Latest News: Author Archive

“Iraq’s new prime minister faces a host of challenges. Coronavirus is just one of them” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn writes for the Independent

Wednesday, June 17th, 2020
Plunging oil revenues, an Isis fightback and a brewing US-Iran conflict make Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s job a tough one, Patrick Cockburn writes.

Read the full article here.

“Why aren’t we seeing more, not less, of the political figures whose programs and insights are today more relevant than ever?” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek writes for RT

Wednesday, June 17th, 2020
With everything that’s plunging the world into chaos right now, one thing surprising me is, why are Greta Thunberg and Bernie Sanders comparatively quiet? Make no mistake, racism, climate issues and the pandemic are all connected.

Except for a short note from Greta that she thinks she survived the Covid infection, the movement she has mobilized has failed to avoid getting drowned out by the Covid-19 pandemic panic and the anti-racism protests in the US. As for Bernie, although he advocated measures (like universal healthcare) which are now, amid the pandemic, recognized as necessary all around the world, he is also effectively nowhere to be seen or heard. Why aren’t we seeing more, not less, of the political figures whose programs and insights are today more relevant than ever?

Read the full article here.

“Matt Taibbi responds to critics” — HATE INC. author interviewed on Hill TV’s Rising

Wednesday, June 17th, 2020

“The American Press Is Destroying Itself” — HATE INC. author Matt Taibbi writes on Substack

Monday, June 15th, 2020

A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press

Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters.

Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem. Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.

But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

Read the full article here.

“The jokes in parliament prove British leaders have no idea how bad slavery was—and why people are protesting” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn writes for the Independent

Monday, June 15th, 2020
The description of what slavers did as “atrocities” is not an exaggeration. Appreciation of the savage reality of slavery is clouded among white populations by films like Gone with the Wind which emphasise sentimental attachments between master and slave. One way to understand what it was really like is to recall how Isis enslaved the Yazidis in northern Iraq and Syria in 2014, murdering men, women and children and selling thousands of women into sexual slavery.

Terrified women held in Isis jails waited to be raped and sold to the highest bidder. “The first 12 hours of capture were filled with sharply mounting terror,” says a UN report on what happened in one jail. “The selection of any girl was accompanied by screaming as she was forcibly pulled from the room, with her mother and any other women who tried to keep hold of her being brutally beaten by [Isis] fighters. [Yazidi] women and girls began to scratch and bloody themselves in an attempt to make themselves unattractive to potential buyers.” The reference comes from With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State by Cathy Otten.

Read the full article here.

“The Cynical Forces Behind America’s Forever Wars” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn interviewed on Scheer Intelligence

Friday, June 12th, 2020

“Pandemic! Protests! Panic!” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek interviewed on Big Think

Thursday, June 11th, 2020

“Today Ellsberg is celebrated as the patron saint of whistleblowers while Assange is locked in a cell in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison for 23 and a half hours a day” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author and IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE contributor Patrick Cockburn writes for the London Review of Books

Thursday, June 11th, 2020
Julian Assange in Limbo
Julian Assange was running WikiLeaks in 2010 when it released a vast hoard of US government documents revealing details of American political, military and diplomatic operations. With extracts published by the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País, the archive provided deeper insight into the international workings of the US state than anything seen since Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971. But today Ellsberg is celebrated as the patron saint of whistleblowers while Assange is locked in a cell in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison for 23 and a half hours a day. In this latest phase of the American authorities’ ten-year pursuit of Assange, he is fighting extradition to the US. Court hearings to determine whether the extradition request will be granted have been delayed until September by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the US he faces one charge of computer hacking and 17 counts under the Espionage Act of 1917. If he is convicted, the result could be a prison sentence of 175 years.

Read the full article here.

“Pat Robertson: ‘God’s Chosen Candidate'” — THE GOSPEL OF SELF author Terry Heaton interviewed on Long Shots podcast with Conor Powell

Thursday, June 11th, 2020

“Both the hard right and liberal left are steeped in racism and its legacy. The hope for change comes from elsewhere” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek writes for the Independent

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
What emerges in violent protests on the streets of America is an anger that cannot be adequately represented in our political space, writes Slavoj Zizek

Read the full article here.

“Defeat ISIS, betray the Kurds, murder the Iranian military mastermind—what does it add up to?” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn interviewed on Here & There

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020

“The ordeal we face is not lockdown and isolation, but what happens when our societies start to move again” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek writes for the Independent

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
Authoritarians are exploiting this crisis, writes Slavoj Zizek. If China succeeds in Hong Kong, the violent takeover of Taiwan could be the next step – then a full scale Pacific war

Read the full article here.

“Media-Darling Cop Terence Monahan’s Legacy of Brutality” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm writes for the Indypendent

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
He took a knee on Monday night at Union Square protests, garnering the effusive praise of Mayor Bill de Blasio. But on Thursday night, he quite literally looked the other way when cops started roughing up protesters in the Bronx.In between, Chief of Department Terence Monahan — the NYPD’s highest-ranked uniform officer — appeared on the network-TV morning shows and with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, whose “Big Brother” apologized to Monahan for criticizing the department’s handling of looting earlier in the week.

Relatively unknown outside of police circles until now, Monahan is suddenly in the spotlight. Yet throughout his nearly four-decade career with the NYPD, Monahan has been a leading practitioner of both broken-windows policing and crackdowns on protests, two of the main issues that enrage many activists on the streets today.

Read the full article here.

“Frank Sinatra, Woody Guthrie, Arthur Miller & the Reds on the Brooklyn Waterfront” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN excerpt published in the Indypendent

Friday, June 5th, 2020
New York City during the 1930s and 1940s saw a unique array of political alliances. Although FDR was a Democrat, he was not connected to the party’s two leading machines in the city, Tammany Hall in Manhattan and its counterpart in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, FDR’s close ally Fiorello La Guardia was a liberal Republican.

La Guardia (aka the “Little Flower”) was also closely linked to leftist Congressman Vito Marcantonio and the garment union-driven American Labor Party (ALP), which had strong ties to the Communist Party (CPUSA). Here’s a sampling of how these connections played out just after the war, with Woody Guthrie, then living on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, as our point of entry.

Read the full excerpt here.

“I don’t agree with those who claim that now is no time for politics… No! Now is a great time for politics, because the world in its current form is disappearing.” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek profiled in Haaretz

Thursday, June 4th, 2020
The pandemic is liable to worsen, ecological disasters loom and technological surveillance will terminate democracy. Salvation will come only by reorganizing human society. A conversation with the radical – and anxious – philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

Read the full profile here.

“It is a sad paradox, but perhaps not surprising, that some of humanity’s greatest writing has been born in times of turmoil.” — CAUTIVOS author Ariel Dorfman writes for the Washington Post

Thursday, June 4th, 2020
Let me invoke Miguel de Cervantes who, for six long months, was unjustly incarcerated in Seville at the end of the 16th century. It was there that he began to write his groundbreaking “Don Quixote de la Mancha,” a process I have conjured up in my own recent novel “Cautivos.”

Read the full article here.

“Anti-lockdown protesters show how the idea of ‘freedom’ has degenerated” — AN INHERITANCE FOR OUR TIMES editors Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson write for Salon

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

How a reductive, anti-social conception of liberty became mainstream

Read the full article here.

“A rich and compelling examination of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 literary classic” — CRUSOE AND HIS CONSEQUENCES reviewed in Peace News

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

This is a rich and compelling examination of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 literary classic Robinson Crusoe – the story of a shipwrecked man who survives on a desert island for 28 years, two months and 19 days.

Read the full review here.

“Do we really want a new Cold War with China? Mainstream media thinks so” — THE WRONG STORY author Greg Shupak writes for Salon

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

Corporate media is laying the ideological groundwork for a new cold war with China, presenting the nation as a hostile power that needs to be kept in check.

Read the full article here.

“What Does Art Have to Do With the Coronavirus?” — THE ANIMALS’ VEGAN MANIFESTO author Sue Coe featured in the New York Times

Monday, June 1st, 2020

Art that raises awareness of the state of our planet can be especially important in today’s world. One example of this is the work of the contemporary artist and illustrator Sue Coe, whose pieces on animal mistreatment have been ignored or, at best, marginalized by an art community that seems to privilege meaninglessness over consequential work.

Read the full article here.

“It’s time to end the phony war and take back the streets.” — THE MONSTER ENTERS author Mike Davis writes for the Nation

Monday, June 1st, 2020

A Call to Revolt

Read the full article here.

“Albany County District Attorney David Soares, once a promising criminal justice reformer, faces primary challenge from the left” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm writes for the Intercept

Monday, June 1st, 2020

UNTIL 2018, New York was behind the curve in terms of criminal justice reform. But spurred by grassroots activists, that year the state legislature surged to the forefront, creating a prosecutorial misconduct commission and initiating debate over the landmark bail reforms passed in early 2019.

The commission was later deemed unconstitutional (because of how its members would be chosen), and the bail reforms were scaled back earlier this year. One of the most vocal opponents of the new measures was Albany County District Attorney David Soares, who served as head of District Attorneys Association of New York, or DAASNY, from 2018 to 2019.

Now, Soares has a target on his back. First elected in 2004 as a promising criminal justice reformer who campaigned on opposition to the Rockefeller Drug Laws, Soares is now being challenged from the left by Albany defense attorney Matt Toporowski, a former prosecutor in Soares’s office.

Read the full article here.

“In American protests, victims of Trump’s policies help the criminal erase the crime” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek writes for RT

Monday, June 1st, 2020
Be they against the Covid-19 lockdown or police brutality, the protests gripping the US stem from a ‘money or life’ choice, where people are forced to choose money. The poor are victims, helping to cover up the crime against them.

Read the full article here.

NEW VIDEO: I ACCUSE! author Norman Finkelstein on the ten-year anniversary of the Gaza flotilla raid

Monday, June 1st, 2020

“Intense and eloquent” — I ACCUSE! reviewed in Mondoweiss

Thursday, May 28th, 2020

Norman Finkelstein’s new book indicts the International Criminal Court for whitewashing Israel

This May 31 marks 10 years since Israeli commandos attacked the Gaza Humanitarian Flotilla in international waters and killed 10 people. Norman Finkelstein, one of the world’s most effective critics of Israel, is observing the occasion with a persuasive indictment of Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC)  in The Hague, for refusing to take legal action over Israel’s lethal attack on the Mavi Marmara, the Flotilla’s flagship.

At first glance, Finkelstein’s new book resembles a legal brief. But start reading more closely, and you soon see his trademark indignation, intense and eloquent.

Read the full review here.

“Prescient” — THE MONSTER ENTERS reviewed in Counterfire

Thursday, May 28th, 2020
Mike Davis must be feeling like a modern-day Cassandra…

Read the full review here.

“A sober, unidealized assessment of the paths forward.” — PANDEMIC! reviewed in the Arts Fuse

Thursday, May 28th, 2020

Choosing Reality and Survival Over Panic and Barbarism

The cover of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s slim new volume Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World spells it out: “PANIC!” stands prominently and, stuck in the middle, is “DEM” — the demos, or the people. After all, unknown viruses aside, what is a pandemic beyond the panic of the people? In this small, 146-page book recently published by OR Books (all royalties will go to Médecins Sans Frontières), the self-proclaimed Marxist, Hegelian, and Lacanian provocateur argues that we should ignore three fallacious logics fostered by the panic/pandemic: the desire to succumb to the mysterious threat, the imbuing of the event with superstitious significance, and the machinations of panic itself. Rejecting these three temptations, Žižek posits a sober, unidealized assessment of the paths forward.

Read the full review here.

“The Best New Books to Read This Summer” — TALES OF TWO PLANETS featured in Lit Hub

Wednesday, May 27th, 2020
The third in Freeman’s hat trick of anthologies that examines inequalities, Tales of Two Planets, may be the most important, for it addresses a colossal and irreversible threat: climate change. How to tell this story about a landscape so altered by us it’s reciprocating the abuse, where the more vulnerable and poor are more susceptible to environmental injustices?

Freeman asked 36 writers from Iceland to India, who are living within the penumbra of this bifurcated world of disparity and disenfranchisement, to bear witness to climate change beyond mere data. They are the facts on the ground, and their stories about craven US governance, the depletion of species in Burundi, Iceland’s geologic tragedy, the displacement of 20 million people in Pakistan, and resource pilfering and greed in Lebanon trace the inequalities that have also led to environmental imbalances. The purpose of such essays, fictions, reportage, and poems are to remind us—as Lina Mounzer discovers when developers overburden the sewer system in Beirut and it erupts in biblical proportions—we can’t carry on as if things will sort themselves out. We have to live within limits.

It’s a dark path we walk when the majority of the planet belongs to Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a poor, cruel and short life, while Frances Fukumaya’s Last Man, (privileged, well fed, with access to technology and globalization’s muse) inhabits the rest. The Last Man will survive environmental stress and scarcity. The First Man will not. Freeman’s collection is critical to understanding our planet beyond the scope of our own personal plights.

See the full list here.

“For someone with no fixed address, much less country of residence, ‘staying at home’ was a novel and initially terrifying concept.” — EXILE author Belén Fernández writes for the New York Times

Monday, May 25th, 2020
Read the full piece here.

“Best Books of Summer 2020” — TALES OF TWO PLANETS featured in Time

Monday, May 25th, 2020
Climate change is such an enormous and unwieldy thing that it often feels hard to see, like trying to comprehend the Titanic while standing six inches away from its hull. In Tales of Two Planets, writer and editor John Freeman tries to make the danger clear by offering readers a range of views — fiction, essays, even poetry, spanning locations from Florida to the Himalayas — while zeroing in on the way that global warming intersects with disparities. Writers in the collection, edited by Freeman, include Margaret Atwood and Edwidge Danticat.

See the full list here.

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