Literature Archives - Page 9 of 55

Burning Books (or Rather Book Companies)

11Oct

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature

Burning Books (or Rather Book Companies)

BY TOM ENGELHARDT Photo by Freddy Kearney No one listened better than Studs. For those of you old enough to remember, that’s Studs Terkel, of course. The most notable thing about him in person, though, was this: the greatest interviewer of his moment, perhaps of any moment, never stopped talking, except, of course, when he was listening to produce one of his memorable bestselling oral histories — he essentially created the form — ranging from Working and Hard Times to The Good War. I still remember him calling my house. He was old, his hearing was going, and he couldn’t tell that my teenage son had rushed to answer the phone, hoping it was one of his friends. Instead, finding himself on with Studs talking a mile a minute, my son would begin...

A brief history of the Comintern – the Third International of the working class

21Sep

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature, World

A brief history of the Comintern – the Third International of the working class

The history of the Comintern is the history of the first worldwide wave of working-class revolution. Let its lessons inform our quest to build the next wave. A recent video on Proletarian TV showed a wide-ranging discussion on the historical backdrop to the Communist (Third) International (aka the Comintern), its development and its eventual dissolution, between comrades Harpal Brar of the CPGB-ML and American Marxist Caleb Maupin. During their talk, they touched briefly on the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, the nature of the Chinese revolution, and the tactical shift in Comintern policy between 1928 and 1935 in the face of the rise of fascism. We reproduce here some accompanying background information to those earth-shaking events. The video itself can be viewe...

Attack on Salman Rushdie: The Increasing Threat of Bigotry and Fanaticism

15Sep

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature, USA

Attack on Salman Rushdie: The Increasing Threat of Bigotry and Fanaticism

Posted by: John Phoenix The attack on Salman Rushdie again reminds us of need to strengthen struggle against the prevailing bigotry, fanaticism spreading at a global scale across the nations. He was attacked and seriously wounded on 12.08.2022 in New York at a public event in which he was invited to speak. We condemn this heinous act and wish him a speedy and complete recovery. Despite the constant threats he faced since the ‘90s, as also the translators of his book ‘Satanic Verses’ belonging to Norway, Italy and Japan, wherein one of the translators from Japan – Hitoshi Igarashi – died, the security lapse in this case of the public event in the US, is a matter of serious concern. The Ayatollah of Iran had issued an edict calling for Rushdie to be killed - and this made him and the tra...

American Pravda: Understanding World War II

27Aug

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature

American Pravda: Understanding World War II

The Shaping Event of Our Modern World RON UNZ Audio Segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 Pat Buchanan and “the Unnecessary War” In late 2006 I was approached by Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative (TAC), who told me that his small magazine was on the verge of closing without a large financial infusion. I’d been on friendly terms with McConnell since around 1999, and greatly appreciated that he and his TAC co-founders had been providing a focal point of opposition to America’s calamitous foreign policy of the early 2000s. In the wake of 9/11, the Israel-centric Neocons had somehow managed to seize control of the Bush Administration while also gaining complete ascendancy over America’s leading media outlets, purging...

Analysing the History of a Controversial Movement

26Aug

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature

Analysing the History of a Controversial Movement

American Pravda: Holocaust Denial RON UNZ Audio Segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Reason Magazine and Holocaust Denial A few years ago I somehow heard about a ferocious online dispute involving a left-leaning journalist named Mark Ames and the editors of Reason magazine, the glossy flagship publication of America’s burgeoning libertarian movement. Although I was deep in my difficult programming work, curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to take a look. During the Immigration Wars of the 1990s, I’d become quite friendly with the Reason people, frequently visiting their offices, especially during my “English” campaign of 1998, when I’d located my own political headquarters in the same small Westside LA office building they u...

The Timing Behind the Attack on Salman Rushdie

25Aug

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature, United Kingdom

The Timing Behind the Attack on Salman Rushdie

E. MICHAEL JONES Share to Gab Author Salman Rushdie. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. On Friday, August 12, a 24-year-old New Jersey resident by the name of Hadi Matar stormed the stage in western New York where the Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie was scheduled to speak and stabbed him 15 times before he was subdued by a security guard and members of the audience.[1] The assault was immediately labeled “an assault on freedom of thought and speech”[2] after Rushdie was praised as “an inspirational defender of persecuted writers and journalists across the world.”[3] Missing from this and other news accounts was the role which Rushdie played as an agent provocateur in a campaign that was designed to provoke violent responses from the Islamic world, which wou...

Those Angry at Rushdie’s Stabbing Have Been Missing in Action Over a Far Bigger Threat to Our Freedom

25Aug

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature, United Kingdom

Those Angry at Rushdie’s Stabbing Have Been Missing in Action Over a Far Bigger Threat to Our Freedom

JONATHAN COOK Nothing I am about to write should be read as diminishing in any way my sympathy for Salman Rushdie, or my outrage at the appalling attack on him. Those who more than 30 years ago put a fatwa on his head after he wrote the novel The Satanic Verses made this assault possible. They deserve contempt. I wish him a speedy recovery. But my natural compassion for a victim of violence and my regularly expressed support for free speech should not at the same time blind me or you to the cant and hypocrisy generated by his stabbing on Friday, just as he was about to give a talk in a town in Western New York. British prime minister Boris Johnson said he was “appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie has been stabbed while exercising a right we should never cease to d...

Stabbing Salman Rushdie: How a Leftist Literary Giant Has Worked to Destroy Free Speech, Not Defend It

25Aug

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature, United Kingdom

Stabbing Salman Rushdie: How a Leftist Literary Giant Has Worked to Destroy Free Speech, Not Defend It

TOBIAS LANGDON They yawned and looked the other way. That was how leftists reacted to a report in July 2022 describing how at least 1,000 White working-class girls had been raped, prostituted and sometimes brutally murdered by Muslim sex-criminals in merely one town in the English Midlands. The girls were white-trash nobodies, you see, and not worthy of leftist commentary or concern. But when the bad and pretentious novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed in New York by a “man from New Jersey,” leftists howled with shock and dismay. Like the cartoonists murdered at Charlie Hebdo in 2016, Rushdie is a leftist and his fellow leftists felt his pain. Maggie’s mighty intellect And like his great friend Christopher Hitchens, Rushdie is a dishone...

22Aug

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature, USA

From Book Banning to Book Burning

BY DAVID ROSEN Photo by Freddy Kearney PEN America recently reported that over the previous nine-month period there were 1,586 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,145 unique book titles. These incidents took place in 86 school districts in 26 states; they represented 2,899 schools with a combined enrollment of over 2 million students. “What is novel for people to understand is that this is being organized and perpetrated at a level we’ve not seen before,” noted Jonathan Friedman, director, free expression and education at PEN America. “It’s part of a movement adjacent to politics but very much part of an effort to gin-up outrage over books in schools in an election year.” He added: But what we are seeing here is coordination.&...

8Aug

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature

India at 75: The Siege Within

Posted by: John Phoenix 2022 is the 75th anniversary of India's independence and the 125th anniversary of the birth of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Desperate to appropriate the icons of India's freedom struggle, the Modi government has designated January 23, the birth anniversary of Subhas Chandra Bose as the official beginning of India's Republic Day celebrations and announced the decision to install a giant statue of this iconic freedom fighter at India Gate. From the response of Bose's daughter we know that the committee formed to plan the commemoration of Bose's 125th birth anniversary never met and the decision to install a hologram statue pending the sculpting of the real one came after the rejection of the Subhas Chandra Bose tableau proposal put forward by the West Bengal govern...