Recall “The Hanoi Hilton,” where captured U.S. soldiers were held during the war in Vietnam? If you do recall, no doubt, you’re recalling the Official Story. So what really happened? Watch! | more…
Among the cast of characters making cameo appearances are scores of attorneys, judges, and justices (including Justice Brennan, who eventually became Tigar’s friend and admirer), Bill Kunstler, cowboy Roy Rogers (a family acquaintance), Simone Signoret, James Baldwin, Jeremy Corbyn, Peggy Seeger, the great Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Donald Sutherland, and Otto Preminger…. | more…
What they found was surprising: It wasn’t simply that some POWs were for the war and others against it, nor was it an officers-versus-enlisted-men standoff. Rather, it was the class backgrounds of the captives and their pre-captive experience that drew the lines…. | more…
“According to Wilber, and Lembcke, a Vietnam veteran and anti-war activist himself, what distinguished the dissenters from their accusers was their ‘disparate socioeconomic backgrounds.’ As the authors note, the senior ranking officers shot down over North Vietnam, like Stockdale, tended to be service academy graduates, from privileged circumstances which stood “in sharp contrast with the modest origins of war resisters.” U.S. soldiers captured in the South ‘were mostly enlisted personnel, younger and with less formal education.’ And those who joined the controversial ‘Peace Committee,’ during their imprisonment, were also more racially diverse….” | more…
The oscar-nominated “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” has renewed interest in a particular flashpoint during the trials, when Bobby Seale demanded to represent himself. Judge Julius Hoffman ordered him bound and gagged. Seale was removed from the courtroom and thrown in jail. But in Director Aaron Sorkin’s reinvention of the events of 1968, a really good, but perhaps over-complicated story got “airbrushed” out: A lawyer was imposed on Bobby Seale against his will, and that lawyer was then arrested. The lawyer that was assigned to Bobby Seale was…..Michael Tigar. | more…
“‘Why do we go back?’ she asked sardonically, ‘because they go back,’ the pro-war hawks and military establishment. The ‘patriarchy,’ as she put it, ruminates the defeat in Vietnam like a bad sandwich growling in its stomach through a night that will not end. The defeat in Vietnam struck at a pillar of American manhood. Vietnam veterans would sometimes be chided by older veterans: they had won their war; Vietnam veterans had lost—what kind of men were they?” | more…
“He is currently working on another book focusing on the underlying drivers that cause human society to conflict with nature and create rifts in the metabolic cycles of the planet.” | more…
“The federal courts should be a sanctuary in the jungle,” said Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer in the “Scopes” Monkey Trial. Legendary lawyer Michael Tigar took those words to heart. He hunted the jungle’s predators — the likes of Pinochet. He defended its prey — the likes of Lynne Stewart and Julian Assange. He gave counsel to Panthers like Angela Davis, and, as you just learned, briefly shared a cell with the likes of Bobby Seale. | more…
“The bargain was that if they worked together, they could expropriate the land from the Native Americans and accomplish what came to be called the American Dream, and with a little luck and a lot of pluck, they could then somehow down the road gain free labor from enslaved Africans, and so there was a sort of corrupt bargain at the onset of what is now the United States of America…And still to this very day, you have this kind of class collaboration between some of the ninety-nine percent and some of the one percent. How else can you explain how and why a faux billionaire, Donald J. Trump in November 2020, received almost seventy-five million votes?” | more…
“I thought to myself, ‘I’ve never heard any of this really,’ and I (came of age during) the anti-war movement, I’m a historian of this time period.” If you think you’ve heard enough about the Vietnam War, just wait. | more…
“The members were Santhals, Oraons,as well as tea garden workers, who were allied in a struggle for surplus land distribution. On the whole, death sentences were avoided, but arms were snatched and land was distributed. The aim was to abolish the feudal order….” | more…
“Donnelly gives a short account of the origins of neoliberal imperialism, which emerged in the 1970s as a result of three challenges to the post–World War II global economic order: 1) the decline in the value of the U. S. dollar; 2) economic stagnation and a falling rate of pro t in the rich countries; and 3) the Third World “debt crisis”. Donnelly’s retelling of this story is remarkably concise and coherent; captured in a mere 30 pages, it is perhaps one of the best short overviews of the emergence of neoliberal global capitalism that I have read….” | more…
“….almost half the book comes in the form of substantive interviews that are not simply rich and compelling in the sense of capturing the struggles and experiences of a diverse range of Latin Americans. They are also incredibly smart. The researchers interviewed some really sharp, experienced activists who have clearly thought deeply about political struggle for some time.” | more…