On Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi
Journal, July 2005 Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank…
Category: Power and Ideology
Resistance in the United States of Amnesia
I noticed this post by veteran and medical student Juan Miguel Spinnato: “I always need to remind myself that most of the American public still isn’t able to see Bush’s war in Iraq as a…
Burning Children and the Duty to Resist
In May 1968 Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wrote a statement on behalf of the Catonsville Nine as to why they were performing an act of civil disobedience in protest of the Vietnam War. It reads,…
Minutes
1. The factory inspectors had to confront the problem of how the working day might be defined in practice. At what times should laborers get to work? Is the start-up time inside the factory or…
Getting Free
I randomly picked up a book of interviews with Noam Chomsky off my shelf, and turned to a random page therein and found this, from 1983– There are a vast number of people who are…
The Way It Looked in 1973
In March 1973 Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir Paid a visit to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger Politicians shmooze as easily as they breathe Meir was grateful for US support of Israel And urged the…
Just Received a Book in Today’s Mail…
And opened to a random page which was “xi” of Arundhati Roy’s foreword to the re-issue of Noam Chomsky’s For Reasons of State She writes: Perhaps this belief in its own divinity also explains why…
Consider the Source
The Pentagon will gladly supply, on request, such information as the quantity of ordnance expended in Vietnam. From 1965 through 1969 this amounts to about 4.5 million tons by aerial bombardment. This is nine times…
Hamas and Ourselves
1. U.S. critics refer to “Hamas’s genocidal charter” as odious. No doubt it is. Of course, the U.S. was a practitioner of genocide of the indigenous population across this land. Perhaps a few of those…