I see you being dropped off. I stop the movement of my scope and then I center the crosshairs on you . . . and on you waving the driver goodbye. He drives away . . . leaving you behind at the place where three roads meet, behind the date grove on the other […]
Subjects Archives: Literature
Two Big Protests in Israel against the Massacre in Gaza
Tomorrow (Saturday, January 3, 2009), two big protests will be held in Israel The killing in Gaza continues. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, thousands injured, air strikes have caused utter devastation, and entire families are left homeless. Civilians in the south of Israel are being held captive by a government which lies to them […]
Still the Sirens
Introduction The sirens of oppression I referred to in my first collection (1963) were still present in South Africa in 1989, as they seem to be as well in Gaza in 2009 thanks to Israel’s bombing spree. […]
Six Prominent American Freethinkers
“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English. We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history. Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]
Ferment and Fetters in the Study of Kurdish Nationalism
Hakan Ozoglu. Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. xv + 186 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7914-5993-5. Identifying Kurdish nationalism as “one of the most explosive and critical predicaments in the Middle East,” the author notes that “the subject regrettably […]
The Life and Times of Genora Dollinger
Child of the Sit-Downs: The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger, by Carlton Jackson, WKU Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2008. 256 pages, $39.00 (cloth). This wonderful book is a most welcome biography of Genora Dollinger, labor reformer and feminist. Genora (her husband told Dr. Jackson that she […]
Revitalizing the Memory of Sacco and Vanzetti
I wanted a roof for every family, bread for every mouth, education for every heart, light for every intellect. I am convinced that the human history has not yet begun — that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric. I see with the eyes of my soul how the sky is diffused […]
Beyond Voting: Guerrilla Gardeners, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Pirate Programmers
This US election year, an unprecedented number of voters will likely head to the polls to cast their ballots in an exercise that should take just a few minutes to complete. But what about the rest of the minutes left in the year? Author and activist Chris Carlsson has some suggestions for social change beyond […]
Manley and McKay: Reform and Revolution in the Politics of the African Diaspora
Lloyd D. McCarthy, “In-Dependence” from Bondage: Claude McKay and Michael Manley Defying the Ideological Clash and Policy Gaps in African Diaspora Relations (Africa World Press, 2007). Claude McKay and Michael Manley may seem like strange bedfellows for a study in 20th-century politics. Though both born in Jamaica, a generation apart, they could hardly have pursued […]
Mahmoud Darwish
Celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died on 9 August 2008, at the age of 67, after open-heart surgery. Here is a video of his most famous poem “Identity Card” (published in 1964): A poet of exile par excellence, Darwish died in exile. The village of his birth in western Galilee, al-Birwa (whose Arabic […]
From Black Power to Ethnic Politics: Class Contradictions of Black Nationalism
Cedric Johnson. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Cedric Johnson‘s Revolutionaries to Race Leaders traces the ideological cooptation of one of the twentieth century’s most vibrant social movements. The Black Nationalist resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s demanded nothing short of self-determination, […]
No Revolution Ever Disappears
Penelope Rosemont, Dreams & Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, sds & the Seven Cities of Cibola, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago, 2008, ISBN 978-0-88286-234-2 Despite an era made for modern-day state and corporate Metternichs there are stirrings, movement, growing discontent. In the words of Buffalo Springfield’s song, “There’s something happening here. […]
In Memorian
Hollmann Morris is a Colombian television journalist. A recipient of many awards, he was awarded the Human Rights Defender Award by Human Rights Watch in 2007. “In Memorian,” like The Red Dance (Dir. Yezid Campos Zornosa, 2003), documents the Colombian government’s campaign of assassinations to destroy La Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union), a political party […]
País. . . País. . .
Songs of My Country I’m dying from cold and my voice is angry because at this gate of the river they stabbed the sun because at this gate of the river, my country, they stabbed the sun oh, my country, my country, my country This land has a name from the sea to the […]
The Alchemists of El Dorado
I couldn’t stop my head from cocking to the left for a moment when my grandmother, while watching John Wayne on the television, said that the Old West should have sunk for all the lead he fired into the ground. And it is probably true, given just how many black-hatted ne’er-do-wells would outlive their ninety […]
A Socialist Built My House
That’s what my grandmother told me while we were waiting at the doctor’s office. The socialist, my great-grandfather, built with his bare hands the house I have lived in my entire life. I was taken aback was not expecting this kind of history from my own family. For days I pressed my […]
De Winter: Geert Wilders Is a Bigot
AMSTERDAM – TV Producer Harry de Winter, President of the board of the foundation Een Ander Joods Geluid [Another Jewish Voice], today placed a remarkable advertisement on the front page of the newspaper Volkskrant. De Winter puts Geert Wilders‘s criticism of Muslims in the same category as anti-Semitism. See below the de Winter ad […]
Why Another History of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict?
James L. Gelvin. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. x + 294 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliographies, glossary, time line, biographical sketches, index. Those who have noted, but not read, James Gelvin‘s The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War may well ask themselves, “do we need another […]
Dror Ze’evi on the Sexual Discourses of the Early Modern Ottoman World
Dror Ze’evi. Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourses in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xiv + 223 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. According to one tradition, the Prophet Muhammad once ordered a handsome youth from the tribe of ‘Abd Qays to sit behind him, so that he (the […]
Culture
The mark of Cain won’t sprout from a soldier who shoots at the head of a child on a knoll by the fence around a refugee camp — for beneath his helmet, conceptually speaking, his head is made of cardboard.
