Category: The Press

Listen: “Ending the Myth” podcast (Co-author of Dissenting POWs interviewed on ‘Mechanical Freak’)

Listen: “Ending the Myth” podcast (Co-author of Dissenting POWs interviewed on ‘Mechanical Freak’)

The podcast Mechanical Freak, recently welcomed esteemed sociologist Jerry Lembcke to talk about how the memory of the Vietnam War was both recreated and used in the 1980s and 1990s to unify public sentiment against the liberatory movements of the 1960s. Lembcke reminded the audience that even in the creation of memory, there is a political struggle for the future that needs to be waged.

“A lofty dream” (Work Work Work reviewed in ‘Dissident Voice’ and ‘Countercurrents’)

“A lofty dream” (Work Work Work reviewed in ‘Dissident Voice’ and ‘Countercurrents’)

'Work Work Work' sounds similar for working boys in many countries. Anyone can find them at any hub of exploitation and profit making. A visit to the Tipu Sultan Road or the Dolaai Khaal or Taatee Bazaar area in the capital city of Dhaka, a visit to automobile repair shops around Dhaka or to the marine vessel making yards along the Buriganga near Dhaka will find them. Boys picking torn papers, discarded plastic pieces of innumerable shapes and sizes from street sides, tearing down old posters from walls of the city buildings, looking for whatever is saleable in garbage heaps, selling kitchen items or flowers from morning to night, until may be 10 or 11 PM....

An invaluable warning against the State as a neutral tool (Beyond Leviathian reviewed by ‘Counterfire’)

The state cannot be ‘reformed’ since it is not, despite what liberal theory would insist, a neutral institution. The state historically developed in order to enshrine class power, and so traps us ‘within the paralyzing confines of the hierarchical and antagonistic framework of the political/military domain’. This can only be broken through a ‘radical transformation’ in ‘our social metabolism’, that is in the relations of production of capitalism.

“So much drama, infighting, passion” (Radek: A Novel reviewed during #Germanlitmonth)

Admittedly he was Lenin’s man rather than Stalin’s. He was a passenger on Lenin’s famous sealed train. He made the mistake, however, of aligning himself for ideological reasons with Trotsky after Lenin died, a decision he never really recovered from. I got the impression, from Heym’s telling, that Stalin played cat to Radek’s mouse ever afterward.

Listen: “Haiti, Past, Present and Future” (Gerald Horne on

Listen: “Haiti, Past, Present and Future” (Gerald Horne on the ‘De Facto Podcast’)

Through his characteristic style of global analysis, Horne’s analysis provides a historical and political cross-hatching between the Haitian Revolution and events taking place on the mainland often considered wholly unconnected therefrom, bringing the international implications of the Revolution into relief, and chronicling its seismic impact as the epicenter of universal emancipation against the tides of American counter-revolution.

A chilling account of the development of US nuclear strategy (Washington’s New Cold War reviewed by ‘Morning Star’)

A chilling account of the development of US nuclear strategy (Washington’s New Cold War reviewed by ‘Morning Star’)

'John Bellamy Foster’s contribution, "Notes on Extremism for the Twenty-First-Century Ecology and Peace Movements," is a chilling account of the development of US nuclear strategy. Carefully, he explains the shift in strategic thinking inside US governing circles. In the period before the end of the first cold war, the consensus was that the relative balance in nuclear weaponry meant that the US could not guarantee a victory in a nuclear war with the USSR.... In this context we can understand the eastward expansion of NATO from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden; the Maidan coup and promotion of an anti-Russian government in Ukraine; and the refusal to offer Russia security guarantees last year or peace negotiations this year.'