on the offshore system and provides a transparent look into the secret world of tax havens and the individuals and companies that use and benefit from them.
The files identify the individuals behind the covert companies and private trusts based in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands, Singapore and other offshore havens. They include American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as Russia corporate executives, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Wall Street fraudsters, international arms dealers and families and associates of long-time dictators.
Among the key findings:
Government officials and their families and associates in Azerbaijan, Russia, Canada, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Mongolia and other countries have embraced the use of covert companies and bank accounts.
The mega-rich use complex offshore structures to own mansions, yachts, art masterpieces and other assets, gaining tax advantages and anonymity not available to average people.
Many of the world’s top’s banks – including UBS, Clariden and Deutsche Bank – have aggressively worked to provide their customers with secrecy-cloaked companies in the British Virgin Islands and other offshore hideaways.
A well-paid industry of accountants, middlemen and other operatives has helped offshore patrons shroud their identities and business interests, providing shelter in many cases to money laundering or other misconduct.
Ponzi schemers and other large-scale fraudsters routinely use offshore havens to pull off their shell games and move their ill-gotten gains.
To Read the Rest and to Access the Projects
J. Hoberman -- The Organizer: Description of a Struggle
The Organizer: Description of a Struggle
By J. Hoberman
Current
An unverifiable, if heartfelt, assertion: For the quarter century between 1945 and 1970 (or from Rome Open City to Fellini Satyricon), the world’s greatest popular cinema was produced in Italy—a realm of glamorous superstars, sensational comedians, and great genre flicks. A half dozen maestros were backed by a remarkably deep bench, including writer-director Mario Monicelli (1915–2010), whose 1963 strike drama I compagni (The Comrades), released in the U.S. as The Organizer, is popular cinema in the best sense.
The son of a political journalist who moved from socialism to anarcho-syndicalism to fascism (briefly) to antifascism, and who also founded Italy’s first film journal, Monicelli is best known for his socially aware tragicomedies. Still, his oeuvre is not easily synopsized. He directed some sixty films and wrote or cowrote more than seventy over the course of a career that began in 1935 with a precocious 16 mm feature based (like Frank Borzage’s No Greater Glory, 1934) on Ferenc Molnár’s novel The Paul Street Boys and ended seven decades later, when he was ninety-one, with The Roses of the Desert (2006), a comedy about an Italian medical unit sent to Libya in 1940.
Monicelli characterized his first studio features, made in the early fifties and mainly starring the great sad-faced clown Totó, as “neorealist farce”—shot on location and affectionately satirizing the struggles of the urban poor. (“The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death,” the director maintained. “These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway.”) With the genially caustic A Hero of Our Times (1955), featuring the young Alberto Sordi as a craven lower-middle-class schemer, and Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), an enormous international hit, not least in the U.S., Monicelli pioneered what would be called commedia all’italiana—tales of hapless schemers, in Big Deal played against type by matinee idols Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni.
However cowardly or amoral, Monicelli’s protagonists are essentially sympathetic in their ineptitude—and their privation. The Great War (1959), cowritten, like Big Deal, with the team of Age-Scarpelli (Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli), paired Sordi and Gassman as dim-witted crooks dragooned into the Italian Army during World War I. Not simply antimilitarist but antipatriotic, it shared the Golden Lion with Rossellini’s World War II drama Il generale della Rovere at the 1959 Venice Film Festival. The Passionate Thief (1960), with Anna Magnani as a would-be con artist, followed, along with a contribution to the anthology film Boccaccio ’70, a frothy yet piquant comedy about the oppression, sexual and otherwise, of two young factory workers.
Monicelli always had an ambivalent relationship with engaged cinema. One of his last works documented the protests around the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa; late in his life, he thanked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi “for making me feel young again by joining in protests against him who has all the makings of a modern tyrant.” At the same time, his movies are characterized by a marked skepticism: “I always look at a group of people who want to attempt an enterprise greater than their means. They begin this enterprise, and they fail.” The bumbling burglars and botched heist of Big Deal on Madonna Street offer the purest example of such collective failure. The Organizer, a French-Italian coproduction made soon after Monicelli started his own production company, is a more complex dramatization of defeat.
Inspired, according to its director, by the revolutionary ghosts of Paris’s no longer extant Bastille and set in the slums of late-nineteenth-century Turin, The Organizer accepts what the influential Italian Marxist leader Antonio Gramsci saw as “the challenge of modernity,” namely, “to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” Life is struggle, and to struggle against one’s lot is to flirt with futility. To that end, The Organizer is variously (and, for some, disconcertingly) jaunty, sentimental, comic, and baffling, as Monicelli applies the tonal shifts associated with the French New Wave to a straightforward saga of working-class solidarity. Stanley Kauffmann, who reviewed the movie for the New Republic when it opened in the U.S. in May 1964, found The Organizer “very interesting and very odd”—by which he meant anachronistic. Other critics who, like Kauffmann, had lived through the 1930s also saw The Organizer as a peculiar throwback to the socially significant movies of that period. “What prompted Mario Monicelli . . . to make this picture just now?” Kauffmann wondered. Hadn’t the struggle for workers’ rights long since been won?
Kauffmann was likely unaware of the convulsive autoworkers’ strike that had shaken Turin—and Fiat—in 1962, and yet his puzzlement is understandable. Notable for its period detail and Giuseppe Rotunno’s accomplished faux-daguerreotype cinematography, The Organizer is not so much a call to action as to recollection—both a historical monument and a taboo-breaking depiction of a specific moment. Monicelli meant to remind contemporary viewers that decent working conditions and wages were gained over time and at considerable cost. The Organizer, which had its Italian premiere at the 35th Congress of the Italian Socialist Party, is, above all, a movie about how difficult it is to organize collective action, set in a period when Italian unions barely existed.
To Read the Rest
By J. Hoberman
Current
An unverifiable, if heartfelt, assertion: For the quarter century between 1945 and 1970 (or from Rome Open City to Fellini Satyricon), the world’s greatest popular cinema was produced in Italy—a realm of glamorous superstars, sensational comedians, and great genre flicks. A half dozen maestros were backed by a remarkably deep bench, including writer-director Mario Monicelli (1915–2010), whose 1963 strike drama I compagni (The Comrades), released in the U.S. as The Organizer, is popular cinema in the best sense.
The son of a political journalist who moved from socialism to anarcho-syndicalism to fascism (briefly) to antifascism, and who also founded Italy’s first film journal, Monicelli is best known for his socially aware tragicomedies. Still, his oeuvre is not easily synopsized. He directed some sixty films and wrote or cowrote more than seventy over the course of a career that began in 1935 with a precocious 16 mm feature based (like Frank Borzage’s No Greater Glory, 1934) on Ferenc Molnár’s novel The Paul Street Boys and ended seven decades later, when he was ninety-one, with The Roses of the Desert (2006), a comedy about an Italian medical unit sent to Libya in 1940.
Monicelli characterized his first studio features, made in the early fifties and mainly starring the great sad-faced clown Totó, as “neorealist farce”—shot on location and affectionately satirizing the struggles of the urban poor. (“The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death,” the director maintained. “These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway.”) With the genially caustic A Hero of Our Times (1955), featuring the young Alberto Sordi as a craven lower-middle-class schemer, and Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), an enormous international hit, not least in the U.S., Monicelli pioneered what would be called commedia all’italiana—tales of hapless schemers, in Big Deal played against type by matinee idols Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni.
However cowardly or amoral, Monicelli’s protagonists are essentially sympathetic in their ineptitude—and their privation. The Great War (1959), cowritten, like Big Deal, with the team of Age-Scarpelli (Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli), paired Sordi and Gassman as dim-witted crooks dragooned into the Italian Army during World War I. Not simply antimilitarist but antipatriotic, it shared the Golden Lion with Rossellini’s World War II drama Il generale della Rovere at the 1959 Venice Film Festival. The Passionate Thief (1960), with Anna Magnani as a would-be con artist, followed, along with a contribution to the anthology film Boccaccio ’70, a frothy yet piquant comedy about the oppression, sexual and otherwise, of two young factory workers.
Monicelli always had an ambivalent relationship with engaged cinema. One of his last works documented the protests around the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa; late in his life, he thanked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi “for making me feel young again by joining in protests against him who has all the makings of a modern tyrant.” At the same time, his movies are characterized by a marked skepticism: “I always look at a group of people who want to attempt an enterprise greater than their means. They begin this enterprise, and they fail.” The bumbling burglars and botched heist of Big Deal on Madonna Street offer the purest example of such collective failure. The Organizer, a French-Italian coproduction made soon after Monicelli started his own production company, is a more complex dramatization of defeat.
Inspired, according to its director, by the revolutionary ghosts of Paris’s no longer extant Bastille and set in the slums of late-nineteenth-century Turin, The Organizer accepts what the influential Italian Marxist leader Antonio Gramsci saw as “the challenge of modernity,” namely, “to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” Life is struggle, and to struggle against one’s lot is to flirt with futility. To that end, The Organizer is variously (and, for some, disconcertingly) jaunty, sentimental, comic, and baffling, as Monicelli applies the tonal shifts associated with the French New Wave to a straightforward saga of working-class solidarity. Stanley Kauffmann, who reviewed the movie for the New Republic when it opened in the U.S. in May 1964, found The Organizer “very interesting and very odd”—by which he meant anachronistic. Other critics who, like Kauffmann, had lived through the 1930s also saw The Organizer as a peculiar throwback to the socially significant movies of that period. “What prompted Mario Monicelli . . . to make this picture just now?” Kauffmann wondered. Hadn’t the struggle for workers’ rights long since been won?
Kauffmann was likely unaware of the convulsive autoworkers’ strike that had shaken Turin—and Fiat—in 1962, and yet his puzzlement is understandable. Notable for its period detail and Giuseppe Rotunno’s accomplished faux-daguerreotype cinematography, The Organizer is not so much a call to action as to recollection—both a historical monument and a taboo-breaking depiction of a specific moment. Monicelli meant to remind contemporary viewers that decent working conditions and wages were gained over time and at considerable cost. The Organizer, which had its Italian premiere at the 35th Congress of the Italian Socialist Party, is, above all, a movie about how difficult it is to organize collective action, set in a period when Italian unions barely existed.
To Read the Rest
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
Democracy Now: Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Explains Decision to End His Life
Democracy Now
Exclusive: Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Explains Decision to End His Life
In the week marking the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we spend the hour looking at the remarkable life and imminent death of Iraq War veteran Tomas Young. Citing his overwhelming physical pain from wounds that left him paralyzed in Iraq, Young recently announced he has decided to end his life by discontinuing his medicine and nourishment, which comes in the form of liquid through a feeding tube. Young joins to explain his decision from his home in Kansas City, along with his wife Claudia Cuellar. We’re also joined by Phil Donahue, the legendary TV talk show host, whose 2007 documentary, "Body of War," follows Tomas’ rehabilitation and his political awakening to become one of the most prominent antiwar U.S. veterans speaking out against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. "I am, on one hand, sick and tired of being sick and tired," Young says. "And on the other, I don’t want to watch my body waste away." Donahue calls Tomas’ announcement "a very unusual act of moral courage. He wants people to see this, because he came home from the most sanitized war of my lifetime. We don’t see this. But less than 5 percent of us, maybe 1 percent ... have made a personal sacrifice for this war. And Tomas is one of them."
Phil Donahue on His 2003 Firing from MSNBC, When Liberal Network Couldn’t Tolerate Antiwar Voices
In 2003, the legendary television host Phil Donahue was fired from his prime-time MSNBC talk show during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The problem was not Donahue’s ratings, but rather his views: An internal MSNBC memo warned Donahue was a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war," providing "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." Donahue joins us to look back on his firing 10 years later. "They were terrified of the antiwar voice," Donahue says.
Exclusive: Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Reads "Last Letter" to President Bush and Dick Cheney
Iraq War veteran Tomas Young was left paralyzed in a 2004 attack in Iraq. Released from medical care three months later, Young returned home to become an active member in Iraq Veterans Against the War. He recently announced that he will stop his medicine and nourishment, which comes in the form of liquid through a feeding tube — a decision which will hasten his death. Joining us from his home in Kansas City, Young reads from his letter, "A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran." Young says to Bush and Cheney: "You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans — my fellow veterans — whose future you stole."
To Watch these Episodes
More Resources:
Iraq War Timeline: From "Shock and Awe" to Civilian Toll, to Billions in Reconstruction, Vet Health
Exclusive: Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Explains Decision to End His Life
In the week marking the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we spend the hour looking at the remarkable life and imminent death of Iraq War veteran Tomas Young. Citing his overwhelming physical pain from wounds that left him paralyzed in Iraq, Young recently announced he has decided to end his life by discontinuing his medicine and nourishment, which comes in the form of liquid through a feeding tube. Young joins to explain his decision from his home in Kansas City, along with his wife Claudia Cuellar. We’re also joined by Phil Donahue, the legendary TV talk show host, whose 2007 documentary, "Body of War," follows Tomas’ rehabilitation and his political awakening to become one of the most prominent antiwar U.S. veterans speaking out against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. "I am, on one hand, sick and tired of being sick and tired," Young says. "And on the other, I don’t want to watch my body waste away." Donahue calls Tomas’ announcement "a very unusual act of moral courage. He wants people to see this, because he came home from the most sanitized war of my lifetime. We don’t see this. But less than 5 percent of us, maybe 1 percent ... have made a personal sacrifice for this war. And Tomas is one of them."
Phil Donahue on His 2003 Firing from MSNBC, When Liberal Network Couldn’t Tolerate Antiwar Voices
In 2003, the legendary television host Phil Donahue was fired from his prime-time MSNBC talk show during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The problem was not Donahue’s ratings, but rather his views: An internal MSNBC memo warned Donahue was a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war," providing "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." Donahue joins us to look back on his firing 10 years later. "They were terrified of the antiwar voice," Donahue says.
Exclusive: Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Reads "Last Letter" to President Bush and Dick Cheney
Iraq War veteran Tomas Young was left paralyzed in a 2004 attack in Iraq. Released from medical care three months later, Young returned home to become an active member in Iraq Veterans Against the War. He recently announced that he will stop his medicine and nourishment, which comes in the form of liquid through a feeding tube — a decision which will hasten his death. Joining us from his home in Kansas City, Young reads from his letter, "A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran." Young says to Bush and Cheney: "You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans — my fellow veterans — whose future you stole."
To Watch these Episodes
More Resources:
Use this interactive timeline to see highlights from a decade of Democracy Now! coverage of the Iraq War. It was 10 years ago on March 19, 2003, that the United States invaded Iraq on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Six weeks later, President Bush stood under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" and declared an end to major military combat operations. But Operation Iraqi Freedom would lead to an almost nine-year U.S.-military occupation
Iraq War Timeline: From "Shock and Awe" to Civilian Toll, to Billions in Reconstruction, Vet Health
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Democracy Now: The Monsanto Protection Act? A Debate on Controversial New Measure Over Genetically Modified Crops; Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America from Monsanto to Wal-Mart
Democracy Now
The Monsanto Protection Act? A Debate on Controversial New Measure Over Genetically Modified Crops
President Obama outraged food activists last week when he signed into law a spending bill with a controversial rider that critics have dubbed the "Monsanto Protection Act." The rider says the government must allow the planting of genetically modified crops even if courts rule they pose health risks. The measure has galvanized the U.S. food justice movement, which is now preparing for its next fight when the provision expires in six months. We host a discussion on the "Monsanto Protection Act" and the safety of genetically modified foods with two guests: Gregory Jaffe, director of the Biotechnology Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that addresses food and nutrition issues; and Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of the book, "Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America." On Wednesday, Hauter’s group is releasing a major new report called "Monsanto: A Corporate Profile."
To Watch the Episode
Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America from Monsanto to Wal-Mart
Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, joins us to discuss her new book, "Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America." Hauter tackles the corporations behind the meat, vegetables, grains and milk consumed by millions every day — including some of the most popular organic brands. "Foodopoly" details how a handful of large corporations control the nation’s food production in ways that limit how small farms operate and how ordinary people make choices in grocery stores. And in the wake of the recently passed provision dubbed by critics as the "Monsanto Protection Act," Hauter also discusses the new report by Food & Water Watch, "Monsanto: A Corporate Profile."
To Watch the Episode
Background on the corporation Monsanto:
The Monsanto Protection Act? A Debate on Controversial New Measure Over Genetically Modified Crops
President Obama outraged food activists last week when he signed into law a spending bill with a controversial rider that critics have dubbed the "Monsanto Protection Act." The rider says the government must allow the planting of genetically modified crops even if courts rule they pose health risks. The measure has galvanized the U.S. food justice movement, which is now preparing for its next fight when the provision expires in six months. We host a discussion on the "Monsanto Protection Act" and the safety of genetically modified foods with two guests: Gregory Jaffe, director of the Biotechnology Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that addresses food and nutrition issues; and Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of the book, "Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America." On Wednesday, Hauter’s group is releasing a major new report called "Monsanto: A Corporate Profile."
To Watch the Episode
Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America from Monsanto to Wal-Mart
Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, joins us to discuss her new book, "Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America." Hauter tackles the corporations behind the meat, vegetables, grains and milk consumed by millions every day — including some of the most popular organic brands. "Foodopoly" details how a handful of large corporations control the nation’s food production in ways that limit how small farms operate and how ordinary people make choices in grocery stores. And in the wake of the recently passed provision dubbed by critics as the "Monsanto Protection Act," Hauter also discusses the new report by Food & Water Watch, "Monsanto: A Corporate Profile."
To Watch the Episode
Background on the corporation Monsanto:
There’s nothing they are leaving untouched: the mustard, the okra, the bringe oil, the rice, the cauliflower. Once they have established the norm: that seed can be owned as their property, royalties can be collected. We will depend on them for every seed we grow of every crop we grow. If they control seed, they control food, they know it – it’s strategic. It’s more powerful than bombs. It’s more powerful than guns. This is the best way to control the populations of the world. The story starts in the White House, where Monsanto often got its way by exerting disproportionate influence over policymakers via the “revolving door”. One example is Michael Taylor, who worked for Monsanto as an attorney before being appointed as deputy commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1991. While at the FDA, the authority that deals with all US food approvals, Taylor made crucial decisions that led to the approval of GE foods and crops. Then he returned to Monsanto, becoming the company’s vice president for public policy.
Thanks to these intimate links between Monsanto and government agencies, the US adopted GE foods and crops without proper testing, without consumer labeling and in spite of serious questions hanging over their safety. Not coincidentally, Monsanto supplies 90 percent of the GE seeds used by the US market. Monsanto’s long arm stretched so far that, in the early nineties, the US Food and Drugs Agency even ignored warnings of their own scientists, who were cautioning that GE crops could cause negative health effects. Other tactics the company uses to stifle concerns about their products include misleading advertising, bribery and concealing scientific evidence.
World According to Monsanto from Hyperion on Vimeo.
Workers Unite: Mario Monicelli on The Organizer
Workers Unite: Mario Monicelli on The Organizer
The Current
The Organizer is a dramatically political statement from director Mario Monicelli. More commonly known for lighter films like Big Deal on Madonna Street, Monicelli created an expression of the necessity of collective action that is both gritty and entertaining. In making this period piece about a factory strike in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Turin (the rapidly industrializing Italian city that would come to be called “Italy’s Detroit”), Monicelli strove for the utmost realism, casting the film with actual workers and shooting on location in one of the area’s huge textile factories. In this 2006 interview, included as part of the film’s Criterion release, Monicelli (who died in 2010) talks about filming in the factory, along with the importance of creating an oppressive atmosphere and showing the reality of the working world.
To Watch the Clip
The Current
The Organizer is a dramatically political statement from director Mario Monicelli. More commonly known for lighter films like Big Deal on Madonna Street, Monicelli created an expression of the necessity of collective action that is both gritty and entertaining. In making this period piece about a factory strike in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Turin (the rapidly industrializing Italian city that would come to be called “Italy’s Detroit”), Monicelli strove for the utmost realism, casting the film with actual workers and shooting on location in one of the area’s huge textile factories. In this 2006 interview, included as part of the film’s Criterion release, Monicelli (who died in 2010) talks about filming in the factory, along with the importance of creating an oppressive atmosphere and showing the reality of the working world.
To Watch the Clip
Monday, April 01, 2013
Adam Curtis: The Baby and the Baath Water
The Baby and the Baath Water
by Adam Curtis
The Medium and the Message
What is happening in Syria feels like one of the last gasps of the age of the military dictators. An old way of running the world is still desperately trying to cling to power, but the underlying feeling in the west is that somehow Assad's archaic and cruel military rule will inevitably collapse and Syrians will move forward into a democratic age.
That may, or may not, happen, but what is extraordinary is that we have been here before. Between 1947 and 1949 an odd group of idealists and hard realists in the American government set out to intervene in Syria. Their aim was to liberate the Syrian people from a corrupt autocratic elite - and allow true democracy to flourish. They did this because they were convinced that "the Syrian people are naturally democratic" and that all that was neccessary was to get rid of the elites - and a new world of "peace and progress" would inevitably emerge.
What resulted was a disaster, and the consequences of that disaster then led, through a weird series of bloody twists and turns, to the rise to power of the Assad family and the widescale repression in Syria today.
I thought I would tell that story.
In 1968 a CIA agent called Miles Copeland wrote a book called 'The Game of Nations' that revealed what went on in 1947. Back then Copeland was part of a mangement consulting team in Washington who were working out how America should contain the threat of communism in the Middle East, now the old European Empires had gone. This was before the CIA existed, and Copeland describes how they got together an odd group of diplomats, secret agents left over from the war, advertising men from Madison Avenue, and "pipe-smoking owls" (which is what intellectuals were called in those days).
Copeland describes an impassioned lecturer telling this group that their aim should be to change the leadership in the countries in the Middle East:
"Politicians in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt seem to have been elected into power, but what elections! The winners were all candidates of foreign powers, old land-owners who tell their tenants and villagers how to vote, or rich crooks who can buy their votes. But peoples of these countries are intelligent, and they have a natural bent for politics. If there is a part of the world which is crying for the democratic process the Arab World is it."
They decided to start with Syria.
Compared to what was to come, it was all very sweet and innocent. Elections were due in Syria in 1947, and the Americans decided to give "a discreet nudge here and there". This involved warning landowners, employers, ward bosses and police chiefs not to intimidate the voters. The American oil companies were paid to put up big posters telling the Syrians to "vote for the candidate of your choice" (apparently this baffled all the Syrians because the posters didn't mention any candidates by name). Hundreds of taxis were hired to take voters to the polls free of charge. And the Americans brought in automatic, tamper-proof voting machines.
It didn't go as expected. The landowners and other elites ignored all the warnings and intimidated everyone. There were massive gun fights and scores of people were killed. The taxi-drivers bonded together and sold themselves to different candidates - promising to make their passengers vote the "right" way. The voting machines didn't work properly because of irregularities in the electric current, or were sabotaged. Two did work - but the losing candidates refused to accept the verdict of "imperialist technology" - and got recounts by hand, which strangely made them win.
And worst of all, most of the pro-American candidates defected to other foreign powers. The Americans had nobly refused to give them any money - so the Russians, the French and the British stepped in and bribed them - and the candidates changed their allegiances.
The Americans were upset. So they decided they would have to go further. The chief diplomat in Damascus was called James Keeley. The solution he said was to find a way of "quarantining" the Syrians from the corrupting forces that had wrecked the election so they would become more self-confident. More "naturally democratic". Here is a picture of James Keeley.
And the way to create this "quarantine" was by engineering a military coup. According to Copeland, Keeley believed that America should get rid of the present elected leaders, bring in a short period of dictatorship which would protect the Syrian people and thus allow them to develop self-confidence and stronger personalities, and within a few years a real independent democracy would emerge.
To Read the Rest of the Essay and to Watch Video Clips
by Adam Curtis
The Medium and the Message
What is happening in Syria feels like one of the last gasps of the age of the military dictators. An old way of running the world is still desperately trying to cling to power, but the underlying feeling in the west is that somehow Assad's archaic and cruel military rule will inevitably collapse and Syrians will move forward into a democratic age.
That may, or may not, happen, but what is extraordinary is that we have been here before. Between 1947 and 1949 an odd group of idealists and hard realists in the American government set out to intervene in Syria. Their aim was to liberate the Syrian people from a corrupt autocratic elite - and allow true democracy to flourish. They did this because they were convinced that "the Syrian people are naturally democratic" and that all that was neccessary was to get rid of the elites - and a new world of "peace and progress" would inevitably emerge.
What resulted was a disaster, and the consequences of that disaster then led, through a weird series of bloody twists and turns, to the rise to power of the Assad family and the widescale repression in Syria today.
I thought I would tell that story.
In 1968 a CIA agent called Miles Copeland wrote a book called 'The Game of Nations' that revealed what went on in 1947. Back then Copeland was part of a mangement consulting team in Washington who were working out how America should contain the threat of communism in the Middle East, now the old European Empires had gone. This was before the CIA existed, and Copeland describes how they got together an odd group of diplomats, secret agents left over from the war, advertising men from Madison Avenue, and "pipe-smoking owls" (which is what intellectuals were called in those days).
Copeland describes an impassioned lecturer telling this group that their aim should be to change the leadership in the countries in the Middle East:
"Politicians in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt seem to have been elected into power, but what elections! The winners were all candidates of foreign powers, old land-owners who tell their tenants and villagers how to vote, or rich crooks who can buy their votes. But peoples of these countries are intelligent, and they have a natural bent for politics. If there is a part of the world which is crying for the democratic process the Arab World is it."
They decided to start with Syria.
Compared to what was to come, it was all very sweet and innocent. Elections were due in Syria in 1947, and the Americans decided to give "a discreet nudge here and there". This involved warning landowners, employers, ward bosses and police chiefs not to intimidate the voters. The American oil companies were paid to put up big posters telling the Syrians to "vote for the candidate of your choice" (apparently this baffled all the Syrians because the posters didn't mention any candidates by name). Hundreds of taxis were hired to take voters to the polls free of charge. And the Americans brought in automatic, tamper-proof voting machines.
It didn't go as expected. The landowners and other elites ignored all the warnings and intimidated everyone. There were massive gun fights and scores of people were killed. The taxi-drivers bonded together and sold themselves to different candidates - promising to make their passengers vote the "right" way. The voting machines didn't work properly because of irregularities in the electric current, or were sabotaged. Two did work - but the losing candidates refused to accept the verdict of "imperialist technology" - and got recounts by hand, which strangely made them win.
And worst of all, most of the pro-American candidates defected to other foreign powers. The Americans had nobly refused to give them any money - so the Russians, the French and the British stepped in and bribed them - and the candidates changed their allegiances.
The Americans were upset. So they decided they would have to go further. The chief diplomat in Damascus was called James Keeley. The solution he said was to find a way of "quarantining" the Syrians from the corrupting forces that had wrecked the election so they would become more self-confident. More "naturally democratic". Here is a picture of James Keeley.
And the way to create this "quarantine" was by engineering a military coup. According to Copeland, Keeley believed that America should get rid of the present elected leaders, bring in a short period of dictatorship which would protect the Syrian people and thus allow them to develop self-confidence and stronger personalities, and within a few years a real independent democracy would emerge.
To Read the Rest of the Essay and to Watch Video Clips
Democracy Now: Polish Resistance Figure Jan Karski, Honored with Posthumous Medal of Freedom, in His Own Words
[HUM 221 students -- Gerry Adair discussed Jan Karski in his guest lecture.]
Polish Resistance Figure Jan Karski, Honored with Posthumous Medal of Freedom, in His Own Words
Democracy Now
[Last June], the White House apologized to Poland over language used by President Obama in honoring the late Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski. Obama referred to a "Polish death camp" when awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom without noting Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany. During World War II, Karski helped alert the world to the Nazi Holocaust. He visited the Warsaw Ghetto and traveled to the United States to give eyewitness testimony to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. We air excerpts of an interview with Karski conducted by Andrew Leslie Phillips in 1986.
Jan Karski, Polish resistance fighter, interviewed by Andrew Leslie Phillips in 1986.
To Watch the Episode
Polish Resistance Figure Jan Karski, Honored with Posthumous Medal of Freedom, in His Own Words
Democracy Now
[Last June], the White House apologized to Poland over language used by President Obama in honoring the late Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski. Obama referred to a "Polish death camp" when awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom without noting Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany. During World War II, Karski helped alert the world to the Nazi Holocaust. He visited the Warsaw Ghetto and traveled to the United States to give eyewitness testimony to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. We air excerpts of an interview with Karski conducted by Andrew Leslie Phillips in 1986.
Jan Karski, Polish resistance fighter, interviewed by Andrew Leslie Phillips in 1986.
To Watch the Episode
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Dan Pink: Drive (or, what really motivates us)
[MB: I would be very interested to hear from students, or anyone else, what they think about Dan Pink's presentation. The video is only 11 mins.]
Der Spiegel: Sandra Scgulz -- Mao's Disneyland: 'Red Tourism' Is Golden for Chinese Economy
Mao's Disneyland: 'Red Tourism' Is Golden for Chinese Economy
By Sandra Schulz
Der Spiegel
China's leaders have responded to waning interest in ideology by setting up a vast "red tourism" industry. While celebrating the great members and moments of the Communist Party of China, it also helps the economy.
Wu Yongtang's great advantage is having a mole on his chin almost exactly where Mao Zedong did. The 56-year-old actor pulls at the bandage covering the spot, then carefully peels it off and touches the scab with his fingertip. He saw a doctor to have the size of the mole reduced, and now it is exactly as large Mao's was. Wu is pleased. He looks like Mao, he speaks like Mao and his mole might be his ticket to landing movie roles as Mao. There's demand for Mao look-alikes in China -- and especially now. "People have deep feelings for the chairman," Wu says.
Wu spent a full theater season playing Mao at the open-air theater in Yanan, a city in central China described locally as the "Holy Land of the Chinese Revolution." Yanan is where the Long March ended in 1935, the military retreat that marked Mao's ascent to power, and where the Communist Party of China established its headquarters for the province of Shaanxi. Every morning, visitors can watch a performance here called "The Defense of Yanan," complete with fake tanks and real horses. A model airplane even drops from the sky at the end of the show, a moment captured by all the mobile-phone cameras of audience.
The Chinese government has dubbed this "red tourism," and it is meant as a response to its people's identity crisis, to a certain sense of emptiness and alienation. What exactly should people in China believe in these days? Who is really still interested in ideology? Taking a proactive approach to these questions, the Communist Party decided to put its own history on stage to create reminders of the revolution in various places around the country -- and to make clear to all Chinese citizens who made their country great. The government has also set up a "National Coordination Group for Red Tourism" and convened "Conferences for Red Tourism" that have even been attended by a member of the Politburo.
But one thing sets this approach apart from similar campaigns in the past. This time, the idea is for Chinese people to have fun with their political party, to enjoy themselves in the great amusement park of Communism. They're invited to feast on braised pork, Mao's favorite dish, in the leader's birthplace of Shaoshan. They can drink from the well Mao himself supposedly dug in Ruijin or carry fake rifles aboard a rollercoaster at the "Cultural Park of the Eighth Route Army," where they can re-enact the war against Japan. There have even been "National Red Games," including events such as "storming the log house" and a "grenade toss." Party training centers and companies send members to these destinations as part of educational holidays. China saw over half a billion "red tourists" in 2011 alone.
To Read the Rest of the Article
By Sandra Schulz
Der Spiegel
China's leaders have responded to waning interest in ideology by setting up a vast "red tourism" industry. While celebrating the great members and moments of the Communist Party of China, it also helps the economy.
Wu Yongtang's great advantage is having a mole on his chin almost exactly where Mao Zedong did. The 56-year-old actor pulls at the bandage covering the spot, then carefully peels it off and touches the scab with his fingertip. He saw a doctor to have the size of the mole reduced, and now it is exactly as large Mao's was. Wu is pleased. He looks like Mao, he speaks like Mao and his mole might be his ticket to landing movie roles as Mao. There's demand for Mao look-alikes in China -- and especially now. "People have deep feelings for the chairman," Wu says.
Wu spent a full theater season playing Mao at the open-air theater in Yanan, a city in central China described locally as the "Holy Land of the Chinese Revolution." Yanan is where the Long March ended in 1935, the military retreat that marked Mao's ascent to power, and where the Communist Party of China established its headquarters for the province of Shaanxi. Every morning, visitors can watch a performance here called "The Defense of Yanan," complete with fake tanks and real horses. A model airplane even drops from the sky at the end of the show, a moment captured by all the mobile-phone cameras of audience.
The Chinese government has dubbed this "red tourism," and it is meant as a response to its people's identity crisis, to a certain sense of emptiness and alienation. What exactly should people in China believe in these days? Who is really still interested in ideology? Taking a proactive approach to these questions, the Communist Party decided to put its own history on stage to create reminders of the revolution in various places around the country -- and to make clear to all Chinese citizens who made their country great. The government has also set up a "National Coordination Group for Red Tourism" and convened "Conferences for Red Tourism" that have even been attended by a member of the Politburo.
But one thing sets this approach apart from similar campaigns in the past. This time, the idea is for Chinese people to have fun with their political party, to enjoy themselves in the great amusement park of Communism. They're invited to feast on braised pork, Mao's favorite dish, in the leader's birthplace of Shaoshan. They can drink from the well Mao himself supposedly dug in Ruijin or carry fake rifles aboard a rollercoaster at the "Cultural Park of the Eighth Route Army," where they can re-enact the war against Japan. There have even been "National Red Games," including events such as "storming the log house" and a "grenade toss." Party training centers and companies send members to these destinations as part of educational holidays. China saw over half a billion "red tourists" in 2011 alone.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Adam Liptak: Justices Say Time May Be Wrong for Gay Marriage Case
Justices Say Time May Be Wrong for Gay Marriage Case
by Adam Liptak
The New York Times
As the Supreme Court on Tuesday weighed the momentous question of whether gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry, six justices questioned whether the case, arising from a California ban on same-sex marriages, was properly before the court and indicated that they might vote to dismiss it.
“I just wonder if the case was properly granted,” said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who probably holds the decisive vote, in a comment that showed a court torn over whether this was the right time and right case for a decision on a fast-moving social issue.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed to share that concern. “If the issue is letting the states experiment and letting the society have more time to figure out its direction,” she said, “why is taking a case now the answer?”
Those justices and others seemed driven to that conclusion by an argument in which no attractive middle ground emerged on the substance of the question before them: whether voters in California were entitled to enact Proposition 8, which overturned a State Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage.
Justices who appeared sympathetic to same-sex marriage indicated that there was no principled way to issue a ruling that could apply only in California or only in the nine states that have robust civil union or domestic partnership laws but withhold the word “marriage.”
That appeared to leave the court with an all-or-nothing choice on the merits: either a ruling that would require same-sex marriage in all 50 states or one that would say that all states may do as they wish. Neither choice seemed attractive to a majority of the justices.
Five members of the court asked questions indicating that they might vote to dismiss the case on the threshold issue that supporters of Proposition 8 lacked standing to appeal a lower court’s decision. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., whose questions on the merits indicated discomfort with requiring states to allow same-sex marriage, seemed particularly interested in the standing issue.
Justice Kennedy seemed more open to the possibility that the proponents of Proposition 8 had standing, but he twice asked lawyers why the court should not dismiss the case outright. When the justices have second thoughts about agreeing to hear a case, they sometimes dismiss it as “improvidently granted.”
Questions from the justices do not always reliably forecast votes, of course, and many of the justices also indicated their views of the central issue presented in the case.
When Justice Kennedy turned to the merits of the case, he voiced sympathy for the children of gay couples. “There are some 40,000 children in California,” he said, who “live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important in this case.”
To Read the Rest of the Article
by Adam Liptak
The New York Times
As the Supreme Court on Tuesday weighed the momentous question of whether gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry, six justices questioned whether the case, arising from a California ban on same-sex marriages, was properly before the court and indicated that they might vote to dismiss it.
“I just wonder if the case was properly granted,” said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who probably holds the decisive vote, in a comment that showed a court torn over whether this was the right time and right case for a decision on a fast-moving social issue.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed to share that concern. “If the issue is letting the states experiment and letting the society have more time to figure out its direction,” she said, “why is taking a case now the answer?”
Those justices and others seemed driven to that conclusion by an argument in which no attractive middle ground emerged on the substance of the question before them: whether voters in California were entitled to enact Proposition 8, which overturned a State Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage.
Justices who appeared sympathetic to same-sex marriage indicated that there was no principled way to issue a ruling that could apply only in California or only in the nine states that have robust civil union or domestic partnership laws but withhold the word “marriage.”
That appeared to leave the court with an all-or-nothing choice on the merits: either a ruling that would require same-sex marriage in all 50 states or one that would say that all states may do as they wish. Neither choice seemed attractive to a majority of the justices.
Five members of the court asked questions indicating that they might vote to dismiss the case on the threshold issue that supporters of Proposition 8 lacked standing to appeal a lower court’s decision. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., whose questions on the merits indicated discomfort with requiring states to allow same-sex marriage, seemed particularly interested in the standing issue.
Justice Kennedy seemed more open to the possibility that the proponents of Proposition 8 had standing, but he twice asked lawyers why the court should not dismiss the case outright. When the justices have second thoughts about agreeing to hear a case, they sometimes dismiss it as “improvidently granted.”
Questions from the justices do not always reliably forecast votes, of course, and many of the justices also indicated their views of the central issue presented in the case.
When Justice Kennedy turned to the merits of the case, he voiced sympathy for the children of gay couples. “There are some 40,000 children in California,” he said, who “live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important in this case.”
To Read the Rest of the Article
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Democracy Now: Kevin Connor and Justin Elliott -- Energy Nominee Ernest Moniz Criticized for Backing Fracking & Nuclear Power; Ties to BP, GE, Saudis
Energy Nominee Ernest Moniz Criticized for Backing Fracking & Nuclear Power; Ties to BP, GE, Saudis
Democracy Now
President Obama’s pick to become the nation’s next secretary of energy is drawing criticism for his deep ties to the fossil fuel, fracking and nuclear industries. MIT nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz has served on advisory boards for oil giant BP and General Electric, and was a trustee of the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, a Saudi Aramco-backed nonprofit organization. In 2011, Moniz was the chief author of an influential study for MIT on the future of natural gas. According to a new report by the Public Accountability Initiative, Moniz failed to disclose that he had taken a lucrative position at a pro-drilling firm called ICF International just days before a key natural gas "fracking" study was released. Reaction to his nomination has split the environmental community. Advocacy groups such as Public Citizen and Food & Water Watch are campaigning against Moniz’s nomination, but the Natural Resources Defense Council has praised his work on advancing clean energy based on efficiency and renewable power. We speak to Kevin Connor of the Public Accountability Initiative and ProPublica reporter Justin Elliott, who have both authored investigations into Moniz’s ties to industry.
Guests
Justin Elliott, a reporter at ProPublica. He recently wrote an article called "Drilling Deeper: The Wealth of Business Connections for Obama’s Energy Pick."
Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit research organization focused on corporate and government accountability. The group recently published a report called "Industry Partner or Industry Puppet? How MIT’s Influential Study of Fracking Was Authored, Funded, and Released by Oil and Gas Industry Insiders." Connor is also the co-founder of LittleSis.org, which compiles data on over 40,000 people and organizations with special influence over the political process, including politicians, corporate executives and lobbyists.
To Watch the Episode
Democracy Now
President Obama’s pick to become the nation’s next secretary of energy is drawing criticism for his deep ties to the fossil fuel, fracking and nuclear industries. MIT nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz has served on advisory boards for oil giant BP and General Electric, and was a trustee of the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, a Saudi Aramco-backed nonprofit organization. In 2011, Moniz was the chief author of an influential study for MIT on the future of natural gas. According to a new report by the Public Accountability Initiative, Moniz failed to disclose that he had taken a lucrative position at a pro-drilling firm called ICF International just days before a key natural gas "fracking" study was released. Reaction to his nomination has split the environmental community. Advocacy groups such as Public Citizen and Food & Water Watch are campaigning against Moniz’s nomination, but the Natural Resources Defense Council has praised his work on advancing clean energy based on efficiency and renewable power. We speak to Kevin Connor of the Public Accountability Initiative and ProPublica reporter Justin Elliott, who have both authored investigations into Moniz’s ties to industry.
Guests
Justin Elliott, a reporter at ProPublica. He recently wrote an article called "Drilling Deeper: The Wealth of Business Connections for Obama’s Energy Pick."
Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit research organization focused on corporate and government accountability. The group recently published a report called "Industry Partner or Industry Puppet? How MIT’s Influential Study of Fracking Was Authored, Funded, and Released by Oil and Gas Industry Insiders." Connor is also the co-founder of LittleSis.org, which compiles data on over 40,000 people and organizations with special influence over the political process, including politicians, corporate executives and lobbyists.
To Watch the Episode
Michael Schuman: Marx’s Revenge -- How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World
Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World
By Michael Schuman
Time
Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap Forward into capitalism, communism faded into the quaint backdrop of James Bond movies or the deviant mantra of Kim Jong Un. The class conflict that Marx believed determined the course of history seemed to melt away in a prosperous era of free trade and free enterprise. The far-reaching power of globalization, linking the most remote corners of the planet in lucrative bonds of finance, outsourcing and “borderless” manufacturing, offered everybody from Silicon Valley tech gurus to Chinese farm girls ample opportunities to get rich. Asia in the latter decades of the 20th century witnessed perhaps the most remarkable record of poverty alleviation in human history — all thanks to the very capitalist tools of trade, entrepreneurship and foreign investment. Capitalism appeared to be fulfilling its promise — to uplift everyone to new heights of wealth and welfare.
Or so we thought. With the global economy in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed. Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,” Marx wrote.
A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right. It is sadly all too easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. A September study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington noted that the median annual earnings of a full-time, male worker in the U.S. in 2011, at $48,202, were smaller than in 1973. Between 1983 and 2010, 74% of the gains in wealth in the U.S. went to the richest 5%, while the bottom 60% suffered a decline, the EPI calculated. No wonder some have given the 19th century German philosopher a second look. In China, the Marxist country that turned its back on Marx, Yu Rongjun was inspired by world events to pen a musical based on Marx’s classic Das Kapital. “You can find reality matches what is described in the book,” says the playwright.
That’s not to say Marx was entirely correct. His “dictatorship of the proletariat” didn’t quite work out as planned. But the consequence of this widening inequality is just what Marx had predicted: class struggle is back. Workers of the world are growing angrier and demanding their fair share of the global economy. From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern China, political and economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between capital and labor to a degree unseen since the communist revolutions of the 20th century. How this struggle plays out will influence the direction of global economic policy, the future of the welfare state, political stability in China, and who governs from Washington to Rome. What would Marx say today? “Some variation of: ‘I told you so,’” says Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist at the New School in New York. “The income gap is producing a level of tension that I have not seen in my lifetime.”
Tensions between economic classes in the U.S. are clearly on the rise. Society has been perceived as split between the “99%” (the regular folk, struggling to get by) and the “1%” (the connected and privileged superrich getting richer every day). In a Pew Research Center poll released last year, two-thirds of the respondents believed the U.S. suffered from “strong” or “very strong” conflict between rich and poor, a significant 19-percentage-point increase from 2009, ranking it as the No. 1 division in society.
The heightened conflict has dominated American politics. The partisan battle over how to fix the nation’s budget deficit has been, to a great degree, a class struggle. Whenever President Barack Obama talks of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to close the budget gap, conservatives scream he is launching a “class war” against the affluent. Yet the Republicans are engaged in some class struggle of their own. The GOP’s plan for fiscal health effectively hoists the burden of adjustment onto the middle and poorer economic classes through cuts to social services. Obama based a big part of his re-election campaign on characterizing the Republicans as insensitive to the working classes. GOP nominee Mitt Romney, the President charged, had only a “one-point plan” for the U.S. economy — “to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules.”
Amid the rhetoric, though, there are signs that this new American classism has shifted the debate over the nation’s economic policy. Trickle-down economics, which insists that the success of the 1% will benefit the 99%, has come under heavy scrutiny. David Madland, a director at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank, believes that the 2012 presidential campaign has brought about a renewed focus on rebuilding the middle class, and a search for a different economic agenda to achieve that goal. “The whole way of thinking about the economy is being turned on its head,” he says. “I sense a fundamental shift taking place.”
To Read the Rest of the Essay
By Michael Schuman
Time
Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap Forward into capitalism, communism faded into the quaint backdrop of James Bond movies or the deviant mantra of Kim Jong Un. The class conflict that Marx believed determined the course of history seemed to melt away in a prosperous era of free trade and free enterprise. The far-reaching power of globalization, linking the most remote corners of the planet in lucrative bonds of finance, outsourcing and “borderless” manufacturing, offered everybody from Silicon Valley tech gurus to Chinese farm girls ample opportunities to get rich. Asia in the latter decades of the 20th century witnessed perhaps the most remarkable record of poverty alleviation in human history — all thanks to the very capitalist tools of trade, entrepreneurship and foreign investment. Capitalism appeared to be fulfilling its promise — to uplift everyone to new heights of wealth and welfare.
Or so we thought. With the global economy in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed. Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,” Marx wrote.
A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right. It is sadly all too easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. A September study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington noted that the median annual earnings of a full-time, male worker in the U.S. in 2011, at $48,202, were smaller than in 1973. Between 1983 and 2010, 74% of the gains in wealth in the U.S. went to the richest 5%, while the bottom 60% suffered a decline, the EPI calculated. No wonder some have given the 19th century German philosopher a second look. In China, the Marxist country that turned its back on Marx, Yu Rongjun was inspired by world events to pen a musical based on Marx’s classic Das Kapital. “You can find reality matches what is described in the book,” says the playwright.
That’s not to say Marx was entirely correct. His “dictatorship of the proletariat” didn’t quite work out as planned. But the consequence of this widening inequality is just what Marx had predicted: class struggle is back. Workers of the world are growing angrier and demanding their fair share of the global economy. From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern China, political and economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between capital and labor to a degree unseen since the communist revolutions of the 20th century. How this struggle plays out will influence the direction of global economic policy, the future of the welfare state, political stability in China, and who governs from Washington to Rome. What would Marx say today? “Some variation of: ‘I told you so,’” says Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist at the New School in New York. “The income gap is producing a level of tension that I have not seen in my lifetime.”
Tensions between economic classes in the U.S. are clearly on the rise. Society has been perceived as split between the “99%” (the regular folk, struggling to get by) and the “1%” (the connected and privileged superrich getting richer every day). In a Pew Research Center poll released last year, two-thirds of the respondents believed the U.S. suffered from “strong” or “very strong” conflict between rich and poor, a significant 19-percentage-point increase from 2009, ranking it as the No. 1 division in society.
The heightened conflict has dominated American politics. The partisan battle over how to fix the nation’s budget deficit has been, to a great degree, a class struggle. Whenever President Barack Obama talks of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to close the budget gap, conservatives scream he is launching a “class war” against the affluent. Yet the Republicans are engaged in some class struggle of their own. The GOP’s plan for fiscal health effectively hoists the burden of adjustment onto the middle and poorer economic classes through cuts to social services. Obama based a big part of his re-election campaign on characterizing the Republicans as insensitive to the working classes. GOP nominee Mitt Romney, the President charged, had only a “one-point plan” for the U.S. economy — “to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules.”
Amid the rhetoric, though, there are signs that this new American classism has shifted the debate over the nation’s economic policy. Trickle-down economics, which insists that the success of the 1% will benefit the 99%, has come under heavy scrutiny. David Madland, a director at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank, believes that the 2012 presidential campaign has brought about a renewed focus on rebuilding the middle class, and a search for a different economic agenda to achieve that goal. “The whole way of thinking about the economy is being turned on its head,” he says. “I sense a fundamental shift taking place.”
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Rachel Maddow urges students to master the art of argument in her first return to Stanford
Rachel Maddow urges students to master the art of argument in her first return to Stanford
Stanford News
Stanford alumna and MSNBC television host Rachel Maddow insists that an education in the humanities is a crucial asset in today's job market, illustrating with her own story how the ability to make good arguments and write well powered her career in advocacy, activism and the national media.
Asked by students what kind of major she looks for in a successful job candidate, Rachel Maddow, the popular television host and best-selling author, did not hesitate in her answer. "I look for people who have done mathematics. Philosophy. Languages.
"And really," she concluded, "History is kind of the king."
After earning her bachelor's degree from Stanford in public policy in 1994 and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University, Maddow spent the next decade raising awareness about HIV/AIDS and fighting for health reform in British and American prisons. She said to make an impact in the world and to change hearts and minds, she needed to know how to convince others and how "to make good arguments."
And that meant knowing how to write well. On Saturday, during an evening conversation with students and other Stanford affiliates, Maddow said that an education in a humanities subject was indispensable to her past and present success in advocacy and activism. The event was organized by Stanford's "Ethics in Society" program.
While a student at Stanford, Maddow took numerous classes in humanities subjects, including philosophy and history. It was at Stanford, she said, that she learned how to structure and present a persuasive argument.
In today's tough job market, she said, perfecting this skill is a must.
"Most people can't write," she said. "Only one in 50 resumes is somebody who can write."
Poor reasoning is not a winning argument, neither for employment nor, in fact, for anything in life. Learning how to write a resume that reasons its way from A to B to C to D is very important, she said. And this, she insisted, is the skill taught in the humanities.
To Read the Rest
Stanford News
Stanford alumna and MSNBC television host Rachel Maddow insists that an education in the humanities is a crucial asset in today's job market, illustrating with her own story how the ability to make good arguments and write well powered her career in advocacy, activism and the national media.
Asked by students what kind of major she looks for in a successful job candidate, Rachel Maddow, the popular television host and best-selling author, did not hesitate in her answer. "I look for people who have done mathematics. Philosophy. Languages.
"And really," she concluded, "History is kind of the king."
After earning her bachelor's degree from Stanford in public policy in 1994 and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University, Maddow spent the next decade raising awareness about HIV/AIDS and fighting for health reform in British and American prisons. She said to make an impact in the world and to change hearts and minds, she needed to know how to convince others and how "to make good arguments."
And that meant knowing how to write well. On Saturday, during an evening conversation with students and other Stanford affiliates, Maddow said that an education in a humanities subject was indispensable to her past and present success in advocacy and activism. The event was organized by Stanford's "Ethics in Society" program.
While a student at Stanford, Maddow took numerous classes in humanities subjects, including philosophy and history. It was at Stanford, she said, that she learned how to structure and present a persuasive argument.
In today's tough job market, she said, perfecting this skill is a must.
"Most people can't write," she said. "Only one in 50 resumes is somebody who can write."
Poor reasoning is not a winning argument, neither for employment nor, in fact, for anything in life. Learning how to write a resume that reasons its way from A to B to C to D is very important, she said. And this, she insisted, is the skill taught in the humanities.
To Read the Rest
Enku Ide: On the Marriage Equality Act
[MB: Enku is a friend who has some great insights into this issue and I wanted share his thoughts.]
In the streets and in the courts; in the legislative halls and in our communities; liberals have demanded marriage equality. This issue has not only divided liberals from conservatives. It has divided liberal gays and allies from radical queers and allies. Queers, being anti-assimilationist, have often taken the position that either 1. Marriage doesn’t matter to 2. Marriage is the wrong fight, a conservatizing effort within the LGBTQ community and should be rejected. I have found myself on the cusp of these arguments. On the eve of possibly securing marriage equality finally through the courts, I would like to weigh in and challenge the gays and the queers.
First, I’ll challenge the pro-marriage gays and allies:
Marriage is not THE issue of the LGBTQ community, and the domination of this issue within the movement has been destructive. It has left us blind to the realities of many LGBT people, primarily the poor. LGBT youth are twice as likely as straight youth to face homelessness. LGBT people are legally discriminated against in employment and housing. Hate crimes against our community continue. The marriage fight will primarily benefit middle class LGBT folk, and the movement overall has been elitist in this way, making other very real challenges facing LGBT people invisible.
For those (including President Obama) who seem to believe that the fight for justice for LGBT people is culminating in marriage, that our fight is soon to be over, I would say that your conception is narrow and classist. I would also say that the movement has given into the assumption that monogamous, married families are the best way we should organize ourselves thus disempowering, making invisible, or demonizing those of us (and straight people) who choose to build our families differently. This could be polyamorous people or people who recognize the historic oppression that has come along with marriage. The movement for marriage equality cannot interrogate the economic and social construct of marriage and will divide our community among the “respectable” married folk and the rest of us. The fight for marriage also precludes us from interrogating larger social systems that push people to get married. On this point, the rhetoric of “choice” to marry or not is undermined. Social policy privileges the married in many ways, and the fight for marriage equality has been about both the nonmaterial (respect) as well as the material (health benefits, taxes, housing, etc.). I do believe we should be fighting for a world where people have the true freedom to choose their relationships and not be coerced by a system that privileges the married over the non-married. I believe we should be fighting for a world where everyone has healthcare, for example, and not one where we can extend privileges of marriage to gays, thus coercing us into marriage. Marriage often facilitates one individual’s dependence on another. Historically, wives were considered to be the property of their husbands, and we haven’t interrogated this violent history of the institution which still shapes the institution today. In this, the fight for marriage equality has become low hanging fruit for liberal middle class folk, and is problematic.
Now, I’ll challenge the queers…
Given all of this above, I believe LGBT people should have the right to choose whether or not to be married. Although I note above that “choice” is undermined by a system that coerces people into marriage, I do not believe the correct response is to say that no-one should have a choice. In fact, it is a privileged choice in some circumstances to be able to not get married and take such a purist political stance. Yes, we must fight for a society where marriage doesn’t mean these massive material benefits over the unmarried. But, that is a fight to be waged by those who do not marry or choose not to marry, not a fight for LGBTQ people who are forcibly excluded from marriage. Marriage is deeply important to many people. While we might hope that it wasn’t, or that society didn’t coerce people into marriage, this is the world we live in. Repeating radical critiques of marriage has become as knee-jerk and non-reflexive as the pro-marriage side and instead of moving the conversation forward we have often retreated into queer communities to pat ourselves on the backs for our ideological purity. I recently heard a queer theorist say “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to get married.” This poverty of understanding, this lack of heart, this ideological purity, has cost us our ability to connect with many people. Such a stance does not take people where they are and engage them. It blames people for not being where we are. It does not recognize the community-level symbolic importance of marriage. For a theory (queer) that seems to be all about the shifting subjectivities of people, it casts the pro-marriage gays and liberals in static terms, one based on a false-consciousness argument that would be theoretically detestable to many radical queers.
It may be the case that the marriage fight will be seen as the end of the LGBTQ movement, but it might also be the case that achieving marriage equality will make it considerably easier to tackle issues like housing and employment discrimination.
Conclusion:
The movement for marriage equality has been highly problematic, and rightly criticized. I support marriage equality.
More Resources:
The New Yorker: Supreme Court Justice Scalia Says Marriage Views Not Affected by Lifelong Fear of Gays
In the streets and in the courts; in the legislative halls and in our communities; liberals have demanded marriage equality. This issue has not only divided liberals from conservatives. It has divided liberal gays and allies from radical queers and allies. Queers, being anti-assimilationist, have often taken the position that either 1. Marriage doesn’t matter to 2. Marriage is the wrong fight, a conservatizing effort within the LGBTQ community and should be rejected. I have found myself on the cusp of these arguments. On the eve of possibly securing marriage equality finally through the courts, I would like to weigh in and challenge the gays and the queers.
First, I’ll challenge the pro-marriage gays and allies:
Marriage is not THE issue of the LGBTQ community, and the domination of this issue within the movement has been destructive. It has left us blind to the realities of many LGBT people, primarily the poor. LGBT youth are twice as likely as straight youth to face homelessness. LGBT people are legally discriminated against in employment and housing. Hate crimes against our community continue. The marriage fight will primarily benefit middle class LGBT folk, and the movement overall has been elitist in this way, making other very real challenges facing LGBT people invisible.
For those (including President Obama) who seem to believe that the fight for justice for LGBT people is culminating in marriage, that our fight is soon to be over, I would say that your conception is narrow and classist. I would also say that the movement has given into the assumption that monogamous, married families are the best way we should organize ourselves thus disempowering, making invisible, or demonizing those of us (and straight people) who choose to build our families differently. This could be polyamorous people or people who recognize the historic oppression that has come along with marriage. The movement for marriage equality cannot interrogate the economic and social construct of marriage and will divide our community among the “respectable” married folk and the rest of us. The fight for marriage also precludes us from interrogating larger social systems that push people to get married. On this point, the rhetoric of “choice” to marry or not is undermined. Social policy privileges the married in many ways, and the fight for marriage equality has been about both the nonmaterial (respect) as well as the material (health benefits, taxes, housing, etc.). I do believe we should be fighting for a world where people have the true freedom to choose their relationships and not be coerced by a system that privileges the married over the non-married. I believe we should be fighting for a world where everyone has healthcare, for example, and not one where we can extend privileges of marriage to gays, thus coercing us into marriage. Marriage often facilitates one individual’s dependence on another. Historically, wives were considered to be the property of their husbands, and we haven’t interrogated this violent history of the institution which still shapes the institution today. In this, the fight for marriage equality has become low hanging fruit for liberal middle class folk, and is problematic.
Now, I’ll challenge the queers…
Given all of this above, I believe LGBT people should have the right to choose whether or not to be married. Although I note above that “choice” is undermined by a system that coerces people into marriage, I do not believe the correct response is to say that no-one should have a choice. In fact, it is a privileged choice in some circumstances to be able to not get married and take such a purist political stance. Yes, we must fight for a society where marriage doesn’t mean these massive material benefits over the unmarried. But, that is a fight to be waged by those who do not marry or choose not to marry, not a fight for LGBTQ people who are forcibly excluded from marriage. Marriage is deeply important to many people. While we might hope that it wasn’t, or that society didn’t coerce people into marriage, this is the world we live in. Repeating radical critiques of marriage has become as knee-jerk and non-reflexive as the pro-marriage side and instead of moving the conversation forward we have often retreated into queer communities to pat ourselves on the backs for our ideological purity. I recently heard a queer theorist say “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to get married.” This poverty of understanding, this lack of heart, this ideological purity, has cost us our ability to connect with many people. Such a stance does not take people where they are and engage them. It blames people for not being where we are. It does not recognize the community-level symbolic importance of marriage. For a theory (queer) that seems to be all about the shifting subjectivities of people, it casts the pro-marriage gays and liberals in static terms, one based on a false-consciousness argument that would be theoretically detestable to many radical queers.
It may be the case that the marriage fight will be seen as the end of the LGBTQ movement, but it might also be the case that achieving marriage equality will make it considerably easier to tackle issues like housing and employment discrimination.
Conclusion:
The movement for marriage equality has been highly problematic, and rightly criticized. I support marriage equality.
More Resources:
The New Yorker: Supreme Court Justice Scalia Says Marriage Views Not Affected by Lifelong Fear of Gays
Salon: Robert Marshall - The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda
The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda
By Robert Marshall
Salon
The godfather of the New Age led a secretive group of devoted followers in the last decade of his life. His closest "witches" remain missing, and former insiders, offering new details, believe the women took their own lives.
For fans of the literary con, it’s been a great few years. Currently, we have Richard Gere starring as Clifford Irving in “The Hoax,” a film about the ’70s novelist who penned a faux autobiography of Howard Hughes. We’ve had the unmasking of James Frey, JT LeRoy/Laura Albert and Harvard’s Kaavya Viswanathan, who plagiarized large chunks of her debut novel, forcing her publisher, Little, Brown and Co., to recall the book. Much has been written about the slippery boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the publishing industry’s responsibility for distinguishing between the two, and the potential damage to readers. There’s been, however, hardly a mention of the 20th century’s most successful literary trickster: Carlos Castaneda.
If this name draws a blank for readers under 30, all they have to do is ask their parents. Deemed by Time magazine the “Godfather of the New Age,” Castaneda was the literary embodiment of the Woodstock era. His 12 books, supposedly based on meetings with a mysterious Indian shaman, don Juan, made the author, a graduate student in anthropology, a worldwide celebrity. Admirers included John Lennon, William Burroughs, Federico Fellini and Jim Morrison.
Under don Juan’s tutelage, Castaneda took peyote, talked to coyotes, turned into a crow, and learned how to fly. All this took place in what don Juan called “a separate reality.” Castaneda, who died in 1998, was, from 1971 to 1982, one of the best-selling nonfiction authors in the country. During his lifetime, his books sold at least 10 million copies.
Castaneda was viewed by many as a compelling writer, and his early books received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time called them “beautifully lucid” and remarked on a “narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies.” They were widely accepted as factual, and this contributed to their success. Richard Jennings, an attorney who became closely involved with Castaneda in the ’90s, was studying at Stanford in the early ’70s when he read the first two don Juan books. “I was a searcher,” he recently told Salon. “I was looking for a real path to other worlds. I wasn’t looking for metaphors.”
The books’ status as serious anthropology went almost unchallenged for five years. Skepticism increased in 1972 after Joyce Carol Oates, in a letter to the New York Times, expressed bewilderment that a reviewer had accepted Castaneda’s books as nonfiction. The next year, Time published a cover story revealing that Castaneda had lied extensively about his past. Over the next decade, several researchers, most prominently Richard de Mille, son of the legendary director, worked tirelessly to demonstrate that Castaneda’s work was a hoax.
In spite of this exhaustive debunking, the don Juan books still sell well. The University of California Press, which published Castaneda’s first book, “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” in 1968, steadily sells 7,500 copies a year. BookScan, a Nielsen company that tracks book sales, reports that three of Castaneda’s most popular titles, “A Separate Reality,” “Journey to Ixtlan” and “Tales of Power,” sold a total of 10,000 copies in 2006. None of Castaneda’s titles have ever gone out of print — an impressive achievement for any author.
Today, Simon and Schuster, Castaneda’s main publisher, still classifies his books as nonfiction. It could be argued that this label doesn’t matter since everyone now knows don Juan was a fictional creation. But everyone doesn’t, and the trust that some readers have invested in these books leads to a darker story that has received almost no coverage in the mainstream press.
Castaneda, who disappeared from the public view in 1973, began in the last decade of his life to organize a secretive group of devoted followers. His tools were his books and Tensegrity, a movement technique he claimed had been passed down by 25 generations of Toltec shamans. A corporation, Cleargreen, was set up to promote Tensegrity; it held workshops attended by thousands. Novelist and director Bruce Wagner, a member of Castaneda’s inner circle, helped produce a series of instructional videos. Cleargreen continues to operate to this day, promoting Tensegrity and Castaneda’s teachings through workshops in Southern California, Europe and Latin America.
At the heart of Castaneda’s movement was a group of intensely devoted women, all of whom were or had been his lovers. They were known as the witches, and two of them, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, vanished the day after Castaneda’s death, along with Cleargreen president Amalia Marquez and Tensegrity instructor Kylie Lundahl. A few weeks later, Patricia Partin, Castaneda’s adopted daughter as well as his lover, also disappeared. In February 2006, a skeleton found in Death Valley, Calif., was identified through DNA analysis as Partin’s.
To Read the Rest of the Article
By Robert Marshall
Salon
The godfather of the New Age led a secretive group of devoted followers in the last decade of his life. His closest "witches" remain missing, and former insiders, offering new details, believe the women took their own lives.
For fans of the literary con, it’s been a great few years. Currently, we have Richard Gere starring as Clifford Irving in “The Hoax,” a film about the ’70s novelist who penned a faux autobiography of Howard Hughes. We’ve had the unmasking of James Frey, JT LeRoy/Laura Albert and Harvard’s Kaavya Viswanathan, who plagiarized large chunks of her debut novel, forcing her publisher, Little, Brown and Co., to recall the book. Much has been written about the slippery boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the publishing industry’s responsibility for distinguishing between the two, and the potential damage to readers. There’s been, however, hardly a mention of the 20th century’s most successful literary trickster: Carlos Castaneda.
If this name draws a blank for readers under 30, all they have to do is ask their parents. Deemed by Time magazine the “Godfather of the New Age,” Castaneda was the literary embodiment of the Woodstock era. His 12 books, supposedly based on meetings with a mysterious Indian shaman, don Juan, made the author, a graduate student in anthropology, a worldwide celebrity. Admirers included John Lennon, William Burroughs, Federico Fellini and Jim Morrison.
Under don Juan’s tutelage, Castaneda took peyote, talked to coyotes, turned into a crow, and learned how to fly. All this took place in what don Juan called “a separate reality.” Castaneda, who died in 1998, was, from 1971 to 1982, one of the best-selling nonfiction authors in the country. During his lifetime, his books sold at least 10 million copies.
Castaneda was viewed by many as a compelling writer, and his early books received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time called them “beautifully lucid” and remarked on a “narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies.” They were widely accepted as factual, and this contributed to their success. Richard Jennings, an attorney who became closely involved with Castaneda in the ’90s, was studying at Stanford in the early ’70s when he read the first two don Juan books. “I was a searcher,” he recently told Salon. “I was looking for a real path to other worlds. I wasn’t looking for metaphors.”
The books’ status as serious anthropology went almost unchallenged for five years. Skepticism increased in 1972 after Joyce Carol Oates, in a letter to the New York Times, expressed bewilderment that a reviewer had accepted Castaneda’s books as nonfiction. The next year, Time published a cover story revealing that Castaneda had lied extensively about his past. Over the next decade, several researchers, most prominently Richard de Mille, son of the legendary director, worked tirelessly to demonstrate that Castaneda’s work was a hoax.
In spite of this exhaustive debunking, the don Juan books still sell well. The University of California Press, which published Castaneda’s first book, “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” in 1968, steadily sells 7,500 copies a year. BookScan, a Nielsen company that tracks book sales, reports that three of Castaneda’s most popular titles, “A Separate Reality,” “Journey to Ixtlan” and “Tales of Power,” sold a total of 10,000 copies in 2006. None of Castaneda’s titles have ever gone out of print — an impressive achievement for any author.
Today, Simon and Schuster, Castaneda’s main publisher, still classifies his books as nonfiction. It could be argued that this label doesn’t matter since everyone now knows don Juan was a fictional creation. But everyone doesn’t, and the trust that some readers have invested in these books leads to a darker story that has received almost no coverage in the mainstream press.
Castaneda, who disappeared from the public view in 1973, began in the last decade of his life to organize a secretive group of devoted followers. His tools were his books and Tensegrity, a movement technique he claimed had been passed down by 25 generations of Toltec shamans. A corporation, Cleargreen, was set up to promote Tensegrity; it held workshops attended by thousands. Novelist and director Bruce Wagner, a member of Castaneda’s inner circle, helped produce a series of instructional videos. Cleargreen continues to operate to this day, promoting Tensegrity and Castaneda’s teachings through workshops in Southern California, Europe and Latin America.
At the heart of Castaneda’s movement was a group of intensely devoted women, all of whom were or had been his lovers. They were known as the witches, and two of them, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, vanished the day after Castaneda’s death, along with Cleargreen president Amalia Marquez and Tensegrity instructor Kylie Lundahl. A few weeks later, Patricia Partin, Castaneda’s adopted daughter as well as his lover, also disappeared. In February 2006, a skeleton found in Death Valley, Calif., was identified through DNA analysis as Partin’s.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Monday, March 25, 2013
Radio Open Source: Gore Vidal on the Great Republic and its Fall
Gore Vidal on the Great Republic and its Fall
Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Having read all the Gore Vidal obits and the many more-and-less grudging encomia, I find the man himself at very near his best in my own conversational files — from an evening at Harvard just before Thanksgiving in 2003, on the occasion of his publishing Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams and Jefferson. He’d walked into the hall slowly, on a cane, that night, but his chatter was was crackling with fresh mimicry and mischief. (Two nights earlier, his reward at a joint reading in Provincetown was discovering that ancient nemesis Norman Mailer was getting around on two canes.) Great entertainer and great complainer, Vidal at 78 came through as passionate historian and erudite old comic who could still fill the house, and whose repartee was not all repertoire. I asked him, as the novelist of Empire, whether the hard plunge in these Bush years from republic to empire was now irreversible. He said the temptations of empire and the fate of ours were inescapable: “I think Gibbon would say: no. It’s highly reversible. And try to step aside when the Capitol falls on you. Ours will go as the others have gone.”
Harry Truman’s Cold War was the beginning of the end of our Great Republic, in the Vidal litany — the “Russians are coming” campaign when Truman and Dean Acheson knew that the Russians weren’t going anywhere. “Senator Vandenberg told Truman: ‘if you want this buildup because “the Russians are coming,” you’re going to have to frighten the American people to death or you’re not going to get any money out of Congress.’ Truman said: ‘I’ll take care of that,’ and he did!” Vidal’s heroes turned out to be General U. S. Grant, for writing in his celebrated memoirs that our Civil War was God’s judgment and retribution for the cruel folly of our war on Mexico; Benjamin Franklin, for forseeing the corruption of the people; and John Quincy Adams, for the Munroe Doctrine and his warning not to “seek out monsters to destroy” in the world.
To Read the Rest of the Introduction and to Listen to the Interview
Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Having read all the Gore Vidal obits and the many more-and-less grudging encomia, I find the man himself at very near his best in my own conversational files — from an evening at Harvard just before Thanksgiving in 2003, on the occasion of his publishing Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams and Jefferson. He’d walked into the hall slowly, on a cane, that night, but his chatter was was crackling with fresh mimicry and mischief. (Two nights earlier, his reward at a joint reading in Provincetown was discovering that ancient nemesis Norman Mailer was getting around on two canes.) Great entertainer and great complainer, Vidal at 78 came through as passionate historian and erudite old comic who could still fill the house, and whose repartee was not all repertoire. I asked him, as the novelist of Empire, whether the hard plunge in these Bush years from republic to empire was now irreversible. He said the temptations of empire and the fate of ours were inescapable: “I think Gibbon would say: no. It’s highly reversible. And try to step aside when the Capitol falls on you. Ours will go as the others have gone.”
Harry Truman’s Cold War was the beginning of the end of our Great Republic, in the Vidal litany — the “Russians are coming” campaign when Truman and Dean Acheson knew that the Russians weren’t going anywhere. “Senator Vandenberg told Truman: ‘if you want this buildup because “the Russians are coming,” you’re going to have to frighten the American people to death or you’re not going to get any money out of Congress.’ Truman said: ‘I’ll take care of that,’ and he did!” Vidal’s heroes turned out to be General U. S. Grant, for writing in his celebrated memoirs that our Civil War was God’s judgment and retribution for the cruel folly of our war on Mexico; Benjamin Franklin, for forseeing the corruption of the people; and John Quincy Adams, for the Munroe Doctrine and his warning not to “seek out monsters to destroy” in the world.
To Read the Rest of the Introduction and to Listen to the Interview
HUM/ENG Extra Credit Opportunity: 5 Broken Cameras
William T. Young Library Auditorium
UK Students for Justice in Palestine will be holding a free public screening of the Oscar-nominated film "5 Broken Cameras" on March 28 at the William T Young Library Auditorium. Doors will be opening at 6:00pm and the documentary will start at 6:30pm.
Filmed from the perspective of Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, "5 Broken Cameras" was shot using six different video cameras – five of which were destroyed in the process of documenting Emad’s family’s life as well as Palestinian and international resistance to Israeli appropriation of land and occupation. It is a first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements. In 2009 Israeli co-director Guy Davidi joined on to create the film. Structured around the destruction of Burnat's cameras, the filmmakers' collaboration follows one family's evolution over five years of turmoil.
UK Students for Justice in Palestine will be holding a free public screening of the Oscar-nominated film "5 Broken Cameras" on March 28 at the William T Young Library Auditorium. Doors will be opening at 6:00pm and the documentary will start at 6:30pm.
Filmed from the perspective of Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, "5 Broken Cameras" was shot using six different video cameras – five of which were destroyed in the process of documenting Emad’s family’s life as well as Palestinian and international resistance to Israeli appropriation of land and occupation. It is a first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements. In 2009 Israeli co-director Guy Davidi joined on to create the film. Structured around the destruction of Burnat's cameras, the filmmakers' collaboration follows one family's evolution over five years of turmoil.
Radio Open Source -- Dennis Lehane: Between Dorchester Ave and Sunset Boulevard
Dennis Lehane: Between Dorchester Ave and Sunset Boulevard
Radio Open Source
Dennis Lehane so rules the neighborhood of Noir (“Nwaaah,” as we say in Boston) that he gets street credit for work he didn’t write, like “The Departed” and “The Town.” But does the author of “Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone” and the new Moonlight Mile get credit enough for a body of artistic work now far beyond private-eye or “genre” of any kind — way beyond his gift for Boston-accented dialog?
Our conversation is about the murkier depths of his Gothic novel and movie “Shutter Island,” with Leonardo diCaprio as a U.S. Marshall apparently trapped in a Boston Harbor lock-up for the criminally insane in the 1950s. I think it’s Lehane’s version of the War on Terror. He says it’s more nearly his answer to the Patriot Act, his reliving of the Cold War and the repressions it licensed in America. “All past is prologue,” he remarks. “Noir is without a doubt the ultimate genre of ‘you cannot outrun the past’… That’s ‘Mystic River’: you cannot outrun your nature. You cannot escape the past.” “Shutter Island” in that sense turns out to be Dennis Lehane’s recapitulation of McCarthyism (an American Stalinism): those good old days when the CIA experimented with LSD and other psychotropic drugs on Federal prisoners and other unsuspecting guinea pigs. It was a time, he’s saying, that foreshadowed the suspension of habeas corpus and the tortures of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in the George Bush years.
To Read the Rest of the Introduction and to Listen to the Episode
Radio Open Source
Dennis Lehane so rules the neighborhood of Noir (“Nwaaah,” as we say in Boston) that he gets street credit for work he didn’t write, like “The Departed” and “The Town.” But does the author of “Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone” and the new Moonlight Mile get credit enough for a body of artistic work now far beyond private-eye or “genre” of any kind — way beyond his gift for Boston-accented dialog?
Our conversation is about the murkier depths of his Gothic novel and movie “Shutter Island,” with Leonardo diCaprio as a U.S. Marshall apparently trapped in a Boston Harbor lock-up for the criminally insane in the 1950s. I think it’s Lehane’s version of the War on Terror. He says it’s more nearly his answer to the Patriot Act, his reliving of the Cold War and the repressions it licensed in America. “All past is prologue,” he remarks. “Noir is without a doubt the ultimate genre of ‘you cannot outrun the past’… That’s ‘Mystic River’: you cannot outrun your nature. You cannot escape the past.” “Shutter Island” in that sense turns out to be Dennis Lehane’s recapitulation of McCarthyism (an American Stalinism): those good old days when the CIA experimented with LSD and other psychotropic drugs on Federal prisoners and other unsuspecting guinea pigs. It was a time, he’s saying, that foreshadowed the suspension of habeas corpus and the tortures of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in the George Bush years.
To Read the Rest of the Introduction and to Listen to the Episode
Hardcore History: Logical Insanity
[MB: an intense, thorough look at the "logical insanity" that led to the authorization of WWII atrocities from/on all sides.]
Show 42 - (BLITZ) Logical Insanity
Hardcore History
After many listener requests, Dan examines the issue of the morality of dropping the Atomic Bombs in the Second World War. As usual, he does so in his own unique, unexpected way.
Notes:
“MHQ SUMMER 1990 VOL: 2 NO: 4. The Battle of Britain: How did The Few Win?" by Williamson Murray
To Listen to the Episode
Show 42 - (BLITZ) Logical Insanity
Hardcore History
After many listener requests, Dan examines the issue of the morality of dropping the Atomic Bombs in the Second World War. As usual, he does so in his own unique, unexpected way.
Notes:
“MHQ SUMMER 1990 VOL: 2 NO: 4. The Battle of Britain: How did The Few Win?" by Williamson Murray
To Listen to the Episode
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Hardcore History: Old School Toughness
Show 33 - (BLITZ) Old School Toughness
by Dan Carlin
Hardcore History
Does the toughness of peoples play any role in history? How can historians deal with such an amorphous human quality? Historiography, boxing, barbarians, philosophy and wisdom are among the subjects touched upon.
Notes:
1.Anabasis by Xenophon
2.Cyropaedia by Xenophon
3."Our Oriental Heritage" The Story of Civilization, Vol.1 by Will Durant
4. "Warfare in Antiquity" History of the Art of War, Volume 1 by Hans Delbruck
5."A History of the Ancient World" by Chester G. Starr
6."The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1" by Edward Gibbon
7. "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond
8."The Histories" by Herodotus
To Listen to the Episode
by Dan Carlin
Hardcore History
Does the toughness of peoples play any role in history? How can historians deal with such an amorphous human quality? Historiography, boxing, barbarians, philosophy and wisdom are among the subjects touched upon.
Notes:
1.Anabasis by Xenophon
2.Cyropaedia by Xenophon
3."Our Oriental Heritage" The Story of Civilization, Vol.1 by Will Durant
4. "Warfare in Antiquity" History of the Art of War, Volume 1 by Hans Delbruck
5."A History of the Ancient World" by Chester G. Starr
6."The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1" by Edward Gibbon
7. "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond
8."The Histories" by Herodotus
To Listen to the Episode
Davey D: On the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War We Recall key Anti-War Hip Hop Songs
On the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War We Recall key Anti-War Hip Hop Songs
by Davey D
Davey D's Hip Hop Corner
The other night ABC News did a special report on the growing popularity of anti-war protest songs. The report focused on how all these musicians were now coming out and providing a sound track to the growing discontent many of us are having with the war in Iraq. It talked about how people are more accepting of such songs and how major record labels were loosening up in the aftermath of the Dixie Chicks who got lambasted and later boycotted for speaking out against George Bush and his policies in 2003.
The report also brought to light the impact anti-war songs had on fueling the Anti-war movement against Vietnam in the late 60s and the question was raised as to what sort of impact todays rash of songs would have.
I cant remember all the singers they profiled, but I did recall seeing country singer Merle Haggard, Rock-N-Roll icon Bruce Springstein and pop sensation Pink. What surprised me was not seeing any mention of Hip Hop especially with the exception of KRS-One, since it was artists in the rap community that up to date have released more anti-war songs and were the first to unabashedly do so right after 9-11.
If we take a short walk down memory lane, folks may recall that the day after 9-11 Bay Area Hip Hop activists from organizations like Lets Get Free, The Ella Baker Center and Minds Eye Collective put together a rally that was held in Snow Park in Oakland. Close to 500 people attended this event which focused on the loss of human life and questioned the foreign policy missteps of the Bush administration. It was at this rally that many of us heard our last poem from the late June Jordan.
We also heard an incredible song from Michael Franti & Spearhead calling for healing and peace. A couple of months later, Franti appeared on Conan O’Brian and performed the anti-war song Bomb the World to Pieces only to find that his sentiments angered producers who threatened to censor the song when the show aired. Community outrage lead to OBrian’s people eventually showing the performance.
Early on we heard anti-war songs from acts like the Beastie Boys (World Gone Mad), Nas (Rule), Wu-Tang Affiliates Known Associates (World So Cold), Talib Kweli (the Proud), J-Live (Satisfied) and Mr Lif (home of the Brave). All in all there are more than 150 anti-war songs that have been recorded by Hip Hop artists.
The song that really made heads turn was by Bay Area artist Paris who came out of retirement and released a 6 minute missive called What Would You Do? that went into great detail about The Caryle Group, Bush’s relationship to the Bin Laden family and the hawkish action plans of the Neo-cons serving in Bushs cabinet. Paris gave the song away for free and then followed it up with an entire antiwar album called Sonic Jihad which went on to sell over 200 thousand units. Another great anti-war cut off that album was ‘Sheep to Slaughter‘.
To Read the Rest of the Essay and Listen to the Songs
by Davey D
Davey D's Hip Hop Corner
The other night ABC News did a special report on the growing popularity of anti-war protest songs. The report focused on how all these musicians were now coming out and providing a sound track to the growing discontent many of us are having with the war in Iraq. It talked about how people are more accepting of such songs and how major record labels were loosening up in the aftermath of the Dixie Chicks who got lambasted and later boycotted for speaking out against George Bush and his policies in 2003.
The report also brought to light the impact anti-war songs had on fueling the Anti-war movement against Vietnam in the late 60s and the question was raised as to what sort of impact todays rash of songs would have.
I cant remember all the singers they profiled, but I did recall seeing country singer Merle Haggard, Rock-N-Roll icon Bruce Springstein and pop sensation Pink. What surprised me was not seeing any mention of Hip Hop especially with the exception of KRS-One, since it was artists in the rap community that up to date have released more anti-war songs and were the first to unabashedly do so right after 9-11.
If we take a short walk down memory lane, folks may recall that the day after 9-11 Bay Area Hip Hop activists from organizations like Lets Get Free, The Ella Baker Center and Minds Eye Collective put together a rally that was held in Snow Park in Oakland. Close to 500 people attended this event which focused on the loss of human life and questioned the foreign policy missteps of the Bush administration. It was at this rally that many of us heard our last poem from the late June Jordan.
We also heard an incredible song from Michael Franti & Spearhead calling for healing and peace. A couple of months later, Franti appeared on Conan O’Brian and performed the anti-war song Bomb the World to Pieces only to find that his sentiments angered producers who threatened to censor the song when the show aired. Community outrage lead to OBrian’s people eventually showing the performance.
Early on we heard anti-war songs from acts like the Beastie Boys (World Gone Mad), Nas (Rule), Wu-Tang Affiliates Known Associates (World So Cold), Talib Kweli (the Proud), J-Live (Satisfied) and Mr Lif (home of the Brave). All in all there are more than 150 anti-war songs that have been recorded by Hip Hop artists.
The song that really made heads turn was by Bay Area artist Paris who came out of retirement and released a 6 minute missive called What Would You Do? that went into great detail about The Caryle Group, Bush’s relationship to the Bin Laden family and the hawkish action plans of the Neo-cons serving in Bushs cabinet. Paris gave the song away for free and then followed it up with an entire antiwar album called Sonic Jihad which went on to sell over 200 thousand units. Another great anti-war cut off that album was ‘Sheep to Slaughter‘.
To Read the Rest of the Essay and Listen to the Songs
David Harvey: Crises of Capitalism
David Harvey looks beyond capitalism towards a new social order. Can we find a more responsible, just, and humane economic system?
Alice Walker: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution
Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution
by Alice Walker
Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Color Purple has been celebrated as a modern literary classic and was made into a film and theatrical musical. ...
This article is adapted from her introduction to Nancy Stout’s One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution, forthcoming from Monthly Review Press
...
The people in this book who were tortured, assassinated, disappeared, left me yearning for and missing them. For instance, Frank País—a young schoolteacher of twenty who was the other comandante, Fidel’s partner in guiding the overthrow of the dictator, and Celia’s primary contact in the early days of the Revolution—was murdered by Batista’s police a month after his younger brother, Josué, had been killed by them. Their mother, Rosário, who claimed their bodies, is now gone too, yet I am still able, as I experience their story, to feel some of her agony. And that of two indomitable rebel women, Clodomira and Lydia, tortured sadistically before they died in the custody of the police. Much of the world continues to grieve the loss to humanity of Ché Guevara, assassinated so young and with so much still to offer, but he is far from the only astonishing person who is missing, and played a role in Celia’s Revolution and her story.
Cuba has suffered so much I sometimes think of it as the country whose greatest wealth is the people’s collective experience of deeply shared emotion. All those who struggled so bravely and died, sometimes horribly, were passionately loved and appreciated by the revolutionaries they left behind, and strengthened. I believe it is the glue of this mutually lived history, and the hope of creating a free and healthy Cuba that, even today, holds the country together. In this book we see some of the cost of seeking to live one’s own way, charting and being drawn by one’s own destiny. These fallen heroes, women and men, young and old, many of them revealed for the first time in this book, are cause to mourn.
But just as much, and also as revealed in this book, cause to celebrate, or simply to admire.
Reading this story we see precisely why Fidel Castro adored Celia Sánchez and why Ché and Celia were good friends. All three of these revolutionaries were persons of the highest moral character and integrity; deeply human also in their transgressions and imperfections, they were equals of the fiercest sort. There was also a price on all their heads.
We see something else as well: that the women of Cuba were full participants in the Revolution, combatants, covert operatives, and even co-instigators. It was in fact Celia and Haydée Santamaría who, early on and with other women, took up arms to fight the dictatorship. Celia, the daughter of a doctor, who frequently helped her father in his attendance to the poor, a society girl and high-school beauty queen, this woman who wore red lipstick, wide skirts, high heels (and would wear high heels with her rebel army uniform when she felt like it) took to the mountains of eastern Cuba with Fidel, Ché, and other revolutionaries no less brave but far less known, and placed her life against the killing machine of wealth, corruption, and depravity that so insulted and wounded her beloved country.
I love this book. Biographer Nancy Stout is to be congratulated for her insightful, mature, and sometimes droll exploration of a profoundly liberated, adventuresome, and driven personality. I love the life of Celia Sánchez, a life that was singular, sui generis, and true to its time of revolution and change in Cuban society, but also archetypal in its impact and relevance to all times of social struggle and revolt, including this one, in which Cuba’s archenemy, the government of the United States, is also experiencing transformation. To fight the demons that have overtaken us, and to lead the world back to its senses, such an intrepid woman warrior would have to exist: a Durga, a Kali. A Celia.
Knowing her as well as I now believe I do, I ask myself: Did we meet? I remember visiting Cuba for the first time in 1978. Celia would have been very ill by then; she died in 1980. I do recall a visit to the Federation of Cuban Women and if I’m not mistaken I met Vilma Espín, another remarkable revolutionary, and perhaps Haydée Santamaría, whom I surely had “met” in the story of the torture and murder of her brother Abel, one of those captured after the attack on the Moncada garrison in 1953. I remember Haydée especially for her reply to the guard who brought her one of her brother’s eyes: if he would not talk, nor can I.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Alice Walker
Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Color Purple has been celebrated as a modern literary classic and was made into a film and theatrical musical. ...
This article is adapted from her introduction to Nancy Stout’s One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution, forthcoming from Monthly Review Press
...
The people in this book who were tortured, assassinated, disappeared, left me yearning for and missing them. For instance, Frank País—a young schoolteacher of twenty who was the other comandante, Fidel’s partner in guiding the overthrow of the dictator, and Celia’s primary contact in the early days of the Revolution—was murdered by Batista’s police a month after his younger brother, Josué, had been killed by them. Their mother, Rosário, who claimed their bodies, is now gone too, yet I am still able, as I experience their story, to feel some of her agony. And that of two indomitable rebel women, Clodomira and Lydia, tortured sadistically before they died in the custody of the police. Much of the world continues to grieve the loss to humanity of Ché Guevara, assassinated so young and with so much still to offer, but he is far from the only astonishing person who is missing, and played a role in Celia’s Revolution and her story.
Cuba has suffered so much I sometimes think of it as the country whose greatest wealth is the people’s collective experience of deeply shared emotion. All those who struggled so bravely and died, sometimes horribly, were passionately loved and appreciated by the revolutionaries they left behind, and strengthened. I believe it is the glue of this mutually lived history, and the hope of creating a free and healthy Cuba that, even today, holds the country together. In this book we see some of the cost of seeking to live one’s own way, charting and being drawn by one’s own destiny. These fallen heroes, women and men, young and old, many of them revealed for the first time in this book, are cause to mourn.
But just as much, and also as revealed in this book, cause to celebrate, or simply to admire.
Reading this story we see precisely why Fidel Castro adored Celia Sánchez and why Ché and Celia were good friends. All three of these revolutionaries were persons of the highest moral character and integrity; deeply human also in their transgressions and imperfections, they were equals of the fiercest sort. There was also a price on all their heads.
We see something else as well: that the women of Cuba were full participants in the Revolution, combatants, covert operatives, and even co-instigators. It was in fact Celia and Haydée Santamaría who, early on and with other women, took up arms to fight the dictatorship. Celia, the daughter of a doctor, who frequently helped her father in his attendance to the poor, a society girl and high-school beauty queen, this woman who wore red lipstick, wide skirts, high heels (and would wear high heels with her rebel army uniform when she felt like it) took to the mountains of eastern Cuba with Fidel, Ché, and other revolutionaries no less brave but far less known, and placed her life against the killing machine of wealth, corruption, and depravity that so insulted and wounded her beloved country.
I love this book. Biographer Nancy Stout is to be congratulated for her insightful, mature, and sometimes droll exploration of a profoundly liberated, adventuresome, and driven personality. I love the life of Celia Sánchez, a life that was singular, sui generis, and true to its time of revolution and change in Cuban society, but also archetypal in its impact and relevance to all times of social struggle and revolt, including this one, in which Cuba’s archenemy, the government of the United States, is also experiencing transformation. To fight the demons that have overtaken us, and to lead the world back to its senses, such an intrepid woman warrior would have to exist: a Durga, a Kali. A Celia.
Knowing her as well as I now believe I do, I ask myself: Did we meet? I remember visiting Cuba for the first time in 1978. Celia would have been very ill by then; she died in 1980. I do recall a visit to the Federation of Cuban Women and if I’m not mistaken I met Vilma Espín, another remarkable revolutionary, and perhaps Haydée Santamaría, whom I surely had “met” in the story of the torture and murder of her brother Abel, one of those captured after the attack on the Moncada garrison in 1953. I remember Haydée especially for her reply to the guard who brought her one of her brother’s eyes: if he would not talk, nor can I.
To Read the Entire Essay
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Dan Savage: "What is the most important issue related to sex and sexuality today?"
"Dan Savage answers an audience question at Jacksonville University -- "What is the most important issue related to sex and sexuality today?" His answer is a classic Dan rant, covering such varied topics as faith, sex, love and politics."
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