Articles

After the AttackÉThe War on Terrorism

by The Editors

November 1, 2001

There is little we can say directly about the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.—except that these were acts of utter, inhuman violence, indefensible in every sense, taking a deep and lasting human toll. Such terrorism has to be rid from the face of the earth. The difficulty lies in how to rid the world of it. Terrorism generates counterterrorism and the United States has long been a party to this deadly game, as perpetrator more often than victim.

The United States is a Leading Terrorist State: An Interview with Noam Chomsky: An Interview with Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian

by Noam Chomsky

November 1, 2001

There is rage, anger and bewilderment in the U.S. since the September 11 events. There have been murders, attacks on mosques, and even a Sikh temple. The University of Colorado, which is located here in Boulder, a town which has a liberal reputation, has graffiti saying, "Go home, Arabs, Bomb Afghanistan, and Go Home, Sand Niggers." What's your perspective on what has evolved since the terrorist attacks?

Limbs of No Body: The World’s Indifference to the Afghan Tragedy

by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

November 1, 2001

If you read my article in full, it will take about an hour of your time. In this hour, fourteen more people will have died in Afghanistan of war and hunger and sixty others will have become refugees in other countries. This article is intended to describe the reasons for this mortality and emigration. If this bitter subject is irrelevant to your sweet life, please don't read it.

On Walking the Walk

by Loretta J. Williams

November 1, 2001

Anne Braden, The Wall Between (2nd edition, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 348 pages, $40 cloth, $20 paper.

Perhaps you, like me, tend to greet reissues in general and memoirs in particular, with a polite ho–hum. Why a reissue now, I ask, and who benefits from this republication? Does anyone lose? But when I read Anne Braden’s analytical memoir, I concluded that we all gain by The Wall Between now becoming available to a wider audience

Notes from the Editors, October 2001

by The Editors

October 1, 2001

The fact that the vested interests in the United States are able to rely on a well-oiled propaganda system, in which the media dutifully play their appointed role, is perhaps nowhere clearer today than in the case of Social Security privatization. From the standpoint of the establishment the truth simply will not do. If the truth were presented on Social Security, that is, if there were a responsible and independent press hammering away at the truth, against the obscene manipulation of the facts by the establishment, there would be no Social Security “crisis” and no substantial public support for even partial privatization. The idea of the failure of Social Security is a classic case of propaganda by the elite aimed at manipulating the minds of the people.

Ecology Against Capitalism

by John Bellamy Foster

October 1, 2001

In a 1963 talk on "The Pollution of Our Environment" Rachel Carson drew a close comparison between the reluctance of society in the late twentieth century to embrace the full implications of ecological theory and the resistance in the Victorian era to Darwin's theory of evolution: As I look back through history I find a parallel. I ask you to recall the uproar that followed Charles Darwin's announcement of his theories of evolution. The concept of man's origin from pre-existing forms was hotly and emotionally denied, and the denials came not only from the lay public, but from Darwin's peers in science. Only after many years did the concepts set forth in The Origin of Species become firmly established. Today, it would be hard to find any person of education who would deny the facts of evolution. Yet so many of us deny the obvious corollary: that man is affected by the same environmental influences that control the lives of all the many thousands of other species to which he is related by evolutionary ties (Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, pp. 244-45).

Remembering Nora Sayre

by John J. Simon

October 1, 2001

What follows is a chapter from Nora Sayre’s Running Time: Films of The Cold War (The Dial Press, 1982). We reprint it here not only to mark the untimely death of its author on August 8, but because it is a good example of a kind of radical cultural analysis distinguished by incisiveness as well as clarity, and, unfortunately, not often seen. In this selection, Sayre not only provides a critical examination of films that resisted the post-blacklist conformity of Hollywood, but she places them in the context of both larger social and historical forces, and the evolving corporate pressures of the movie business.

Unglaring Exceptions: Dissent in the Films of the 1950s

by Nora Sayre

October 1, 2001

While the largest American audiences of 1954 watched James Stewart studying his neighbors in Rear Window, or Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge shooting it out in Johnny Guitar, or Victor Mature fondling Susan Hayward in Demetrius and the Gladiators, while many savored the inspired lunacies of Beat the Devil, there was one film that most were protected from seeing. Salt of the Earth, made independently by blacklisted writers—directed by Herbert Biberman of the Hollywood Ten, written by Michael Wilson, and produced by Paul Jarrico—was presented by the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, which had been expelled from the CIO in 1950 on charges of Communist domination. The movie was beleaguered from its inception. Filmed in Silver City, New Mexico, Salt of the Earth was based on the 1951-1952 strike by the Mexican-American zinc miners of Mine-Mill, who had demanded equality with their Anglo colleagues, as well as safety regulations on the job

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