Category: The War-making State

Beyond the Support the Troops Syndrome

I recently read  a collection of essays in Brenda M. Boyle’s The Vietnam War: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature.   Academics explored authors like Bao Ninh (The Sorrow of War), Michael Herr (Dispatches), Duong…

The Ultimate in Jewish Nightmares

I was sitting outside at RISE with a young Irish-Jewish American friend who asked me, when I showed her a particular chapter in Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, “Who is Abbie Hoffman?” It was a pleasure…

Finkelstein’s Pessimism and Optimism

Philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as three masters of suspicion in the modern West.  Over the last three decades, Norman Finkelstein has shown himself to be a contemporary  maven of suspicion when…

An Option for “Unworthy Victims”

On Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Year First published in the National Catholic Reporter, fall 1997 Some years back, the political critics Noam Chomsky and…

Theme of Class #2: From Up in the Air

In our Thursday evening class, Walking Together without Fear: Reading and Writing with Alice Walker, we pondered the following reflections from Alice Walker, Denise Levertov, and Fred Branfman. 1. Alice Walker, Thousands of Feet Below…

“People Know My Lai”

Cal wrote to Carla Nguyen and me in an email: “People know My Lai (Or they think they do) People over 60 or so Remember the name Calley But what about the others? I don’t…

A Journalist/4

I regularly prowled the arms bazaars of the Middle East, seeking an answer to the same old questions. Who are the men who produce this vile equipment? How can they justify their trade? How will…