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
Category: Dissidents
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…
Resisters/Veterans
It’s not going to be easy to hear what we have to say. It’s not going to be easy for us to tell it. But we believe that the only way this war is going…
Responsibility to Our “Unworthy Victims”
On Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide. Many years ago, I wrote a critical study of acclaimed moralist Elie Wiesel in which I tried to account for his trajectory from being…
Wonderful To See Babies Burning: On Howard Zinn’s “The Bomb”
City Lights Open Media Series has done the U.S. people a service in publishing historian Howard Zinn’s The Bomb, a two-part pamphlet that is a contribution to critical thinking about war, and about one of…
An Appreciation of Roy Bourgeois
This was written in 2005 and I am sharing it here for friends who may be headed this weekend to Fort Benning. For some of us, the story of Father Roy Bourgeois is familiar. We…