9-11, Foreign Policy, History, Howard Zinn
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 »
Foreign Policy, Journalism, Middle East, Robert Fisk
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 »
Eugene V. Debs, Socialism
In Debs, Eugene V., Electoral Politics, History, Labor, Socialism on December 2, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Eugene V. Debs addresses a massive crowd in Chicago, 1912 (Source: Indiana State University)
It’s sad that so many people take the silly back and forth about President Obama’s alleged “socialism” seriously. If the name Eugene Victor Debs was as well known as it should be, such nonsense would be recognized for what it is.
Nick Salvatore is the author of Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (University of Illinois Press, 2nd edition 2007), a fascinating and engaging biography of the socialist leader and presidential candidate and a detailed history of the early radical American labor movement.
Lenny Flank edited Writings of Eugene Debs: A Collection of Essays by America’s Most Famous Socialist and Reds,White and Blue: An Anthology of American Socialism and Communism 1880-1920 (Red and Black Publishers, 2009).
Both generously took the time to answer some questions about their books.
G&R: How did Eugene Debs define socialism and how much was his vision influenced by Marx and the European movements?
Nick Salvatore: EVD read Marx and some of the more popular European socialists, but they were never a driving force for him. His understanding of socialism for America owed more to an effort to maintain American democratic values in an era of industrial corporate development. Read the rest of this entry »
Berlin, comic books, Comics, Draw & Quarterly, Jason Lutes
In Comics, History, Lutes, Jason, World History on November 2, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Berlin: City of Smoke (Drawn & Quarterly, 2008), Book Two of Jason Lutes’s in-progress trilogy about the Weimar Republic’s disintegration, picks up shortly after the 1929 May Day massacre that terminated Book One, City of Stones. Lutes, who is among the most skilled practitioners of the high-input labor of cartooning, continues to harmonize rich and emotive drawing with brilliantly imagined dialog and plotting.
Each character, appearing however briefly, has a fully developed personality and it’s this humanist heart of Berlin that makes witnessing the city’s nauseous slouch towards tragedy so agonizing. A few characters depart the German capital in Book Two, and the knowledge that these exits are in fact escapes enhances the reader’s dread for those who remain.
Lutes himself has cautioned that “it’s somewhat simplistic and reductive to make many direct comparisons between the current political climate and that of the Weimar Republic,” but it’s impossible to ignore the familiar feel of the angry unemployed father who finds comradeship and an outlet for his rage among the Nazis or of the elites who prefer laughing at satirized Brownshirts in the cabaret to confronting the totalitarian power growing in the streets and the Reichstag.
As Noam Chomsky recently reminded an audience in Belfast: “There is now a mass of people with real grievances who want answers and are not receiving them. A common reaction in elite educated circles and much of the left is to ridicule the right-wing protesters.
“But that is a serious error.”
A People's History of the World, Chris (UK), Harman, History, International Socialism, Socialist Workers Party
In Harman, Chris, History, World History on July 3, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Here in the US, many readers are introduced to radical history with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which challenges the conventional understanding of history as, in the words of mass-murder Henry Kissinger, “the memory of states.”
British writer Chris Harman tackles 100,000 years of human history in a similarly defiant act of independent scholarship with his excellent A People’s History of the World (Verso, 2008), a book that will appeal to veteran Zinn fans and those investigating the world beyond the History Channel for the first time.
Harman generously took time to respond by email to some questions about his work.
G&R: In the US, the “people’s history” format is often associated with Howard Zinn’s pioneering work. Was Zinn an influence on A People’s History of the World?
CH: I wrote the book out of frustration at the fact that although there were many radical accounts of particular episodes and phases in history, mainly influenced by the insights of Marx and Engels, there was not over-reaching account. In the earlier part of the book the major influence was the Australian archaeologists of the first half of the 20th Century, Gordon Childe. But his account had to be updated to take into account new research by archaeologists and radical anthropologists like Richard Lee and Eleanor Leacock since his death in 1957. Read the rest of this entry »
All Art is Propaganda, Facing Unpleasant Facts, George Orwell, The Betrayal of Dissent
In History, Literature, Orwell, George on June 25, 2009 at 7:31 pm
In 1946, George Orwell wrote: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”
In his The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century (Pluto, 2003), Scott Lucas writes that Orwell’s mission in practice was hardly as balanced as this declaration from the essay/manifesto “Why I Write” suggests. The “serious work” against surpassed that for, and against often substituted for understanding. Orwell’s “lack of economic and political theory,” Lucas writes, yielded an inconsistent “Socialism” Orwell himself declared “not doctrinaire, not even logical” that he defined primarily by attacking other leftists. Read the rest of this entry »
Berlin, comic books, Comics, historical fiction, Jason Lutes
In History, Literature, Lutes, Jason, World History on December 1, 2008 at 7:27 am
From 2004. Posted because my old interviews with extraordinary people for Asheville Global Report are vanishing into the ether and because volume two of Jason’s truly brilliant Berlin trilogy was published this year. Jason’s website is Coyote vs. Wolf. His books are published by Drawn & Quarterly.
G&R: Why were you drawn to Weimar Germany as a subject for such long term project as Berlin?
Lutes: The original impulse was just that: an impulse. In 1994 I was sitting on the can reading a magazine when I came across an ad for a book called Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin. I didn’t know much about the Weimar Republic, but when I read the ad copy, I realized that that would be the subject of my next comics novel, and that it would be long. I ordered the book, but before I even received it I had settled on the structure of 24 chapters/issues of 24 pages each. Read the rest of this entry »
A People's History of the Civil War, Civil War, Confederacy, Union, Williams, David
In American Civil War, History, Williams, David on November 11, 2008 at 6:53 pm
There are few topics in American history that produce more strong feeling than the Civil War. The South, some will passionately insist, fought to repel authoritarian aggression and to preserve the right of regional self determination. Others contend that the North waged a war fought by free men to preserve the democratic Union and to liberate the slaves that they could share in that freedom. Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee and other major players are canonized in opposing Churches of Geographic Loyalty.
In his excellent A People’s History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom, David Williams, professor of history at Valdosta State University in Georgia, tells a different kind of story. As he explains in the introduction, his book remembers the people who “who fought through everyday struggles whose collective meaning and results were ultimately much bigger than battles, much greater than leaders, and much broader than the Civil War itself.”
G&R: All the other books about the Civil War I’ve seen seem obviously romanticized, with this kind of Halmarky, tragic family fight kind of feel to it, like in The Killer Angels.
Williams: If you just look at what’s going on in the battle field, which is really what most people do who are drawn to the Civil War, you kind of get left with that impression. One reason I think that so much of what I try to include in the book is overlooked so often, is that we just focus on the battlefield and maybe some of the politics, and that’s it. Ninety-percent of everything that’s ever been written on the Civil War has had to do with military or political aspects, so that kind of becomes the overarching formative parts of our impression about the war, with the North on one side and the South on the other and that’s it. They really don’t talk much about anti-war movements in the South, anti-war movements in the North.
When I’m teaching classes on this, particularly when I’m teaching class on Southern history, and I talk about how much opposition there was to the war in the South, the question becomes: how in the world was the Confederacy able to survive as long as it was with that kind of opposition coming from its own people? And the quickest answer to that is because Lincoln was having his own problems with popular support in the North… Read the rest of this entry »
