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Juan Gonzalez on America's role in Latin America

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

I think the central theme of my book is that the — you cannot understand the enormous Latino presence in the United States unless you understand America’s role in Latin America, and in fact that the Latino presence in the country is the harvest of the empire. It is the result of more than a century of domination of many of these countries. And in fact, those countries that were most dominated by the United States are the ones that have sent the most migrants to this country. And Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Salvador, Guatemala, these are the countries that have provided the bulk of the migration from Latin America, largely many of them fleeing from the civil wars, as in the cases of Guatemala and Nicaragua and El Salvador, in which the United States government played a key role in backing one side or the other, others coming here as a result of the needs of American businesses that established migration and recruiting, actually recruited people to come here to fill jobs — that’s more so in the case of the Puerto Ricans and the Mexicans. And so, in essence, the migration flows, the mass migration flows of Latin Americans to this country were a direct response to the needs of the empire. Most Americans are not aware of that, because most Americans don’t even think of our country as an empire. - Juan Gonzalez, from a DemocracyNow! interview.

Adam Hochschild on how World War I began

Fri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The interesting thing about this war, which really remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way — it killed some 20 million people, military and civilian; the way it ended guaranteed the rise of the Nazis and the second even more destructive war — was that in all of the countries involved, there were people who felt the war was madness and shouldn’t be fought. They didn’t prevail, unfortunately, but I nonetheless wanted to write their story, because it seemed to me that when we usually write about wars, we describe them as a contest between one side and the other, whereas I was more interested in this conflict between people who saw the war as a noble and necessary crusade and people who saw it as madness.

I focused on England, because that’s where this antiwar movement was strongest. More than 20,000 British men of military age refused to go into the army when they were drafted. Many of them, as a matter of principle, refused the alternative service offered to conscientious objectors, like driving ambulances at the front or, you know, working in war industries. More than 6,000 went to prison, under very harsh conditions — the largest number of people who had been imprisoned, up to that point in time, for political reasons in a Western democracy. And they were a remarkable group of people. And happily, for me as a writer, they wrote letters. They kept diaries. They published clandestine prison newspapers. And they had interesting relationships with friends and family members who felt differently about the war and, in some cases, were at the front fighting. - Adam Hochschild, from a DemocracyNow! interview.

Manning Marable, 1950 - 2011, dies days before publication of his biography of Malcolm X

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

African American historian Manning Marable passed away on Friday, April 1 at the age of 60, just days before the publication of his life’s work, a monumental biography about Malcolm X. Two decades in the making, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is described as a reevaluation of Malcolm X’s life which provides new insights into the circumstances of his assassination, as well as raising questions about his autobiography. Manning Marable has been one of the few historians who has had access to the three missing chapters from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" that he says paint a very different picture than the book with Alex Haley and Spike Lee’s film. Marable has also had unprecedented access to Malcolm’s family and documents that shed new light on the involvement of the New York Police, the FBI and possibly the CIA in Malcolm X’s assassination.

Manning Marable on Malcolm X:

I think that Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical figure produced by Black America in the 20th century. That’s a heavy statement, but I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm came to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual that he shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective. He shared with Marcus Garvey a commitment to building strong black institutions. He shared with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a commitment to peace and the freedom of racialized minorities. He was the first prominent American to attack and to criticize the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, and he came out four-square against the Vietnam War in 1964, long before the vast majority of Americans did. So that Malcolm X represents the cutting edge of a kind of critique of globalization in the 21st century. In fact, Malcolm, if anything, was far ahead of the curve in so many ways. - an excerpt from a 2005 DemocracyNow! interview. See also Democracy Now!'s Complete Interviews with Manning Marable.

Edward Herman and David Peterson on Julian Assange and Luis Posada Carriles

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0700

By an historical coincidence, both Julian Assange and Luis Posada Carriles were brought before Western courts around the same time in late 2010 and early 2011—Assange in Britain and Posada in the United States. The contrast in their treatment by the U.S.-Anglo system of justice and in their handling by the Western establishment media is enlightening.

Posada, now 82, is a self-confessed terrorist, Bay of Pigs veteran, School of the Americas graduate, and CIA operative who has been credibly placed at two meetings where the plan was hatched for the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all 73 civilians aboard. He also has been implicated in numerous other terrorist acts in which people were killed or injured and property destroyed, and he played a role in the United States' arms-smuggling network in Central America that eventually came to light in the Iran-Contra investigations.

"The CIA taught us everything," Posada told the New York Times in 1998. "They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage." Posada was a star pupil. But as a longtime CIA asset and, until the past decade, the "most notorious commando in the anti-Castro underground," the U.S. justice system has never charged Posada with a crime related to terrorism or the death of civilians, even though a former FBI counterterrorism expert who investigated the Cuban airliner bombing claims that Posada was "up to his eyeballs" in its planning. Surely this is because his killings and bombings were carried out against targets of U.S. policy, and because he almost certainly would have implicated the CIA.

In fact, the U.S. justice system never charged Posada with any kind of offense until early 2007, when a federal grand jury indicted him with the ludicrously lesser charges of making false statements during his naturalization interview two years earlier. After Posada had slipped into Miami's anti-Castro Cuban-exile community in March 2005, he filed for political asylum but then quickly withdrew his application when he recognized that in the aftermath of 9/11 and Bush's "War on Terror," his past activities made him a "hot potato."

But before he could disappear again, he held a news conference in Miami, and Department of Homeland Security agents grabbed him—and ever since he has faced a series of on-again-off-again perjury charges related to his original interview.

With his current trial now underway in a U.S. District Court in El Paso, things have not moved beyond this point, leading one observer, Jose Pertierra, a Washington D.C.-based attorney who represents the Venezuelan government, which since 2005 has sought Posada's extradition to stand trial for the Cuban airliner bombing, to conclude that "all parties are waiting for a biological solution to this case.”

As U.S. prosecutor Timothy Reardon told the court at the start of this trial, Posada "can do anything he wants to the Cuban regime." But he lied during his naturalization interview, and one "must play by the rules and tell the truth to become a citizen."

Julian Assange, by contrast, has not killed anybody, or so far even broken any law, and key U.S. military officials have denied claims that information released into the public realm via WikiLeaks has resulted in anybody's death...

- an excerpt from Mixed Media: Assange and Posada in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson. Herman and Peterson are coauthors of the new book The Politics of Genocide published by Monthly Review Press.

Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Bob Dylan, or at least the idea of him, is the lurking, mocking background chorus in this beautiful, bittersweet look at postwar America's foremost agitprop singer/songwriter. For all that Phil Ochs could have achieved in his lauded but still overshadowed career, there stands Dylan, the one who came up through the same West Village coffeehouse folk scene but who had no problem jettisoning its politics once he realized that greater commercial reward was there for the taking without the encumbrance of protest. As Christopher Hitchens points out in the film, there was a difference between those who liked Dylan and those who even knew about Ochs -- anybody could be into Dylan, Ochs's songs were for those who cared.

- an excerpt from the filmcritic.com review of Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune by Chris Barsanti.

Van Dyke Parks: The thing about Phil that made him interesting was he was totally unequivocal. He was determined, precise, literate, but already filled with rage and political purpose in his songs.

Phil Ochs: [singing] He slowly squeezed the trigger, the bullet left his side. It struck the heart of every man when Evers fell and died. Too many martyrs and too many dead...

Dave Van Ronk: Topical song movement evolved out of opposition to segregation, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement, in general, subsequently the Vietnam War. Without those howling injustices and outrages, there would have been no protest song movement. Probably there would have been no folk song movement.

Phil Ochs: [singing] And then there came the boycotts and then the Freedom Rides. And forgetting what you stood for, you tried to block the tide. Oh, the automation bosses were laughing on the side, as they watched you lose your link on the chain, on the chain, as they watched you lose your link on the chain.

Michael Ochs: Phil would play anywhere. There were the club things. There’d be a multi-artist thing. You’d hear about all these causes that needed help. He would go to the South and do civil rights things.

Phil Ochs: [singing] If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find. Oh, the calendar is lying when it reads the present time. Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of. Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of.

Michael Ochs: It was a great way to reach people through one’s music. Phil would actually turn down a commercial job for a benefit, because the benefit would usually reach more people.

Abbie Hoffman: No matter how small a group or big the group, whenever anybody asked, I can never remember him turning down anybody, any benefit, any chance to sing for a cause he believed in. He really—Phil Ochs was there.

Lucian Truscot IV: Those guys were true believers. Those guys would show up, you know, for the opening of an envelope to give $10 to some guy that was handing out crackers on the Bowery, to sing a song for the cracker-hander-outter guy.

Arthur Gorson: Phil went down to Hazard, Kentucky, because there was a miners’ strike.

Phil Ochs: [singing] Well, some people think that unions are too strong, union leaders should go back where they belong.

Arthur Gorson: We got to sleep in bathtubs, so that when they came and shot up the rooms at night, you wouldn’t have bullets bouncing off. And it was cool.

Phil Ochs: [singing] Well, mining is a hazard in Hazard, Kentucky, and if you ain’t mining there, you’re awful lucky, because if you don’t get silicosis or a pay that’s just atrocious, you’ll be screaming for a union that will care.

Arthur Gorson: There was sort of a very kind of practical moral politics that had to do with a sincere feeling that people should be treated equally.

Phil Ochs: [singing] But if you want to get together and fight, good buddy, that’s what I want to hear.

- An excerpt from Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune taken from a DemocracyNow! interview with Kenneth Bowser, the director, and Michael Ochs, the produce and brother of Phil Ochs.

American scholar Chalmers Johnson, 1931 - 2010

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0700

There are people whose memory fades with time. There are others whose importance only grows. Such a man was Chalmers Johnson , who died last week. As a CIA analyst, and an influential scholar of east Asia's political economy, he forced a revision both of the Chinese revolution and the Japanese "economic miracle". Johnson went from being a spear-carrier for US global power to an unflinching chronicler of its impending demise. It started with a visit to Okinawa, where a 12-year-old Japanese girl was abducted and raped by two US marines and a sailor in 1995. He found that local hostility to the US military was not the exception, a response to three "bad apples", but the rule. Only late in his career did his impact reach beyond academia, with a trilogy that pathologised America's current role in the world. Blowback, the CIA word for the unintended consequences of actions that are kept secret from the US public, was the first: it was ignored at home when it came out in 2000. Its prime example was the recruiting, arming and putting into combat of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s. 11 September made this book a bestseller, while "blowback" entered the political vocabulary. With 700 declared military bases, and probably 300 secret ones, around the world, Johnson likened his country to the Roman republic as it turned into an empire, which would find itself overstretched, bankrupted and then overrun. The uncomfortable parallel may have some life in it yet. - from In praise of … Chalmers Johnson.

Chalmers Johnson on his "Blowback" trilogy:

In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia -- the area of my academic training -- than on the Middle East."

The Sorrows of Empire was written during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete manifestation of our global hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners as Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization."

In Nemesis, I have tried to present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where our current behavior is likely to lead. Specifically, I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent. The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

- three excerpts from Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson.

Susan Reverby has won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for Examining Tuskegee

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Medical Historian Susan Reverby has won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy

"Examining Tuskegee" seeks to reaffirm the importance of medical ethics and informed consent. Unlike previous studies on Tuskegee, Reverby's "Examining Tuskegee" highlights the usual black-and-white tale of ethics and deception by documenting the personal stories of surviving victims. "I was terrified that I wouldn't understand the heavy southern accent and I was more worried that they wouldn't understand my New York accent," Reverby said of her first interactions with former Tuskegee subjects. She traveled to Macon County, Ala. to interview the men directly. Reverby was not solely concerned with making her findings on Tuskegee known to the government. She spoke to the families of the victims to help them understand the injustice of the syphilis study.

"The scariest thing was speaking at a Southern Baptist church," she recalled. It was in that Baptist Church that she discussed the syphilis study before an audience of approximately one hundred individuals in Notasulga, Ala., just outside of Tuskegee. "About a quarter were family members of the study," Reverby recalled. She had to face down the community's suspicious comments: "‘Why should we believe you? Are you here just to use us one more time?'"

To acknowledge Reverby's efforts in documenting and publishing details on the Tuskegee experiments, Macon County declared a "Susan Reverby Day." "This was a high point in my intellectual career," said Reverby, who was overwhelmed by the response of Macon County and the warmth extended to her. Although Reverby acknowledged the personal importance of the reaction to her efforts from the local communities, she is even more appreciative of the impact she has had on the academic community. Her work has had a lasting impact on more than twenty historians, a fact that is deeply meaningful to her. - from The Wellesley News

"He who knows syphilis, knows medicine," famed early twentieth-century John Hopkins physician Sir William Osler is often quoted as saying. The contemporary adage would be different: "Those who know 'Tuskegee' know racism in medicine and injustice." Yet these simple maxims belie their connected longer versions and not-so-simple truths. A twentieth-century medical research study of African American men with sexually transmitted disease of syphilis, in which the hundreds involved did not know that treatment was supposedly withheld, has led to many stories where conceptions of race, uncertainties in medicine, mistrust of doctors, and the power of the state intertwine. This book is about what made the study possible, why it continued, and the histories and stories told after it ended. It unravels the political and cultural purposes served when a complicated experience has many narratives, but the tale is told simply as a straightforward allegory for all time about racism, medicine and mistrust. - from Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy by Susan Reverby.

Note: About four years ago while researching Examining Tuskegee, Susan Reverby discovered information about previously unknown experiments in Guatemala by American doctors who deliberately infected hundreds of prisoners, soldiers and mental patients with syphilis from 1946 to 1948. See US says sorry for 'outrageous and abhorrent' Guatemalan syphilis tests.

Fractal Mathmematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, 1924 – 2010

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Benoit B Mandelbrot. Apparently the 'B' stood for 'Benoit B Mandelbrot'

Benoît Mandelbrot has had his name applied to a feature of mathematics that has become part of everyday life, the Mandelbrot set. Beginning in the 1960s, Mandelbrot realized that many real-world phenomena in different branches of science display similar patterns that recur at smaller and smaller scales. These included clouds, snowflakes, coastlines, stock-market fluctuations, brain tissue, music, lingusistics and other phenomena. Mandelbrot modeled these phenomena with objects that he called "fractals." The name refers to a property called fractional dimensionality: fractals are fuzzier than a line but never quite fill a plane. The best known fractal is the Mandelbrot set. It is generated by repeatedly solving a mathematical function and plugging the answer back into it. Popular accounts of chaos theory sometimes present the Mandelbrot set and fractal geometry as a story of indeterminism. Actually, however, it is a story of how simple deterministic relations can produce extraordinarily complex results.

Benoît Mandelbrot died on October 14 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 85. On hearing of his death, mathematician Heinz-Otto Peitgen said "if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences, he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years." French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Mandelbrot had "a powerful, original mind that never shied away from innovating and shattering preconceived notions...His work, developed entirely outside mainstream research, led to modern information theory."

Mohammed Arkoun, Islamic scholar who explored Enlightenment ideals, 1928-2010

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Mohammed Arkoun, one of the most prominent and original scholars in the field of Islamic Studies, died last month at the age of 82.

An aspect of modern Muslim countries that Arkoun constantly drew attention to was the crisis of education. Instead of becoming a means of learning and liberation from superstition, education has become, in most Muslim countries, a means of spreading what he described as "institutionalised ignorance". The spread of such education went hand in hand with the rise of Islamist discourse, even in countries where Islamists are not in power.

Arkoun saw his project as one that goes beyond the confines of the field of Islamic studies. He believed in a critical approach that was also self-critical and hence aware of its own limits. As such, the critical approach becomes a process. Such work is also of a comparative nature – one cannot study Islam outside its monotheistic context and in isolation from Judaism and Christianity. He believed that if scholars in Muslim countries adopted such an approach in practising Islamic studies, they would not only liberate their discipline, but also themselves and, in the process, help liberate their societies. - from the Guardian obituary.

As he began to consider how one might rethink Islam in the contemporary world, his sophisticated questioning provided a welcome counterpoint to the highly ideological interpretations that dominated debate in both the Muslim world and the non-Muslim West. - from the Institute of Ismaili Studies obituary.

In the final years of his career, Arkoun repeatedly expressed regret that his methodological suggestions often fell on deaf ears among scholars of Islam. But that did not deter him the least. In fact, in the last ten years or so, he actually expanded his horizons from the study of Islamic thought to a critique of all forms of reason and rational thinking, proposing an almost Kantian philosophical recalibration, which he called the 'Emerging Reason Project' and continued to advocate and propagate until the very end. - from Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010): Trailblazer for new approaches to the study of Islam by Carool Kersten.

Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Born in 1936 in Arequipaog, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa has for years been Peru's most acclaimed writer. In the late 1980s he also gained a reputation as a right-wing maverick when he led a mass movement against a decision to nationalize the country''s banks and later ran for the presidency in 1990 as a free market conservative. "His political position stains his literature" were the words of Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela. The Nobel Prize committee obviously disagreed and cited Mario Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat". A complex figure, we quote Vargas Llosa from a 2002 interview about his latest book at that time, The Feast of the Goat:

What was the inspiration for The Feast of the Goat?

In 1975, I went to the Dominican Republic for eight months during the shooting of a film based on my novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. It was during this period I heard and read about Trujillo. I had the idea of a novel set with this historical background. It's a long project. I went many times to the Dominican Republic to read the papers, and also to interview many people: victims, neutral people and collaborators of Trujillo.

To what degree is the book really about Alberto Fujimori?

Well, I think it's a book about Trujillo, but if you write about a dictator you are writing about all dictators, and about totalitarianism. I was writing not only about Trujillo but about an emblematic figure and something that has been experienced in many other societies.

Particularly in Latin America.

When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty, corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities. He pushed to the extreme trends which were quite common to most dictators of the time.

The corruption of power.

Dictators are not natural catastrophes. That's something I wanted to describe: how dictators are made with the collaboration of many people, and sometimes even with the collaboration of their victims.

Do you have insights into dictatorship from your political experience?

My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values and transform people into little monsters.

This novel is written partly from a woman's point of view. Was that a problem?

A challenge, not a problem. I wanted a woman to be one of the protagonists, because I think women were the worst victims of Trujillo. To his authoritarianism you have to add machismo. Trujillo used sex not only for pleasure but also as an instrument of power. And in this he went far further than many, many other dictators. He went to bed, for example, with the wives of his collaborators.

Like a Shakespeare play.

In a way. Coriolanus is a fantastic play about this subject. - from an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa conducted by Robert McCrum and published in The Observer in 2002.

1 Urania. Her parents had done her no favor; her name suggested a planet, a mineral, anything but the slender, fine-featured woman with burnished skin and large, dark, rather sad eyes who looked back at her from the mirror. Urania! What an idea for a name. Fortunately nobody called her that anymore; now it was Uri, Miss Cabral, Ms. Cabral, Dr. Cabral. As far as she could remember, after she left Santo Domingo (or Ciudad Trujillo -- when she left they had not yet restored the old name to the capital city), no one in Adrian, or Boston, or Washington, D.C., or New York had called her Urania as they did at home and at the Santo Domingo Academy, where the sisters and her classmates pronounced with absolute correctness the ridiculous name inflicted on her at birth. Was it his idea or hers? Too late to find out, my girl; your mother was in heaven and your father condemned to a living death. You'll never know. Urania! As absurd as insulting old Santo Domingo de Guzman by calling it Ciudad Trujillo. Could that have been her father's idea too?

She waits for the sea to become visible through the window of her room on the ninth floor of the Hotel Jaragua, and at last she sees it. The darkness fades in a few seconds and the brilliant blue of the horizon quickly intensifies, beginning the spectacle she has been anticipating since she woke at four in spite of the pill she had taken, breaking her rule against sedatives. The dark blue surface of the ocean, marked by streaks of foam, extends to a leaden sky at the remote line of the horizon, while here, at the shore, it breaks in resounding, whitecapped waves against the Sea Walk, the Malecón, where she can make out sections of the broad road through the palms and almond trees that line it. Back then, the Hotel Jaragua faced the Malecón directly. Now it's to the side. Her memory brings back the image -- was that the day? -- of the little girl holding her father's hand as they entered the hotel restaurant so the two of them could have lunch together. They were given a table next to the window, and through the sheer lace curtains Urania could see the spacious garden and the pool with its diving boards and swimmers. In the Patio Espanol, surrounded by glazed tiles and flowerpots filled with carnations, an orchestra was playing merengues. Was that the day? "No" she says aloud. The Jaragua of those days had been torn down and replaced by this massive shocking-pink structure that had surprised her so much when she arrived in Santo Domingo three days ago.

Were you right to come back? You'll be sorry, Urania. Wasting a week's vacation, when you never had time to visit all the cities, regions, countries you would have liked to see -- the mountain ranges and snow-covered lakes of Alaska, for instance -- returning to the island you swore you'd never set foot on again. A symptom of decline? The sentimentality of age? Curiosity, nothing more. To prove to yourself you can walk along the streets of this city that is no longer yours, travel through this foreign country and not have it provoke sadness, nostalgia, hatred, bitterness, rage in you. Or have you come to confront the ruin of your father? To learn what effect seeing him has on you, after so many years. A shudder runs the length of her body. Urania, Urania! What if after all these years you discover that behind your determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement, behind the fortress admired and envied by others, you have a tender, timid, wounded, sentimental heart? - an excerpt from The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

Tariq Ali on "The Obama Syndrome"

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

What has really changed since Obama replaced Bush in the White House. Very little, argues Tariq Ali in his latest book, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender At Home, War Abroad, apart from the mood music.

I know some of his supporters might feel it’s a little harsh, but I think that we’ve had two years of him now, Amy, and the contours of this administration are now visible. And essentially, it is a conservative administration which has changed the mood music. So the talk is better. The images of the administration are better, the reasonable looks. But in terms of what they do—in foreign policy, we’ve seen a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies, and worse, in AfPak, as they call it, and at home, we’ve seen a total capitulation to the lobbyists, to the corporations. The fact that the healthcare bill was actually drafted by someone who used to be an insurance lobbyist says it all.

Let’s look at it concretely. Bush had promised exactly the same withdrawal pattern from Iraq: by this time, we will be out. Obama has followed it. They’re not going out. What is essentially happening, they’re reducing the presence of combat troops and eliminating it in the big cities, and building six huge military bases all over Iraq, in which they’ll keep between fifty and sixty thousand soldiers, ready to act when the need be—just like the British did when they occupied Iraq in the '20s and ’30s of the last century. And the British were then driven out by a violent upheaval and revolution in the ’50s. So the US is keeping these bases in, (a) to control Iraq, and (b) as a warning to Iran. And I think there's going to be trouble.

The war isn’t over at all. We’ve seen, just a few days ago, huge explosions in Baghdad and Fallujah. It’s a total disaster and a mess. And to present that as somehow "mission accomplished part two" is a joke. That country has been wrecked, a million Iraqis dead, its social infrastructure destroyed. And in Afghanistan, they are now going from bad to worse. They know, and General Eikenberry knows and says, we cannot win this war militarily. They can’t lose it, but they can’t win it, either. So, political solution is the only way out, and that means that they have to have an exit strategy. Obama isn’t even talking about that, because that might be construed as a sign of weakness. But by who? The army knows what’s going on. They can’t stay there forever. - Tariq Ali, speaking to Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow!

In Cairo, at West Point, at Oslo, Obama has treated the world to one uplifting homily after another, each address larded with every euphemism that White House speechwriters can muster to describe America’s glowing mission in the world: ‘Our country has borne a special burden in global affairs’; ‘Our cause is just, our resolve unwavering.’ The model for this variant of imperial presidency is Woodrow Wilson—no less pious a Christian, whose every second word was peace, democracy or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti and attacked Russia. But cant still goes a long way to satisfy those who yearn for it... - Tariq Ali, from The Obama Syndrome.

Historian and public intellectual Tony Judt, 1948 - 2010

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Considered by many to be a giant in the intellectual world, Tony Judt died last month following a two-year fight with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Judt was in "the great tradition of the spectateur engagé, the politically engaged but independent and critical intellectual" (Timothy Garton Ash - ) "A historian of the very first order,a public intellectual of an old-fashioned kind and — in more ways than one — a very brave man" (Michael Elliott - TIME Magazine). We quote Tony Judt from two recent interviews:

Tony Judt on courage among today’s politicians:

Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened dictatorship than it is in a democracy. However, there is another factor. My generation has been catastrophic. I was born in 1948 so I am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political. There were no wars they had to fight. They did not have to fight in the Vietnam War. They grew up believing that no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences. The result is that whatever the differences of appearance, style and personality, these are people for whom making an unpopular choice is very hard.

Someone once said: ‘But Blair’s choice to go to war in Iraq was unpopular with the majority of the population.’ I agree. But what Blair was doing was going for a different kind of popularity – he wanted to show his strength. To do this he had to do something unpopular, yet something that cost him nothing. Doing something unpopular that may cost you your job is much harder. The last generation in America with such courage was probably the generation of Lyndon Johnson. In a funny kind of way Thatcher, whom I certainly do not like, had courage. However, she fits the description of naive and idealistic; I don’t like her ideals, her naivety was a disaster, but it’s still a fair description. Today it is a criticism to describe a politician as idealistic. This is in a way a new phenomenon and it too is born from the fact that Europe has not been involved in wars that would demand the mobilisation of the whole population for over 60 years now. The last time there was such a sustained period of peace was probably the early Middle Ages. Traditionally leaders rose to power through wars or conquest. We have had six, seven generations of leaders who came to power exclusively by political manoeuvring, which is historically very unusual. It’s like inbreeding: there are no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself. This isn’t an argument in favour of war, just a historical fact.

Tony Judt on what Europe can do to exert pressure on Israel:

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage. If the EU said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the EU market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories. Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes. If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state. It is the European bad conscience that is part of the problem. - two excerpts from The Way Things Are and How They Might Be, an interview with Kristina Božic from March 2010 published in the London Review of Books.

Tony Judt on Democracy Democracy has always been a problem. The truly attractive features of the Western tradition that we accidentally—and it really is accidentally—get the benefit of are the rule of law, liberalism and tolerance, all of which are virtues inherited from predemocratic societies, whether they were based in eighteenth-century Anglo-American aristocratic individualism or nineteenth-century European forms of a type of developed postfeudal legal state. Democracy comes last. Democracy is simply a system of selection of people to rule over you. And it's not accidental that everyone is now a democrat. The Chinese are for democracy. George Bush was for democracy. The Burmese believe in it; they just call it something slightly different. South African whites believed in democracy; they just thought it should be arranged differently for blacks. Democracy is a dangerously empty term, and to the extent that it has substance, and the substance consists of allowing people to select freely how they live, the chance that they will choose to live badly is very high. The question is, What do we do now, in a world where, in the absence of liberal aristocracies, in the absence of social democratic elites whose authority people accept, you have people who genuinely believe, in the majority, that their interest consists of maximizing self-interest at someone else's expense? The answer is, Either you re-educate them in some form of public conversation or we will move toward what the ancient Greeks understood very well, which is that the closest system to democracy is popular authoritarianism. And that's the risk we run. Not a risk of a sort of ultra-individualism in a disaggregated society but of a kind of de facto authoritarianism. - from Talking With Tony Judt, an interview with Christine Smallwood from May 2010 published in The Nation.

Former U.S. Senator James Abourezk on Leaders in Hiding

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Those of us who have read some history also know what happened to the Irish when they first came to America. We also remember how Jews were assaulted, both in the press and in person, until the remainder of the country put a stop to it by making it unpopular to isolate a community so they could be demonized.

Now, it's the turn of the Arabs and the Muslims to receive the same treatment that blacks, the Irish, and the Jews did before that treatment became unpopular.

How similar is the assault on the Muslims and Arabs when compared to what happened to other ethnic groups in our shady past. Where the similarity ends is how the media is treating the entire "mosque" at ground zero. The proposed building is neither a mosque, nor is it at ground zero. It is a community center that, among other activities, includes a prayer room. I know of no one who would build an eleven-story mosque, and I know of no mosque that would allow a swimming pool and recreation center to be built in it, or even above it.

So what we have here is a political football that leaves it open for the gaggle of demagogues and hustlers -- I'm thinking specifically of Newt Gingrich, Rick Lazio and Sarah Palin -- to try to reap some kind of political popularity from denouncing the project.

It used to be that both political leaders and the media would denounce this kind racism, and that such denunciations would soon bring such demagoguery to an end. But not this time. Most of the media, MSNBC being the major exception, has ducked its head, being content to just report on the onslaught against the Islamic Center, but not denouncing the demagoguery.

So far, this has resulted in someone setting fire to the construction of a real mosque in Tennessee. This usually follows acts of violence against Arabs and Muslims in different parts of the country. We've seen it before.

All this won't stop unless and until all the political leaders--now silent--come down hard on what is happening, when the haters begin themselves to feel isolated. Cheers to President Obama and to Mayor Bloomberg, who have tried to lead the way, but who lost Howard Dean and Harry Reid in the process. The rest of the political leadership--both Republican and Democratic--predictably are in hiding. - an excerpt from Give Me That Old Time Racism by former U.S. Senator James Abourezk.

David Kirby on something else we feed chickens

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

David Kirby on why chickens grow faster when fed arsenic With the chickens that we eat, so-called broiler chickens, they often add arsenic into that feed to make the birds grow faster and to prevent intestinal diseases...The theory is that when you poison a chicken, it gets sick, so it eats and drinks more, consumes more, to try to get the poison out of its body. That makes a chicken grow faster, and it prevents intestinal parasites. The risk to humans, there have been studies done, and they have found residue of arsenic in some chickens. The real threat is in the litter that comes out the other end of the chicken. When that gets spread on farmland, people breathe in that arsenic dust. And there’s a town in Arkansas where cancer rates are just through the roof. There’s been over twenty pediatric cases in this tiny town of Prairie Grove with just a couple of thousand people...

Something else we feed chickens that people don’t realize is beef products. And when those chickens eat that beef product, some of it falls into their litter. Well, we produce so much chicken litter in this country, because of these factory farms, and it is so rich in phosphorus and nitrogen, its land application uses are limited. So you have surplus chicken litter and nothing to do with it. What do they do with it? They feed it to cattle. So we feed beef cows chicken crap. That chicken litter often contains bits and byproducts of cattle. So we are actually feeding cattle to cattle, which is a risk factor for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. We actually feed cattle products to cattle in three different ways: chicken litter, restaurant scraps, and blood products on dairy farms. And all the mad cow cases in this country came from mega-dairies where, when that calf is born, they remove it from its mother immediately, because that mother’s milk is a commodity, it’s worth money, so instead they feed that calf a formula that includes bovine blood products, and again increasing the risk of mad cow disease. - Two excerpts from a DemocracyNow! interview with David Kirby.

Andrew J. Bacevich on How to Dismantle the American Empire

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?

The Afghanistan decision was his [Obama's] opportunity to begin to chart a new course on national security policy, to begin to break away from this pattern of behavior that we’ve adhered to for the past sixty or so years. And he blew it. I can’t pretend to look into his heart and understand what factors caused him to make the decision he did. I suspect that a political calculation may have weighed more heavily than a strategic calculation or a moral calculation. And I find that deeply upsetting, because I, and I think many of us, felt that here, finally, was a public figure who—whose decisions would not be influenced primarily by political calculations... My guess is the President probably right now has a case of buyer’s remorse and is wishing that he hadn’t actually made the decision that he did, but it has become Obama’s war. I mean, he finds himself in a circumstance now where, having bought the war, it’s going worse now than it was last year. And he’s basically facing a reelection campaign right around the corner. Unless David Petraeus, our new commander, truly pulls a rabbit out of the hat, then President Obama will run for reelection in 2012 with this war still very much ongoing and, in all likelihood, with no end in sight.

But you asked the question, where does the pressure come from? And the pressure comes from what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. The pressure comes from the national security apparatus. There are people in institutions who are deeply invested in maintaining the status quo. There are budgets, there are prerogatives, there are ambitions, that ostensibly get satisfied by maintaining this drive for American globalism, again, backed by an emphasis on military power. So I don’t discount for a second that the President would have had to, you know, shove aside some fairly stubborn resistance to make that course change on Afghanistan, and he chose not to do it. - Andrew J. Bacevich from a DemocracyNow! interview.

There exists an alternative tradition to which Americans today could repair, should they choose to do so. This tradition harks back to the nearly forgotten anti-imperial origins of the Republic. Succinctly captured in the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” this tradition is one that does not seek trouble but insists that others will accord the United States respect. Updated for our own time, it might translate into the following substitute for the existing sacred trinity.

First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests. However necessary, military power itself is neither good nor inherently desirable. Any nation defining itself in terms of military might is well down the road to perdition, as earlier generations of Americans instinctively understood. As for military supremacy, the lessons of the past are quite clear. It is an illusion and its pursuit an invitation to mischief, if not disaster. Therefore, the United States should maintain only those forces required to accomplish the defense establishment’s core mission.

Second, the primary duty station of the American soldier is in America. Just as the U.S. military should not be a global police force, so too it should not be a global occupation force. Specific circumstances may from time to time require the United States on a temporary basis to establish a military presence abroad. Yet rather than defining the norm, Americans should view this prospect as a sharp departure, entailing public debate and prior congressional authorization. Dismantling the Pentagon’s sprawling network of existing bases promises to be a lengthy process. Priority should be given to those regions where the American presence costs the most while accomplishing the least. According to those criteria, U.S. troops should withdraw from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia forthwith.

Third, consistent with the Just War tradition, the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self-defense. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war -- the United States bestowing on itself the exclusive prerogative of employing force against ostensible threats even before they materialize—is a moral and strategic abomination, the very inverse of prudent and enlightened statecraft. Concocted by George W. Bush to justify his needless and misguided 2003 invasion of Iraq, this doctrine still awaits explicit abrogation by authorities in Washington. Never again should the United States undertake “a war of choice” informed by fantasies that violence provides a shortcut to resolving history’s complexities.

Were this alternative triad to become the basis for policy, dramatic changes in the U.S. national security posture would ensue. Military spending would decrease appreciably. The Pentagon’s global footprint would shrink. Weapons manufacturers would see their profits plummet. Beltway Bandits would close up shop. The ranks of defense- oriented think tanks would thin. These changes, in turn, would narrow the range of options available for employing force, obliging policy makers to exhibit greater restraint in intervening abroad. With resources currently devoted to rehabilitating Baghdad or Kabul freed up, the cause of rehabilitating Cleveland and Detroit might finally attract a following.

Choosing

President Lyndon Johnson had hoped that an ambitious domestic reform program known as the Great Society might define his legacy. Instead, he bequeathed to his successor a nation that was bitterly divided, deeply troubled, and increasingly cynical.

To follow a different course would have required Johnson to depart from the Washington rules. This he -- although not he alone -- lacked the courage to do.

Here lies the real significance -- and perhaps the tragedy -- of Barack Obama’s decision, during the first year of his presidency, to escalate the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. By retaining Robert Gates as defense secretary and by appointing retired four-star officers as his national security adviser and intelligence director, Obama had already offered Washington assurances that he was not contemplating a radical departure from the existing pattern of national security policy. Whether wittingly or not, the president now proffered his full-fledged allegiance to the Washington consensus, removing any lingering doubts about its durability.

In his speech of December 1, 2009, while explaining to the cadets at West Point why he felt it necessary to widen a war already in its ninth year, Obama justified his decision by appending it to a much larger narrative. “More than any other nation,” he declared, “the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades -- a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, and markets open, and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress and advancing frontiers of human liberty.” Obama wanted it known that by sending tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan his own administration was carrying on the work his predecessors had begun. Their policies were his policies.

The six decades to which the president referred in his artfully sanitized rendering of contemporary history were the years during which the American credo and the sacred trinity had ascended to a position of uncontested supremacy. Thus did the president who came into office vowing to change the way Washington works make known his intention to leave this crucially important element of his inheritance all but untouched. Like Johnson, the president whose bold agenda for domestic reform presaged his own, Obama too was choosing to conform - an excerpt from WASHINGTON RULES: America's Path To Permanent War by Andrew J. Bacevich.

Stacy Malkan on Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Last month Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced legislation that would toughen safety standards for beauty products and require regular government testing for hazardous ingredients. DemocracyNow! hosted a debate between Stacy Malkan, founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and author of Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, and John Bailey, chief scientist at the Personal Care Products Council and a spokesperson for the cosmetics industry. We feature some excerpts from Stacy Malkan's comments:

I actually was a lover of makeup when I was a teenager. I used lots of products. And I was using about twenty products a day. So that was shampoos, lotions, hair gels, all kinds of makeup. And for the book, I went back, and I actually looked up all of those products that I had been using as a teen and learned that I had been exposing myself to 230 synthetic chemicals every day, you know, before even getting on the school bus. And that’s pretty typical kind of exposures for a teenage girl.

So, in that mix were seventeen carcinogens, chemicals linked to cancer. There were dozens of hormone-disrupting chemicals, many parabens, which can act like estrogen in the body. Lots of these products, as we know from the product tests we’ve conducted at Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, are contaminated with carcinogens like formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane, that are not listed on the label. We found those chemicals in dozens of top-selling children’s bath products.

There are two huge loopholes in labeling laws. The companies don’t have to tell us what’s in fragrance, and that can be a dozen or more chemicals that are in any shampoo or conditioner with a fragrance, for example. They also don’t have to tell us about contaminants or byproducts, and those are some common ones that typically get into products from the chemical processes that are used. So, formaldehyde, 1,4-dioxane would be examples, nitrosamines. Those are carcinogens. We find lead in lipstick. We’ve done tests of kids’ face paint and found low levels of lead, as well as other heavy metals like nickel and chromium.

So, contaminants are very common. The industry knows about them. FDA knows about them. But there are no limits. And the only way to find out if your product contains them is to send it to a lab and spend a couple of hundred dollars to test it.

So the problem with cosmetics, as I was saying about my own daily exposures, it’s the mixture of low levels of hazardous chemicals that we’re exposed to continually, day after day after day. And the companies always say, and I’m sure John will say, it’s just low levels, it’s just a little bit, just traces of1,4-dioxane and formaldehyde. But, you know, these are chemicals derived from oil products with known toxicities, and they’re mixed together. So a typical baby in a tub could be exposed to formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane from the shampoo, the bubble bath, the body wash. The same chemicals are used in laundry detergent, dish soap. So the exposures are continual. And there’s no need for it. There’s absolutely no reason on earth for baby shampoos to contain carcinogens. The companies already know how to make products without those chemicals, and that’s what they should be doing. - Stacy Malkan from DemocracyNow!.

Joy Gordon on the Invisble War, the United States and Iraq Sanctions

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Joy Gordon, author of Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, discusses the comprehensive sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s that killed 500,000 children, the US led effort to literally starve Iraq by cutting off food importation, how the Gulf War and subsequent sanctions destroyed Iraq’s modern infrastructure and prevented rebuilding, contradictory US and UN policies on rewarding compliance of Security Council resolutions and how the US “reverse veto” power guaranteed the sanctions would never be lifted while Saddam Hussein remained in power. Listen to Scott Horton's interview of Joy Gordon on Anti-war Radio.

It is important to remember that the U.S. presence in Iraq, and the harm done by the Unted States to the Iraqi population, did not begin in 2003. Starting in August 1990, the United States was instrumental in imposing the cruelest sanctions in the history of international governance. While the United Nations (UN) Security Council was within its mandate to respond to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the sanctions regime it imposed, in conjunction with the massive bombing campaign of 1991, destroyed nearly all of Iraq's infrastructure, industial capacity, agriculture, telecommunications, and critical public services, particularly electricity and water treatment. For the next twelve years the sanctions would prevent Iraq from restoring any of these to the level Iraq had achived in the 1980s and would devestate the health, education, and basic well-being of almost the entire Iraqi population... - from Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University.

Tom Engelhardt on the American Way of War

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

"The reality of modern war, from the early twentieth century on, is that what we call collateral damage has increasingly become the central damage of the war. Collateral damage means damage to civilians. But as war has progressed into our time, you could really say that the soldiers, increasingly, on either side, are the collateral damage, and increasingly, the civilians are the central damage of any war." We have bombed about seven wedding parties, says Tom Engelhardt on DemocracyNow! "I find this shocking. But we are incredibly detached from the wars that we fight. And as long as we are thinking in terms of our own safety, we think very little about wedding parties, funerals, baby naming parties... If you’re going to fight from the air—and that is part of the American way of war—you are going to kill civilians, period. And you’re going to probably kill them in greater numbers than any other way. That’s just a fact of war." - Tom Engelhardt, from DemocracyNow!

Listen to Tom Engelhardt discuss his new book, The American Way of War, with Scott Horten on Antiwar Radio. On the trillion-plus-dollar war budget: “Of course the striking thing…is that [these wars] in essence never end. If there were ever a victory, it would kind of get in the way of the American style of warfare. Basically, our wars no longer result in victory; they just go on and on and on.”

Author Tom Engelhardt is also the creator and editor of the website TomDispatch - "essential reading...a one-stop-shop where you can find the most provocative thinkers writing the most eloquent and hard hitting articles about the most pressing issues of the day. Read, get mad, and take action" - Howard Zinn on Tom Dispatch.

Writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, 1938 - 2010

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, who has died at the age of 72, made Mexico understandable to Mexicans – or at least helped them laugh about it. He was admired for the intelligence and the intricate ironies of his prose, recognised for his principled support of leftwing causes, and famed for his crumpled appearance and adoration of cats. It is a measure of how popular he was that even the favoured targets of his acerbic wit rushed to include themselves among his admirers upon news of his death. Felipe Calderón, the country's rightwing president, announced: "We Mexicans will miss his critical, reflective and independent vision." - Jo Tuckman, from Carlos Monsiváis obituary

Arguably the sharpest observer of Mexico’s political, social and cultural life in the latter part of the 20th century, Monsivais became a cult figure in his homeland but was mostly unrecognized (and untranslated) abroad. With penetrating prose and humor, Monsivais deconstructed Mexico for Mexicans, often ridiculing the country’s farcical political system, but savoring its original and often quirky cultural heritage. “He never made concessions. He was an independent journalist, a journalist who gave a voice to many people,” said author Guadalupe Loaeza, a close friend. - from the Guadalaja Rareporter.

He is totally unreproducible — he was sui generis — Martin Gardner, 1914 - 2010

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Gardner packed his commentary and footnotes on the text with insights into the hidden messages, allusions, word-games, private jokes, puns, parodies, mathematical riddles and assorted literary tricks encrypted in the tales, demonstrating that many of Carroll's jokes were in fact mathematical games. "In the batty world of Carroll scholarship", declared one critic, "Martin Gardner is the undisputed king." - from the Telegraph obiturary.

"This is really a sad day… because he had such a profound influence on so many of us," Gardner's friend Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" who succeeded Gardner at Scientific American, wrote on the magazine's website. "He is totally unreproducible — he was sui generis — and what's so strange is that so few people today are really aware of what a giant he was in so many fields." - from the Los Angeles Times obituary by Thomas H. Maugh II.

Well, a classic Martin Gardner column would be an essay. He published a lot of puzzles over the years and everybody knows those puzzles; they've become famous. But mainly, he wrote essays. He would take some topic and describe it in a way that related it to other things, related it to the real world, related it to literature and to science and to magic. He was a magician himself, in fact, and in philosophy. And he made all of this come together and made the math seem, you know, more interesting, more important than any teacher ever would be able to...He was philosophically a Mysterian, which is not a word you'll find in many dictionaries. But he defined himself as a Mysterian because he struggled all his life with philosophical questions. His library was full of books heavily annotated in the margins. And he came to the conclusion that life is mysterious, the world is mysterious, and that we have to come to grips with that, and is influenced to the - how he lived his life, how he thought about religion, how he interacted with people. And so it's the sense that the world is a wonderful place and a mysterious place that pervaded everything he did. And so I think that's what you should remember him by. - Michele Norris from an NPR interview with Dana Richards on the legacy of Martin Gardner.

Joe Meadors: I seem to have all the bad luck in the world when it comes to the Israelis.

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

For second time, Joe Meadors was aboard a ship attacked by Israeli forces in international waters. He was aboard the Svendoni, one of the Free Gaza boats that was seized early Monday morning (not the Mavi Marmara where nine activists were killed); and he was a signalman on the USS Liberty, the US Navy ship that was attacked by Israeli forces in international waters 43 years ago in 1967. Thirty-four Americans were killed and more than 170 were wounded in that attack.

Capt. William McGonagle: It appeared, from the ferocity of the attack, that the intent of the attackers was to sink the ship. Maybe they hoped to have no survivors, so that they would not be held accountable for the attack after it occurred.

Stan White: We didn’t know who was attacking us. They didn’t know who was attacking us. I don’t know how Washington can say, "Don’t go, because they’re friends of ours." So that’s the thing that’s always bothered me right there.

Dean Rusk: I never, myself, accepted the Israeli purported explanation. Accidents don’t occur through repeated attacks by service vessels and by aircraft. It obviously was a decision taken pretty high up on the Israeli side, because it involved combined forces. The ship was flying an American flag. Even if it had been unidentified from an Israeli point of view, it was a reckless thing for them to do. Suppose it had been a Soviet ship. That could have produced very large problems indeed.

James Akins: George Ball, the brilliant and courageous Undersecretary of State at the time of the '67 war, wrote about the attack on the Liberty subsequently. He said, "The ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack" was that it "had far more effect on policy in Israel than in America. Israel's leaders concluded that nothing they might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal. If America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything."

- from the documentary Loss of Liberty.

Joe Meadors: They [Israel] claimed that they mistook us for an Egyptian tramp steamer. They claimed it was a mistake, and they apologized for the mistake. The US government accepted it. But then again, the US government has never conducted an investigation of the attack. War crimes were committed by both Israel and the United States during that attack, and we’ve been trying to get them investigated, but the US government just ignores our request.

Amy Goodman: Your thoughts about what happened last weekend in the early morning hours of Monday?

Joe Meadors: I was kind of apprehensive, given the history I’ve had with the Israelis. I seem to have all the bad luck in the world when it comes to the Israelis.

- from a DemocracyNow! interview with Joe Meadors.

Historian Bruce Cumings on the rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula

Sun, 30 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

This particular incident [North Korea’s March 26 sinking of South Korea's Cheonan naval ship where 46 sailor's lost their lives] is just ripped out of context, the context of a continuing war that has never ended. Just an armistice holds the peace. But in the case of this particular incident, which happened very close to the North Korean border, we’ve had incidents like this...going back more than ten years. In 1999, a North Korean ship went down with thirty sailors lost and maybe seventy wounded. That’s a larger total of casualties than this one. And last November, a North Korean ship went down in flames. We don’t know how many people died in that. This is a no man’s land, or waters, off the west coast of Korea that both North and South claim. And the Cheonan ship was sailing in those waters when it was hit by a torpedo...I’m sure it’s a 95 percent case that the US and South Korea are right that North Korea fired this torpedo. Let’s say they did. The fact is, our government has not pointed out the background that I just pointed out, the sinking last November, the clashes in 1999 and 2002. This is a no man’s land, where the US and South Korea demarcated a so-called Northern limit line unilaterally. The North has never accepted it. The North says that this area is under the joint jurisdiction of the North and South Korean militaries. So you have an incident waiting to happen...Regardless of whether the North Koreans fired it or not, this incident is being blown way out of proportion. Secretary of State Clinton referred to it a couple days ago as unprovoked aggression, which of course is what we accused the North of when the Korean War started sixty years ago. I noticed in your clip she’s now simply calling it a provocation. I do think there’s probably an attempt on the part of the Obama administration to draw down the tension over this. But the fact is, you have a structure in Korea that’s ongoing since the Korean War, where these incidents can happen and you can have a ratcheted-up escalation that might result in a second Korean War. So it’s imperative to try to end this war and find a way to have a dialogue with the North, so that the Peninsula can be denuclearized and these incidents don’t come along every once in awhile and raise such a threat to peace.

- Bruce Cumings, from an interview on DemocracyNow!.

How the hell did it happen? - Daniel Okrent on how Prohibition democratized drinking and made the income tax possible

Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

In 1920 could anyone have believed that the Eighteenth Amendment, ostensibly addressing the single subject of intoxicating beverages, would set off an avalanche of change in areas as diverse as international trade, speedboat design, tourism practices, soft-drink marketing, and the English language itself? Or that it would provoke the establishment of the first nationwide criminal syndicate, the idea of home dinner parties, the deep engagement of women in political issues other than suffrage, and the creation of Las Vegas? As interpreted by the Supreme Court and as understood by Congress, Prohibition would also lead indirectly to the eventual guarantee of the American woman's right to abortion and simultaneously dash that same woman's hope for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Prohibition changed the way we live, and it fundamentally redefined the role of the federal government. How the hell did it happen?

- from Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent

On how Prohibition democratized drinking

The saloon was a male-only place. That was always the case...Prohibition changes everything. The saloons become speakeasies, and because it is an outlaw operation, it begins to behave in outlaw ways. Women start to come because it's an exciting thing to do. They're accommodated. That means they have to put in tables, because you can't just have the women standing at the bar, so table service begins. Music shows up for the first time. If you have men and women drinking together, you have to have music. Jazz, the outlaw music, is rising at that very same time. There were no bars in the pre-Prohibition era that had live music. It just didn't happen.

On how Prohibition made the income tax posible:

Going back as far as the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s and then the beer tax that was brought in during the Civil War to finance the Civil War, the federal government had been dependent upon the excise tax on alcohol to operate. In some years, domestic revenue, as much as 50 percent of it came from excise taxes. So the Prohibitionists realized that they couldn't get rid of liquor so long as the federal government was dependent upon liquor to get its revenue and to operate. So they supported the income tax movement, and in exchange, many of the populists who were behind the income tax movement supported Prohibition. In 1913, the 16th Amendment is passed. The income tax comes in. The federal government has another means of supporting itself. And at that point, the Prohibitionists who had been operating state by state by state decided we can now have an amendment to the federal Constitution because the government is no longer dependent. There's another source of revenue.

- two excerpts from Prohibition Life: Politics, Loopholes And Bathtub Gin, a Terry Gross, Fresh Air interview with Daniel Okrent.

"We have more than an oil slick out of control, we also have these big corporations out of control." - Marine toxicologist Rikki Ott on the BP and Exxon Valdez oil spills.

Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

As a former commercial salmon "fisherma'am in Alaska," marine toxicologist Riki Ott experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Exxon did everything it could to reduce its liability. Exxon never paid for long-term damages. It only paid for short-term damages. So this is really something to watch out for. It’s one thing to say we’re going to hold- the President- listening to him say, we’re going to hold BP accountable to our laws. Our laws are pretty darn weak. For starters, they’re will only going to protect directly damaged parties. So fisherman, I’m sorry, but in our community, as I’m sure down in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, the fisherman buy groceries, good restaurants, put children in school, by clothes. If the fishermen don’t have money, where- it damages all the shoreside industry as well. So, there’s collateral damage to businesses that won’t necessarily be compensated under the law. And unfortunately, the Exxon Valdez case set president in the Supreme Court that these big companies don’t have to pay much on the issue of punitive damage. It got knocked way down. So it’s more like a business expense. These big companies will go on making business, drilling for oil, and fishermen are going to go bankrupt. That’s certainly what we saw in Cordova.

Exxon got away with not reporting cleanup workers’ health problems. There over 6,722 workers reported upper respiratory illnesses, I discovered in toxic tort lawsuits. And there is an exemption to the Occupational Safety and Health Act that says these industries don’t have to report colds and flu. So instantly, all this coughing and these cold and flu-like symptoms become colds and flu instead of probably what it really is which is a chemical-induced illnesses. This is work related. So we really need to close that loophole in OSHA.

- two excerpts from a DemocracyNow! interview with Rikki Ott.

"This is too important. We cannot leave this to governments": Cormac Cullinan on the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan on the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, one of the key initiatives to come out of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia:

What the declaration is, essentially, is—it’s intended to complement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of—on the Human Rights. So the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights only recognizes that human beings have got inherent rights. In other words, it says just because you exist as a human being, you have these rights, regardless of whether your country or government tries to take them away from you.

What we’re saying is that everything has inherent rights. By virtue of the fact that the earth exists and all other creatures and mountains and rivers exist, they must also have inherent rights. At least the right to exist, to play their part in the evolutionary processes of Mother Earth. So the problem is, because we’ve only recognized human rights, we’ve created an imbalance. So human rights trump everything else, because they don’t have rights. And we’re trying to redress that balance by recognizing the rights which surround human rights…Democracy used to be something that happened between diplomats behind closed doors, etc. Now we are saying—you’re seeing people saying, “This is too important. We cannot leave this to governments. We have to take responsibility for addressing these issues.” So this is about people saying, “We’d like the UN to take this up, but even if it doesn’t, we are—this is what we believe, and we’re going to work on these issues right now.”… [The Universal Declaration of Human Rights] essentially came out the horrors of the Second World War and people feeling that something had to be done, this can’t go on anymore. And we’re in a similar position in history. We are sitting here saying climate change is threatening humanity and many species, etc. And what ‘s happening through these very formal negotiating processes between governments aren’t fast enough and don’t go far enough and don’t address the root causes. And so, this is an initiative which comes out of a similar period of crisis to say we’ve go to cut to the chase: what is wrong is our relationship with Mother Earth, and we must heal that. So a lot of this declaration is about human responsibilities to Mother Earth, as well as the rights of Mother Earth.

- South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan from an interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! See World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change for the entire week of DemocracyNow! coverage of the conference.

Anarchist, poet, publisher and chess-player, John Rety, 1930 - 2010

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

I asked him when he first became an anarchist? ‘During the war in Budapest’ he said after many minutes of expressive thought ‘I think I was part of the resistence( aged 9!). I pressed him further ‘ Didn’t you know if you were part of the resistence?’ ‘Well’ he said ‘ I was running around delivering packages to people hiding in ruined buildings so i think i must have been’. Our movement has suffered a sad loss – a very fine, honest, funny, steadfast human being has died. JOHN RETY. - from John Rety has died by Ian Bone.

Open-mindedness and catholic taste do not always go with intense political commitment, but in John’s case they did. His short introduction to Well Versed is one of the wisest short statements you could find about the place of poetry in our time: “A choice of poems cannot be divorced from one’s view of life ... There is real love, there is real anger, there is biting satire, and there is also celebration when it is called for ... [These] poems hint at a new age when the ethics which exist behind closed doors might suddenly, as by quantum leap, take over the public domain.” - from Tribute to a well-versed soul by Harry Eyres.

Anarchist, poet, Hearing Eye publisher and chess-player, John Rety died on February 3 aged 80.

"Literature was another victim of the war": Miguel Delibes, 1920 - 2010

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

"I write what I hear," Miguel Delibes, the Spanish novelist, once said. After winning the country's foremost literary prize when he was just 27, for more than half a century Delibes's hauntingly stark, gritty prose style captured the essence of Spain's rural and provincial life, and earned the writer massive popular and critical acclaim.

The author of 20 novels and over double that number of non-fiction works, Delibes's writing career effectively began with his wholly unexpected victory in the Nadal Prize in 1948 for his first novel, La sombra del ciprés es alargada. At the time a near-penniless journalist in his hometown of Valladolid, Delibes only discovered he had won as he was reading off the evening's dispatches on his newspaper's teleprinter.

"The prize was a unique opportunity; [normally] you couldn't publish anything," Delibes said later. "In the years after the Civil War, Spain had been struck dumb. All the writers had either been killed, exiled or had fallen silent. Literature was another victim of the war."

Slowly but surely, Delibes's unmistakeably concise, bleak writing helped rebuild Spain's literary legacy, both in the novels that appeared with unremitting regularity every two years, and in his five-year editorship of one of Spain's leading provincial newspapers El Norte de Castilla. "Journalism showed me how to put the maximum amount of information into the minimum number of words," Delibes said. As a liberal in Franco's dictatorship, journalism also showed him how to manipulate an apparently simple text so it would get past the censors with minimum interference... - from the obituary of Miguel Delibes by Alasdair Fotheringham published in the Independent.

The beautiful brain of Sherman Alexie: War Dances wins 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Sherman Alexie has won the 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction for his book of short stories, essays and poems, War Dances. He is the first Native American author to win the prestigious prize.

Are Indians pressured by the marketplace to write certain kinds of stories?

It's the corn-pollen, four directions, eagle-feathers school of Native literature. People are more interested in our spirituality than anything else. Certainly, I've never received that kind of pressure because I never wrote that kind of stuff, but there are a lot of people out there selling their spirituality.

What expectations do you encounter from readers?

It's so funny -- because I'm a public Indian figure, people assume I have all these magical Indian powers, like I'm some sort of healer or shaman. That also extends to just being a writer in general -- I think people assume that just because somebody's good with metaphors, he's a better human being. It's not true. I'm just better with metaphors than 99 percent of the population, and that doesn't make me magical, it just makes me fairly smart.

In your experience, do white Americans have a different sense of history -- both of events, and the significance of those events in contemporary culture -- than American Indians?

White Americans have a short memory. This country really hasn't entered puberty yet -- white Americans' political thoughts are really young, and the culture is really young. The one general statement you can make about America is it's young, and wildly immature, and incredibly talented. Like some twelve-year-old kid who really pisses you off, because he's really good at everything and he knows it. What can be done to bring the U.S. from this immature point to maturity?

I don't know. I'm one of those people who thinks that the world is getting better and better. I wouldn't want to be an Indian a hundred years ago -- somebody would be shooting at me. I wouldn't want to be a woman forty years ago, and I wouldn't want to be a black person twenty-five years ago. I think the world is getting better, and it's getting better because of liberal social policies. I don't think there has ever been a conservative social policy that helped anybody, except those who enacted it. I don't believe in any -ism particularly, I believe in fighting conservatism. Conservatives didn't want women to vote, didn't want Indians to become citizens.

- an excerpt from an Atlantic Unbound interview with Jessica Chapel.

WORLD PHONE CONVERSATION, 3 A.M.

After I got home with yogurt and turkey dogs and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and my brother-in-law left, I watched George Romero’s “Diary of the Dead,” and laughed at myself for choosing a movie that featured dozens of zombies getting shot in the head. When the movie was over, I called my wife, nine hours ahead in Italy. “I should come home,” she said. “No, I’m O.K.,” I said. “Come on, you’re in Rome. What are you seeing today?” “The Vatican.” “You can’t leave now. You have to go and steal something. It will be revenge for every Indian. Or maybe you can plant an eagle feather and claim that you just discovered Italy.” “I’m worried.” “Yeah, Catholicism has always worried me.” “Stop being funny. I should see if I can get Mom and me on a flight tonight.” “No, no, listen, your mom is old. This might be her last adventure. It might be your last adventure with her. Stay there. Say hi to the Pope for me. Tell him I like his shoes.” That night, my sons climbed into bed with me. We all slept curled around one another like sled dogs in a snowstorm. I woke, hour by hour, and touched my head and neck to see if they had changed shape—to feel if antennae were growing. Some insects hear with their antennae. Maybe that was what was happening to me.

EXIT INTERVIEW FOR MY FATHER

· Did you, when drunk, ever get behind the tattered wheel of a ’76 Ford three-speed van and somehow drive your family a thousand miles on an empty tank of gas? · Is it true that the only literary term that has any real meaning in the Native American world is “road movie”? · How many times, during any of your road trips, did your children ask you, “Are we there yet?” · In twenty-five words or less, please define “there.” · Sir, in your thirty-nine years as a parent you broke your children’s hearts, collectively and individually, six hundred and twelve times, and you did this without ever striking any human being in anger. Does this absence of physical violence make you a better man than you might otherwise have been? · Without using the words “man” or “good,” can you please define what it means to be a good man? · Do you think you will see angels before you die? Do you think angels will come to escort you to Heaven? As the angels are carrying you to Heaven, how many times will you ask, “Are we there yet?”

REUNION

After she returned from Italy, my wife climbed into bed with me. I felt as if I hadn’t slept comfortably in years. I said, “There was a rumor that I’d grown a tumor, but I killed it with humor.” “How long have you been waiting to tell me that one?” she asked. “Oh, probably since the first time some doctor put his fingers in my brain.” We made love. We fell asleep. But, agitated by the steroids, I woke at 2, 3, 4, and 5 A.M. The bed was killing my back, so I lay flat on the floor. I wasn’t going to die anytime soon, at least not because of my little friend Tumor, but that didn’t make me feel any more comfortable or comforted. I felt distant from the world—from my wife and my sons, from my mother and my siblings, from all my friends. I felt closest to those who’d always had fingers in their brains. I didn’t feel any closer to the world six months later, when another MRI revealed that my meningioma had not grown in size or changed its shape. “You’re looking good,” my doctor said. “How’s your hearing?” “I think I’ve got about ninety per cent of it back.” “Well, then, the steroids worked. Good.” And I didn’t feel any more intimate with the world nine months after that, when one more MRI made my doctor hypothesize that my meningioma might only be more scar tissue from the hydrocephalus. “Frankly,” he said, “your brain is beautiful.” “Thank you,” I said, though it was the oddest compliment I’d ever received. I wanted to call my father and tell him that a white man thought my brain was beautiful. But I couldn’t tell him anything. He was dead. I told my wife and my sons that I was O.K. I told my mother and my siblings. I told my friends. But none of them laughed as hard about my beautiful brain as I knew my father—the drunk bastard—would have.

- three snippets from War Dances by Sherman Alexie.

It's terrible to be possessed by brittle things: Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version wins the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

"The Russian Version obliterates the stereotype of what Great Russian Poetry should sound like," wrote Idra Novey, Chair of the Best Translated Book Poetry Panel. "Fanailova has the candor and compassion of Akhmatova and a gift for striking metaphor that might bring Mandelstam to mind. She is also ruthlessly quick to fire 'from the hip,' as she says in the title poem, and her aim is impeccable."

The Best Translated Book Award is administered by the University of Rochester's Three Percent, an organization that promotes international literature. Only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation according to the Three Percent website. That figure includes all books in translation, for works of literary fiction and poetry, the number is closer to 0.7%.

It’s terrible to be possessed by brittle things.
How can you learn here who taught people to draw
Stars between eyebrows, butterflies over the gristle
Of throats, weeping eye between breasts.
And anyway, who taught them to live with strange
Chasms, with their nocturnal beasts,
With this yawning, this singing, this delirium –
unreachable
Even with open palms outstretched: take them
If you are not afraid of such embraces.
If the faces floating up from an amalgam
Of sploches, from the molding, black, silvery depths
Don’t frighten you.

- from The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova

Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Barbara Bray, who has died aged 85, was one of the most significant links between British and French literature in the 20th century. She was the principal translator and an early champion of Marguerite Duras, who was her close friend, and also translated the work of Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh and Alain Robbe-Grillet. As a young and influential script editor at the BBC in the 1950s, she fostered the work of many writers including Harold Pinter and, perhaps most importantly, Samuel Beckett, who became her personal and intellectual partner for more than 30 years. - from the obituary for Barbara Bray published in theGuardian by Andrew Todd.

Barbara Bray, apart from introducing Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett, was also the BBC radio script editor who found and commissioned both men when they began their careers in radio drama, Beckett with All That Fall in January 1957 and Pinter with A Slight Ache in 1959. Barbara Bray recalls: "the (BBC) Third Programme asked Sam to write them a radio play and though he never worked to commissions he said he would if he could. All That Fall aroused such interest among the general public and among writers that we thought it would be a good idea to introduce the public to Beckett's prose works. While we waited for him to write Embers we selected things from his works and there happened to be an invasion of Irish actors in the London theatre then. So we got people like Pat Magee and Jack McGowran to read bits from the so-called trilogy." What then was the original reaction of the general public to the works of these two men both destined to become Nobel Prize winners? Barbara Bray explains: "Pinter's first radio plays were met with remarks concerning the ravings of a lunatic, and similar things were said concerning Samuel Beckett readings, but after the second or third readings people began to get intrigued and began to get an ear for it as you do with music. New music is at first strange to you, then you listen to it a few times and you begin to get the hang of it. We did all Harold's radio plays on the Third Programme. Harold would write many of his plays first for radio, then they would become television plays and then stage plays. The tide was turning when authors realized that if they were going to distinguish themselves, it was going to be as much with their words as with their action." Barbara Bray was one of the first producers to realize that such a change was taking place as, in the wake of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger (1956), the nature of the relationship between author and public was dramatically being transformed. She remembers: "the focus of drama switched back to the classical Shakespeare period when the word was more important than the action or at least as important as the action and where the stress was largely on the function of words in drama." - from When Harry Met Sam by Declan McCavana.

Barbara Bray, editor and translator and four time winner of the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation, was born November 24, 1924 and died February 25, 2010.