Historian Gerald Horne, author of dozens of books, including the just-out The Dawning of the Apocalypse, talked recently with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper on their Rolling Stone podcast, Useful Idiots, in an effort to contextualize the current race protests through a historical lens… | more…
August 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed…. | more…
To explore what’s going on now in the streets, in light of how “Black people’s lives have remained vulnerable and unprotected by the very government that abolished the institution of slavery,” Marcus Anthony Hunter, chair of the department of African American Studies at UCLA, and author of three books, assembled five noted authors and journalists of color, including Gerald Horne, author of the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse… | more…
Yates begins with a detailed description of the world-wide working class. Who they are: most wage laborers, the reserve army of labor (unemployed, involuntary part-timers and discouraged workers), unpaid reproductive workers, and most peasants and laborers. How many: several billion spread across the globe. According to Yates, there are more people in the working class than many might suppose…. | more…
Protests are nothing new in American society. And protests for racial justice are certainly nothing new. But has America not learned any lessons from the civil rights movement? Have we learned nothing from decades of the police clashing with peaceful marchers? Why is this still happening in America in the year 2020? Why are our police departments militarized and so willing to use violence against citizens?… | more…
Our talk about the organization of the working class in Seattle—including the tensions over organizing black and Japanese workers alongside white ones—explored the question of what it means when, for a little while, the working class runs the city. Because that’s what happens during a general strike. And it is happening now…. | more…
Gerald Horne, radical pundit and prolific author, talks to Patrick Farnsworth, creator and host of Last Born in the Wilderness, examining “the material conditions that have precipitated the uprisings across the United States the past week, in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th…. Dr. Horne frames the wave of uprisings across the nation within a deeper and broader context of previous uprisings (e.g. the Watts Riots of the 1960s in Los Angeles and the nation-wide uprisings that occurred after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.), and points to the impacts the ‘Long Sixteenth Century’ had in the formation of white supremacy, as explored in his book The Dawning of the Apocalypse…. | more…
Cal Winslow, author of Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919, talks to Sasha Lilley, host of KPFA’s Against the Grain:
While the United States is in the throes of upheaval over police murders, we take a historical look back at another time of great social ferment: a century ago, when the workers of Seattle shut that city down. The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last widespread pandemic — the Spanish influenza…. | more…