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Category: Feature Articles

  • Ruth First and the FBI’s Historical Role of Enforcing Inequality

    Ruth First playing herself in Jack Gold’s film on her imprisonment with husband Joe Slovo during the treason trial.

    A few years ago I filed Freedom of Information Act requests for FBI, CIA, and US State Department files held on the murdered anti-apartheid activist, Ruth First. My interest in Ruth First was initially raised because so much the research she did for her activist writings was based on anthropological forms of participant observations. She researched her books and articles by living amongst the people she wrote about, and her analysis brought the sort of bottom-up perspectives gifted ethnographers strive to produce. Some of her approach appears to have come from her personality, but some of it also came from her academic training at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1940s, which included anthropology courses; and she later wrote about the formative impact on her life of doing field research for her books and articles documenting the brutalities of her Apartheid.

    Ruth First was born in Johannesburg in 1925, to immigrants Tilly and Julius First, whose socialist political orientation shaped her early critique of apartheid. As a university student, Ruth First’s exposure to sociological critiques of power relations and anthropological methods of bottom-up inquiry shaped elements of her later work. She joined the Communist Party and helped form an activist group known as the Federation of Progressive Students, which challenged the basic assumptions of apartheid. She worked as a social worker, labor union organizer, taught in black schools, and learned the craft of writing reporting for various newspapers including the Communist Party’s Johannesburg paper The Guardian. Though The Guardian was banned in 1951, she created new journalistic outlets to publish important series of articles showing South Africans and the world the realities of apartheid. Her investigative journalism often involved simple, but dangerous, through stints of fieldwork observation she spent significant stretches time in rural settings, documenting the daily degradations of life in South Africa. She also chronicled problems facing the African National Congress (ANC).

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  • Will’s Smith’s Gift to Racists

    Will Smith’s assault on comedian Chris Rock during the live televised Academy Awards ceremony watched by millions is a godsend for racists and a slap in the face of racial equality and progress. As America struggles with its ongoing racial reckoning, Smith has given bigots ammunition for and confirmation of their stereotypes of Blacks.

    Smith’s caricature-confirming slap heard ’round the world comes at a time when the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences has been taking steps to address the #OscarsSoWhite criticism, that Hollywood’s preeminent industry organization and the annual awards it bestows were biased. In terms of membership (long dominated by older male whites), the Academy, which was founded back in 1927, has become more inclusive and diverse and its splendid new movie museum in Los Angeles focuses on issues of ethnic and gender representation.

    In terms of the actual Academy Awards, more minorities have been winning those coveted golden statuettes, including: Danial Kaluuya, who praised “Chairman Fred,” the Black Panther leader he portrayed in 2020’s Judas and the Black Messiah, while presenting an award on the March 27, 2022 telecast; Mexican Alfonso Cuaron as Best Director for 2018’s Roma; the 2019 Korean feature Parasite, which won four Oscars, including Bong Joon Ho for Best Director and Best Motion Picture; Korean Youn Yuh-jung for Best Supporting Actress in 2020’s Minari; etc.

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  • Re-Reading Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality in an Age of Authoritarianism

    Image by Jørgen Håland.

    We live in an era where authoritarians are on the march in Hungary, Russia, Brazil, India, Turkey, the United States, and a disturbingly long list of other countries. Russia’s brutal ongoing invasion of Ukraine demonstrates that many authoritarians won’t stop at their own borders. The authoritarian wave of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s offers us an obvious parallel. In August 2019, Verso released a new edition of The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a study conducted after World War II by social psychologists including the noted Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno. The observations about authoritarian psychology that it contains have notable resonances with the present and are worth a second look. Before we get started, it’s important not to make the common mistake of conflating electoral support for authoritarians with authoritarianism as a psychological phenomenon. Not everyone who voted for Trump necessarily has an authoritarian personality; anyone who’s a diehard Trumpist certainly is.

    That being said, what commonalities did people with authoritarian personality profiles exhibit in Adorno’s study? They didn’t believe that they personally benefited from a progressive administration like FDR’s. They disliked progressive governments for being too weak – in the sense of being friendly towards socially disadvantaged groups and in foreign affairs – even as they simultaneously expressed fear of a strong, overbearing government: in the words of Adorno and his coauthors, “resentment of government interference is fused with the ‘no pity for the poor’ complex.”

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  • The Empyreal Horn of Wadada Leo Smith

    Image by Alberto Bigoni.

    There’s an ancient church in Pohja, Finland named after Mary, the mother of Jesus. Built in the fifteenth century. In 2019 it hosted and, in its obvious aural perfection, became an essential part of a recording by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith released in 2021. Titled completely and simply Trumpet, the music on these discs is as sublime as a church choir imagines the heavenly choirs of angels. Smith’s horn is as clarion as Gabriel’s was said to be and as melodic as the birds singing outside your morning window. The tones and timbre in these solo pieces are as clear as the source of a mountain spring and as bewitching as a Nordic winter in the forests of the Völva; the witches of the Norsemen and women.

    Wadada Leo Smith is a jazz legend; an elder in the halls of this music that defines improvisation, defies form while creating new ones, and demands the listener respond to its calls for contemplation and response. Born in the small Mississippi town of Leland in December 1941, he formed the Creative Construction Company with Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins in 1967. Prior to that first foray into the new milieu known as free jazz, Smith had worked in R&B and the blues. When considering his birthplace, it’s interesting to note that not only does US Highway 61 go through the town, but the bluesmen James “Son” Thomas and Johnny Winter both spent parts of their lives there. Indeed, Thomas is buried there after spending much of his later life living near the railroad tracks in town.

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  • The Price America Paid for Madeleine Albright

    Albright speaking at a February 1999 press conference, where she threatened the Serbs by announcing that the Clinton administration is adding 51 US warplanes to its attack force in Europe.

    By the end of 1995 alone, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization said that after careful investigation it had determined that as many as 576,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions. The mortality rates were soaring with terrifying speed. The infant mortality rate had gone from 47 percent per 1000 in 1989 to 108 per 1000 in 1996. For kids under five the increase in the rate was even worse, from 56 per 1000 in 1989 to 131 per 1000 in 1996. By 1996 the death count was running at 5,000 children a month.

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  • One More Reason to Oppose Nuclear Technology

    Image by Michal Lis.

    Recently I wrote about the faulty logic of the pro-nuke Left; those among us that support nuclear power as an answer to climate change. But, as I argued, supporting atomic technology will end up doing more harm than good. Then came Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine which has also demonstrated that the threat of nuclear war is not solely dependent on the detonation of atomic weapons, providing one more reason nuclear power should be opposed and not embraced.

    As Russia’s invasion so clearly demonstrated, the threat of nuclear war is not solely dependent on the detonation of atomic weapons. Nuclear power plants, when located in contested regions or on active battlefields, also pose a grave risk. If hit by artillery or missile fire, an unforeseen tragedy could quickly unfold. One such frightful scenario nearly occurred as Russian forces shelled the Zaporizhzhia power plant in the southern Ukrainian city of Enerhodar in late February 2022. As blasts occurred around the facility, a fire erupted in a nearby building and was later extinguished. Reports claimed no radioactivity was released during the blaze, but given the nature of the conflict, no independent investigation was conducted to ensure its safety.

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  • Marcus Rediker on History from Below, Anti-Slavery Resistance, and the Fearless Benjamin Lay

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  • Shoot Out the Lights

    I know Kyiv from the writings of Mikhail Bulgakov. Well, I don’t know it. I have an image of it, what it looks like, what it smells like, what it the air feels like, as clear in my mind as the image of Paris imprinted from Breathless and The 400 Blows. Clear and outdated. I […]

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  • #MeToo, #NiUnaMenos, and Human Rights

    Image by Mélodie Descoubes.

    Much of the discussion about #MeToo presents it as more or less isolated situations where powerful men commit sexual violence against less powerful women. But it’s also a prism through which to view a good part of human existence, at least in terms of Marc Bloch’s metaphor: “Just as the progress of a disease shows a doctor the secret life of the body, the progress of a great calamity yields valuable information about the nature of a society”. The word “disease” is appropriate because #MeToo reveals and partly represents a sick post-capitalist world in which humans commit violence not only against other species but also against their own and are well on the way to destroying their habitat, the whole planet. Just when the revolutionary character of universal human rights needs to be reclaimed more vehemently than ever before, western feminism, like most left-wing movements, is shying away from it: it’s too inclusive. In short, a bunch of privileged feminists doesn’t give a rat’s arse about others who are fighting for their lives, around the world and especially in Latin America where the inclusive name of the struggle #NiUnaMenos shows how distant it is from the individualistic #MeToo.

    While #MeToo protests about narrow issues with media, forensic, and legal backing #NiUnaMenos is a movement of women who aren’t well off and who can’t pay lawyers, responding to extreme, generalised violence with more official obstructiveness than support. #NiUnaMenos has little echo outside Latin America. This isn’t so much a problem of language as indifference towards “other” women. And, no doubt, it’s far too radical for most #MeToo feminists for whom the aim’s a bigger slice of the system’s pie. For #NiUnaMenos, the pie is unfit for human consumption.

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  • Another Global Warming Worry

    When we think of the coming disasters of global warming, rising sea levels, disruptions to agriculture and disappearing species come readily to mind. We don’t necessarily think of the livability of the Earth’s surface. But if global warming continues to worsen — and every indication is that will be so — there will be places on Earth that could become uninhabitable.

    Uninhabitable in the literal meaning of human beings not being able to survive there.

    Such places could come into existence during this century, and perhaps sooner than even climate scientists currently fear, given that lethal combinations of heat and humidity have started to occur for brief periods of time. We are not talking about thinly populated or uninhabited desert locations. We are talking here of cities where tens and hundreds of thousands of people currently live.

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  • Mormon Mythistries–Richard Hansen in El Mirador

    Richard Hansen in an interview with Vice News, 2020.

    Richard Hansen is a white, Mormon archeologist and capitalist from the United States. He has been working for over 40 years in Petén, Guatemala in the Maya Biosphere Reserve among the ancient Maya city of El Mirador. Coupled with his archeology, Hansen has been working toward building a privately-owned ecotourist wilderness resort in the forests of El Mirador. Most of the Maya Biosphere Reserve is occupied by concessions communities that manage these forests through sustainable logging. These communities are made up of Indigenous Maya and local Ladino communities, some of which have been stewarding these forests for generations despite decades of anti-leftist, genocidal, “scorched earth” campaigns enacted against them by their own government (funded-and-backed by the U.S. and Israel, of course). Hansen’s project would ban logging, turning Maya and local communities from collective stewards of a forest to employees of a park. It would also bring “spiritual tourism” from Book of Mormon-themed companies like Anderson Tours, LDS Tours Cancun, Helaman Tours, Alma’s LDS Tours, and LehiTours (Helaman, Alma, & Lehi are Book of Mormon names).

    “Any use of this particular area of forest other than ecotourism would be, to me, the equivalent of using the Grand Canyon for a garbage dump.” Hansen told Smithsonian Magazine while they flew over the Reserve. Just as many U.S. National Parks were created through settler enacted massacres & forced displacements of Indigenous Peoples of this land, Hansen’s project would also take a militarized anti-Indigenous approach to establish this private park in Maya land.

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  • A Failure of Vision

    Image by Hennie Stander.

    The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) currently boasts being the largest socialist organization in the United States with over 92,000 members. According to its website, the DSA focuses on four key issues: healthcare, labor unions, environmentalism, and electoral strategy. However, that last goal has arguably been the main focal point since DSA supported the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders. That electoral politics have been the center of attention for DSA is no accident: it is the core vision of its founder, Michael Harrington. For Harrington, the only way socialists could make waves in American politics would be to work within the established party system. If socialists could move members of the Democratic Party to the left, then the party would make meaningful reforms that would help working and oppressed people. Unfortunately, this strategy of realignment has continually failed to push the party leftward. In his book, A Failure of Vision, Doug Greene traces the genealogy of Harrington’s thought and its fundamental impact on the DSA today.

    Harrington is largely remembered for his 1962 book on poverty in the United States, The Other America. Despite being known as “the man who discovered poverty,” Harrington grew up in an upper-middle-class Irish American family and was sheltered from directly experiencing the worst effects of the Great Depression. Influenced by his mother’s volunteer work with the Catholic Church, Harrington pursued a Jesuit education at the College of the Holy Cross. His father hoped he would become a lawyer like him, so after graduating, he enrolled in Yale Law School. Once there, his Catholic conservatism would be challenged by his left-liberal and socialist professors and colleagues. But Harrington’s politics remained influenced by the anticommunism of his day. It would take Harrington moving to Chicago to begin to see the exploitative effects of capitalism firsthand. Choosing not to finish his law degree, he enrolled at the University of Chicago to study writing instead. After graduating in 1949 with his master’s degree in literature, Harrington took a job as a social worker. During his first assignment in a sharecropper district, he recalled the horrible smells of backed-up toilets, rotting food, and decaying buildings, compelling him to spend the rest of his life “trying to obliterate that kind of house and to work with the people who lived there.”

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  • The Benedict Arnold of LSD

    I’ve been wading through more than 500 pages of FBI transcripts and memoranda, showing that Timothy Leary was volunteering to snitch, then snitching to the feds about his knowledge of the Weather Underground and almost anyone else Leary thought the feds might be interested in, including his former wife Rosemary, his attorneys and the wife […]

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  • The Kremlin Goes Neocon

    Image by Ignat Kushanrev.

    A dashcam in Belgorod, on the Russian side of the Ukraine-Russia border purportedly shows a large, new column of Russian forces ready to enter Ukraine. Another escalation is taking shape.

    Chaotic scenes at the Dnipro train station as young families and elderly women alike jump off the platform and cross the tracks by foot, desperate to escape the approaching onslaught. Another city emptied of its people.

    A blinding flash of fiery lightning illuminates the night sky outside Kyiv, the shockwave following a few seconds later like wake lines from a ravenous shark. Another pound of Ukrainian flesh.

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  • The New Deal, Writers and Rediscovering America

    Too many historians have a tendency to write in unadorned, dry prose which, no matter how impressive their research, can have a soporific effect. Such writing can make reading a book cover to cover a laborious chore, even if, as Noam Chomsky says of the equally dull New York Times, it contains many facts. Scott Borchert’s recently published Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America is definitely not such a book. Borchert, a former assistant editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, writes with passion and pizazz, while never allowing his enthusiasm for 1930s ink-stained wretches and the Federal Writers’ Project publications they produced to overwhelm his subject matter. His impeccable research makes this essential entry into the history of the 1930s a fascinating read, with buried or forgotten facts jumping off every page.

    The Federal Writers’ Project was a division of the first Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration’s New Deal-era Works Project Administration. The WPA was put in place to provide useful paid work for millions of destitute people. The FWP, launched in 1935, operated alongside WPA projects for theater, visual art, and music. It provided a lifeline for thousands of professional and amateur writers (typically employing in the neighborhood of 5,000 people) and produced hefty guides for the then forty-eight states, in addition to the District of Columbia, the Alaska Territory, and Puerto Rico. Guidebooks were also produced on cities and towns, various highways, and locales such as Death Valley.

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  • There’s No Money? Then How Can There be $10 Trillion for Financiers in Two Years?

    Image by Sharon McCutcheon.

    Noting that there is always money to be thrown at the finance industry but little for social needs is by now about as startling as noting the Sun rose in the east this morning. But what is eye-opening is the truly gargantuan amounts of money handed out to benefit the wealthy.

    We’re not talking billions here. We are talking trillions.

    For example, the amount of money created by the central banks of five of the world’s biggest economies for the purpose of artificially propping up financial markets since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic totals US$9.94 trillion (or, if you prefer, €8.76 trillion). And that total represents only one program of the many used by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and Bank of Canada.

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  • Ku Klux Climate: Coal, Petro-Palingenesis, and the Historical Materialism of Fossil Fascism

    Image by Zbynek Burival.

    We live in a dangerous time when a far-right more powerful than at any time since 1945 is doing all it can to accelerate the capitalist project to turn our planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber. The last United States president, the “instinctive fascist” Donald Trump, believed that anthropogenic (really capitalogenic) global warming was a hoax and did everything he could to end limits on fossil fuel production. Brazil’s current president, the demented pandemo-fascist Jar Bosonaro, has sadistically opened up the Amazon – the lungs of the planet – to enrich agro-industrial profiteers. Climate-denialist far-right parties have marched into key energy and climate-related offices in Europe, from Sweden and Norway to Spain, Poland, and Hungary. As the world tips into climate catastrophe, anti-immigrant parties who promote the unchecked extraction and burning of fossil fuels are surging in the name of white supremacy and national regeneration. Even while climate crisis begins to collapse civilization before our very eyes, right-wing forces have surfaced absurdly and dangerously claiming to possess the purported real solutions to the supposed real problems: closing European and US borders to “save the nation(s)” from nonwhite immigrants and clearing out Indigenous tribes from rural Brazil.

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  • The Man Who Came Undone

    Last week I got a call asking me to speak at a rally in Portland to protest the police shooting of Amir Locke, the 22-year-old black man shot on a couch by Minneapolis Police during a no-knock raid. Minneapolis and Portland are similar cities: outwardly progressive, but violently policed. I’d written a story about the […]

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  • Greed is Us: Titans, The Rise of Wall Street

    As its title indicates, Titans, The Rise of Wall Street is a docuseries that focuses on the financial sector headquartered at Lower Manhattan and the financiers who built this leviathan of wealth, speculation, equity, inequity, iniquity, bubbles, booms, busts, bull markets and more. In Season 1, the first four previously released episodes spanned the early years of Wall Street, starting circa 1857 when J.P. Morgan arrived in New York from London, proceeding through the Gilded Age and World War I. Using a semblance of the “great man theory of history” attributed to 19th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, these chapters zoom in on magnates such as J.P. Morgan and his father Junius, Jay Cooke, Henry Goldman and Samuel Sachs and chronicle how these titular “titans” turned Wall Street into the Mecca of American capitalism.

    The four ensuing chapters for Season 2 of Titans, released starting Feb. 17 on Curiosity Stream, cover the Roaring Twenties, the infamous Oct. 29, 1929 crash on Black Tuesday, the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to reform and restrain the juggernaut of the financial system and then jump forward to The Go-Go 80s in Episode 7, depicting the onslaught of deregulated capitalism during the Reagan era.

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  • Green Energy’s Threat to the Desert West

    There is a lot of hot air blowing around the West these days, blustery claims that geothermal, wind, massive solar installations, nuclear power, along with a smattering of hydroelectric dams, will help the world achieve a much-needed reduction in climate-altering emissions. Certainly, there is money to be made off of this massive energy transition, and More

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  • “Put the Blood Back In”: Martín Espada on Poetry, Book Banning, and Radical Politics

    Image by Freddy Kearney.

    “If the language of power – medicalese, legalese, bureaucratese, corporatese – drains the blood from words,” poet, essayist, and translator, Martín Espada, said when I interviewed him, “Poets can put the blood back in the words.” Our conversation took place merely weeks after Espada won the National Book Award for his latest collection of poetry, Floaters.

    There are few living artists who can better execute the magic of simultaneously dissecting and enlarging language than Espada. A former tenant lawyer and committed activist, the “left wing, Puerto Rican poet,” to quote his self-identification, manages to hover between two planes, with one foot always in the territory of the imagination, and another firmly dug into the mud of politics, oppression and defiance, and history. The imagination, especially with an orientation toward hope, as Espada would have it, performs the essential service that his late friend, Howard Zinn, described with characteristic eloquence on the closing page of his memoir, “If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”

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  • The Ugly Marriage of Postmodernism and Neoliberalism

    When speaking of postmodernist philosophy and neoliberal capitalism, the best opening question might be which came first, the philosophy or the economic system. Both are based on an assumption that human life is essentially meaningless, mutable and, in the case of neoliberalism, a means to make a profit from every possible human action. Like Jim Morrison sang in his 1970 release “Roadhouse Blues,” “the future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” Therefore, change who you are to whatever you want to be even if it’s only for a year or two, privatize anything you can get away with, put a price on it and tell everyone that this is the future ordained.

    One can oppose this, but doing so can easily being assimilated into the neoliberal equivalent of the borg on Star Trek—a phenomenon described in Wikipedia like this: “The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge of other alien species to the Collective through the process of “assimilation”: forcibly transforming individual beings into “drones….” Whether one is cross-dressing a la David Bowie, Lou Reed and other so-called glam rockers in the 1970s, becoming an alien as Bowie did at least twice in his career (Ziggy Stardust and The Man Who Fell to Earth) or playing video games where one assumes a character intent on murder, the rejection of the powers that be is ultimately atomized and meaningless. In other words, resistance is futile.

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  • Afro-Uruguayans: Historical and Cultural Developments in the Black Atlantic World

    Although the United States had only a short-lived involvement of the slave trade in Uruguay from 1797-1809, they took advantage of the hideous enterprise and served as a flagship for many clandestine voyages, including the sale of hides to Rhode Island as noted by historian Alex Borucki. Every coastal city, for that matter, in the Atlantic world was touched by slavery and every distinct place had a microhistory that translated into a larger national and global story. While the topics of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, civil war, and questions related to various reconstruction efforts across the Americas predominantly cover the United States and Brazil, the issue of Uruguay offers an interesting case study and history. This essay provides the historiography of slave histories in the Americas and attempts to figure in Uruguay, to reimagine the transatlantic slave trade along coastal cities and regions like the Rio de la Plata and the city of Montevideo, from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.

    Leonardo Marques has pointed out “the role of wind ocean currents and the demand of rum that made possible a strong network connecting Rhode Island” to the coasts of the South Atlantic, Africa and the Americas. In what is perhaps another overlooked region of the slave trade concerning Rhode Island’s involvement is 1782-1807 Southeast Africa with “evidence of at least nine voyages organized by U.S. slave traders to Mozambique.” Marques’ revisions are also helpful when analyzing Uruguay, where he states that the U.S. purchased “548 enslaved people from Montevideo, Uruguay” and that overall “about 11% of all transatlantic slaves disembarked in Montevideo” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “This unusual connection” writes Marques, spanning the North and South Atlantic world was the consequence of the hostile participation of the enslavers of Rhode Island. James DeWolf’s vessel disembarked 95 slaves in Montevideo in 1805.

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  • Don’t Bother to Knock

    The raid was to take place in the dark. That’s what the warrant said. While the people in the apartment were sleeping. So as to take them by surprise. It would be safer this way. Safer for whom was left unsaid, though we know who they mean. The lock would be picked. The door opened […]

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  • We Cannot Truly Die

    The extraordinary statement “we cannot truly die” is found on page 133 of Joseph Selbie’s book, The Physics of God (New Page Books, 2021). Indeed, it’s a book for people who want to understand and believe that there is more to life’s course than earthly corporeal existence.

    Based upon reams of fascinating scientific and metaphysical research, Selbie connects the dots in a masterful blend of science and religion taken to the edge of multi-universes and beyond to the heart of the astral plane.

    Our existence is much more than a boring standardized physical life on Earth. Selbie offers an uplifting view of so much more with considerable science-based evidence as well as personal experiences by people of intellectual stature. Life on our planet is but one small leg of a much bigger journey, a phenomenal journey unlike anything ever experienced or ever dreamed, in as much as, we truly cannot die.

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  • Biden’s Munich: the Origins of the Ukraine War

    If you’re the Russian president, Vladimir Putin—with oligarch billions tucked away in off-shore trusts, a few mistresses, ice time at the local rink, and dachas on the Black Sea—what’s left for your Soviet-era trophy room except the mounted head of the corrupt Ukrainian government, that which believes that Ukraine ought to remain independent from Russia?

    When Putin says “Atakovat” to his military command, Russian tanks, bombers, cyber warriors, fighter jets, and missiles will wash over Ukraine as if it were Saddam’s Baghdad, and in short order a Russian puppet collaborationist government will be installed in Kyiv (the Soviet name was Kiev) to hoist the white flag and declare “an end to hostilities” with Russia—as if somehow Ukraine were to blame for its own invasion.

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  • Fortress Against The Defenceless

    Image by Mike Kenneally.

    “Fortress Europe” has been and still is a nasty term. In the Second World War, Francesco Tava notes, it was used by British and Germans alike but for very different propaganda purposes. For the British, it was an RAF boast (“Fortress Europe has no roof”), referring especially to the bombing of Dortmund on the night of 23-24 May 1943 when 2,000 tons of bombs were dropped, killing about 15,000 people. That fortress was a military target. For the Nazis, Festung Europa was used to reassure the German population after the failed campaign in Russia with a promise that any invasion of Nazi-held Europe would be thwarted by an impenetrable shield of defences, especially the “Atlantic Wall”, a gigantic system of fortifications, barriers, and warning systems. This time, the fortress was protection.

    The insider-outsider idea of Festung is alive and well, hailed by members of Germany’s far-right AfD party and supported by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Austria’s Sebastian Kurz. But the Festung isn’t just a project of ranting extremists. Europe’s liberal states are busy building a fortress to make Hitler’s Atlantic Wall look like a kiddies’ play park and, instead of warding off armed attacks, it’s “protecting” Europe from the world’s most vulnerable people. Last November, the Polish government approved a €350m wall with advanced cameras and motion sensors and, around the continent, migrant- and refugee-deterring technology includes air surveillance, sensors, cameras (radars, thermal cameras, and “heartbeat detectors”), walls, deadly fences, surveillance centres, drones (made by Israeli arms companies and well tested in the Gaza Strip), AI lie detectors, a sound cannon (Greece) blasting 162 decibels at the “barbarians” at the gate. The EU’s border force, Frontex, and member states with EU grants (including from Horizon 2020, which encourages “innovation”) are paying for it all. It’s a bonanza for arms companies, to the tune of some €128 billion.

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  • Hendrix in Our Time

    On a spring night in 1967, the manager of the Savoy Theatre told the young guitar phenom Jimi Hendrix that Paul McCartney and George Harrison would be in the audience for the band’s final show in London. About an hour before going on stage Hendrix, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell hastily rehearsed “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.” They opened their set with a blistering version of the song, which had only been released by The Beatles three days earlier.  By his own account, McCartney was so blown away by the performance that he began incessantly talking up Hendrix to other musicians and producers, including the organizers of the Monterey Pop Festival, who soon invited the new band to perform at the big concert on the California coast three weeks later.  Hendrix closed the Monterey performance, vividly recorded by DA Pennebaker’s cameras, with a vicious cover of Chip Taylor’s rave-up “Wild Thing,” where 90,000 heads were blown, when he lit his crackling Stratocaster on fire and tossed the shrieking guitar into the crowd. Music was never the same.

    Three completed studio albums: Are You Experienced? (1967), Axis: Bold as Love(1968), Electric Ladyland (1969). That’s all we have from Jimi Hendrix. Each distinctive. Each meticulously crafted. Each musically innovative and thematically coherent. There’s nothing else like them in the canon of rock music. And then he was gone. Dead in a London flat at the age of 27 and, as a consequence, forever linked to the ghosts of two infinitely lesser talents: the Texas screecher Janis Joplin and the messianic drug-fiend Jim Morrison.

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  • What Capitalism’s Brought to Tonga

    The eruption of the undersea volcano, off the twin islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha’apai within the Tongan system, drew the world’s attention, if only for a few days, to the island kingdom of Tonga. The death toll so far has been low, and so, for the global viewing audience, more spectacle than tragedy. The satellite images of Nuku’alofa, the capital, covered with grey ash, looked somber and spooky. But such volcanic fall-out is part of Polynesia, isn’t it? Won’t it surely wash away in the tropical rain?

    One heard the little discussion, at least among the talking heads on cable news, of what volcanic ashfall does to a vulnerable ecosystem involving freshwater wells, fishponds, and crops such as coconuts. Coconut palms like volcanic soil, of lava and lava ash, beneath them; they do not, however, like the ash raining down on top of them, defoliating them, breaking their branches. This is especially important as Tonga’s main exports have long been copra and coconut oil. Ash is not good either for the vanilla plants, either, which produce their (sometimes) lucrative beans for the world marketplace.

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  • On the Misuse (and Invention) of Words

    Image by Joseph Chan.

    It is common to hear and read “experts” say that US politics is too “polarized” between “the left,” meaning the Democrats, and the right, meaning the Republicans. According to those who worry and complain about “polarization,” US-Americans need to “come together” and “meet in the middle,” in order to “heal the divisions in the country.”

    This is nonsense. There’s next-to-nothing “left” about the dismal, dollar-drenched Democratic Party of the two Joes (Biden and Manchin), Nancy “We’re Capitalist and Just the Way it Is” Pelosi and Chuck Schumer but there’s quite a bit far right about the Amerikaner Party of Trump (APoT) and January 6 – the Republifascist Party. Helping drive the whole two-party system far to the right, the lying neoliberal warmonger Democrats are in much the same corporate and imperial space that “moderate Republicans” used to occupy. With nowhere left go since the Demublican Citigroup presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the GOP crossed over into radical white nationalist and neofascist territory. It went there in a big way with Trump.

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