Interviews, Reviews, Analysis, and Comment

Archive for 2010

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Good books for good citizens

In Baillargeon, Normand, Blumenthal, Max, Education, Electoral Politics, Fascism, Hedges, Chris, Journalism, Religion on March 4, 2010 at 6:10 am

Noam Chomsky once advised that citizens of democracies take courses in intellectual self-defense. To this end, Professor of Education Fundamentals Normand Baillargeon has written the appropriately titled A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense (Seven Stories Press, 2007), a compact and accessibly written guide to the detection and treatment of things sneaky and mendacious.

Drawing on works by critical thinking heavies like Chomsky, Carl Sagan, and James Randi, Baillargeon covers language and logic; statistics, probability, and data presentation (what he calls “citizen mathematics”); the scientific method; and media criticism (including an introduction to Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model). Read the rest of this entry »

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Wallace Shawn’s Essays

In Foreign Policy, Shawn, Wallace on January 28, 2010 at 7:33 pm

In his novel Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut wrote that art is important because,  “Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’”

I think this is true, especially when the person who sends the message can write or paint or sing much better than the recipient, who then not only feels less lonely but also, benefitting from the creator’s more effective expression, knows herself better, too.

I bet there is a handy German noun for this notion and if there is such a word, it would have been a good runner-up title for Wallance Shawn’s collection Essays (Haymarket Books, 2009). Read the rest of this entry »

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Howard Zinn 1922-2010

In Foreign Policy, History, Zinn, Howard on January 28, 2010 at 12:21 pm


G&R: Since September 11th, you’ve been in great demand as a speaker. How does the mainstream media depiction of the anti-war-events you’ve attended and of the anti-war movement in general compare with your own observations?

Howard Zinn: The major media have paid very little attention to the anti war movement. There’s an occasional article here and there, but there’s a lot more anti-war activity than you would gather from reading the mainstream press.

I know there have been at least 150 gatherings at campuses around the country. I mean, that was of two weeks ago and by now, I am sure there are many more.

I, and others I know, who have been involved, have been ferociously busy, and in fact, not able to meet all the requests to come and speak to student groups and community groups. And when we do speak, the crowds are very large. Read the rest of this entry »

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“The Weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ”: Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation on fascists in the US military

In Fascism, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Military Issues, Religion, US Constitution, Weinstein, Mikey on January 18, 2010 at 11:38 am

“How do you see the balance between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause?” I asked.

There was a long pause. Civilians might reasonably plead ignorance, but not a general who has sworn on his life to defend these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

“I have to write those things down,” Regni finally answered. “What did you say those constitutional things were again?”

Journalist Jeff Sharlet, speaking with US Air Force Academy Commander Lieutenant General John Regni, “Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military”, Harper’s Magazine, May 2009

“For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.

“Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world…

“In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. …the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”

From “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” by Umberto Eco, New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995

In the mainstream news media, there is much talk about the terrifying possibility of religious fundamentalists acquiring a weapon of mass destruction. Largely unreported is the fact that this has already occurred, not by the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but by Fundamentalist Christians in the US military, with control and access to incomprehensibly deadly weapons and a devotion to a homicidal and fascistic “End Times” theology Read the rest of this entry »

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“These lands do not belong to us.” Robert Fisk’s The Age of the Warrior 

In Fisk, Robert, Foreign Policy, History, Journalism, Middle East on January 7, 2010 at 11:44 am

Reading award-winning British war correspondent Robert Fisk’s The Age of the Warrior (Nation Books, 2008), I was often reminded of two recently published collections of George Orwell’s essays. Like Orwell, Fisk writes about many things–history, literature, cinema, locomotives, cats–and also like Orwell, whose “serious work” was always, “directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism,” Fisk’s writings are always in opposition to war, which he has defined so well as “the total failure of the human spirit.”

“A reporter’s supposed lack of ‘bias’–which, I suspect, is now the great sickness of our Western press and television–has become the antidote to personal feeling, the excuse for all of us to avoid the truth,” he writes. Having allowed himself access to his human feelings, Fisk is able to report on the horrors of war as a human being and without stupefying fealty to the mythological god “objectivity,” to which so many of our American journalists are willing devotees, having failed to heed evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s warning:

“(It) is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice. Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference.” Read the rest of this entry »