Interview
Eduardo Galeano, who was born in Uruguay in 1940, has written big, thick books. Open Veins of Latin America (1973), which Hugo Chávez of Venezuela handed to Barack Obama in May, hoping it would teach him history, is more than 300 pages. Then there’s Galeano’s Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces & Masks, and Century of the Wind that adds up to nearly 1,000 pages. More recently, he has written shorter books, and practiced a kind of ecology of the word. Mirrors, his newest work, contains more than one hundred short entries about almost everything — from salt to maps and money, and almost everyone, from Cleopatra to Alexander Hamilton and Che Guevara. None of the entries is longer than a single page. Not surprisingly, Galeano’s answers to the questions in this interview are pithy, poetic, humorous, and sometimes oblique. “I’m fighting word inflation, which in Latin America is worse than monetary inflation,” he says. “I try to say more with less — because less is more.” -J.R. | more…
Noam Chomsky is an Institute Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His most recent books are Interventions (City Lights, 2007), Failed States (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Inside Lebanon: Journey to a Shattered Land with Noam and Carol Chomsky (Monthly Review Press, 2007). Gabriel Matthew Schivone is an editor of Days Beyond Recall: Alternative Media and Literary Journal and winner of the 2007 Frederica Hearst Prize for Lyrical Poetry.This article is based on an interview conducted by telephone and e-mail November 27, 2007–February 11, 2008. The interviewer thanks Mary Elizabeth Barnes for help with editing and transcribing this interview… | more…
Pete Seeger is one of the world’s quintessential activists, having played such an important role in singing the songs and engaging in the struggles of civil rights, free speech, human rights, anti-Vietnam War, environmental, peace, anti-nuclear, and social justice movements. (David Kupfer, “Longtime Passing,” Whole Earth Magazine, 104, 2001, p. 19.) | more…
David Barsamian: What are the regional implications of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq?
Noam Chomsky: I think not only the region but the world in general perceives it correctly as a kind of an easy test case to try to establish a norm for use of military force, which was declared in general terms last September. Last September, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America was issued. It presented a somewhat novel and unusually extreme doctrine on the use of force in the world. And it’s hard not to notice that the drumbeat for war in Iraq coincided with that. It also coincided with the onset of the congressional campaign. All these are tied together | more…
The Surveillance and Indictment of Lynne Stewart (An Interview)
On June 14, 2000, radical attorney Lynne Stewart broke a signed agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. She released a press statement to the Reuters news service in Cairo on behalf of her imprisoned client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted of instigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The statement said, in part, that the Sheikh, spiritual advisor to the fundamentalist Islamic Group [IG], wished to call off a cease-fire then observed in Egypt by the IG. Following this press release, the Clinton Justice Department admonished Stewart for violating the Special Administrative Measures [SAMs], which prohibited the Sheikh from communicating in any way with the outside world. Stewart admitted she had erred and signed the SAMs agreement again, assuming her work would proceed as usual | more…
Lessons from Planning in the U.S.S.R. & the U.S.
In early July 2002, I asked Harry Magdoff if he would be interviewed for the Statesman, a Kolkata, India newspaper for which I write political commentary. Our first interview was so satisfying that we continued for several sessions. What follows is a discussion of something Harry has considered, what we can learn from the experience of the Soviet Union. It is, characteristically, concerned with learning from history. Harry is methodologically committed to the actual world from which all theory springs, to which it must speak, and to meet whose specific particularities it must continually be reshaped. | more…
Evrensel Kultur: Postmodernism’s advice to us was to have doubts towards all kinds of information acquired. The “security syndrome” following September 11 has spread these doubts to daily life. In other words, the twenty-first century has begun as an age of doubts/suspicions. How does the suspiciousness of the new century differ from that of past centuries? If we take “suspicion” as a metaphor, what kind of real relations/connections can be described or hidden with this metaphor? | more…
an Interview with Doug Henwood
Doug Henwood, author of Wall Strr£t:How It Works andfur lWIom (Verso, 1997) and publisher and primary author of the newsletter Left Business Observer; is a fre- quent contributor to Munthly Review. Doug was interviewed earlier this year for the San Francisco Ba:y Guardian by another good friend of ours, Christian Parenti-author of 1.JxiuJnam Ameriaz (Verso, 1999), reviewed in last month’s MR At the end of February we asked a few additional questions of Doug. The composite interview follows | more…
Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files (New York: Dial Press, 1999), 564 pp., $26.95.
It is fitting that the “Atomic Century” draw to a close with the publication of The Plutonium Files. A decade in the making, Eileen Welsome’s book explores the secret human radiation experiments that grew out of the U. S. atom bomb program. Carried out under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Department of Energy’s predecessor, the experiments were designed to help determine atom bomb plant safety standards and to replicate nuclear battlefield conditions. As a result, thousands of hospital patients and servicemen were unknowingly exposed to dangerous levels of radiation | more…
Interview with István Mészáros
From the modern vision, the great revolutions, the anti-Nazi war, to the collapse of socialism in East Europe and to the sovereignty of the market, what do you think about the twentieth century—the “century of extremes” as Hobsbawm calls it? | more…
The twentieth anniversary issue of Monthly Review in May 1969 carried the announcement that Harry Magdoff—the independent economist-had officially joined Paul Sweezy as co-editor, replacing Leo Huberman, who had died in 1968