#memoirs of a dissident publisher

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Phyllis Chesler

Can anyone really evaluate Oct. 7—the genocidal pogrom that took place barely a year ago and is not yet over?

After all, scholars are still analyzing pogroms that took place thousands of years ago all over the pagan, Christian and Muslim worlds. Only recently has the scholar Irina Astashkevich documented, in her 2018 work Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in Pogroms: 1917-1921, the terrifying but typical details of the rape and femicide of Jewish women during pogroms that took place more than a century ago.

More than 1,000 pogroms took place in 500 locales. Lives, as well as minds, were lost. Entire communities were erased. In the aftermath, some women attempted suicide, others succeeded, some women stopped menstruating and others had to be psychiatrically hospitalized, most were afraid to go outside forever afterward.

In Astashkevich’s words: “The carnival of violence, complete with scenes of torture, rape and murder, played out on the second day of the pogrom as ‘celebratory street theater.’ Pogrom perpetrators purposefully drove Jews into the streets and hunted down their victims … acts of torture took place in front of an audience of pogrom perpetrators, the local population and frightened Jews. The ritualized violence reiterated the previous pogroms, but often in a more grotesque and horrifying form … . Pogromschiki bayoneted their victims, careful not to kill them, but to leave the wounded to suffer and bleed to death in agony that sometimes lasted for several days … . Pogromschiki made sure that all the apothecaries were wrecked, and there was no medical assistance.”

Even now, decades later, original and important analyses are still emerging about the Holocaust. Just this year, my friend and colleague, Shulamit Reinharz, published an extraordinary book, Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir, which breaks new ground about how some Jews may have survived the Nazis by hiding and by being hidden. Reinharz’s work, which relied upon her father’s “hidden” memoirs letters and conversations, required her considerable academic skills and access to a vast and still-growing literature on the Holocaust and the perspective that more than 80 years in the future can provide. I immediately knew that Oct. 7 was a pogrom, yet my understanding of what was unique about this particular Iranian-funded crime against the Jewish people and humanity overall has evolved in the months since the initial attack. As we approach the first anniversary of that horrific event, a number of items stand out.

First: Hamas terrorists recorded live video footage of their atrocities and released it on social media. They even sent it to the families of those who were tortured, raped, murdered or kidnapped.

Second: The attacks unleashed an ugly and increasingly ominous global firestorm that has cheered on Hamas’s sadism as “resistance” and condemned all Israeli civilians—be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze or Buddhist. It has also led to a seemingly unstoppable, propaganda-driven, worldwide siege against the Jews.

Third: The alleged “progressives” in the West, including the feminists who have, at the very least, paid lip service in vocalizing their opposition to the torture, gang rapes and murders of women, children and dissidents in countries like Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, Iran, Nigeria, Rwanda and Sudan, have remained silent. They refuse to condemn Hamas’s brutality against women on Oct. 7 despite myriad video evidence of the atrocities.

Fourth: Many governments and international organizations keep demanding more and more proof of Hamas’s actions and continue to deny the Oct. 7 atrocities. Yet these same actors have not denied any other 21st-century genocides.

Fifth: More people now know that the raging, masked, keffiyeh-wearing demonstrators who have been flooding American and European cities and campuses since Oct. 7 have been bought and paid for by Russia, Iran, Arab oil money, and woke American philanthropists and foundations. It is also now clear that these same groups have been preparing for this moment for 60 years.

Sixth: As some have suggested, Hamas’s behavior on Oct. 7 seems to have been influenced by the most sadistic pornography, as well as by mood-altering drugs. This sadism rivals and may even exceed the horror of other pogroms or war zones.

Seventh: Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of so-called civilians in Gaza joined in this “carnival of violence.” They surged into Israel right along with the armed paragliders and fiends on motorbikes. Just as some Palestinian Arabs celebrated Sept. 11 by cheering and handing out candies, so, too, did Gazan civilians happily, perhaps even joyfully, sit down, eat, drink and loot Israeli homes, even as Israelis were being tortured, raped and murdered in the next room or very nearby.

This suggests that there are no or very few “innocent” Gazans. These heavily indoctrinated Arabs are barbarians, and the Westerners who support them are not merely bystanders but collaborators.

I am now and forever an Oct. 8 Jew and an Oct. 8 American.

[fatehbaz]

Almost four years after the French Algerian city of Orleansville was devastated by an earthquake in September 1954, the Franco-Algerian playwright Henri Krea published a play that presented the seismic disaster as a harbinger of [...] decolonization. [...] [T]he struggle was still underway when Krea wrote Le seisme: Tragedie. [...] [T]he play’s portrayal of natural disasters is intertwined with its portrayal of Roman/French colonialism in North Africa. [...] For the average historian, “Algeria 1954″ is shorthand for one thing: the beginning of the Algerian Revolution [...]. For the survivors of Orleansville, [...] “Algeria 1954″ invokes not only the revolution but also the earthquake.

For those who experienced environmental disasters in Morocco, Algeria, and France between 1954 and 1960, the consequent horrors were major events, not mere footnotes [...]. The inseparability [...] of disaster and decolonization, was inscribed across a range of historical texts [...]. These disasters occurred in the period of French Africa’s transition to independence [...]. 

Two of the disasters [...] were earthquakes: the September 9, 1954 earthquake and its seismic aftershocks in Algeria’s Chelif Valley, and the February 28, 1960 earthquake in Agadir, Morocco. The other two are of overtly anthropogenic origins: the flooding of Frejus, France, due to the collapse of the Malpasset Dam in 1959, and a mass outbreak of paralysis in 1959 Morocco, caused by a contamination of the food supply with jet engine lubricant from an American airbase.

---

These four disasters were interrelated in multiple ways. Refugees from the Orleansville earthquake found themselves in Frejus when the Malpasset Dam collapsed, and Orleansville became a model for state responses to disaster in both Frejus and Agadir. The experience of the 1959 poisoning altered the political calculus of both the US State Department and the Moroccan political opposition following the 1960 earthquake. [...]. 

Steinberg has argued that the modern idea of a “natural” disaster is a technology of power, allowing elites to obscure the processes that produce disproportionate suffering among the disempowered. [...]

Scholars Gregory Mann and Emmanuelle Saada, among others, have urged their colleagues to integrate the study of particular localities into our understanding of imperialism in both metropole and colony [...], to see beyond the colonial cultures and discourses of the imperial administrative centers (Paris, Dakar) [...].

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The historiographic turn toward locality parallels efforts by Algerian scholars and memoirists to explore and remember local pasts [...]. Ait Saada’s examination of the Chelif Valley details an enduring discourse about the violence of the environment in Algeria that has persisted from the time of French conquest [...].

Ait Saada explains that the association of natural disaster with the uprising of the Algerian people appeared not only in the work of Henri Krea but also in that of other Algerian writers such as Habib Tengour and Belgacem Ait Ouyahia [...], as well as Jean Millecam and Mohamed Magani. Ait Saada could also have included the leftist dissidents Boualem Khalfa, Henri Alleg, and Abdelhamid Benzin, who echoed Krea in the memoir of the dissident newspaper Alger Republicain: “The autumn of 1954 opened with cataclysm. As if nature wanted to be the herald of the hurricane that, for more than seven years, would tear apart and convulse the country.” [...]

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The intersections of colonialism and decolonization with environmental calamity are equally evident in writings about the disasters in Frejus, Agadir, and Meknes. In Morocco, there has been much interest in distinct histories of localities long neglected in nationalist historiographeis [...]. This interest is due both to the widespread perception [...] that the 1960 earthquake had a deleterious and disorienting effect on Agadir’s relation to Moroccan heritage and identity and to the countervailing narrative of the Berber cultural movement that posits Agadir as the “capital” of Morocco’s Berber culture. [...]

[I]n these localities, the experience of catastrophe was inseparable from the upheavals of decolonization, and the shape of decolonization was crafted by catastrophe.

---

Text by: Spencer Segalla. “Chapter One: Introduction.” Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954. 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me.]

[alaturkanews]

Russian opposition leader Navalny knew he would die in prison, says memoir

Excerpts from Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s upcoming memoir published in New York magazine show that the dissident believed he would die in prison. The passages were published in anticipation of Navalny’s memoir, “Patriot”, which will be released on 22 October. “I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here,” Navalny reportedly wrote in March 2022, adding, “There will not…

[dankusner]

Navalny’s memoir from prison is a plea to keep resisting Putin

BOOKS

Happy and fearless

Well-meaning people would ask Alexei Navalny, the scourge of Russian President Vladimir Putin, why he ever decided to return home from Germany in 2021, after Putin’s agents tried to kill him with a nerve agent called Novichok, and nearly succeeded.

Airlifted to Germany for emergency medical treatment after the poisoning, Navalny was arrested as soon as he set foot back on Russian soil.

He was imprisoned in increasingly awful conditions and apparently killed earlier this year, at the age of 47.

His answer, as recounted in his posthumously published memoir, Patriot , is that there was no way he could not return.

He loved Russia, loved Russians (most of them), felt that he had an obligation to continue the fight against Putin, and knew that if he stayed in exile, he would be acknowledging Putin’s power over him.

“So what’s my first duty?” he wrote.

“That’s right, not to be intimidated and not to shut up.”

A better question, really, is how Navalny managed to stay so incredibly optimistic through all his travails.

He was without doubt the sunniest Russian politician who ever stood on a soapbox.

Honest, full of penetrating wit and with a nice ear for mockery, he was nonetheless as cheerful and empathetic as Putin is malevolent and threatening.

He wielded cheerfulness as a weapon, and never lost faith that the right side must eventually prevail, even if he might no longer be around to see it.

Toward the end of his life, as he sat in solitary confinement in an Arctic prison camp, he wrote,

“My plan … was not to become brutalized and bitter and lose my laid-back demeanor; that would mean the beginning of my defeat.”

I called him a politician, because that’s how he saw himself — as someone organizing a people’s movement.

A handsome lawyer, Navalny wrote a blog about graft and founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which, as he put it, deployed earnest investigators who were “somewhere between journalists, lawyers and political activists.”

The foundation posted videos on YouTube of palatial palaces and oceangoing yachts owned by officials with modest salaries, and they have been seen by millions.

Navalny made use of other social media sites as well, including Instagram and TikTok.

He tried to run for president in 2018, but was struck off the ballot by the electoral commission.

He admired the old Soviet-era dissidents, he wrote, but his aim was not to be an outcast, not to be on the fringes of society; it was to bring his fellow Russians together and stoke their desire for a more honest society and system to the point where they could no longer be denied.

He called Russians “a good people with a bad state,” and told them they should change their famous habit of being proud of themselves for enduring hardships when, in fact, with a decent government those hardships never would have happened.

And so, to his compatriots he wrote, “Come on, cheer up. If you’re alive and well and out there, you’re doing all right. Finish your pumpkin latte and go do something to bring Russia closer to freedom.”

He would tailor his message to his audience.

Addressing a court of appeals, he didn’t stress freedom, saying:

“We need to fight not so much because Russia is not free as because overall it is unhappy in every respect.”

Patriot is breezy, especially when Navalny surveys the downfall of the Soviet Union, the continuities between that era and the present in Russia, and his own coming of age.

I don’t mean that as a criticism.

He brings a wry and sensible touch to everything from his denunciations of corruption to his meticulous efforts to brew a decent cup of coffee in prison.

He started writing the book while recovering in Germany from the Novichok attack.

He didn’t finish it, of course.

His wife, Yulia, put the manuscript together, interspersed with social media posts that Navalny was able to deliver and publish through his lawyers.

Those posts tend to be a little more pointed than the rest of his prose.

But throughout, his argument is that the corruption and dishonesty of the Putin reign are not that complicated, and the grifters in and around the Kremlin are not that smart. It doesn’t take a deep dive to know what’s what.

Quoting the Soviet-era writer Vasily Shukshin (1929-1974), Navalny said that lies cover Russia “like a scab.”

He wrote that he didn’t want the book to be a prison diary, though there’s quite a lot about his cellmates, one of whom was a thief specializing in antiques, which amused and fascinated him.

He also dwelled on his aching back, his rare glimpses of the sky, why he enjoyed reading Maupassant more than Flaubert in his cell, the food parcels from home and the ludicrously inane regulations.

A cellmate handed him an apple, it was caught on a security camera and the cellmate was forced to take it back.

As Navalny was moved to ever stricter camps, eventually his fellow prisoners were pressured not to talk to him, which must have been especially galling to someone so curious about everyone he met.

He laid out what he called the prisoner’s “golden rule,” about his jailers, but maybe also about the gang in the Kremlin:

“Don’t trust them, don’t fear them, don’t ask them for anything.”

He did feel sorry for his two children.

“You don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.”

About his wife, Yulia — how could he do this to her? — he wrote that she was always on board with his mission, sustaining him through it all.

Toward the end of what he managed to write, he mused about dying in prison.

Yulia had pointed out that the security services might try again to poison him (which they seem to have done, successfully).

What of it? he asked.

He’d had an interesting life, a loving family.

The book ends on a religious note, a vow to seek the Kingdom of God and righteousness, for in midlife Navalny had embraced his Russian Orthodox faith.

Let us acknowledge that he wore his devotion lightly.

I would rather remember him for his happy fearlessness.

The barrage of criminal charges against him, intended to put him away forever, he wrote, was proof of his personal victory over Putinism.

“They now say openly, ‘We are afraid of you. We are afraid of what you will say. We are afraid of the truth.’”

Patriot A Memoir Alexei Navalny, translated from Russian by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel Knopf, $35

[prayersfromlilacveins]

Picard felt strongly that one of the things lacking in modern life is the true encounter—people see and talk to each other but do not really encounter one another; the one gives nothing of himself to the other. To have met Max Picard was an encounter, and to meet him in his work is just as much so. He gave generously of himself; his heart is in his work, and if his reader meets him only part way, he will take with him something that will make him a more nearly complete and a better person.

[greatworldwar2]

• Otto Skorzeny

Otto Skorzeny was an Austrian-born SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in the Waffen-SS during World War II. During the war, he was involved in several operations, including the Gran Sasso raid which rescued Benito Mussolini from captivity.

Otto Skorzeny was born in Vienna on June 12th, 1908 into a middle-class Austrian family which had a long history of military service. His surname is of Polish origin, and Skorzeny's distant ancestors came from a village called Skorzęcin in Greater Poland region. In addition to his native German, he spoke excellent French and was proficient in English. He was a noted fencer as member of a German-national Burschenschaft as a university student in Vienna. He engaged in fifteen personal combats. The tenth resulted in a wound that left a dramatic dueling scar known in academic fencing as a Schmiss (German for "smite" or "hit") on his cheek. In 1931 Skorzeny joined the Austrian Nazi organization and soon became a member of the Nazi SA. A charismatic figure, Skorzeny played a minor role in the Anschluss on March 29th, 1938, when he saved the Austrian President Wilhelm Miklas from being shot by Austrian Nazis.

After the 1939 invasion of Poland, Skorzeny, then working as a civil engineer, volunteered for service in the German Air Force (the Luftwaffe), but was turned down because he was considered too tall at 1.92 metres (6 ft 4 in) and too old (31 years in 1939) for aircrew training. He then joined Hitler's bodyguard regiment, the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH). Skorzeny took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union with the SS Division Das Reich and subsequently fought in several battles on the Eastern Front. In October 1941, he was in charge of a "technical section" of the German forces during the Battle of Moscow. His mission was to seize important buildings of the Communist Party, including the NKVD headquarters at Lubyanka, and the central telegraph office and other high priority facilities, before they could be destroyed. He was also ordered to capture the sluices of the Moscow-Volga Canal because Hitler wanted to turn Moscow into a huge artificial lake by opening them. The missions were canceled as the German forces failed to capture the Soviet capital.

In December 1942, Skorzeny was hit in the back of the head by shrapnel; he was evacuated to the rear for treatment. He was awarded the Iron Cross. While recuperating from his injuries he was given a staff role in Berlin, where he developed his ideas on unconventional commando warfare. Skorzeny's proposals were to develop units specialized in such warfare, including partisan-like fighting deep behind enemy lines, fighting in enemy uniform, and sabotage attacks. In April 1943 Skorzeny's name was put forward by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the new head of the RSHA, and Skorzeny met with Walter Schellenberg, head of Amt VI, Ausland-SD (the SS foreign intelligence service department of the RSHA). Schellenberg charged Skorzeny with command of the schools organized to train operatives in sabotage, espionage, and paramilitary techniques. Skorzeny was appointed commander of the recently created Waffen Sonderverband z.b.V. Friedenthal stationed near Berlin (the unit was later renamed SS Jagdverband 502, and in November 1944 again to SS Combat Unit "Center", expanding ultimately to five battalions). The unit's first mission was in mid-1943, Operation François. Skorzeny sent a group by parachute into Iran to make contact with the dissident mountain tribes to encourage them to sabotage Allied supplies of material being sent to the Soviet Union via the Trans-Iranian Railway. However, commitment among the rebel tribes was suspect, and Operation François was deemed a failure.

Throughout the war Skorzeny and his unit conducted several additional operations including Operation Oak (Unternehmen Eiche, September 1943) and operation planned to rescue of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Operation Long Jump a planned operation to assassinate the "Big Three" (Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt) during the 1943 Tehran Conference. The plot was uncovered before its inception. Skorzeny denied any plan existed. Operation Knight's Leap (Unternehmen Rösselsprung, May 1944) an attempt to capture Yugoslavian partisan leader Josip Broz Tito alive. Operation Griffin (Unternehmen Greif, December 1944) a false flag operation to spread disinformation during the Battle of the Bulge, and Operation Armoured Fist (Unternehmen Panzerfaust a.k.a. Unternehmen Eisenfaust, October 1944) the planned kidnapping of Miklós Horthy Jr. to force his father, Admiral Miklós Horthy, to resign as Regent of Hungary in favor of Ferenc Szálasi, the pro-Nazi leader of the Arrow Cross Party. As part of the German Ardennes offensive in late 1944 (Battle of the Bulge), Skorzeny's English-speaking troops were charged with infiltrating American lines disguised in American uniforms in order to produce confusion to support the German attack. For the campaign, Skorzeny was the commander of a composite unit, the 150th SS Panzer Brigade. As planned by Skorzeny, Operation Greif involved about two dozen German soldiers, most of them in captured American Jeeps and disguised in American uniforms, who would penetrate American lines in the early hours of the Battle of the Bulge to cause disorder and confusion. A handful of his men were captured and spread a rumour that Skorzeny personally was leading a raid on Paris to kill or capture General Eisenhower, who was not amused by having to spend Christmas 1944 isolated for security reasons. Eisenhower retaliated by ordering an all-out manhunt for Skorzeny, with "Wanted" posters distributed throughout Allied-controlled territories featuring a detailed description and a photograph. In all, twenty-three of Skorzeny's men were captured behind American lines and eighteen were executed as spies for contravening the rules of war by wearing enemy uniforms.

Skorzeny spent January and February 1945 commanding regular troops as an acting major general, taking part in the defence of the German provinces of East Prussia and Pomerania, and at the Defence of Schwedt Bridgehead. On March 17th, he received orders to sabotage the last remaining intact bridge across the Rhine at Remagen following its capture by the Allies, but the bridge collapsed that same day, and the naval demolitions squad prepared instead unsuccessfully attacked a nearby Allied pontoon bridge between Kripp and Linz. Hitler awarded him one of Germany's highest military honours, the Oak Leaves to the Knight's Cross. After the war was officially over Skorzeny was interned for two years before being tried as a war criminal at the Dachau trials in 1947 for allegedly violating the laws of war during the Battle of the Bulge. He and nine officers of the Panzerbrigade 150 were tried before a US Military Tribunal in Dachau on 18 August 1947. They faced charges of improper use of US military insignia, theft of US uniforms, and theft of Red Cross parcels from U.S. POWs. The trial lasted over three weeks. The charge of stealing Red Cross parcels was dropped for lack of evidence. Skorzeny admitted to ordering his men to wear US uniforms, but his defence argued that as long as enemy uniforms were discarded before combat started, such a tactic was a legitimate ruse de guerre. Skorzeny was detained in an internment camp at Darmstadt awaiting the decision of a denazification court. On July 27th, 1948 he escaped from the camp with the help of three former SS officers dressed in US Military Police uniforms who entered the camp and claimed that they had been ordered to take Skorzeny to Nuremberg for a legal hearing. Skorzeny afterwards maintained that the US authorities had aided his escape, and had supplied the uniforms.

Skorzeny hid out at a farm in Bavaria which had been rented by Countess Ilse Lüthje, the niece of Hjalmar Schacht (Hitler's former finance minister), for around 18 months, during which time he was in contact with Reinhard Gehlen, and together with Hartmann Lauterbacher (former deputy head of the Hitler Youth) recruited for the Gehlen Organization. Skorzeny was photographed at a café on the Champs Elysées in Paris on February 13th, 1950. The photo appeared in the French press the next day, causing him to move to Salzburg, where he met up with German veterans. Shortly afterwards, with the help of a Nansen passport issued by the Spanish government, he moved to Madrid, where he set up a small engineering business. In April 1950 the publication of Skorzeny's memoirs by the French newspaper Le Figaro caused 1500 communists to riot. In 1952 Egypt was taken over by General Mohammed Naguib. Skorzeny was sent to Egypt the following year by former General Reinhard Gehlen (who was now working indirectly for the CIA) to act as Naguib's military advisor. Skorzeny recruited a staff made up of former SS and Wehrmacht officers to train the Egyptian army. Among these officers were former Wehrmacht generals Wilhelm Fahrmbacher and Oskar Munzel; the head of the Gestapo Department for Jewish Affairs in Poland Leopold Gleim; and Joachim Daemling, former chief of the Gestapo in Düsseldorf. In addition to training the army, Skorzeny also trained Arab volunteers in commando tactics for possible use against British troops stationed in the Suez Canal zone. He stayed on to serve as an adviser to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. According to some sources, he traveled between Spain and Argentina, where he acted as an advisor to President Juan Perón and as a bodyguard for Eva Perón. The Israeli security and intelligence magazine Matara published an article in 1989 claiming that Skorzeny had been recruited by Mossad in 1963 to obtain information on German scientists who were working on an Egyptian project to develop rockets to be used against Israel. According to their information, a Mossad team had started to develop a plan to kill Skorzeny, but chief Isser Harel decided to attempt to recruit him instead, as a man on the inside would greatly enhance their ability to target Nazis who were providing military assistance to Egypt. No confirmed source can explain Skorzeny's motives for working with Israel, but he may have craved adventure and intrigue and feared assassination by Mossad.

In 1970, a cancerous tumour was discovered on Skorzeny's spine. Two tumours were later removed while he was staying at a hospital in Hamburg, but the surgery left him paralyzed from the waist down. Vowing to walk again, Skorzeny spent long hours with a physical therapist; and, within six months, he was back on his feet. Skorzeny died of lung cancer on July 5th, 1975 in Madrid. He was 67 years old. At no point in his life did Skorzeny ever denounce Nazism. He was given a Roman Catholic funeral Mass in Madrid in August 1975. His body was cremated afterwards, and his ashes were later taken to Vienna to be interred in the Skorzeny family plot at Döblinger Friedhof. His funeral "was attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute", according to former Mossad agents who also attended the funeral.

[back-and-totheleft]

“Make it for the soldiers”

The three-time Oscar winner is back with a new book—Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game—and turning its pages is like entering a Stone movie. The one-time infantryman had a single condition in granting HUSTLER this Q&A: “Make it for the soldiers. You’ve got to make it interesting to them.” Movie stars are often household names, but Oliver Stone is one of the few screenwriters and directors to have a high public profile. Now he’s released a new book, and it’s a rip-roaring, rollicking read, full of tense drama and trauma. The 342-page memoir focuses on Stone’s life through the age of 40 and sheds light on what forged Hollywood’s movie maverick and makes him tick.

After the Allies liberated Paris, his father—Colonel Louis Stone, who served on General Eisenhower’s staff—met the Parisian Jacqueline Pauline Cezarine Goddet. In December 1945 they married, which Stone wryly writes was “possibly the greatest mistakes of their lives,” and sailed from France to live in New York, where Louis, a Yale graduate, resumed his Wall Street career as a stockbroker. Stone reveals how their divorce affected him and, for the first time ever, describes in detail his combat experiences in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Coming under fire in Indochina’s jungles ignited an intense mistrust of government and hatred of war that actually compelled Stone to become a filmmaker. As the Chasing the Light subtitle indicates, the book zooms in on four movies and provides a behind-the-scenes peek at Stone’s maneuvering through Tinseltown’s machinations. Stone scored his first Hollywood triumphs as the screenwriter of 1978’s Midnight Express, winning an Oscar and a Golden Globe. Like his script for 1983’s Scarface, Midnight Express lampooned the so-called War on Drugs. This set the stage for Stone to tackle President Reagan’s secret war in Central America with 1986’s hard-hitting Salvador, followed later that same year by his grunt’s-eye view on the Vietnam War, the no-holds-barred Platoon. At the 1987 Academy Awards ceremony, Stone was in the rare enviable position of competing against himself in the Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen category for both Salvador and Platoon. Although he won neither, his boyhood idol Elizabeth Taylor did give Stone the Best Director Oscar for Platoon, which also won for Best Picture. The book’s curtain closes as Stone earns his sublime moment in the limelight, emerging as one of the movie industry’s most celebrated writer-directors of all time. His future body of work—1987’s Wall Street, 1991’s The Doors and JFK through 2016’s Snowden—are only mentioned in passing, if at all. An exception is 1989’s Best Picture-nominated Born on the Fourth of July, for which Stone was awarded his second Best Director Oscar, for helming this searing cinematic biopic about maimed Vietnam War vet Ron Kovic, whose relationship with Stone began during the period his memoir covers. HUSTLER interviewed Stone when he returned to Los Angeles in between trips to Europe to promote his book. In this candid conversation Stone opens up about the Vietnam War, drugs, censorship, Edward Snowden, Larry Flynt, Jackie Kennedy, his new Kennedy assassination film and so much more. HUSTLER: How did Chasing the Light come about? Did you write any of it while sheltering in place? OLIVER STONE: No. I was finishing up in that phase. I wrote it over two years. It was final draft, checking things, draft edits, around February, March… I was working on other things, documentaries and so forth. In your memoir you write about your time in Vietnam. Have you recounted those personal experiences extensively before? No. No, I haven’t. In interviews I’ve shared some of it. But no, this is all fresh material. The movies were dramatic presentations. I talk about Born on the Fourth of July and my relationship with Ron Kovic [the paralyzed Vietnam War vet portrayed by Tom Cruise in the 1989 feature]. And a lot about Platoon. Because both were written in 1976 [the year Kovic’s book was published], which falls in the period I’m covering in Chasing the Light, up to 1986. They play a significant role—the failures of those two films to get made haunted me. You were wounded twice in Vietnam—where you served with distinction as an infantryman, winning a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. So what do you think about President Trump allegedly calling dead soldiers “losers” and “suckers” and stating that military parades should exclude wounded vets? It’s a strange statement. I don’t know if he made it, but it sounds very bizarre. Obviously, I don’t agree with it. On the other hand, I don’t believe we should be over-glorifying our veterans either, because that leads to other sets of problems, which we’ve seen in the spate of recent wars. To prepare for this interview, I watched Scarface again. In your book you mention that you were probably conceived in Europe, your mom was an immigrant from France, and it struck me that Scarface is very much an immigrant’s saga. How do you view the Trump/Stephen Miller immigration and refugee policies? I abhor them. I do believe in immigration—it’s what the American way is about. This country has been built on immigration. Even in this lifetime of mine we’ve had such a new spate of immigration from different countries, Third World, Asia. It’s remarkable. In Scarface we talk about Latin Americans who are coming into Miami, some good, some bad. It’s a rich mix, and that’s what had given America its experimental nature. There’s no fixed America in my mind. It’s 250 years—it’s a constantly changing soup. Scarface, like Midnight Express, is drug-themed. Your memoir is quite candid about your own use of substances. What do you think of the War on Drugs? Who won? [Laughs.] It’s a ludicrous objective. It should not be called a “war.” Listen, I partook of drugs. I’ve been very honest about it. It started for me in Vietnam. I smoked it in the base camps, in the rear, when we came back. I smoked it to relax. I go into the reasons for it. It helped me get through that war as a human being. Very important to me. I respect it. I also talk about drug use later on in my life, like cocaine—which I don’t think worked for me at all, and I said why. So I’m on both sides of it. But I do think it’s an individual issue, of individual responsibility and education. The treatment for it is not punishment but hospitalization or medical help or psychiatric help. The War on Drugs is a waste of money, and again, it’s political. I saw that in Scarface, the birth of the Drug Enforcement [Administration]—very political, huge budgets; it’s growing every year. The Reagan war and all that—they call it a war. Everything in America is a war. But we don’t win any one of them. Have you encountered political censorship in Hollywood for your movies’ dissident politics over the years? You posit that Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig being on MGM’s board may have affected an early effort to make Platoon. Yes. It’s been a long haul. And I emphasize the word may, because you never know when they turn it down. They never tell you, “It’s because of political reasons that we don’t want to make your film.” They never say that. They couch it in economic terms or, “This is too depressing.” “It’s blah-blah A, B or C.” You never know. In this case, it was a very easy deal for them to make. Dino De Laurentiis was behind it—as my producer he was financing the film. MGM had a distribution deal with Mr. De Laurentiis, and they didn’t live up to it. He was making very risky movies at that time, like Blue Velvet. MGM had to make a minimal investment in distribution costs, and they did not do it. Why? Well, I would assume that the president of MGM at the time, Frank Yablans, said that he had gone to the board and they had turned [Platoon] down, but I’m not sure he’s telling the truth. Because they sometimes don’t even bother to go to the board because they don’t want to take any heat. On the board, of course, were two very conservative men on Vietnam who I’d classify as war hawks. So, I mean, it became a political issue. I do believe that; I have no proof. Also, the Pentagon passed on the film, calling it completely unrealistic. This is an important issue because the movie is realistic. I was there, and I saw it on the ground. I was in four different platoons, in four different units, in three combat platoons. I served in the south and in the north and saw quite a bit of action. And I’m telling you, three things I wrote in the book, about the three lies in Vietnam, I believe apply even today to all fought wars. One is friendly fire. American soldiers get killed by their own side, by small arms fire, artillery and bombs. It’s not precision bombing. About 20 percent of the casualties, wounded and dead, comes from friendly fire. This is a very important point, because it is buried over and over again by the Pentagon in their after-action reports. Recently, the Arizona Cardinals’ Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, and there was a whole mess in trying to get to the reasons for his death. Of course, that was a celebrity-type killing, but this goes on all the time in every war. In Vietnam, in the jungle, you can imagine the asymmetric aspect of it. When fire happens, you don’t even know where the fire is coming from. People are firing—you don’t know if it’s coming in or out. And various things like that are happening all the time. I believe my first wound came about through friendly fire. The second lie I talked about was killing civilians, trashing villages. Racism was really a huge factor in that. We treated the civilians mostly as enemies, as people who were supporting the enemy. [Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara estimated three to four million Vietnamese killed. The third lie, the biggest one of all: “We’re winning the war.” We heard that lie again and again and again. It was fed to the American people. Even from the beginning, we never had a chance. In Neil Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie, [Lieutenant Colonel] John Paul Vann made it really clear, in 1962 this was a hopeless situation, a hopeless war, because true patriotism was to fight for your country. This was a war, as he said, of independence that was fought against us as colonizers in the wake of the French. Inflating body counts, lying about enemy movements, CIA involvement in the war, no question about it. Misguiding the war. Often bad information, among other things, about the My Lai massacre in March 1968, when 500-plus villagers were killed in cold blood by [U.S.] units who were told that the enemy would be in the village. Not a single enemy bullet was fired in that whole day. And this was investigated by the Army itself, by an honest [lieutenant] general named [William Ray] Peers. He didn’t believe it at first. He thought it was bullshit, that the Seymour Hersh revelations were bullshit. He went in there and investigated thoroughly and came up with the conclusion. That’s what my movie I wanted to make on the My Lai massacre is about. He indicted 20-plus officers all the way up to the top of that division. He indicted the general of that division for his negligence. It’s a disgusting story. But it happens all the time in war and is covered up. Covered up for the dignity of the family, for the dignity of the death and so forth and so on. “How can you criticize the military?” You know, that horrible kind of righteousness, which prevents us from seeing what war is. Although you’re a decorated Vietnam veteran, the Pentagon denied you any support for Platoon—and, I assume, for your other Vietnam War-related movies. Yes, that’s correct. But other directors such as, say, Michael Bay, who never served in the military but who make pro-war, pro-military films, are given permission to shoot at U.S. bases, use of armed services personnel, access to high-tech equipment, etc. What do you make of this double standard? Does it violate the First Amendment? I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly a violation of morality. It’s much bigger than Michael Bay—there’s a book that came out in 2017, National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood by Matthew Alford and Tom Secker. James DiEugenio, who works with me, has covered this issue separately in another book, Reclaiming Parkland. These two books cover the involvement of the Pentagon in Hollywood. Alford and his coauthor talk about 800-plus films that were made with Pentagon cooperation. You’d be stunned at some of the films made. Among case studies are Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down—which is basically a whitewashing of the affair in Somalia—Charlie Wilson’s War, Hotel Rwanda, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Rules of Engagement, The Terminator, 13 Days, United 93, Wag the Dog. Talks about people like Tom Clancy, of course a big military supporter, and the CIA too. TV series such as Alias, Homeland and 24—which had a tremendous effect on the American public in glorifying the CIA, making it seem like it was a backstop for our security, which is a lie too. It undermined our security. All this is much bigger than Michael Bay. In Chasing the Light you mention “surveillance” a number of times, and of course you made 2016’s Snowden. On September 2, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance—which Edward Snowden exposed—was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. What do you think of that, and what should happen to Snowden now? [Laughs.] It’s obviously correct. Snowden should be brought back to the country. I don’t know if he should be pardoned for his wrongs—because he never did anything wrong. He should be pardoned immediately, as should [WikiLeaks’] Julian Assange. The fact is, the NSA has been breaking the law for so many years. We owe it to George Bush and that administration. That was reported on as early as around 2004, but buried by The New York Times until after the election. The Pentagon Papers was released by The Times because they hated Nixon, but I guess with Bush, they gave him a pass. Terrible. It [NSA’s bulk surveillance] has resulted in this sense of unease—you’re always monitored, we have to check our behavior, we’re under control. This is a disaster for the world. Also, other countries have responded accordingly. The World Wide Web is very dangerous. It goes back to the worst days of J. Edgar Hoover. Free speech is a recurring theme in a number of your films. How were you involved in the making of 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt? I was a producer. It was written by Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander. It was their script. Milos Forman developed it with them. I did feel that Larry Flynt had a case—he won the case [against Reverend Jerry Falwell Sr.]. I’m glad. I’m proud of the movie. After Platoon was released, you quote Jacqueline Kennedy, who wrote you and said, “Your film has changed the direction of a country’s thinking.” Your movies presented a counter-narrative to the Reagan regime’s reactionary agenda. Modesty aside, do you think that Salvador, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July may have helped stop Reagan and Bush from turning their Contra Wars in Central America into full-fledged Vietnam-like invasions? I don’t believe that they did. What happened was the fortuitous fuckup by the CIA when Eugene Hasenfus was captured after his plane was shot down. He was a contractor—he was in Nicaragua supplying [weapons to the U.S.-backed anti-Sandinista Contras]. It leads to the larger story of Oliver North, Reagan, George Herbert [Walker] Bush and the Iran-Contra affair. That’s what stalled them. Not that it was revealed in its entirety—that’s another story, of course, that’s been buried by The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham, who has been lionized in another kind of movie. But basically that scandal at least was enough to stop the momentum of an invasion, and Reagan did not have the power, the ability, the credibility anymore after October ’86. Which of course helped Platoon too, because it came out right in that juncture, and that revived Salvador, which was rereleased. Both films had an impact, but whether that would have changed the course of Reagan without the accident with the CIA—I don’t think so. Tell us about your new film, JFK: Destiny Betrayed. It’s a four-hour documentary, and it has the facts. More facts than ever. We deal with everything that happened after—in terms of documentation—since [JFK] came out in 1991. Very interesting. Because the assassination records review board, which was created from the JFK film with the JFK [Records] Act—although it was stymied by many restrictions, it did manage to release a fair amount of documents. Not all. And in those documents there’s quite a bit of information, including, of course, Operation Northwoods, that the Pentagon was operating to undercut Cuba. What are some of the highlights you learned since 1991 about the liquidation of President Kennedy? Well, I think you have to wait for the movie. [Laughs.] But certainly the ties of [Lee Harvey] Oswald to the CIA. That’s more explicit. Certainly, the evidence. We revisit the original evidence presented by Mark Lane but with new witnesses; new characters have come forward. Many people [didn’t] talk, but they start talking after the movie in the 1990s…People talk. All these informational signals come from all directions. You explain that your book title, Chasing the Light, refers to a moviemaking term. But does it also allude to your personal quest for enlightenment? And if so, have you attained it yet? Well, I’m much older [now] than when the book ends. But certainly that is an important moment, in 1986. After wanting to achieve a dream of writing and directing since I was 22 and being rejected and defeated many times, having some success along the way, and after having almost given up at 30—finally, at the age of 40, I really had a breakthrough of major proportions, with two solid movies back to back that really convinced the world, as well as myself, that I was a writer-director. It was a core victory for me and an important fact. That sets the tone for the foundation of my character. There’s going to be changes, more detours, pushes and turns in the story, but certainly, it’s established in 1986. So your memoir ends in 1987. That means a lot of your other classics are yet to come. So, in that grand Hollywood tradition, will there be a sequel to Chasing the Light? Well, I hope so. I do hope so. I hope the book does well enough to justify it. What’s next for you? I have two documentaries. One is the JFK documentary, four hours long, that won’t be out for a year. Another one is unedited, about the future, the need for clean energy, which includes nuclear energy. It’s based on a book I bought called A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow, by Joshua Goldstein and a Swedish scientist, Staffan A. Qvist. I understand you’re traveling these days. I’m about to promote the book in Paris. I just came back from Italy, France and Germany… It was big in Italy—they loved me. [Laughs.] Much better than in the United States.

-Ed Rampell, Hustler, Jan 16 2021

[anamericanconversationpodcast]

Phyllis Chesler Legend & Icon

Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D., is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York. She is a best-selling author, a legendary feminist leader, a retired psychotherapist, and an expert courtroom witness. She has lectured and organized political, legal, religious, and human rights campaigns in the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, and the Far East. Her work has been translated into many European languages and into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew.

Dr. Chesler is a co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969), The National Women's Health Network (1974), and The International Committee for the (Original) Women of the Wall (1989). She is a Ginsburg-Ingerman Fellow at The Middle East Forum and a Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy (ISGAP).

She is the author of eighteen books, including the landmark feminist classic Women and Madness, as well as many other notable books including With Child: A Diary of Motherhood; Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody; Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M; Woman's Inhumanity to Woman; and Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism's Holy Site. After publishing The New Anti-Semitism (2003), she published The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle For Women's Freedom (2005) and An American Bride in Kabul (2013), which won a National Jewish Book Award. In 2016, she published Living History: On the Front Lines for Israel and the Jews 2003-2015, and in 2017 she published Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing A Veiled War Against Women. In 2018, she published A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killings, and a Memoir: A Politically Incorrect Feminist.

Since 9/11, Dr. Chesler has focused on the rise of anti-Semitism, the demonization of Israel, and the nature of terrorism; the rights of women, dissidents, and gays in the Hindu, Sikh, and Islamic world. Dr. Chesler has published four studies, and is working on a fifth, about honor-based violence, including honor killings, and penned a position paper on why the West should ban the burqa; these studies have all appeared in Middle East Quarterly. Based on her studies, she has submitted affidavits for Muslim and ex-Muslim women who are seeking asylum or citizenship based on their credible belief that their families will honor kill them. She has archived most of her articles at her website: www.phyllis-chesler.com

She has been profiled in encyclopedias, including Feminists Who Have Changed America, Jewish Women in America, and in the latest Encyclopedia Judaica.

Dr. Chesler has published widely over the years in the mainstream media (New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Times of London, London Guardian, Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, Jerusalem Post, etc.), as well as at FOX, FrontpageMag, Israel National News, Jewish Press, Middle East Quarterly, New York Post, PJ Media, Tablet Magazine, Times of Israel, etc.

She lives in Manhattan and is a very proud mother and grandmother.

Check out this episode!

[takeeachdayonebookatatime]

(Laura8759) About the author and what she is up to.

(Tikiri) I was born on a tropical island in the Indian Ocean, spent my childhood in the savannas of Southern Africa, and lived and worked in Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. I have been an accidental traveler all my life. 

I come from many places. I am a citizen of this world. 

After leaving home at a young age to distance myself from a toxic childhood, I worked menial jobs, sleeping in basements, to put myself through a bachelor’s degree in Canada. I went on to get a master’s degree from Europe and worked as a corporate risk manager for more than a decade until I rediscovered my life’s passion for books. 

My love for the written word began when I was very young. 

I used to read Jack and Jill stories with a torchlight under my blanket till late when I was supposed to be sleeping. I graduated to Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew, then onto Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Agatha Christie, and Arthur Conan Doyle. As a child who moved to a new city, a new country, a new continent every few years, I found it hard to make friends. So, books became my companions, and authors became my allies and my mentors. 

I gobbled up every book I got my hands on. I savored every word I read.

One day, I discovered a dusty, ripped copy of the Gulag Archipelago at school. This book portrayed Stalin’s Russia and was written by a dissident who risked his life to get his story to the world. This was not a book for a child, but there wasn’t much else in my little school library in that remote mining town in East Africa where my parents worked at that time. 

That book changed my life. 

It taught me the power of words. It taught me how storytelling can shine a powerful spotlight on injustice and how mere words can transform ideas and minds around the planet.

My own writing journey began in 2010. 

The inspiration for my early memoirs and travel stories came from experiencing life across four continents. But I yearned to write a story about a smart, spunky, sassy young woman who rises through adversity and becomes stronger and wiser, despite what she endures. I yearned to write a story about a woman who will always stand for what’s right and never waiver in her fight for justice. 

This is how the Red Heeled Rebels series was born. This is where the subsequent Merciless Murder Mystery series originated.

I now write because I'm compelled to write. I can do nothing else. I will do nothing else.

(Laura8759) How many books have you written?

(Tikiri) Seventeen books to date. Twelve full-length crime thrillers, one novella, four nonfiction books, and sixteen travel short stories.

(Laura8759) How many books are in your series?

(Tikiri) The Red Heeled Rebels international crime thriller series has six novels and one prequel novella. This is the origin story set across four continents and tells the tale of how all the characters in my books come to being and how they find each other. 

My second fiction series is the Merciless murder mystery thrillers, which showcase the same characters but older and wiser. They form a private detective team who solves heinousness cold cases in small towns in the USA. This series has six books and more to come!

I also have written four nonfiction books—the Rebel Diva series—based on my life experiences. These were written to inspire young women who may wish to follow their own rebel paths and seek a life that is fun and fulfilling. 

My sixteen short stories are part of the Accidental Traveler anthology and are based on my travels across the world. 

(Laura8759) Will there be any  more books in your  series? 

(Tikiri) Yes! 

The Merciless murder mystery thrillers have five books published and six books written to date. This series features intrepid private detective Asha Kade, and her friends, Irish Canadian Katy McCafferty and former Ukrainian rebel soldier Tetyana Shevchenko. Max the German Shepard will also feature in future books.

The latest novel, Merciless Deaths, which is set in Seattle, will be released this Summer. I plan to write a few more books in this series and set them in small American towns. 

(Laura8759) What is your favorite part of your book or series? 

(Tikiri) My favorite part of writing a mystery thriller is creating the twists, the turns, and the diversions to keep the reader hooked on the story without giving away the bad guys/girls hidden in plain sight. 

When I craft my stories, I feel like an alchemist sitting in my secret workshop, rubbing my hands in glee as I try to conjure up all the ways to showcase the villains without letting the reader know, making them guess from chapter to chapter till the very end. 

I like to think of my readers as highly intelligent mystery lovers who enjoy exercising their “little gray cells” while being entertained with the thrills and excitement of the story. If I can keep my readers at the edge of their seat, biting their nails, foregoing sleep, as they try to figure out who the doer of the evil deeds are, I have done my job.

 

(Laura8759) What is your thought on outlines for stories/books?

(Tikiri) Every writer writes differently. Some are gardeners who prefer to write into the dark from a blank page, inventing things as they go. Others, like me, are architects who craft the story before putting pen to paper. 

As an architect, I have a forty plus page outline detailed in advance. This consists of a character bible, story premise and goals, major twist points and red herrings, the book description, story structure and more. 

The main part of this outline comprises story beats, where I plot each scene in a few bullets. This way, I can be sure every scene has a home and is key to the story. If a part/scene/chapter doesn’t move the story forward, I cut it out. This may sound brutal, but this is what helps me keep the pace fast and furious. 

I love plotting and usually do this while running along the beach or sitting on my patio, day dreaming. Once all the story pieces come together in my head, I am ready to write the book.

I write this way because I enjoy the process. Planning is part of my DNA. 

(Laura8759) Why do you think more people should read books?

(Tikiri) I have been fortunate to have travelled the world throughout my childhood and adult life. To me, books are an even more awe-inspiring means to travel into worlds that only exist in the imagination. 

Reading a book is akin to going on an expedition to an adventure. 

Books are magical machines that can take you to places, times, emotions, feelings, and characters you may never experience otherwise. They provide a window into worlds, some of which may teach us new lessons or share a perspective we may have never thought of before. 

How cool is that? Do you need any other reason to read a book? 

(Laura8759) Do you have an opinion on beta readers? Are they necessary?

(Tikiri) Absolutely. 

Beta readers give me a great indication of how well a book will do with the larger reader audience. 

Every author has a different process, but to me, I find my international beta reader team of immense value. They are an amazing resource of insightful critiques and thoughtful feedback.

Beta readers get the first look into a manuscript and will tell me whether they liked it or not with brutal honesty. They give me signals to whether the story line makes sense and help me gauge the strength of a story so I can improve the areas that need to be fixed.

For their contribution and time, I acknowledge them in my books, so their names and my heart-felt gratitude for their feedback is printed for posterity. 

(Laura8759) Do you prefer paperbacks or ebooks? 

(Tikiri) I read fiction in ebook format, but listen to nonfiction audiobooks. If a book, fiction or nonfiction, is particularly intriguing, I will buy its paperback edition so I can have a physical copy in my library. 

(Laura8759) Softcover or hardcover books?

(Tikiri) I usually buy softcovers because they’re easier to read, especially in bed. But there are occasions when I buy a hardcover if the cover design is magnificent. 

(Laura8759) Besides writing, what are your other hobbies/skills? 

(Tikiri) My favorite pastime is to cook and bake in my kitchen with a glass of red wine on the counter and jazz and blues in the background. I love experimenting with fusion cuisine and find chopping vegetables and playing with spices to be incredibly therapeutic. 

I am also an adrenaline junkie and have rock climbed, rappelled, bungee jumped, parasailed, flown in an acrobatic airplane upside down, rode on the back of a race motorcycle across Quebec, and parachuted solo from 3,000 feet. 

I live by the seashore, so every weekend, I also make it a goal to run along the beach to clear my mind and craft the stories in my head. 

But the greatest love of my life is reading. Books are what gave me an escape, a door to adventure and possibilities during the darkest moments of my childhood. I now pledge to read at least forty books a year, every year.

(Laura8759) Current book you're reading?

(Tikiri) The Locked Door by Freida McFadden. A spine-tingling thriller. 

(Laura8759) Any social media pages our very few readers can find you at and were they can buy your books 

(Tikiri)

Author Page: www.TikiriHerath.com 

Facebook: www.facebook.com/TikiriHerathAuthor

Amazon USA: www.amazon.com/Tikiri-Herath/e/B075DYLBKT 

[animentality]

Christmas is coming and I have a PSA.

For those of you who are new here, and didn’t know this.

I am an author.

I’ve published three books, all belonging to the same trilogy (Memoirs of the Mausoleum):

Gallows Humor 

Shock Values

Roman’s Numeral

The second series in this universe is in the works, but nevermind that for now.

Christmas is coming. 

I figured I’d just remind you guys (or let you know) since you can put one of my books on your Christmas list.

Just a thought. 

ALSO.

if you’re not sure you want to try the full series yet, you could try reading Borderlines. It’s a standalone romance novel. It’s gay. And camp...y. 

Anyway. Just thought I’d remind you that I’ve written a fuckton and would appreciate some support as a burgeoning author. 

And if you can’t (or don’t want to, which is fine) buy a copy, even online where it’s (cough) super cheap, like 3 dollars (on Kindle anyway), then do me a favor.

Reblog this post so others can see it.

Thanks in advance. 

And here’s the summary for Gallows Humor:  

To some, the idea of committing horrendous acts of violence and cruelty against another human being is repulsive. To others, it is a regrettable occurrence, a last resort but always an option. And for a select few, it’s a hobby. Locations where a horrifying crime or crimes have occurred are known as “haunted” places. They are relatively harmless, miserable, but lacking any real danger. Ghosts can’t hurt you, after all. The same cannot be said for a Revenant. When a person dies in a haunted place, he or she can be resurrected by the spirits inhabiting that physical space and become a paranormal entity with bizarre, lethal superhuman abilities based on the nature of their death. Because of these terrifying powers a Revenant gains upon resurrection, humans struggle to keep them contained in the Mausoleum, a prison designed to contain them and create revenue for scientific research by forcing Revenants to participate in brutal death matches. Naïve young intern Roman Sheer enters this twisted world searching for a purpose in life, but he soon receives more than he ever expected when a long-time resident, the violent, mentally unstable Revenant number Ten, massacres several employees. But during the incident, Ten unexpectedly spares Roman's life, prompting the Mausoleum director to reassign Roman to his case. Roman soon learns that he shares a complicated past with Ten, one which he mysteriously cannot remember. As he attempts to piece together his own past and learn more about Ten, the other Revenants, and the meaning of their existence, he struggles with his perceptions of morality as he descends into the chaotic world of the undead.

And here’s the summary for Borderlines:

 In a world divided by technologically and militarily enforced boundaries, a soldier is sent on a suicide mission into a rival faction and is captured in an isolationist country. He's tortured brutally for information but is not forthcoming. They plan to kill and dispose of him, but the night before they intend to carry out his execution, he’s rescued by a political dissident of the country. He takes him from the government facility, brings him back from the brink of death, and waits for him to wake up. But when he does, the captured soldier bitterly reveals that he was a traitor. He has no information and had been sent on a suicide mission to be rid of him. And because of the state of his world, he has no place on earth where he belongs anymore because of the separations created by satellite-enforced surveillance and high-tech thermal detection borders. The dissident, not believing him and dedicated to his mission, forces him to take a journey through treacherous terrain and hazardous weather, and in the process, they both begin to question what they had once believed to be unshakable truths.

And there you go.

Thanks.

Keep scrolling, I guess, but if you do reblog or decide to give me a whirl, you’ve got my eternal gratitude. and that isn’t a joke, every single sale or reblog i get for my books, i mean, that’s some good shit. 

[freeepubpdf]

textbook$ After the Fall Being American in the World We've Made [ PDF ] Ebook

textbook$ After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made [ PDF ] Ebook

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

[PDF] Download After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made Ebook | READ ONLINE

Author : BenRhodes Publisher : ISBN : 1984856057 Publication Date : -- Language : eng Pages : 338

To Download or Read this book, click link below:

http://read.ebookcollection.space/?book=1984856057

[PDF, mobi, ePub]

Synopsis : textbook$ After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made [ PDF ] Ebook

Why is democracy so threatened in America and around the world? And what can we do about it? A former White House aide and close confidante to President Barack Obama -- and New York Times bestselling author of The World as It Is -- travels the globe in a deeply personal, beautifully observed quest for answers. In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they worked to build for eight years was being taken apart. To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outward. Over the next three years, he traveled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists, and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart. Along the way, a Russian opposition leader he spends time with is poisoned, the Hong Kong protesters he comes to know see their movement snuffed out, and America itself reaches the precipice of losing democracy before giving itself a second chance.Equal parts memoir and reporting, After the Fall is a hugely ambitious and essential work of discovery. Throughout, Rhodes comes to realize how much America’s fingerprints are on a world we helped to shape: through the excesses of our post-Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism, post-9/11 nationalism and militarism, mania for technology and social media, and the racism that shaped the backlash to the Obama presidency. At the same time, he learns from a diverse set of characters - from Obama to rebels to a rising generation of leaders - how looking squarely at where America has gone wrong only makes it more essential to fight for what America is supposed to be at home - for our own country, and the entire world.

[prayersfromlilacveins]

In 'National Culture' and 'The Jefferson-Adams Letters' he developed more fully the idea of an elite, not as a privileged class leading an isolated and protected existence, but as a creative, responsible, and active group who by their standards of quality and behavior raise the level of society as a whole. He suggested that is a few hundred men who prefer good writing to bad would correspond with each other on a regular basis, maintain a periodical that correlated American thought with what is going on in other countries, insist on clear definitions of terms, and at least protest against the worst malpractices of the press and book trade and the more violent inaccuracies of the so-called books of reference, much could be accomplished in the way of raising standards.

Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher, Henry Regnery

[justforbooks]

More than 60 years ago, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote,

I am anxiously waiting for the secret of eternal life to be discovered.

By most counts, he seems to have discovered it.

Ferlinghetti — the poet, the scholar, the champion of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, the tireless critic of political ills — turned 100 on March 24.

He has not mellowed. At all.

In 2017, Ferlinghetti told The Washington Post, “I never wanted to write an autobiography because I don’t like looking back.” Evidently, he overcame that reluctance, but, of course, the autobiography he’s releasing this month is entirely on his own terms. “Little Boy” isn’t really a memoir. The publisher calls it “a novel,��� but it really isn’t that either. As his literary ancestor Walt Whitman would say, it’s a “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”

A few months ago, Ferlinghetti claimed, “The little boy is an imaginary me,” but the broad outlines of his real life appear here, particularly in the early pages, which are the only ones that tell something like a coherent story. We learn of his tumultuous childhood: His father died before he was born; an aunt whisked him to France and then back to the United States; the aunt’s wealthy employer, descended from the founders of Sarah Lawrence College, adopted him.

He may have lived like “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” but “it was a very lonely life for Little Boy,” Ferlinghetti writes, “with the nearest neighbor out of sight and no children of any age to play with.” In a mansion some 20 miles outside New York City, his new guardians spoke to one another in courtly tones and dressed in Victorian garb. They sent him to a private school, and, more important, they possessed a fine library, which he was encouraged to use.

As the pace of “Little Boy” accelerates chaotically, whole years fly by in a phrase or two — from high school to college with a major in journalism, and then the Navy, where he participated in the Normandy landing and saw Nagasaki just a few weeks after it was destroyed. Discharged, he earned an MA in literature at Columbia University, a PhD at the University of Paris and “emerged as a reasonably miseducated product of high culture and not all so irrelevant as rebels might imagine.” And then, around Page 15, the wheels bust off this narrative, and we’re airborne: “Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-hoard pent up within him.”

What follows for the next 150 pages is a volcanic explosion of personal memories, political rants, social commentary, environmental jeremiads and cultural analysis all tangled together in one breathless sentence that would make James Joyce proud.

Do I recommend it?

Yes I said yes I will Yes.

You may think you’re in good shape, but before long, you’ll be panting after this irrepressible geezer. “Little Boy” is full-on stream-of-consciousness: “A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.” As he swoops back and forth through the impressions and highlights of his long life, Ferlinghetti spits on conventional grammar and mocks the very idea of linear coherence. A Beat sensibility? Sure, but there’s also a dose of Robin Williams’s manic comedy here: the hairpin turns, the interior voices bantering with each other, the constant spinning of an idea till it ricochets off to another. He’s the silliest, angriest, kindest, smartest man you’ve ever heard — a whirling dervish of scholarly asides, literary allusions, corny puns and twisted aphorisms drawn from “an echo chamber of everything ever said or sung in the history of man.”

The inevitable annotated edition of “Little Boy” will have to be four times longer just to explain all the references. Any page might offer a bastardized phrase from Genesis, Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold, while criticizing Christianity, condemning American capitalism and warning of the climate apocalypse.

No one alive carries the history, the writers, the personal experience of 20th-century literature in his mind as Ferlinghetti does. “I was all the mad wandering tattered poets rolled into one sleeping under the bridges of the world,” he writes, “I met all the other great writers and poets and great articulators of consciousness.” Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs and so many others flit in and out of these pages so casually that when he mentions Don Quixote, it took me a moment to realize that he didn’t know the knight personally . Indeed, scholars and fans of the writers who passed through Ferlinghetti’s San Francisco bookstore and publishing house may hope for a compendium of colorful anecdotes, but “Little Boy” has no ambitions in that direction.

“What is the plot of this novel,” he asks in one of many self-referential passages, “if not the remembrance of things still not past for the past is but a cautious counselor of what has yet to come what has yet to transpire or expire so farewell final albatross as time ticks on and all of us like insects in an anthill seen from space all nebulous figures dancing in a tropic night through the night-mazes singing a lyric escape again then and why not Are we to live in despair all the time thinking only of our certain deaths so why not live the highs and ignore the lows. . . .”

Yes, this can feel like trying to set the table while falling down the stairs, but there’s something hypnotic about Ferlinghetti’s relentless commentary, a style that amuses him, too: “Every sentence the last sentence I’ll ever write but then there’s always another thought to be spoken or written and we can’t go on but I do.” If you’re willing to let go, he’ll win you over. “Perhaps there is no meaning there is only existing just as a poem or a painting does not mean but Is and there are only episodes that don’t add up to any meaning but exert in themselves the pith of living.”

It’s that “pith of living” that “Little Boy” offers up so frequently and unexpectedly. Grab hold of any section, break it apart like a pomegranate, and you’ll find delicious bits randomly spread about.

Stick with this book long enough, and you’ll start to hear the central concerns of Ferlinghetti’s life. They revolve around the disastrous conspiracy of our fecundity and our selfishness, what he calls “me-me-me.” “Oh for a little erectile dysfunction before the earth bursts its latitudinals with overpopulation,” he cries, “the spaceship earth overloaded and no end to the eternal rutting and breeding a primeval instinct that will not be denied and no politician dare touch it and don’t tell me I can’t have a baby.”

That concern for the fate of the Earth clearly haunts this thoughtful man as he contemplates “the ravenous maw of eternity.” He may be, as he calls himself, a “dissident romantic or romantic dissident,” but he feels in his own approaching mortality the larger calamity barreling down on us all as we fritter away these final chances for salvation. “The cries of birds now are not cries of ecstasy but cries of despair.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[blackbritishwomeninlit]

Aminatta Forna, Selective Empathy: Stories and the Power of Narrative

In this essay for World Literature Today, Forna writes about the power of empathy within a narrative. She spends time taking the reader through her childhood, in which she spent time between Sierra Leone and Britain during the 1970s. She describes her experience with the word n****r, and the range it carries through various moments in her childhood. After the age of 6, she begins to understand the power and danger the word carries. Forna utilizes different perspectives from people within the African Diaspora, intellectuals and writers like, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, and John Lewis. 

Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow, Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. Throughout her childhood, she spent a tremendous amount of time Today, she divides her time between both countries. Forna writes about her father, her West African heritage, and familial relationships through non-fiction and fiction writing. Some of her published works include The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002), Ancestor Stones (2006), a novel set in West Africa, The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and The Angel of Mexico City (2014). Ancestor Stones is a a memoir of her dissident father in Sierra Leone.

Currently, she is the Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Williams College in Massachusetts awarded her a position as the Sterling Brown Visiting Professor, in 2011 and 2013. Yale University in Connecticut named Aminatta Forna a winner of a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, which is typically awarded annually. 

“Reading frees the reader from the constraints of the self, from our own prejudices and assumptions. Reading makes you a more highly functioning person. In other words—reading makes you a better person.”

“To see oneself only ever reflected through the eyes of another is to view the self through a distorting lens. This has to be true. In my teenage years the awareness grew that even if I did not see myself in the many depictions of black people that surrounded me, a great many people did. And if you had told me that challenging, overturning one at a time, those false narratives would become my life’s work, as it has become the life’s work of every one of us not born at the center, persistently viewed as “other” to a presumed norm, either because of race or gender, sexuality or disability, I would certainly have disbelieved you.”

“We take back our stories, we take the center, we reverse the gaze, and we transgress boundaries, setting our narratives beyond the spaces we have been allocated.”

Sources

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2017/november/selective-empathy-stories-and-power-narrative-aminatta-forna

https://aminattaforna.com

[anamericanconversationpodcast]

Phyllis Chesler Legend & Icon

Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D., is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York. She is a best-selling author, a legendary feminist leader, a retired psychotherapist, and an expert courtroom witness. She has lectured and organized political, legal, religious, and human rights campaigns in the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, and the Far East. Her work has been translated into many European languages and into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew.

Dr. Chesler is a co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969), The National Women's Health Network (1974), and The International Committee for the (Original) Women of the Wall (1989). She is a Ginsburg-Ingerman Fellow at The Middle East Forum and a Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy (ISGAP).

She is the author of eighteen books, including the landmark feminist classic Women and Madness, as well as many other notable books including With Child: A Diary of Motherhood; Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody; Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M; Woman's Inhumanity to Woman; and Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism's Holy Site. After publishing The New Anti-Semitism (2003), she published The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle For Women's Freedom (2005) and An American Bride in Kabul (2013), which won a National Jewish Book Award. In 2016, she published Living History: On the Front Lines for Israel and the Jews 2003-2015, and in 2017 she published Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing A Veiled War Against Women. In 2018, she published A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killings, and a Memoir: A Politically Incorrect Feminist.

Since 9/11, Dr. Chesler has focused on the rise of anti-Semitism, the demonization of Israel, and the nature of terrorism; the rights of women, dissidents, and gays in the Hindu, Sikh, and Islamic world. Dr. Chesler has published four studies, and is working on a fifth, about honor-based violence, including honor killings, and penned a position paper on why the West should ban the burqa; these studies have all appeared in Middle East Quarterly. Based on her studies, she has submitted affidavits for Muslim and ex-Muslim women who are seeking asylum or citizenship based on their credible belief that their families will honor kill them. She has archived most of her articles at her website: www.phyllis-chesler.com

She has been profiled in encyclopedias, including Feminists Who Have Changed America, Jewish Women in America, and in the latest Encyclopedia Judaica.

Dr. Chesler has published widely over the years in the mainstream media (New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Times of London, London Guardian, Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, Jerusalem Post, etc.), as well as at FOX, FrontpageMag, Israel National News, Jewish Press, Middle East Quarterly, New York Post, PJ Media, Tablet Magazine, Times of Israel, etc.

She lives in Manhattan and is a very proud mother and grandmother.

Check out this episode!

[berniesrevolution]

THE GUARDIAN

On 25 March 2015, six months before becoming Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn spoke in Westminster about “human rights and security in the Democratic Republic of Congo”. A long, U-shaped arrangement of chairs had been set up in the grand Commons committee room. “I am pleased that we are having this half-hour debate,” he began, in the flat, almost anti-rhetorical voice that had become a parliamentary fixture since his election 32 years earlier. Unshowily, he revealed that he had visited Congo twice, that he had “a considerable number” of Congolese immigrants in his constituency, and that he had a grasp of the country’s colonial and post-colonial history. “Sadly,” he said, “the horrors of Congo are not new.”

There was a sense, rare in Westminster, of politics being about life-or-death questions that extended across continents and centuries. But Corbyn’s entire audience consisted of a Conservative junior minister, a Democratic Unionist party MP, and four other people, two of whom chatted while he was speaking. Corbyn carried on, seemingly quite unfazed; in early 2015, as for much of his political life, promoting apparently lost causes before tiny audiences was what he did.

In the vast literature written about Labour between the 1980s and 2015 – all the fat gossipy memoirs, diaries and biographies, confident overviews by journalists and historians, and careful analyses by political scientists – there is an absence, which has seemed ever larger and more puzzling since Corbyn was overwhelmingly elected leader. He and his closest comrades for decades – John McDonnell, now shadow chancellor, and Diane Abbott, now shadow home secretary – rarely feature.

They are not in books about the 2003 Iraq war, which they all opposed. They are hardly in books about New Labour; or about the Conservative government and its austerity policies, which they opposed when their party barely did. They do not even feature much in studies of Labour’s startling success in London, where they all have constituencies and have hugely increased their majorities since the 90s.

Corbyn was elected to parliament in 1983, the same year as Tony Blair. From 1986 to 1993, Blair’s London home was in Corbyn’s constituency; and from 1993 to 1997, half a mile away. Many of the formative experiences of both politicians happened in the same small borough, Islington, long a favoured residence and subject for reporters. Yet for decades, most journalists, like most politicians, were preoccupied by the version of Labour politics pursued by Blair and his allies, which was slickly presented as the party’s only feasible strategy. Corbyn’s version – purist, sometimes crudely articulated – was assumed to be of little importance, and of minimal voter appeal.

In his decades on the margins, it was forgotten that he, Abbott and McDonnell had all been promising figures early in their careers. Corbyn had been the favoured protege of the socialist grandee Tony Benn. Between 1981 and 1985, McDonnell had been a key member of the radical and innovative Greater London Council. Abbott was the first black woman elected to parliament, in 1987. Yet by the end of that decade they all found themselves, as McDonnell put it in a 1998 documentary, “out in the wilderness”: leftwingers in a party and a country that seemed to be moving permanently rightwards.

Instead of careers, they had causes – anticapitalism, class struggle, peace activism, Irish Republicanism – towards which most other MPs were either increasingly apathetic or actively hostile. Westminster came to regard them with disdain. A former New Labour minister says that McDonnell was widely seen as “intolerant, hard, completely incorrigible”; Abbott as “very bright but fundamentally lazy”; and Corbyn as “naive” – “of no relevance” to the New Labour governments.

By 2015, the three comrades were all in their 60s. According to conventional wisdom, they had turned into a particular sort of British socialist: stubborn, unchanging, principled, passionate but often dour, uninterested in power, more influenced by the receding radical dreams of the 70s than the modern world. Supposedly more astute, ambitious figures had long written them off. In 1996, Blair discussed the state of the Labour party with the journalist Joe Murphy. “You really don’t have to worry,” said Blair, “about Jeremy Corbyn suddenly taking over.”

Since Corbyn first stood for leader, two popular interpretations of these wilderness years have emerged. 

One, favoured by the rightwing press and the Conservatives – and more quietly by some in the Labour party – is that he, Abbott and McDonnell spent these years as “loony left” fanatics and “apologists for terror”, as the Daily Mail put it in a long cautionary article the paper vainly published the day before this year’s election. This activism was a dead end, from which the three comrades escaped by fluke, thanks to the collapse of New Labour, Conservative divisions and mistakes, and foolish changes to the rules of Labour leadership contests.

The other interpretation, favoured by Corbynistas, especially older ones, is that these years of struggle were actually a long march towards the Labour left’s great breakthroughs in 2015 and 2017. “It laid the base for what’s happened since,” says Graham Bash, a leftwing activist and journalist who has been close to Corbyn since the 70s. A mainstream media fixated by parliament and dismissive of leftwing politics, this argument runs, did not notice that, on the streets outside, Corbyn and his comrades were steadily gaining credibility, converts and political networks.

The second interpretation may be too neat and coloured by hindsight – and too incurious about the illiberal characters with whom Corbyn and the others occasionally shared platforms – but it better reflects how the three comrades operated, and eventually came to power within the Labour party. On marches, at rallies, on picket lines, at occupations and at other events, however tiny or seemingly futile – at which other Labour MPs were rarely present – Corbyn and McDonnell were a familiar double act: McDonnell dapper and intense, Corbyn baggier in his dress and his sentences, both speaking with utter conviction, listening patiently to each other’s unvarying speeches, patting each other lightly on the shoulder afterwards. Abbott sometimes appeared with them. For decades the recipient of more racist and sexist abuse than probably any other MP, her public manner was more lawyerly and guarded; but she made exactly the same arguments.

Abbott and Corbyn had been lovers as young activists in the late 70s. From 1987, they represented adjacent constituencies – Corbyn held Islington North, and Abbott held Hackney North and Stoke Newington – with intertwined leftwing subcultures. They remain close friends and allies today. McDonnell joined them in parliament in 1997, as MP for Hayes and Harlington in west London. Within a few years, Corbyn was publicly describing him as “my best friend in the House of Commons”. Their voting behaviour was almost identical: during Blair’s first government – according to Philip Cowley, the authority on Commons rebellions – Corbyn defied the Labour whip 64 times, and McDonnell did 59 times, almost always on the same issues. They were the two least-obedient Labour MPs, and remained so after their party lost power in 2010. Abbott was also consistently high on the list of Labour dissidents. By 2015, they had been MPs for 78 years between them, and had held no ministerial positions.

Rarely in Britain has such a marginal, ideological group become so dominant in a party, so influential in how other parties and the country discuss fundamental issues, and so electorally powerful. The last time such a takeover happened was with the Thatcherites in the 70s. But Thatcher and her band of Tory rebels were, relatively, establishment figures: ex-ministers who had been out of power only a few years, backed by national newspapers, influential thinktanks, and parts of big business.

The ongoing argument about Corbyn and his comrades’ much lonelier, much longer and more formative wilderness years is really an argument about the validity of Corbynism’s political methods and ideas. It is also an argument about the long-term direction of British politics, ever since Thatcherism became dominant in the mid-80s.

Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnell’s activities between then and 2015 challenged deep assumptions, still widely held today: about the superiority of capitalism over socialism as a political cause, and about Labour’s need to adapt itself accordingly; about Westminster and the mainstream media being the only political arenas that matter; about political change needing to come quickly from the top, rather than slowly from the bottom; and about what constitutes a useful political career.

What important things about Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnell did most people miss between the 80s and 2015? And beyond the hostile caricatures and heroic myths, what did the three comrades actually do during these years? The period was not as monochrome and unvarying for them as their detractors often insist: it featured advances and retreats, alliances and splits, quiet compromises as well as outspoken defiance. Contrary to the caricaturists, the three comrades did not just teleport from 1980 to 2015. The period changed them. And their political lives during these hard years give us hints about how, if Theresa May’s ever-wobblier administration topples, they might approach an even harder task than surviving on the margins: running a truly leftwing British government.

(Continue Reading)