redFlags

Rocking the Cradle for Rachel Corrie

Jed Brandt writes for the Indypendent:

If Israel is supposed to be the sixth borough of New York, then it’s looking like the theater is another occupied territory. After the New York Theatre Workshop indefinitely postponed My Name Is Rachel Corrie, in response to the “concerns” of as yet unnamed Jewish "community" organizations, the play’s future is in question.

Alan Rickman’s play was developed for England’s Royal Court Theatre from the journals that America anti-occupation activist Rachel Corrie kept from the age of 12 up until the day she was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer set to demolish a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip. Corrie was the first “international” to be killed during her participation with the International Solidarity Movement, a non-violent direct action organization that attempted to obstruct the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Pre-Histories of 911 -- Or, What did they know (and did they do it)?

"Bay" proposal for Ground Zero by Magic Propaganda Mill

First things first. I was at Ground Zero the day the planes hit the World Trade Center. I lived there in a cheap apartment on the Hudson River a few blocks north of the towers. Debates about the planes and "base charges," etc are of no interest to me as I saw what happened and, on general principle despise conspiracy theories. I've been embroiled in several "911 Truth" debates, and I think it very unfortunate that real interrogation of the offical story has been left to, how can I say it... unreliable elements.

All that said, I'm with the half of New Yorkers who believe the official 911 report is a "conspiracy theory" and do not accept the simple story we've been told. There are just too many loose ends, conflicting accounts and political expediency in how Bush has spun the whole story.

Browsing the internet, I found a new blog called DW Vents, an apparently communist blog from right here in the city that took on the Pre-Histories of 911. Because I think this piece avoids the more dubious lines of thought that define dissent of the official 911 story (in particular, the strange alleged conspiracy between a New York real estate magnate and the secret government crowd, anti-Semitic and racist bullshit, right-wing "Illuminati" kookiness), I've posted DW's piece here in its entirety for discussion and debate.

Rachel Corrie: A Message Crushed Again

By Katharine Viner from the LA Times, by way of Common Dreams, additional links added--

The flights for cast and crew had been booked; the production schedule delivered; there were tickets advertised on the Internet. The Royal Court Theatre production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, the play I co-edited with Alan Rickman, was transferring later this month to the New York Theatre Workshop, home of the musical "Rent," following two sold-out runs in London and several awards.

We always felt passionately that it was a piece of work that needed to be seen in the United States. Created from the journals and e-mails of American activist Rachel Corrie, telling of her journey from her adolescence in Olympia, Wash., to her death under an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza at the age of 23, we considered it a unique American story that would have a particular relevance for audiences in Rachel's home country. After all, she had made her journey to the Middle East in order "to meet the people who are on the receiving end of our [American] tax dollars," and she was killed by a U.S.-made bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes.

But last week the New York Theatre Workshop canceled the production — or, in its words, "postponed it indefinitely." The political climate, we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As James Nicola, the theater's 's artistic director, said Monday, "Listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections, we had a very edgy situation." Three years after being silenced for good, Rachel was to be censored for political reasons. (continued)

Crimethinc: In love with love itself

Recipes For Disaster:
An anarchist cookbook
By Crimethinc. Agents Provocateurs
2004

A true review In three parts
By Jed Brandt for Clamor Magazine

1.
Blasting the axiom that you can't blow up a social relationship, Crimethinc's latest lexicon delivers way more fireworks than the dubious incendiaries of the original Anarchist Cookbook. Where the latter was an unreliable, DIY guide to explosives and firearms, Recipes for Disaster gathers a polymorphous introduction to the direct-action heart of anarchism. It deserves to be read far beyond the circular networks of true believers, for in the grace of its plain-spoken sedition it succeeds not just as provocation, but as a masterpiece of radical propaganda.

Octavia Butler: A Freedom Dreamer

Octavia Butler was one of the only writers I feel spoke for my culture. Born in 1947, She died yesterday after a fall outside her home in Washington. What can you say about a boundary-buster who's very last novel was titled Fledgling? Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, she went on to win the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction writing. She was also a MacArthur "genius" fellow and deeply loved daydreamer who left us at the height of her powers.

She told stories from the people, with a distinctly African-American sensibility. Butler got weird, such as the insane ethical quandaries of Kindred, the story of a black woman sucked through some portal back into slavery days (along with her white husband!). But isn't that just like life? Problems you couldn't dream up... and that nobody every wants to talk about.

In my two favorite books by her, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents, she explored the seeds of what is coming to be in the collapse of the American dream through the journey of a young, black woman named Lauren Olamina. She suffers from a condition called "hyper-empathy"  in a dystopic near-future California that's an archipelago of walled communities surrounded by social and ecological disintegration.

In the failure of her father's religion, Lauren becomes the prophet of a new philosophy called "Earthseed," which to my simple eye is good, ol' fashioned dialectical materialism... with a penchant for space travel. Her collected writing are a high expression of what Robin Kelly called the Freedom Dream.

Let the opening words of the Parable of the Sower speak now for Octavia Butler's well-lived life:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

Kazembe Balagun, a leading voice of New York's lumpen intelligentsia, recently interviewed Octavia Butler for the Indypendent. The full text follows along with some defining titles from the genre of speculative fiction she came to personify.

The Party Line: Bob Avakian's "The New Situation and the Great Challenges"

I am a defender of Bob Avakian and the following piece he wrote is exactly why. Amid the moaning about the "lack of backbone" among Democrats and all the diffuse inertias of "the left," Avakian has his finger on the pulse of this moment -- recognizing both the profound peril, and connected opportunities that cry out for action. He is not another analyst, not a manager. He is a leader.

Currently re-printed in Revolution, the national, bi-lingual newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, The New Situation and the Great Challenges is effectively the RCP's line on What Is To Be Done. That's an expression that starts as a question, our duty is always to answer it in fact.

For those who can't see how to fight for what they most want, it is a challenge to put some dignity in the struggle... and some struggle in your dignity. Before the next dismissal of Avakian crosses your lips, read this and see what this man is giving his life for -- and what he offers to a world choking on its own impossibilities.

IndyKids: "A Free Paper for Free Kids"

The most recent publication launch from the New York City Independent Media Center is something I've never seen before, a radical paper for primary school students. The current edition of IndyKids features a story about life in West Virginia, how to start a debate and a quick review of the Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. It's been a few issues now and the project is hitting its stride.

IndyKids is distributed through schools, churches and at libraries... but not at the Queens Public Library where (according to recent rumor) it has been blocked.

For more information about how get involved or distribute the "free paper for free kids," email or call 212.592.0116.

Setting the Record Straight: The Legacies of 20th Century Socialism

Set the Record Straight is challenging the anti-communist hegemony that has passed for conventional wisdom for the last couple of decades, particularly on college campuses. For anyone who has never heard the revolutionary communist read on their own history, it beats the hell out of trying to disentangle the lies promoted by the "end of history" crowd.

Starting with a speech by the Maoist political economist Raymond Lotta: Socialism Is Much Better Than Capitalism and Communism Will Be a Far Better World, their website ThisIsCommunism.org features a growing list of articles on the epochal changes that socialism brought to the world in the 20th Century: Socialist Experience. All of the articles are written from the perspective pioneered by Revolutionary Communist Party chairman Bob Avakian.

Raymond Lotta will be speaking on Thursday, February 23, 6:00 pm, in Harvard Yard, at Emerson Hall, Rm 105.

Debunking as Positive Science: In Honor of Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man"

 Richard York and Brett Clark write for Monthly Review:

The physicist Alan Sokal laid a trap for postmodernists and anti-science scholars on the academic left when he submitted his article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to Social Text, a left-leaning cultural studies journal. The trap sprang when the journal unwittingly published the article in its 1996 spring/summer issue. The article was intended to parody the type of scholarship that has become common in some sectors of the academy, which substitutes word-play and sophistry for reason and evidence. Sokal purposefully included in his article a variety of false statements, illogical arguments, incomprehensible sentences, and absurd, unsupported assertions, including the claim that there was in effect no real world and all of science was merely a social construction. He submitted the article to test whether the editors of Social Text had any serious intellectual standards. They failed the test, and the scandal that ensued has become legend.

It is sad to say, but nonetheless true, that some scholars on the academic left have renounced materialism and strayed into a postmodern wonderland in which there is no objective reality and any one factual claim is as good as the next. Such scholars deserve the criticism to which they have been subjected, and one can’t blame Sokal, a leftist himself who taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua under the Sandinista government, for exposing them as intellectual frauds. However, one of the misconceptions that has emerged out of the Sokal affair is that the left is dominated by anti-intellectualism, and by implication, that the right is the defender of reason. Nothing could be further from the truth.

World Can't Wait: Cindy Sheehan arrested just before Bush's State of the Union; 1,000+ rally in Times Square: 68+ cities say "Bush Step Down"

I'm still working my way through Bush's State of the Union speech. I couldn't hear it at Times Square tonight, I'll tell you that. Over 1,000 New Yorkers filled a block of TImes Squre rallying to drive the whole Bush agenda from power. It was cold and drizzling, but the crowd was too hot under the collar to sit and grumble at home. I just found out about Cindy Sheehan getting arrested before Bush got started at the Capitol building, here's what she says really happened (mp3). That sister is ferocious. If the energy and determination manifested in Manhattan are part of a national force -- then this coming spring is going to be a season of struggle. From the early reports -- this movement has legs.

Photos are up on NYC Indymedia from Stanley Rogouski and Fred Askew. Jeff Paterson reports from the Bay Area that thousands gathered and toppled a massive effigy of Bush... in  Chicago they lit theirs on fire. World Can't Wait local reports are coming in by the hour from DC, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Greensboro, NC...

The protest in DC this weekend is important. Every person will count and the trip is a chance to talk about what we can all do when we get back home. If you've been a spectator, you can just get on the bus. If you don't have better plans, stop waiting for the perfect ride and start driving. If you're not sure about making it to the DC protests, Sunsara Taylor has a message for you.