Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

Green Social Thought reviews “Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution” by Don Fitz

February 20, 2024

Don Fitz’s new book Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution was going to press at Monthly Review in early spring, as the pandemic was ramping up, so he had just barely enough time to slip in a postscript teasingly titled, “How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID-19.” The postscript puts an exclamation mark on the medical history of Cuba that Fitz takes us through in the 240 compelling pages that come before. Based on that history, one would have expected Cuba to take early, decisive actions to stem the pandemic, and Fitz says that’s exactly what happened….

“Trump’s ‘Patriot Education’ whitewashes racist, imperial US history”: Gerald Horne on PUSHBACK with Aaron Maté

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, radical historial and prolific author—most recently of The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century—talks to… READ MORE

Stephanie Urdang speaks at SACP’s panel “Gender Equality and Women’s Emancipation: Lessons learned…”

February 20, 2024

Stephanie J. Urdang, South African anti-apartheid activist, gender specialist, journalist, and author–most recently of Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa–spoke recently on a panel sponsored by the Jack Simons Party School of the South African Communist Party, on “Gender Equality and Women’s Emancipation: Lessons learned from the struggle against Portuguese Colonialism.” Watch, below, or on Facebook

Trump’s ‘Patriotic Education’ a Call for White Supremacy and Fascism: Gerald Horne talks to Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news

February 20, 2024

1619 vs. 1776? Trump’s recent speech attacking the New York Times 1619 Project and vaunting his own “1776 Project” is an attempt to rally his base, writes journalist Paul Jay, to create a McCarthyite campaign against the left, and devise conditions for hanging on, even if Trump loses the election. Hear historian and author Gerald Horne‘s on take on all this, as he joins Paul Jay on theanalysis.news podcast…

Anticipating the U.S. presidential election, Gerald Horne talks to The Platypus Review

February 20, 2024

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…”

CubaSi reviews Don Fitz’s “Cuban Health Care: the Ongoing Revolution”

February 20, 2024

After the triumph of the Revolution, Cuba set phenomenal goals, the biggest of all being the remaking of its medical system as a free service for all: health as a human right. Don Fitz comprehensively charts the 61 years that transformed Cuba’s health service into one of the best in the world, where people are placed at the very heart of the system…

Via SFtv, KPFA radio: “Tell The Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan For Workers In The Twenty-First Century”

February 20, 2024

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…

Gerald Horne on The Katie Halper Show

February 20, 2024

Historian Gerald Horne appeared recently on The Katie Halper Show and talked to Katie Halper and her cohost Jack Allison about Dr. Horne’s latest book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. They discuss racism, class-consciousness, Trumpism, 2020, the Supreme Court and the creation of White Supremacy…

New! “Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I”

February 20, 2024

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.

New! “Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19”

February 20, 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the world. It shouldn’t have. Since this century’s turn, epidemiologists have warned of new infectious diseases. Indeed, H1N1, H7N9, SARS, MERS, Ebola Makona, Zika, and a variety of lesser viruses have emerged almost annually. But what of the epidemiologists themselves? Some bravely descended into the caves where bat species hosted coronaviruses, including the strains that evolved into the COVID-19 virus. Yet, despite their own warnings, many of the researchers appear unable to understand the true nature of the disease—as if they are dead to what they’ve seen…