How did the Black Panthers go from a powerful grassroots movement to a drug and strife ridden organization with its best leaders dead? What happened to the American Indian Movement (AIM)? Answer: Counterinsurgency, American style. State financed, illegal methods of framing, blaming and murdering activists has quite a history. From anti-labor Pinkerton thugs, the Palmer raids on Anarchists, to infiltration of anti-globalization protests, Churchill sends activists a warning.
Liberal activism often embraces non-violent resistance in response to state-sponsored terrorism at home and abroad. In this emotional critique, Ward Churchill urges activists to support any and all tactics in order to stop the tyranny of the state. Churchill argues that the terrorist attack of 9/11 disrupted U.S. global capitalism more radically than any peaceful protest the Left has been able to organize. Recorded at a packed and fired up AK Press warehouse in Oakland.
Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Cherokee) is professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado/Boulder, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, and a National Spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.
After having a conversation on the phone with Burroughs in 1968, Giorno initiated the Dial-A-Poem Poets concept, which he claimed would later influence the creation of information services creation over the telephone, such as sports and stock market. Fifteen phone lines were connected with individual answering machines: people would call GPS and listen to a poem they were offered from fragments of various live recordings. Dial-A-Poem, from 1969 on, was very successful, with 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. to 11.30 p.m. peaks. GPS used a variety of social issues at the time, what with the sexual revolution and the Vietnam War, which would create appeal as well as shock from the reactive community.
On this LP of Dial-A-Poem Poets are 27 poets. The records are a selection of highlights of poetry that spontaneously grew over 20 years from 1953 to 1972, mostly in America, representing many aspects and different approaches to dealing with words and sound. The poets are from the New York School, Bolinas and West Coast Schools, Concrete Poetry, Beat Poetry, Black Poetry and Movement Poetry.
The Transformations Of Language Under The Influence Of The Psychedelic Experience:
Berkley, CA (October 1983)
"I think the gradual evolution of language is actually the gradual lifting of the veil that is imposed between ourselves and meaning by the planetary ecology. In other words, the forward thrust of history is actually regulated by the ecology, and it is regulated through control of the evolution of language. Because what you cannot think you cannot do, and where you cannot imagine you cannot steer your culture and go. So I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops and therefore regulates the evolution of human culture generally."
The bulk of Pound's work on The Cantos began after his move to Italy. Like all the other great epics, it is the story of good and evil, a descent into hell and progress to paradise. Its hundreds of characters fall into three groups: those who enjoy hell and stay there; those who experience a metamorphosis and want to leave; and a few who lead the rest to paradiso terrestre. He began work on it in 1915, but there were several false starts and he abandoned most of his earlier drafts, beginning again in 1922. The subject matter ranges from Odysseus, Troy, Dionysus, Malatesta Confucius, and Napoleon, to Jefferson and Mussolini, Chinese history, Pisa, and usury, relying on memories, diaries, jokes, hymns, anecdotes, ideogrammic translation, and up to 15 different languages. Allen Tate, who supported Pound for the Bollingen Prize for the sections of The Cantos known as the Pisan Cantos, writes that the poem is not about anything, and has no beginning, middle, or end. He argues that Pound was incapable of sustained thought and was "at the mercy of random flights of 'angelic insight,' Icarian self-indulgences of prejudices."
What are citizens to do when confronted by unjust laws and when their government embroils them in unjust wars? Delivered in the context of the current U.S. war in Iraq, this recording is a scintillating lecture and discussion by the legendary teacher, historian, playwright and activist. Howard Zinn offers from the lens of history, models, ideas and inspiration for how and why we might go about challenging and changing the structures of power, the necessity of civil disobedience for a functioning democracy, and its centrality to social movements.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italian-born immigrants, workers, and anarchists, who were tried and convicted in 1921 for the armed robbery and murder of two payroll guards. After 7 years of legal appeals and international protest, the two men were executed on August 23, 1927 in Boston for a crime that many felt they did not commit and by a judicial system that was patently biased and unjust.
On November 7, 2008, Howard Zinn offered a lecture on “The Meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti” at the Dante Alighieri Society Italian Cultural Center, in Cambridge, MA. In his lecture Howard Zinn indicated the relevance of the Sacco and Vanzetti case for America today. Nearly 250 people attended the event, sponsored by the Sacco & Vanzetti Commemoration Society (SVCS) and hosted by the Dante Alighieri Society.
In 70 minutes of lecture and Q & A, Zinn starts with a brief description of his own personal history, and uses these accounts to set the foundation for analyzing important current issues. He addresses such topics as the class-based society in the US and whose interests it benefits. He criticizes the recent war and subsequent occupation of Iraq and illustrates how it compares to other imperial US occupations over the last century.
Recorded at Massachusetts College Of Art, Boston, Massachusetts, October 10, 2001.
The author of The People's History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn has picked a thought-provoking subject for this spoken word CD of a lecture he gave at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston on October 10, 2001. In the wake of September 11 and America's military response to it, he discusses the artist's role in wartime. He sticks to this subject throughout his lecture and is never less than eloquent. He reads marvelous selections of the antiwar writings of Langston Hughes, Mark Twain, and many others. He gives Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five as examples of sly antiwar statements that came out after World War II, "the good war," but which were able to criticize aspects of America's involvement in that war and war in general because they were works of fiction. He talks about all the artists who refused invitations to the White House during the Vietnam War, including singer Eartha Kitt and playwright Arthur Miller. Near the end of his lecture, Zinn makes it clear that he is against all war. He believes the rotten nature of war would corrupt even a worthy cause and that fighting violence with violence is the wrong response to an act of terrorism like September 11. He says that it is artists' patriotic duty to speak up at times when it's not popular to voice dissent against the government and its policies. Whether the listener agrees or not with his against-all-wars stance, nobody could say that Zinn doesn't put forth very persuasive arguments and exceptional, substantive examples to back up all of his ideas. ~ Adam Bregman
What sort of view of our history do we get from Hollywood movies? Why are some stories told and others not? Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States helped to enlarge our sense of history to include the stories of women, minorities, labor struggles, and others forgotten or removed from official histories. In this informal talk given at the Taos Film Festival, Zinn turns his attention to Hollywood, the stories it tells, and the ones it doesn't. He tells the stories of wars from the point of view of disillusioned deserters, of the differences between All Quiet on the Western Front and Saving Private Ryan, of railroad strikes and the Haymarket Affait, Eugene Debs and the real story of Helen Keller, socialist and anti-war agitator. Mother Jones leads a march of 11 and 12-year-old textile workers from Pennsylvania to Roosevelt's vacation home in Oyster Bay to demand better working conditions in the textile mills then at age 85 is thrown in jail for leading the Colorado Coal strike of 1913–14. A spellbinding and provocative talk by America's most beloved historian.
Howard Zinn takes us back to a newly industrialized America, the time of rubber barons, tenements bursting with immigrants, and dramatic labor struggles. Zinn’s colorful cast includes Vanderbilt and Carnegie, the young J. Edgar Hoover, and George Bernard Shaw, Ben Reitman, the king of the hobos; Sacco and Vanzetti, whose arrest and execution produced storms of protest around the world, and Emma Goldman, feminist, anarchist, propagandist extraordinaire.
A People's History of the United States: A Lecture at Reed College
A scintillating lecture and discussion by the legendary teacher, historian and activist. Here Zinn explains with great humor and passion how his teaching, his history and his activism are grounded in the stories of social movements-labor, civil rights, feminists, anti-war-which are usually left out or grossly distorted in mainstream history writing.
The facts are not complicated. Finkelstein dispels the ideological fog surrounding this historic conflict.
Finkelstein lays out the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict with clarity and passion, arguing that any other similar conflict would be perfectly understood, yet this one exists beneath a blanket of ideological fog. Finkelstein cuts through the fog with indisputable historical facts, optimistic that the struggle is winnable, and
