Finkelstein/Chomsky
The Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire once wrote, “There’s room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.” Late in life, when his political horizons broadened out, Edward Said would often quote this line. We should make…
Category: Power and Ideology
Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose
The following is from a 1983 interview with MIT professor Noam Chomsky… Interviewer: If you were to wake up tomorrow morning, and find yourself at the State Department, not MIT, and you were Secretary, what…
The Battle of the Gods
Zainab al-Ghazali, Return of the Pharaoh: Memoir in Nasir’s Prison Translated by Mokrane Guezzou Our goal is reformation and not sabotage, edification not destruction. Zainab al-Ghazali Nawal el-Saadawi may have met her match in Zainab…
The Prophetic, the Socratic, and the Democratic
Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism Pat Geier, a dear friend in Louisville, once told me of one of her favorite adages that dated back to the civil right movement: “If you see…
Countering Chaos
Alexander Cockburn, A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture Verso, 2013 Daisy Cockburn: When I was a teenager my father used to suggest I read the dictionary when I…
Act Two by Andrew Wimmer
My friend Andrew Wimmer emailed the following to some of us, and gave me permission to share here… In May 2016, Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker: “There is a simple formula for descriptions…
The Power of Footnotes
1. My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud. I love the idea of parallel texts, with long, discursive footnotes and marginal commentary, texts commenting on texts. –Noam Chomsky, Mother Jones interview, 1987…
The Goal Is Justice, the Method Is Transparency
For those who would like to know a little more about the issues surrounding Julian Assange and Wikileaks, please take two minutes to read and ponder the following passages from Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler’s…
For So They Treated the Prophets…
Here’s Noam Chomsky–True prophets like Amos — “dissident intellectuals,” in modern terminology — offered both elevated moral lessons, which the people in power weren’t fond of, and geopolitical analyses that usually turned out to be…
What a Joy to Run the World!
When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the United States, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality, and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they…