Julian Assange, Enemy of the State
Listen to Julian Assange speak from the Ecuador’s embassy in London to a side meeting of the UN General Assembly last Wednesday.
Category: Dissidents
Coming to Clarity during the Vietnam War
At first I would not believe that our allies, our liberators, the Americans, would plan and carry out programs which were total annihilation sweeps. I felt as did so many good Germans during the Nazi…
A Counter Friction To Stop the Machine
The case of Bradley Manning matters. The reason is simple: He touched a nerve. Before releasing over 250,000 diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, Manning commented, “Hilary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going…
August Introduction to Poets: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
At this month’s Introduction to Poets, it will be my pleasure to share the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His 1958 A Coney Island of the Mind has sold more than a million copies. We will…
Three Passions
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. –Bertrand Russell
Nawal El Saadawi: Uncalled-for-boldness
This year I have invited people to participate in an Arab Writers in Translation Reading Circle. Last month, several friends and I met to discuss Egyptian writer Nawal El-Saadawi’s 1983 Memoirs from the Women’s Prison,…
Refusal (Muhammad Ali)
I came across the following when preparing tonight’s session of our reading circle of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (the chapters on the Black Freedom struggle and the Vietnam War). Why should…
To Be Radical Is Habitually To Do Things Which Society at Large Despises
1. I have seen the victims. And this sight of the mutilated dead has exerted such inward change upon me That the words of corrupt diplomacy appear to me more and more in their true…
Subversives
1. The very definition of democracy is the right to innovation, invention, and imagination. Since nothing in the current social organization is sacred, democracy becomes subversive by nature. Subversion is the driving force of social…
450 Years Apart: From the Beginnings of Western Civilization in the Americas To Several Years Ago
(Or, How to Treat Those Who Are in Your Way, Actually or Potentially) Several of us are beginning to make our way through Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. A couple of…