If they are paying attention, progressives worldwide know that Cuba provides healthcare that saves lives and prevents disease more effectively than does the United States, its major capitalist enemy. They know that Cuban health workers have been caring for people throughout the global South and, during the Covid -19 pandemic, in Europe too. And the word is out that Cuba educates vast numbers of physicians for much of the world… | more…
Ronnie Kasrils, activist and the author of The Unlikely Secret Agent, the story of his wife as an underground agent for the African National Congress, recently wrote about anti-apartheid leader Ruth First, who was killed by a letter bomb on August 17, 1987. Kasrils’s article about First, commemorating the 38th anniversary of her death, is based on a lecture he presented on 23 August 2020. It first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, an online voice of the South African working class… | more…
John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, published in 2000, brought awareness of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engel’s writings on and relevance to, environmental thinking. His latest work, The Robbery of Nature, written with Brett Clark, demonstrates the importance of understanding nature and society with a Marxist perspective…. | more…
Historian and author Gerald Horne, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, talks with Jacqueline Luqman on The Real News Network about how the colonization of the United States helped create the American obsession with property rights and property damage over people’s rights… | more…
World War I, given all the rousing “Over-There” songs and in-the-trenches films it inspired, was, at its outset, surprisingly unpopular with the American public. As opposition increased, Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration became intent on stifling antiwar dissent. Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was jailed, and Deb’s Socialist Party became a prime target of surveillance operations, both covert and overt. Drastic as these measures were, more draconian measures were to come. In Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, Eric Chester reveals that out of this turmoil came a heated public discussion on the theory of civil liberties—the basic freedoms that are, theoretically, untouchable by any of the three branches of the U.S. government. | more…
Sonali Kolhatkar, host of Rising Up with Sonali, a progressive news radio and TV show, recently spoke with Shaun Richman, author of Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century… | more…
Daniel Jacobs: What led you to research the history of the 16th and 17th centuries with respect to the settler colonial project?
Gerald Horne: A number of factors led me in that direction. One is that I was looking for synthetic overviews of the 16th and 17th centuries and was unable to find those overviews. You can find studies and monographs that deal with various aspects of those two centuries and, as my footnotes suggest, I draw upon those various studies extensively. The second point is when I started on this road I was generally dissatisfied with the origin stories, which I refer to often as creation myths, of the founding of the United States of America…” | more…
John Bellamy Foster, one of the foremost thinkers about ecological Marxism, is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Here, Mitch Jeserich, host of Letters and Politics, talks to Foster about his work, beginning with his latest book, which opens with an account of the funerals of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin… | more…
Gerald Horne: Pardon the expression, but it may be a game-changer. What I mean is, these athletes have a lot of social, and potentially political capital. LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, the top player in the league, has about 47 million Twitter followers. These players have a very strong union. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the ownership team of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, and of course, those Milwaukee Bucks who are now leading this protest, the ownership team basically endorsed the protest…. | more…
With Covid-19 roaring through the U.S., now is a good time to discuss Cuban health care. It’s about as different from the American variety as possible. It is not for profit. It is socialized. It does not first resort to expensive medical technology. Its doctors live among the people, like in Haiti after the earthquake, not in luxury hotels, like American doctors. It does not rely on the thinking that there is a pill for every ailment. It is successful. Cuba has suffered 88 deaths from covid, and the 3408 infected people have not gone bankrupt receiving care… | more…
Walter Smolarek, host of Loud & Clear, via Radio Sputnik, is joined by Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history at the University of Houston and the author of many books, including The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Dr. Horne discusses the RNC and the unfolding crisis in Kenosha… | more…
Magro: The 1619 Project—and much of your work—puts settler colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy at the center of the unfolding history of the United States. It seems straightforward, so how do we account for resistance to the Project among some historians?
Horne: The 1619 Project stirred controversy in part because it unsettled the widely accepted “creation myth” of the founding of the United States. | more…
Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution affirms a view of the Cuban Revolution offered to me by C.L.R. James in 1970: While there is much to criticize, it broke the stranglehold of the Monroe Doctrine, even if just a little, and gave the region a chance to shape its own destiny—including its remarkable health care system…. | more…