February 20, 2024
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!
February 20, 2024
How and why the U.S. left has tailed the ruling class on such a bedrock matter as conceptualizing white supremacy soars far beyond the confines of this brief response…..What does this mean for today? It means rejecting the new Cold War against Russians and Chinese and, instead, forging alliances with both. It means linking demands for reparations nationally with likeminded struggles in the Caribbean and Africa. It means realizing that the uncanny ability of some on the U.S. left to hand rhetorical weapons to the right to bash the oppressed – from “political correctness” to “cancel culture” – is hardly a coincidence or accident but simply another expression of a “cross-class alliance” that has propped up settler colonialism from its inception…..
February 20, 2024
“…It’s no accident, as historians like to say, that the Founding Father George Washington was a grand real estate speculator, just like the 45th U.S. President…”
February 20, 2024
“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….”
February 20, 2024
“‘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?”
February 20, 2024
“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?”
February 20, 2024
“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….”
February 20, 2024
“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.
February 20, 2024
As a work of social history, Jazz and Justice traces the origins of Jazz in the northern part of this hemisphere, but the issues it raises are quite contemporary. As his reviewer notes, “the now-common expression ‘gig work’ originated in the jazz world. The near-endless list of Black jazz musicians who have died early deaths is testimony to the overwork the gig economy forced on them.”
February 20, 2024
“…from the world of Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory through to that of the Marsalis family, with the common thread being New Orleans, often cited as the birthplace of the music…an anatomy of resistance; at every stage, despite Jim Crow, gangsters and extreme violence, jazz developed and bloomed….”
