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Tag Archives: The Washington Post

America at War with Itself (2016) by Dr. Henry A. Giroux

14 Fri Oct 2016

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Fascism, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Theory, Education, First Amendment (U.S. Constitution), Free Speech, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Philosophy of Education, Political Economy, Political Science, Sociology

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"What Did You Learn In School Today?", ACLU, Ajamu Baraka, Albert Camus (1913-1960), Amy Goodman (b. 1957), Capitalism and the Politics of Resignation (2010), Central Park Five, curriculum theory, David Talbot (b. 1951), Democracy Now!, Donald John Trump (b. 1946), Doug Henwood, Dr. Henry A. Giroux (b. 1943), Dr. Jill Stein, education theory, HRW, incompatibility between democracy and capitalism, Juan González (b. 1947), junk food news, KPFA, Manuel Zelaya, neoliberalism, news abuse, Pacifica Radio Network, Peter Schweizer, political imagination, school choice, The Washington Post, transcript

girouxamericaatwarwithitselfoct2016LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Educator and leading theorist of critical pedagogy, Dr. Henry Giroux has published a new book entitled America At War With Itself.

Free speech radio’s Democracy Now! has been good enough to feature a brief interview with Dr. Giroux during today’s broadcast. [1]  Primary host Amy Goodman assured her audience this brief interview was only the beginning.  Listen/view (and/or download) here. [2]

Messina

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Pacifica Radio.]

DEMOCRACY NOW!—[14 OCT 2016]  “From Pacifica, this is Democracy Now!.

YUSEF SALAAM:  “I really didn’t know anything about Donald Trump until he took out those ads and called for our execution.  Every time I think about that, I think, had this been the 1950s, we would’ve been modern-day Emmett Tills.  They had our names, our phone numbers, and addresses in the papers.  And, so, what would’ve happened, if somebody from the darkest places of society would’ve come to our homes, kicked in our doors, and drug us from our homes, and hung us from the trees in Central Park?  That would’ve been the type of mob justice, that they were seeking.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “In 1989, Yusef Salaam and four other African-American and Latino teenagers were arrested for beating and raping a white woman jogger in New York City’s Central Park.  They became known as the Central Park Five.

“Donald Trump took out full-page ads at four New York newspapers calling for their execution.

“Then, in 2002, their convictions were vacated after the real rapist came forward, confessed to the crime.  His DNA matched.

“The Central Park Five served between 7 and 13 years in jail each for the assault.

“New York City, ultimately, settled with them for $41 million dollars.  But, as late as last week, Donald Trump still claimed they were guilty.

“We’ll speak with Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five.  He recently wrote in the Washington Post: Donald Trump won’t leave me alone.

“Then, a new report documents the devastating harm of policies, that criminalise the personal use and possession of drugs.”

FILM CLIP:  “Every 25 seconds, someone is arrested in the United States simply for possessing drugs for their personal use.  Around the country, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other kind—over 1.25 million arrests per year.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union released the findings Wednesday with a call for a call for states and the federal government to decriminalise low-level drug offences.

“And, from poisoned water in Flint to the police deaths of African-Americans to hatemongering on the presidential campaign trail, is America at war with itself?

“We’ll speak with Professor Henry Giroux, who argues just that in his new book.  All that and more, coming up.”  (c. 2:35)

[Democracy Now! News Headlines omitted by scribe.  Read, or ‘watch’, them here.]

AMY GOODMAN:  “And those are some of the headlines.  This is Democracy Now!, DemocracyNow.org, the War and Peace Report.  I’m Amy Goodman.” (c. 13:09)

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “And I’m Juan González.  Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world.

“And, Amy, before we get to the rest of the show, I wanted to ask you.  You’re heading back to North Dakota to answer the charges, that were lodged against you in connection to the Labor Day Weekend protests over the Dakota Access pipeline.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “That’s right, our filming of them.  I’m going back to North Dakota to cover the ongoing standoff at Standing Rock with the Democracy Now! team.  I’ll be turning myself in to authorities at the Morton County Jail in North Dakota Monday morning [17 OCT 2016], 8am, North Dakota time—that’s 9am here—as a result of being charged by the state of North Dakota with criminal trespass, following the release of our video showing the Dakota Access pipeline security guards physically assaulting, non-violent, mainly Native American land protectors, pepper-spraying them and unleashing attack dogs.  (c. 14:05)

“I intend to vigorously fight the charge, as I see it as a direct attack on the First Amendment, freedom of the press, and the public’s right to know.  The prosecutor in the case say [sic] he may, actually, uh, add more charges.  Uh, so, we will see.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “Well, hopefully, reason will prevail on Monday with the authorities there.  But we’ll be watching it, definitely.  And best of luck to you.”  (c. 14:29)

[Central Park Five segment omitted by scribe.  Access the news story here.]  (c. 32:14) [3]

[Music break, interrupted by local KPFA announcements:  Dr. Ralph Nader book event, Breaking Through Power Is Easier Than You Think, on Monday, October 17th, 2016, at 7:30pm at St. John’s Presbyterian Church (2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA).]  (c. 33:30)

[Pete Seeger music break continues] (c. 33:33)

AMY GOODMAN:  “Pete Seeger, ‘What Did You Learn In School Today?‘  This is Democracy Now!, DemocracyNow.org, the War and Peace Report.  I’m Amy Goodman.”

[ACLU & HRW report calling for drug decriminalisation segment omitted by scribe.  Access the news story here.]  (c. 45:37)

[Music break, interrupted by local KPFA announcement:  author David Talbot will join author Chris Hedges, Unspeakable, book event, Wednesday, October 19th, at 7:30pm at King Middle School (1781 Rose Street, Berkeley, CA); Wednesday, October 19, 2016, Pacifica coverage of the final presidential debate.]  (c. 46:55)

[Elliot & The Ghost music break continues]

AMY GOODMAN:  “‘Turn Off Your Radar‘, Elliot & The Ghost, whose bandmember, Brett Giroux, is the son of our next guest.   This is Democracy Now!, DemocracyNow.org, the War and Peace Report.  I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González.”  (c. 47:07)

rigged 2016JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “Well, we end today’s show with a look at a new book, that argues America is at war with itself.  From poisoned water in Flint and other cities to the police deaths of African Americans, including Keith Lamont Scott, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland, to hatemongering on the presidential campaign trail, Henry Giroux critiques what he believes is a slide toward authoritarianism and other failings, that led to the current political climate.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Noted scholar Robin D.G. Kelley writes in the book’s foreword, quote:

“‘These are, indeed, dark times.  But they are dark, not merely because we are living in an era of vast inequality, mass incarceration, and crass materialism, or that we face an increasingly precarious future, they are dark because most Americans are living under a cloak of ignorance, a cultivated and imposed state of civic illiteracy, that has opened the gates for what Giroux correctly sees as an authoritarian turn in the United States.  These are dark times because the very fate of democracy is at stake—a democracy fragile from its birth, always battered on the shoals of racism, patriarchy, and class rule.’

“‘The rise of Donald J. Trump is a sign of the times,’ he writes.

“Well, for more, we’re joined by the author of America at War with Itself, Henry Giroux, MccMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest.  He joins us in New York City.

“We welcome you.  It’s great to have you with us.”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Well, I’m honoured.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “How is America at war with itself?” [4]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “It’s at war with itself because it’s basically declared war, not only on any sense of democratic idealism, but it’s declared war on all the institutions that make democracy possible. [5]  And we see it with the war on public schools.  We see it with the war on education.  We see it with the war on the healthcare system.  We see it, as you said earlier, with the war on dissent, on the First Amendment.  We see it in the war on women’s reproductive rights. (c. 48:57)

“But, we, especially see it with the war on youth.  I mean, it seems to me that you can measure any degree—any society’s insistence on how it takes democracy seriously can, in fact, be measured by the way it treats its children.  And if we take that index as a measure of the United States, it’s utterly failing.  You have young people basically who—in schools, that are increasingly modeled after prisons—you have their behavior being increasingly criminalised.  And, one of the most atrocious of all acts, you have the rise of debtors’ prisons for children.  Kids, who basically are truant from school, are being fined.  And if they can’t—their parents can’t pay the fine, they’re being put in jail.  You have kids whose every behavior is being criminalised.

“I mean, what does it mean to be in a public school, and all of a sudden you are engaged in a dress code violation, and the police come in, and they handcuff you? They take you out; they put you in a police car, put you in the criminal justice system, and all of a sudden you find yourself, as Tess was saying earlier, marked for life.  Entire families are being destroyed around this. (c. 49:57)

“So—but it seems to me the real question here is:  How do you understand these isolated incidents within a larger set of categories, that tell us exactly what’s happening? [6]  And what’s happening is the social state is being destroyed, and the punishing state is taking its place.  So, violence now becomes the only tool by which we can actually mediate social problems, that should be dealt with in very different ways.”  (c. 50:20)

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “Well, you devote an entire chapter to Donald Trump’s America.” [7]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Yeah.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “And you, specifically, talk about the—how the media coverage of Trump has sort of divorced him from any past history of the country, in terms of the development of right-wing demagogues and authoritarian figures.” [7]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “That’s an important question.  I mean, you live in a country marked by a culture of the immediate.  You live in a country, that’s marked by celebrity culture, you know, that basically infantilises people, paralyses them.  It eliminates all notions of civic literacy, turns the school into bastions of ignorance.  They completely kill the radical imagination in any fundamental way.”

“And I think that what often happens with Trump is that you see something utterly symptomatic of the decline of a formative culture that makes democracy possible.  Juan, you have to have informed citizens to have a democracy.  You don’t have an informed citizenry.  You don’t have people who can think.  Remember what Hannah Arendt said when she was talking about fascism and totalitarianism.  She said:  Thoughtlessness is the essence of totalitarianism.  So, all of a sudden, emotion becomes more important than reason.  Ignorance becomes more important than justice.  Injustice is looked over as simply something, that happens on television.  The spectacle of violence takes over everything. (c. 51:34)

“I mean so it seems to me that we make a terrible mistake in talking about Trump as some kind of essence of evil. [8]  Trump is symptomatic of something much deeper in the culture, whether we’re talking about the militarisation of everyday life, whether we’re talking about the criminalisation of social problems, or whether we’re talking about the way in which money has absolutely corrupted politics.  This is a country that is sliding into authoritarianism. [9]  I mean it is not a—you cannot call this a democracy anymore.  We make a terrible mistake when we equate capitalism with democracy. [10]  And—” [Amy Goodman’s voice overlaps/interrupts]

AMY GOODMAN:  “You, you talk about the ethical bankruptcy of the U.S. ruling elites paving the way for Donald Trump.” [7]  (c. 52:11)

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “You know, you live in a country in which we have separated all economic activity from social cost, from ethical considerations. [10]  The ethical imagination, in itself, has become a liability.  And I think that when people like you and others make that clear—that you can’t have a democracy without that kind of ethical intervention, without assessing, you know, the degree to which people in some way can believe in the public good, can believe in justice—you have the heavy hand of the law pouncing on you.

“And I think that when the radical imagination dies, when an ethical sensibility dies, you live in a state of terrorism; you live in a state of fear; you live in a state in which people can’t trust each other.  Shared fears become more important than shared responsibilities.  And that’s the essence of fascism.” (c. 52:51)

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “And what sign of hope do you see out of all this, uh—yeah—” [Dr. Henry Giroux’s voice overlaps/interrupts]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “I think there are a lot of signs.  And thank you for the question.  I mean, I think, at some level, we see young people all over the country mobilising around different issues, in which they’re doing something, that I haven’t seen for a long time.  And that is, they’re linking these issues together.  You can’t talk about police violence without talking about the militarisation of society, in general.  You can’t talk about the assault on public education, unless you talk about the way in which capitalism defunds all public goods.  You can’t talk about the prison system without talking about widespread racism.  You can’t do that.  They’re making those connections. [6]  (c. 53:27)

“But they’re doing something more: They’re linking up with other groups.  If you’re gonna talk about Flint, if you’re gonna talk about, it seems to me, Ferguson, you have to talk about Palestine.  If you’re going to talk about repression in the United States, you’ve got to figure out how these modes of repression have become global because something has happened that we—that suggests a new kind of politics: Politics is local, and power is global.  The elite float; they don’t care about the social contract anymore.  So, you know, we see a level of disposability, a level of violence, that is really unlike anything we’ve seen before.  (c. 54:02)

“I mean, Donald Trump talking about the Central Park Five still being guilty, give me a break.  I mean, what is this really about? Is it about somebody who’s just ignorant and stupid?  Or is it somebody who now is part of a ruling class, that is so indifferent to questions of justice that they actually boast about their own racism?”  (c. 54:20)

AMY GOODMAN:  “Hm.  So. let me ask you about the issue of education.”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Right.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “The debate here is around school choice—”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Right, right.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “—of vouchers, charter schools.  But you’ve been talking about schools for a long time.  What is the role of schools and education in our society?”  [overlapping voices; Dr. Giroux eagerly begins answering the question before Amy Goodman finished answering it.]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Schools should be democratic public spheres.  They should be places, that educate people to be informed, to learn how to govern rather than be governed, to take justice seriously, to spur the radical imagination, to give them the tools, that they need to be able to, both, relate to themselves and others in the wider world in a way in which they can imagine that world as a better place.  (c. 54:51)

“I mean it seems to me, at the heart of any education, that matters, is a central question:  How can you imagine a future much different than the present, and a future, that basically grounds itself in questions of economic, political, and social justice?”  (c. 55:03)

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “And so, how do you see, then—for instance, the Obama administration has been a big promoter of charter schools and these privatisation efforts as a school choice model.”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “I—the Obama administration is a disgrace on education.  The Obama administration, basically, is an administration, that has bought the neoliberal line.  It drinks the orange juice.  I mean it doesn’t see schools as a public good.  It doesn’t see schools as places where, basically, we can educate students in a way to take democracy seriously and to be able to fight for it.  It sees them as, basically, kids, who should be part of the global workforce.  But it does more because not understanding schools as democratic public spheres means that the only place you can really go is, either, to acknowledge and not do anything about the fact that many of them are now modeled after prisons, or, secondly, they become places, that kill their radical imagination.

“Teaching for the test is a way to kill the radical imagination.  It’s a way to make kids boring; you know?  It’s a way to make them ignorant.  It’s a way to shut them off from the world in a way in which they can recognise that their agency matters.  It matters.  You can’t be in an environment and take education seriously when your education is under—when your agency is under assault.” (c. 56:15)

AMY GOODMAN:  “—[Dr. Giroux interjected before Goodman could respond.]”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “You can’t do it.”  (c. 56:17)

AMY GOODMAN:  “You begin your book with a quote of Albert Camus: ‘Memory is the enemy of totalitarianism.'” [overlapping voices; Dr. Giroux begins agreeing prior to Goodman completing her statement]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Yeah.  Yeah, yeah.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Explain.” (c. 56:25)

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Well, I’ll explain it in terms of a slogan, a Donald Trump slogan: Let’s make America great again.  You know—and when I hear that—that seems to suggest there was a moment in the past when America really was great—you know?—when women knew their places, when we could set dogs on black people in Mississippi, when young people went and sat-in in at lunch counters and were assaulted by others, that’s about—that’s about the death of memory.  That’s about memory being, basically, suppressed in a way, that doesn’t allow people to understand that there are things, that happened in the past, that we not only have to remember, we have to prevent from happening again.  Or, at another level, it suggests the suppression of memory, so that those things can happen again and that we don’t have to worry about them.

“And, so, it seems to me that a country without a sense of public memory, without a sense of historical memory, is a country always in crisis.” (c. 57:13)

AMY GOODMAN:  “You have talked about Donald Trump also coming about, the phenomenon, as the—a failure of the progressive left.”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Yeah.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “How?”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Well, I think that, you know, one of the things about the left—three things about the left disturb me, Amy.  One is, they never really have taken education seriously.  They think education is about schooling.  What they don’t realise is that forms of domination are not just simply structural.  They’re also about changing consciousness.  They’re also about getting people to invest in a language in which they can recognise that the problems, that we’re talking about have something to do with their lives.  It means making something meaningful, to make it critical, to make it transformative.  (c. 57:55)

“Secondly, it seems to me that the left is too involved in isolated issues [i.e., identity politics]. [11]  You know, we’ve got to bring these issues together to create a mass social movement, that in some way really challenges the kind of power that we’re now confronting.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Only the beginning of the conversation.  Henry Giroux, thanks so much for being with us, McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest.  His new book: America at War with Itself.

“That does it for our broadcast.  Oh, Juan, tomorrow is a very special day: Happy birthday!”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “Amy, thank you.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Well, we’ll be broadcas—”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “You didn’t need to mention that. [chuckles] (c. 58:28)”

AMY GOODMAN:  “We’ll be broadcasting Monday from North Dakota, from right near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.  Tune in.  [SNIP]  ”

[end of Democracy Now! broadcast]

KPFA CART:  Dr. Ralph Nader presentation:  Breaking Through Power, Monday, October 17, 2016, , First Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, California; Mickey Huff will host.

[SNIP]  (c. 59:59)

Learn more at DEMOCRACY NOW!.

***

[1]  Unfortunately, the brief interview seems to have been designed as a form of news abuse in the sense that the entire brief interview, as evidenced by the line of questions the interviewers asked, was not interested in the larger issues discussed in the book about the anti-democratic trends plaguing our institutions, such as education and our political system, a cartelised two-party dictatorship, as Ralph Nader calls it.  Dr. Giroux doesn’t seem to ever use that term.  But if you read more than a soundbite from Dr. Giroux, you will find that he’s very clear on the political corruption of both political parties.

But this interview is taking place in the context of the ongoing 2016 U.S. presidential election and free speech radio (and TV) coverage, with the election less than a month away.  And this interview, as evidenced by the questions from Amy Goodman and Juan González, the editorial slant at Democracy Now! was bent on using Dr. Henry Giroux to sensationalise a bogeyman image of Donald Trump and foment fear among the listeners and viewers.  That is news abuse, in terms of critical media literacy.  And Democracy Now!, like the editorial slant of the SaveKPFA faction at KPFA, has framed the overwhelming majority of its interviews and discussions, which have touched upon the 2016 presidential election, within a narrow-two party framework, and which (intentionally or not) functions to help marginalise alternative political parties and their candidates.  And alternative candidates, such as the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka, are far closer aligned to the ideals and general philosophy of socioeconomic justice championed by Democracy Now! (and KPFA radio).  Yet, they’re loathe to admit it.

Democracy Now! was not interested in the more profound issues being raised by Dr. Giroux, only in a narrow fear-mongering trope about Donald Trump, with a conspicuous implicit subtext to vote for Hillary Clinton.  No critical questions were asked about Hillary Clinton or her how her political record compares to her campaign platform, even though Amy Goodman herself actually emphasised the importance of this point in a speech she gave earlier this year.  But, in practice, Democracy Now! seems to primarily acquiesce to the anti-democratic nature of the two-party machine, which not only keeps out other political parties.  The Democratic Party even keeps out left-of-center candidates, such as Bernie Sanders.  And this is not the first time, as Dr. Jill Stein, has pointed out elsewhere:

“And what we learned, in the course of Bernie’s campaign, is that you cannot have a revolutionary campaign in a counter-revolutionary party.

“The party pulled out its kill switch against Bernie and sabotaged him.  As we saw from the emails revealed, showing the collusion between the Democratic National Committee, Hillary’s campaign, and members of the corporate media.

“And it wasn’t the first time.  This happened to Dennis Kucinich.  It happened to Jesse Jackson.  They did it even to Howard Dean, creating the ‘Dean Scream’.

“This is how they work.  And it’s been a huge wake-up moment.”

This is not the first time this type of news abuse has been perpetrated by Democracy Now!  Some of us have been watching their election coverage since the show began in 1996.  And it seems clear that the editorial agenda at Democracy Now!, during election cycles, has been to subtly steer voters toward the Democratic Party.  A rigorous analysis of Democracy Now!‘s coverage of presidential elections will likely demonstrate this.  And, inhabiting such a central role within free speech media, Democracy Now! should be held accountable for this.  But few have wanted to be critical of their beloved Democracy Now!  Mnar Muhawesh (Mint Press News) is one of the few voices we’ve heard on free speech radio be critical about the failings of our beloved Democracy Now! and their figureheads, such as Amy Goodman.

“But you and I, we’ve been through that; and this is not our fate
So, let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”

[2]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA; Pacifica Radio Network, nationwide) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  Democracy Now!, one-hour episode co-hosted by Juan González and Amy Goodman, Friday, 14 OCT 2016, 09:00 PDT.

[3]  The Central Park Five is a tragic story of five black and Latino teenagers wrongly accused and imprisoned between 7 and 13 years in jail each for the assault, the rape and beating of a white woman, which they did not commit.  Donald Trump put out ads back in 1989, which helped railroad the five teenagers, whose sentences were later vacated when the actual perpetrator came forward and a DNA match was established.

Yes, Donald Trump is a political opportunist.  But, unfortunately, that is not newsworthy, unless one is engaging in electoral propaganda.  Of course, it doesn’t have to be newsworthy.  We can have political commentary and opinion, as long as we’re clear on what’s being presented.  In this case, this ‘Central Park Five’ news story is not actually news, technically speaking.  The only thing new is the fact that one of the Central Park Five, Yusef Salaam, wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post, in which he outlined the legal and social injustices suffered by the Central Park Five as well as the sinister role Donald Trump played in the matter.

The constant reporting on trivial details about Trump, such as his latest inappropriate remark, is definitely emblematic of junk food news.  The rehashing of the Central Park Five story, of course, is not junk food news.  But, as we learn from our critical media literacy education, the placement of this story by Democracy Now! within this broadcast to reinforce the paradigm of fear of Trump and a reactionary vote for neoliberal Hillary Clinton is an example of news abuse.  An older example, as Dr. Peter Phillips has mentioned, would be the case of the Jon Benet story, which was also tragic, but overly reported so as to drown out other more consequential news stories.

The central thrust of Yusef Salaam’s opinion piece in The Washington Post is summarised in its subtitle:  The Republican candidate’s antics have filled me with fear.

The implied fear-based messaging is clear, however: Vote Hillary for president next month.

Similarly, the function of Democracy Now! broadcasting a segment about an opinion-piece expressing fear of a Trump presidency also serves to send subtle messaging to its audiences to vote Hillary for president.  And many liberals are already of a lesser-of-two-evils mentality, and don’t need any further enabling from Democracy Now!, who should be counted on to maintain its commitment to critical analysis, even during election cycles.  But, it’s clear the editorial slant at Democracy Now! favours Hillary Clinton.  Even though, Democracy Now! has taken credit for ‘Expanding the Debates’ during recent broadcasts by inserting responses from willing candidates excluded from the Debates.  (Only the Green Party candidates, Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka agreed to participate in Democracy Now!‘s expanded debates.  It’s unclear whether or not Democracy Now! also invited smaller political parties, such as the socialist Peace and Freedom Party based in California.)

But, despite token coverage of the Green Party candidates, the overwhelming bulk of Democracy Now!‘s coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election has been focused on the Democratic and Republican Party candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  And, worse, it’s largely been uncritical, or toned down its critique, of Hillary Clinton, who, essentially, stole the Democratic Primary.

[4]  A leading question is one which leads the person being questioned to respond in a certain way.  This can be objectionable of proper, depending on the circumstances.  In this case, Amy Goodman‘s selection of a quote from Dr. Giroux‘s book foreword, invoking the spectre of a Donald Trump presidency, seems designed to lead Dr. Giroux into contributing to Democracy Now!‘s ongoing agenda of fomenting fear of a Donald Trump presidency, of prioritising a dominant focus on a binary, good versus evil, narrative of Donald Trump posing an unprecedented menace to society with Hillary Clinton cast as the voice of reason.  But Dr. Giroux is concerned with larger, more profound issues, which transcend one single candidate.  Thus, Dr. Giroux seemed to disappoint Goodman’s interview agenda.  (Apparently undeterred, Juan González kept the Democracy Now! agenda on track when it was his turn to ask question of Dr. Giroux, steering the interview topic back to the Donald Trump talking point with an even more pointed focus than before.)

The dominant focus of this broadcast was:  Fear Trump.  Two of the three news stories were framed in terms of a fear of a Donald Trump presidency.  The framing of the Democracy Now! segment on Dr. Henry Giroux‘s new book is unmistakable in the segment title:  Is Trump’s Rise a Result of America Declaring War on Institutions That Make Democracy Possible?  The segment about the Central Park Five is about an anti-Trump opinion piece recently published in The Washington Post.  We may wonder, however, why an opinion piece about a fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency was not featured, instead, or even an entire factual book, such as My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (2015) by Doug Henwood or Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich (2015) by Peter Schweizer.  For example, Honduras has now become one of the most dangerous nations for activists, or citizens attempting to experience democracy in their daily lives.  Thanks to the role Hillary Clinton played, as U.S. Secretary of State, in helping to legitimate the military coup against the Democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya, prize-winning activists, such as Berta Caseres have been assassinated for standing up to exploitative behaviours of multinational corporations after being targeted, threatened, and harassed.  Only through hyperbole and bad journalism can opportunist Donald Trump be elevated to a bogeyman and neoliberal Hillary Clinton be humanised, as a lesser of two evils.  They are, both, just evil.  Can we say that one pedophile is more evil than another?  Not really.  They are both sick.  They both need help.  They must both be kept away from positions of authority where the health and safety of society is at stake.

[5]  Another example of America being at war with itself, of a war on an institution, which makes democracy possible, is the war on the democratic process itself.  The two-party cartelisation of the political process works to censor all political diversity, keep out alternative political parties, kill the American political imagination, and keep the American people within the tight grip of a neoliberal agenda, whether it’s at the hands of a Democratic or Republican administration.  And, sadly, when we look closely, through a critical media literacy lens, we find that Democracy Now! also works to censor all political diversity when it counts the most, during presidential elections when most Americans are likely to be paying attention to political discussions.  Keeping a focus on the two corporate political parties and their candidates helps steer progressives toward the neoliberal Democratic Party, or toward a sense of disaffection in the face of a defeatist TINA ideology—there is no alternative.

[6]  Dr. Giroux raised the question:  How do you understand these isolated incidents [of erosion of democracy] within a larger set of categories, that tell us exactly what’s happening?  One way we can understand these social ills is through understanding the form of socioeconomic organisation, or mode of production, by which we organise our American society.  Given the American capitalist modes of production, our society’s social priorities are subordinated to the goals of the capitalist owning classes to capture profits and market share by any means necessary and regardless of the human or environmental cost.  This means privatising education, criminalising redundant populations, profiting from prisons, profiting from health care, and so on.  And, above all, in terms of pedagogy in education, it means killing the radical spirit and even political imagination of our students, so that they become uncritical cogs in the national machine of capitalist production.  It means killing off the capacity in our students to ever imagine a better world.  In California, Common Core educational standards emphasise evidence-based reasoning.  But, if the educational content being presented to students is narrowed and sterilised, and students are never asked to question the authority or validity of the truth-claims being taught, then there is a gaping hole in our students’ capacity for meaningful critical thinking and knowledge-building.  Books have been written to counter many of the problems with the educational content being presented to our students.  Dr. James W. Loewen‘s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is one example.  Dr. Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States is another.  And, of course, the epic documentary film series, The Untold History of the United States, by Oliver Stone and Dr. Peter Kuznets is another excellent example of a valuable resource to supplement educational content.  Yet, sadly, most Americans have acquiesced to these totalitarian trends.

For an excellent academic paper addressing some of these themes, read:  Benson, P., & Kirsch, S.. (2010). Capitalism and the Politics of Resignation. Current Anthropology, 51(4), 459–486. http://doi.org/10.1086/653091  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653091

[7]  As noted above, the focus is kept on fomenting a fear of a Donald Trump presidency, apparently intended to trigger fear-based decision-making responses in the audience to steer voters toward voting for Hillary Clinton.  Of all the chapters, Juan González chose to focus on the one chapter on Trump.  In the absence, of any meaningful inclusion of Dr. Jill Stein in the overarching, ongoing, political analyses and discussions within Democracy Now!‘s 2016 presidential election coverage, it becomes clear that the suggestion is toward Hillary Clinton as the antithesis to a Donald Trump presidency, not toward other alternatives to the two-party status quo, such as the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein, whose campaign platform, ironically, is more closely aligned to the ideals of Democracy Now! than is Hillary Clinton’s campaign platform.

[8]  Here we see Dr. Henry Giroux undermining the Trump-as-bogeyman fearmongering agenda of Democracy Now!  Yes, Trump is bad for America.  But so is the neoliberal agenda of Hillary Clinton.  Trump is not “some essence of evil” or bogeyman, as Dr. Giroux subtly informs his Democracy Now! hosts.  It is this larger, neoliberal capitalist imperative, which must be confronted, and which is perpetuated by the two-party system, the two-party dictatorship.  And it is that imperative, that system, which is being perpetuated by an uncritical acquiescence to a cartelised two-party system, which, by definition, kills political diversity and kills our political imagination.

Unfortunately, this subtle admonishment is not enough to make explicit the terrible mistakes of journalism, which Democracy Now! is making by predominantly framing their 2016 U.S. presidential election coverage within a narrow two-party framework, even despite token broadcasts featuring the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka.

[9]  Dr. Noam Chomsky and others have also written compellingly about the historical trend towards fascism, totalitarianism, or authoritarianism in the United States since, at least, the 1960s government backlash against civic engagement, or political engagement, or as Project Censored’s Andy Lee Roth has recently noted, experiencing democracy on a daily basis, rather than as a shallow participation every few years, in which one passively (and often thoughtlessly) chooses an electoral choice from a predetermined menu, which one had no participatory role in creating.

[10]  Indeed, various experts have written, and commented, about the incompatibility between democracy and capitalism (i.e., capitalist modes of production).

(I’ll have to find a few of those references and include them in this footnote.  A great place to start is with understanding capital and capitalism.  Ilan Ziv‘s Capitalism: A Six-Part Series is a highly accessible and intellectually sound entry point for anyone interested in understanding the capitalist modes of production, which circumscribe all of our lives.)

Essentially, democracy calls for meaningful participation from the citizenry in expressing its political, its socioeconomic, will, which elected leaders and state officials are charged with operationalising.  Capitalism, or capitalist modes of production, on the other hand, prioritise property rights and profit motive above all other considerations, such as democracy in the workplace.  Capitalism requires authoritarianism or fascism in the workplace.  Capitalist labour relations, by definition, involve uneven power relations in which a capitalist employer has all of the power in negotiating wages and working conditions; and employees of capitalists have no choice but to take it or leave it.  This causes income inequality from the start of capitalistic enterprise between the working classes and the capitalist owning classes, the owners of capital, of businesses and corporations.  At the core of capitalist relations we find these uneven power relations and conditions of exploitation.

And, since we allow money to influence our political process, obviously, the owning classes have an advantage in unduly influencing political messaging and propaganda in the nation.  This power differential between the working classes and the capitalist owning classes is why, for example, the nation’s tax burden has been perpetually shifted from corporations (once known as royal charters) onto the working classes, such that income tax, as we now know it, didn’t start in earnest until 1913 with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  Prior to that, since the nation’s inception, it was understood that the largest corporations could, and should, solely bear the nation’s tax burden.

And, of course, since we went off the gold standard in 1971 under Richard Nixon, taxes function much differently now.  This point brings us, eventually, to modern monetary theory (or modern money theory).  In 1971, the Nixon administration was mired in the American military efforts to control Vietnamese political self-determination (i.e., the so-called Vietnam War).  At that point, the U.S., essentially, ran out of gold and closed the gold window.  So, Nixon ended the international convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold.  Thus, nowadays, as Dr. Stephanie Kelton and other heterodox economists explain:  Taxes, technically, don’t pay for anything because all modern money exists as an IOU.  These government IOUs are lent, or spent, into creation by the state.  And when they return to the state in the form of tax payments, those IOUs are extinguished, are erased.  Dr. Kelton would emphasise this point by reminding us that the federal reserve actually shred that money, which can be observed whenever one takes a tour of a federal reserve bank.

Obviously, the people, the working classes, would rather not be taxed on their income, as it limits their purchasing power, their livelihoods.  But, because of the incompatibility between capitalism and democracy, the people’s popular will is subordinated to that of the capitalist owning and ruling classes.  But the tax code is only one example of the social ills caused and exacerbated by capitalist modes of production.  Other problems arise in self-serving industry deregulation of safety and environmental protections through political interventions by capitalist elites.  A recent example is the Dakota Access pipeline being built through the sovereign indigenous lands.  Native American leaders have led the resistance to this capitalist project and have been met with violence, repression, and even attack dogs.  Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman, as noted above, is even facing criminal trespass charges for filming the state violence against First Amendment activities.

But, virtually everywhere we turn in society, we can see capitalist profit motive at odds with humanity.  This is why capitalist modes of production are incompatible with democracy, because the will of unqualified profit motive is at odds with the needs of a nation, or socioeconomic polity.

[11]  This is the form of false consciousness in which the left isolates itself into narrow silos, which are narrowly focused on single-issue politics, often identity politics.

***

[14 OCT 2016]

[Last modified 17:26 PDT  17 OCT 2016]

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Prince Rogers Nelson (7 JUN 1958 – 21 APR 2016)

21 Thu Apr 2016

Posted by ztnh in History of Funk, History of Rhythm & Blues, History of Rock and Roll, History of Soul, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

After Hours, Almicar Perez Lopez, Chocolate Beats, CIA, Dick Gregory, Dion Decibels, Dr. Rickey Vincent, Greg Bridges, Hard Knock Radio, Ice Cube, Kris Welch, Media TakeOut, Michael Jackson, Money Don't Matter 2 Night, Prince, Reel Black TV, The Beatles, The History of Funk, The Talkies, The Washington Post, Thinkbeat Radio, Time-Warner, TMZ, transcript, Transitions on Traditions, Warren Buffet (b. 1930)

640px-Prince_at_CoachellaLUMPENPROLETARIAT—It has been reported on free speech radio’s The Talkies that musical legend Prince has died today.  Dr. Rickey Vincent, who has taught courses on the history of funk, joined KPFA colleagues, including Greg Bridges (Transitions On Traditions) [2] to acknowledge, remember, and celebrate the life and music of Prince.

Prince has always been one of the most important musicians for many of us.  The first musical recording your author ever purchased was at the San Mateo Hillsdale Shopping Mall back in third grade.  It was a vinyl copy of Prince’s Controversy.  Prince continues to be, for many of us, one of the greatest musical geniuses of our time.

Mysteriously, the discussants on The Talkies mentioned TMZ has reported today Prince’s death.  Yet, no indication has been given as to the cause of death.  It seems particularly tragic, in a sense, as Prince had (at least, anecdotally, seemed to have) become increasingly politically outspoken, particularly with his outspoken stance in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.  Listen here. [1]

Today’s episode of Hard Knock Radio also dedicated its broadcast to Prince.  Listen here. [2]

UPDATE [22 APR 2016]  KPFA has collaborated with Professor of Funk, Dr. Rickey Vincent, host of KPFA’s History of Funk, to give the community a two-hour special Prince Tribute with DJ Rickey Vincent, featuring some of Prince’s well-known and some obscure recordings.  Rickey Vincent is, as always, a brilliant and mindful curator.  Listen (or download, for a limited time) here. [3]

UPDATE [25 APR 2016] Free speech radio’s History of Funk has also dedicated this week’s broadcast to the life and music of Prince.  This, being a late-night broadcast, is able to explore some of Prince’s grown-folk musical dimensions.  Listen here. [4]

Free speech radio’s Transitions On Traditions has dedicated this week’s broadcast to the life and music of Prince.  Host Greg Bridges presents us with a slightly more jazz-funk-fusion side of Prince, fitting nicely with the fusion flavour of Transitions On Traditions‘ musical palette.  Listen here. [5]

UPDATE [1 MAY 2016]  Free speech radio’s After Hours (or Chocolate Beats) focused their broadcast for 1 MAY 2016 on the work of Prince, including many of the artists, which worked with Prince or were influenced by his musical styles.  Listen here. [6]

UPDATE [2 MAY 2016]  Free speech radio’s Thinkbeat Radio has dedicated their broadcast for 30 APR 2016 to the music of Prince, with an hour-long continuous mix with an emphasis on Prince‘s influential pre-Purple Rain fonk grooves, which came to be known as the Minneapolis Sound. Listen here. [7]

UPDATE [5 MAY 2016]  Celebrated comic Dick Gregory suspects foul play in Prince‘s sudden death. [8]

Messina

***

***

HARD KNOCK RADIO—[21 APR 2016]  “What’s happenin’ folks?  Today on Hard Knock Radio, we reflect on the passage of the great musician and icon, Prince.  That comes up after these news headlines.”

[KPFA News Headlines]

AILEEN ALFANDARY:  “I’m Aileen Alfandary with KPFA News Headlines.

“Prince, who was one of the most innovative and influential musicians of modern times has died at the age of 57.  He was found dead in his home and studio in suburban Minneapolis.

“So far, no cause of death has been announced.

“Fans all over the world are mourning his death.”

RICKEY VINCENT:  “It’s a sad day in the history of funk.”

AILEEN ALFANDARY:  “Rickey Vincent is a UC Berkeley African-American Studies lecturer and author of Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers Band.  He also hosts a Friday night show on KPFA [entitled The History of Funk].

“Vincent joined host Kris Welch shortly after the news broke of Prince’s death.  Vincent commented on Prince’s versatility.”  (c. 2:54)

RICKEY VINCENT:  “So, he would give you some rockabilly, or he would give you some, you know, silly songs.  And he would just get, you know, nasty under the covers.  And he would be determined to be more diverse than you think you can be on a record.”

AILEEN ALFANDARY:  “President Obama released a statement saying he and his wife joined millions of fans from around the world in mourning Prince’s sudden death.  Obama hosted Prince at the White House last year.”

[News Headlines truncated by scribe]  (c. 4:45)

AILEEN ALFANDARY:  “The rapper Equipto and two others began a hunger strike outside the Mission Police Station in San Francisco, saying they’ll only take liquids until San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr resigns or is fired.

“Ike Pinkston is another of the hunger strikers.”

IKE PINKSTON:  “It pains me to know that my children can be any one of these children, that are shot or killed up here by S.F.P.D.

“So, I, myself, am going on this hunger strike, not just for myself, but for my children.  I feel I owe it to my children, to these children, to the future, not just San Francisco, but to our nation.”

AILEEN ALFANDARY:  “Activists have been calling for Chief Suhr’s dismissal since the police shooting death in December of Mario Woods.  They also point to the fatal police shootings of Alex Nieto and Almicar Perez Lopez.

“I’m Aileen Alfandary; more on these and other stories at six on the Pacifica Evening News.”  (c. 5:42)

[music break:  big band jazz sound; then Hard Knock Radio intro audio collage]

(c. 9:15)  “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince and the Revolution  (c. 13:48)

GREG BRIDGES:  “This is Greg Bridges with Hard Knock Radio.

“And, as the world has heard, we are all kind of reeling from, and trying to make sense of and process, the news, that we heard just a little while ago about the passing of one of music’s true icons, one of music’s true geniuses.  And we’re speaking of Prince.

“And with me today are a couple of cats, whose voices you’ve heard on these airwaves, a couple of cats who you have heard Prince and their musical mixes at one time or another.  I’m speaking of my man, [inaudible] Will and Rickey Vincent.”

[SNIP]

Learn more at HARD KNOCK RADIO.

***

“Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” (1990, 1992) by Prince

One more card and it’s twenty two
Unlucky for him again
He never had respect for money; it’s true
That’s why he never wins
That’s why he never ever has enough
To treat his lady right
He just pushes her away in a huff
And says, ‘Money don’t matter tonight’

Money don’t matter tonight
It sure didn’t matter yesterday
Just when you think you’ve got more than enough
That’s when it all up and flies away
That’s when you find out that you’re better off
Makin’ sure your soul’s alright
‘Cos money didn’t matter yesterday,
And it sure don’t matter tonight

Look, here’s a cool investment
They’re tellin’ him he just can’t lose
So, he goes off and tries to find a partner
But all he finds are users (users)
All he finds are snakes in every colour
Every nationality and size
Seems like the only thing that he can do
Is just roll his eyes, and say that

Money don’t matter tonight (don’t matter)
It sure didn’t matter yesterday
Just when you think you’ve got more than enough
That’s when it all up and flies away
That’s when you find out that you’re better off
Makin’ sure your soul’s alright (soul’s alright)
‘Cos money didn’t matter yesterday (don’t matter)
And it sure don’t matter tonight

(ooh wee-ooh, don’t matter)

Hey now, maybe we can find a good reason
To send a child off to war
So, what if we’re controllin’ all the oil?
Is it worth a child dying for? (Is it worth it?)
If long life is what we all live for
Then long life will come to pass
Anything is better than the picture of a child
In a cloud of gas
And you think you got it bad

Money don’t matter tonight (no, don’t matter)
It sure didn’t matter yesterday (yesterday)
Just when you think you’ve got more than enough
That’s when it all up and flies away (flies away, flies away)
That’s when you find out that you’re better off
Makin’ sure your soul’s alright (make certain that your soul’s alright)
‘Cos money didn’t matter yesterday
It sure don’t matter tonight

Money don’t matter tonight
It sure didn’t matter yesterday (yesterday, yesterday)
Just when you think you’ve got more than enough
That’s when it all up and flies away (flies away, flies away)
That’s when you find out that you’re better off
Makin’ sure your soul’s alright
Money didn’t matter yesterday
And it sure don’t matter tonight

Songwriters:  GAINES, ROSIE / ROGERS NELSON, PRINCE

“Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

***

They say: Curiosity killed the cat

***

This video exemplifies the sundry concerns of foul play and speculation amongst Prince’s stunned audience, who knew the artist as a healthy vegetarian who seemed to avoid intoxicants, despite his long-running injuries to his hips resulting from decades of dancing on high-heeled boots, including performing spectacular pirouettes and front splits, which evidently required painkillers to endure, since Prince seemed to have refuse hip surgery, apparently because his Jehova’s Witness religion opposed blood transfusions, consent for which may have been required for hip surgery.

***

[Prior to Prince’s death, this website published an unconfirmed report suggesting Prince may have been battling a life-threatening illness, re-posting a rumour, which had circulated on other tabloid-like publications.]

MEDIA TAKEOUT—[16 APR 2016]

April 16, 2016: MediaTakeOut.com just received word that a VERY popular African-American celebrity – who has recently been in the news – now has what is being described as AIDS. Obviously since we are not able to 100% confirm the story – we’re going to leave it as a Blind Item. We want to make it clear we are NOT talking about Magic Johnson.

This report REALLY hurt our heart.

According to a person EXTREMELY CLOSE to the situation, the celebrity, who is known for having a very EXTREME sexual past reportedly contracted the illness sometime in the 1990s. He kept the illness quiet but began taking his medication RELIGIOUSLY up until about two years ago. Here’s what we’re told by a VERY trusted entertainment insider:

[The celebrity] believed that he was cured, and he had some crazy [religious] people who told him that God cured him. So he stopped taking his medication and the sickness came back. Now doctors say he’s dying, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

We’re told that the celebrity is expected to get sicker and sicker, and eventually pass. It can happen as soon as the summer.

Very sad news.

Learn more at MEDIA TAKEOUT.

***

[1]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  The Talkies, this episode hosted by Kris Welch, with KPFA DJ’s Rickey Vincent (The History of Funk), Greg Bridges (Transitions On Traditions) and Last Will (The Talkies), for Thursday, 21 APR 2016, 11:00 PDT.  [N.B.:  Per past experience, this broadcast may or may not be deleted by the KPFA authorities two weeks after the initial broadcast date, as it’s a new broadcast.  Music of the World, which used to air Monday through Friday at 11:00 PDT has been replaced by new programming.  Music of the World will be condensed to a two-hour broadcast Saturday mornings from 09:00 to 11:00 PDT.]  [As of Friday, 6 MAY 2016, this free speech radio broadcast has been deleted from the audio archive web page.]

[2]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  Hard Knock Radio, this episode hosted by Greg Bridges with Dr. Rickey Vincent and Will Nichols, Thursday, 21 APR 2016, 16:00 PDT.  [N.B.:  For some unfortunate reason, Hard Knock Radio removes all of its broadcasts from the archives two weeks after the broadcast date.]

[3]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  Prince Tribute with DJ Rickey Vincent, hosted by Dr. Rickey Vincent with Will Nichols, Friday, 22 APR 2016, 11:00 PDT.  [N.B.:  For obvious copyright reasons this broadcast will likely be removed from KPFA’s archive webpage within two weeks after the initial broadcast date.]

Brief (perhaps, incomplete) summary:

  • (c. 0:30) “I Wish U Heaven” (1988) (12″ version) (taken from Lovesexy)
  • (c. 6:40) Hosts Rickey Vincent (The History of Funk) and ‘Last Will’
  • (c. 10:25) “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (1979) (taken from Prince)
  • (c. 16:00) “Cream” (1991?) (taken from Diamonds and Pearls)
  • (c. 20:00) “Anotherloverholenyohead” (1986) (taken from Under the Cherry Moon Motion Picture Soundtrack also known as Parade)
  • (c. 24:00) playlist update with hosts Rickey Vincent and Last Will
  • (c. 26:00) “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” (1980)
  • (c. 29:40) “Kiss” (1986) (taken from Under the Cherry Moon Motion Picture Soundtrack also known as Parade)
  • (c. 36:38) “Temptation” (1985) (taken from Around the World In a Day)
  • (c. 45:00)  hosts give a playlist update and talk about Prince and his music
  • (c. 47:25)  obscure song/unable to identify
  • (c. 51:50)  “Little Red Corvette” (1983)
  • (c. 59:20)  back to hosts Rickey Vincent and ‘Last Will’
  • CART:  Flashpoints promo
  • (c. 1:01:30)  back to the hosts, who commented and ‘relished’, however innocently, in “controversial speculation”, the fact that TMZ reported that certain drugs or painkillers were prescribed to Prince, which were a part of Prince’s ailments resulting from Prince’s history dancing with high heels.
  • (c. 1:11:00)  “Musicology” (2004)  (taken from Musicology)
  • (c. 1:15:00)  back to the hosts
  • (c. 1:19:00)  “new stuff”, possibly “Clouds” (2014) with bass player Ida Nielsen
  • “The Beautiful Ones” (1984) (taken from Purple Rain Motion Picture Soundtrack also known as Purple Rain)
  • (c. 1:29:00) “This Could B Us” (2015) (taken from HitnRun Phase One)
  • (c. 1:32:50) “Betcha by Golly Wow” (1996) (taken from Emancipation)
  • (c. 1:36:00) [TW] Rickey Vincent
  • (c. 1:38:30)  “Space” (1994) (taken from Come)
  • (c. 1:42:50)  “Breakdown” (2014) (taken from Art Official Age)
  • “Sexuality” (1981) (taken from Controversy)
  • “Around the World In A Day” (1985) (taken from Around the World in a Day)
  • ‘…stand up and organise…’ song
  • (c. 1:54:00) back to hosts Rickey Vincent and ‘Last Will’

[4]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  The History of Funk, hosted by Rickey Vincent, Friday, 22 APR 2016, 20:00 PDT.

[5]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  Transitions On Traditions, hosted by Greg Bridges, Monday, 25 APR 2016, 20:00 PDT.

Playlist:

  • “Shout Out” by Sekou Sundiata
  • “Baltimore” by Prince
  • “And God Created Woman” by Prince
  • “Letitgo” by Prince
  • “If I Was Your Girlfriend” by Prince
  • “When You Were Mine” by Prince
  • “Partyman” by Prince
  • “Computer Blue” by Prince
  • “17 Days” by Prince
  • “Automatic” by Prince
  • “South” by Prince
  • “Crazy You” by Prince
  • “De Bang” by Prince
  • “The Greatest Romance Ever Sold” by Prince
  • “Thieves In the Temple” by Prince
  • “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” by Prince
  • “She Spoke 2 Me” by Prince
  • “Money Don’t Matter” by Prince
  • “Dinner With Delores” by Prince
  • “Black Muse” by Prince
  • “The Most Beautiful Girl In the World (Mustang Mix)” by Prince
  • “New World Symphony (live)” by Earth, Wind & Fire

[6]  Terrestrial four-hour-long radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  After Hours, hosted by hosts Tonita(sp?), D Minor(sp?), and T(sp?), Sunday, 1 MAY 2016, 01:00 PDT.  (Oddly, KPFA also lists Chocolate Beats Radio, as having been broadcast during the same broadcast time-slot from 1am to 5am.  Chocolate Beats Radio also lists an identical playlist somehow.  Perhaps, Chocolate Beats Radio has been preempted by After Hours.  Perhaps, After Hours is typically a two-hour broadcast.)

Playlist:

  • Discussion of local news and events, including the anti-police terrorism hunger strike by SF Bay Area rapper Equipto, of Bored Stiff and numerous collaborations with Andre Nickatine, Edward Lindo(sp?), Selassie, and two other comrades.  The hunger strikers have been dubbed the Frisco Five.  [Selassie is a long-time SF Bay Area artist and activist, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with over the years, especially after I covered Michael Moore’s visit to Oscar Grant Square in Oakland, California with Abby Martin and Media Roots.]
  • “After Hours” by Johnny Taylor
  • (c. 18:10) “Struggle No More” by Anthony Hamilton (taken from Daddy’s Little Girl)
  • “Black Lullaby” by Angela Johnson (taken from Naturally Me)
  • “Better For Me” by Algebra Blessett (taken from Recovery)
  • “Takeoff” by Prince
  • “Scandalous” by Prince
  • “NPG Operator” by Prince
  • “Love Sign” by Prince
  • “Condition of the Heart” by Prince
  • “South” by Prince”
  • “My Stick” by The Time (taken from What Time Is It?)
  • “Love Bazaar” by Sheila E (taken from Sheila E)
  • “If A Girl Answers” by Vanity 6 (taken from Vanity 6)
  • “Affection” by Ta Mara and The Seen (taken from Ta Mara & The Seen)
  • “Screams of Passion” by The Family (taken from The Family)
  • “Sex Shooter” by Apollonia 6 (taken from Apollonia 6)
  • “Honeymoon Express” (1987) by Wendy & Lisa
  • “One” by Madhouse (taken from Madhouse 8)
  • “Dopamine Rush” by Eric Leeds (taken from Times Square)
  • “I Wanna Be Your Lover” by Prince
  • “For You” by Prince (taken from For You)
  • “If I Was Your Girlfriend” by Janet (taken from Janet)
  • “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” by Faith Evans (with Mary J. Blige) (taken from Faith)
  • “Heard It All Before” by Sunshine Anderson (taken from Your Woman)
  • “Spotlight” by Jennifer Hudson (taken from Jennifer Hudson)
  • “Drifter” by Dawnari
  • “Diary” by Alicia Keys (with Tony! Toni! Tone) (taken from The Diary of Alicia Keys
  • “Let’s Stay Together” by Lyfe Jennings (taken from The Pheonix)
  • “If I Was Your Girlfriend” (1987) by Prince (taken from Sign “☮” The Times
  • “Jazz Liberatorz” by Fatlib & T Love
  • “What Time It Is” by Cornel West (with Jill Scott)
  • “Can I” by One Way
  • “Sex, Love & Money” by Yasin Bey aka Yasin Gaye
  • “Love Sign” by Prince
  • “Sex Machine” by Sly Stone
  • “Here We Go Again” by Isley Brothers
  • “The Look In Your Eyes” by Maze
  • “Truth” by Handsome Boy Modeling School
  • “Sensual Everafter” by Prince
  • (c. 1:38:45) back to the hosts, which refer to the broadcast as After Hours
  • (c. 1:39:50)  “Sometimes It Snows In April” (piano instrumental) with poetry read by host
  • (c. 1:47:00) “Diamonds and Pearls (instrumental)” by Prince and The New Power Generation

[7]  Terrestrial four-hour-long radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  Thinkbeat Radio, hosted by Wonway Posibul and Dion Decibels, Saturday, 30 APR 2016, 01:00 PDT.  [N.B.:  Music programmes are usually deleted from the KPFA archives two weeks after the initial broadcast date.]

It was definitely an epic Prince Party at Thinkbeat Radio with this continuous DJ/turntablist mix.  Listen to your body, listen to your lower chakra, and get yo’ groove on, my friends.

Playlist (incomplete, rough notes):

  • brief introduction
  • Prince Party Mix by DJ Dion Decibels
    • (c. 1:00) ‘My Name Is Prince’ by Prince
    • (c. 2:45) ‘New Age’ by Prince
    • (c. 7:00) ‘3121’
    • (c. 10:30)
    • (c. 12:30) “If I Was Your Girlfriend” (1987) by Prince
    • (c. 15:00) “I Wonder U” (1986) by Prince and The Revolution
    • (c. 16:30) “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” (1987) by Prince
    • (c. 20:00)
    • [continuous mix continues]
    • (c. 41:00) “1999” by Prince
    • (c. 44:00)
    • (c. 46:00)
    • (c. 51:00) “Erotic City” by Prince
    • (c. 54:50) “Do Me, Baby” (1981) by Prince
  • (c. 56:00) Programme hosts describe the preceding continuous mix
  • (c. 1:00:00) An interview with DJ Anthony Valdez (from KCRW)
  • (c. 1:17:00) Begin improvised turntablist mix by DJ Anthony Valdez
    • “New World Symphony” (elements) by Earth, Wind & Fire
    • [continuous mix continues]
    • (c. 1:58:00) end of DJ Anthony Valdez mix
  • Shout out to Equipto and the Frisco 5 hunger strikers camped out in front of San Francisco’s Mission District Police Station currently on Day 9 or 10 of their hunger strike against police terrorism, police killing with impunity, and calling for the firing of San Francisco Police Department Chief Greg Suhr.
  • (c. 2:00:00) Prince audio documentary and music turntablist mix
    • “Head”
    • (c. 2:09:00) “Soft and Wet” by Prince
    • (c. 2:11:30) “1999” by Prince
    • (c. 2:14:00) “Controversy” by Prince
    • [continuous mix still going c. 2:15:00]

[8]  Dick Gregory:  ‘They Killed Prince’

Comedian/Activist DICK GREGORY shared his perspective on the recent deaths of Prince and Afeni Shakur as well as the recent sale of the Beatles publishing rights to Sony in this exclusive clip by ReelBlack TV.  Photographed on 4 May 2016. Camera: Les Rivera.  Interviewer: Mike D.  (More Dick Gregory: Understanding clips coming soon to Reel Black TV.)

[Working Draft transcript by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and the ReelBlack Podcast]

THE REELBLACK PODCAST SERIES presents:  Dick Gregory, Understanding “They Killed Prince”

MIKE D:  “The queen turned 90.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Hm?”

MIKE D:  “The Queen [of England] just turned 90.  There was a big celebration.  And, coincidentally, it was the same day, that Prince passed away.”

DICK GREGORY:  “And it was the same day she was here in Washington, D.C.”

MIKE D:  “—”

DICK GREGORY:  “Front page of The Washington Post [brief pause] got her and her family dressed in [long pause] pink [brief pause]—purple.  And that’s when she announced that Charles won’t get the—it’s gon’ skip over him and point to the lil’ boy, the prince [laughs ironically] the same day they killed Prince.

“They killed Prince on the plane.  And that plane is owned by Warren Buffet. [laughs wryly]

“And, um, so, those are the games they play, man.”

MIKE D:  “Well, let’s talk about Prince ‘cos, um, you knew Prince; right?”

DICK GREGORY:  “M-m. [nodding no]  No, he knew me.”

MIKE D:  “Okay.”

DICK GREGORY:  “He talked about me because of the [gesticulates circles with his index fingers]—I don’t hang out with entertainers.  But there’s no way that, now, that they’ve come out that he died from AIDS.  Okay?”

MIKE D:  “M-hm.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Well, remember, the night that he died, the next day he was on the plane.  That same night, they put him on the plane, he did a one-man concert at eight o’clock, and then another one.

“You saw him.  Did he look like he was dying from AIDS? [asking incredulously]

MIKE D:  “No.”

DICK GREGORY:  “No, man.  The case is closed.  [SNIP]  “

MIKE D:  “Why did they want him dead now?”

DICK GREGORY:  “See, you ask me shit, that I don’t qualify to answer. [agitatedly]

MIKE D:  “Okay. [softly]“

DICK GREGORY:  “Why did they want him dead now?  Huh? [aggressively]“

MIKE D:  “Well, I’m asking you.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Because the white folks that killed him, they not like niggas and ignorant white folk.  I’ll kill you, motherfucka!  They’ll do it ten years later.

“Now, if I had to guess, I think when he went in to that record company and talked to them folks with that ‘SLAVE’ thing on him. [gesticulating to face painting]  That’s what got him killed.

“They ain’t killed no nigga for some money.  That ain’t nothing but chump change he got.  Hm?  Chump change.”

MIKE D:  “So, like a lot of people are saying:  He had gotten a lot of the rights to his recordings.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Had gotten what?

MIKE D:  “The rights to his master recordings.”

“Well, they’ll tell you that, so you can repeat it.  How you know?”

MIKE D:  “He had said it.”

“Huh?”

MIKE D:  “His lawyers had said it.

“How you know it was him?  How you know who his fuckin’ lawyers was?”

“Okay.”

“See, that’s where you—you talkin’ to the master. [stamps hand on his desk]  But I got the listeners.  You know how many agents?!  The number one government agent is the man in Chicago’s brother!  Huh?!  Okay?

“Ain’t nothin’ but CIA.  Huh?

“So, you all comin’ up with this little old weak shit.”

MIKE D:  “Well, I’m just curious.”

DICK GREGORY:  “No!  You can’t be curious out of ignorance.”

MIKE D:  “Okay.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Huh?!”

MIKE D:  [failing to move on and change the subject]  “Alright.  So—”

DICK GREGORY:  “I just told you what I thought!” [shouting; beating his chest; losing patience]

MIKE D:  “Yes, sir.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Okay.  But they’re gon’ tell you the muthafucka didn’t have no insurance, no will.  But that mothafucka gon’ do his hair [gesticulating hair pampering] before he goes out.  Mothafucka swish the back of his clothes to make sure it ain’t no lint on it.  But they can convince you he didn’t have no goddamned will?  If you hate all your family, you do what that woman did, the billionaire woman in New York, Helmsley, left it to her goddamned dog.”

MIKE D:  “M-hm.”

DICK GREGORY:  “But ya’ll can’t even see that ‘cos these crackas told you about the nigga.  Huh?  It’s a game.  It’s a fucking game, man.  (c. 3:56)

“The most important thing is that plane he was on is owned by Warren Buffet.  He’s the one that rents the planes.”

MIKE D:  “So, there were pictures, that TMZ circulated, of Prince riding a bicycle and waiting outside of a Walgreen’s.”

DICK GREGORY:  “I’m surprised you asked me that.  I mean this is for the people.”

MIKE D:  “H-hm.”

DICK GREGORY:  “That was after he came back from Atlanta.”

MIKE D:  “H-hm.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Hm?”

MIKE D:  “H-hm.”

DICK GREGORY:  “They, before, he died, outside the compound.  And you didn’t see no crowds around the mothafucka. Hey, Prince!“

MIKE D:  “Mm.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Hm?  Then, who in the fuck is TMZ?”

MIKE D:  “They’re owned by Time-Warner.”

DICK GREGORY:  “And who the fuck is Time-Warner?”

MIKE D:  “His old record company.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Huh?”

MIKE D:  “His old record company.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Okay.  Well, case closed.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Hm?”

MIKE D:  “M-hm.”

DICK GREGORY:  “It’s a game.

“We even investigated the fuckin’ mayor, the mayor of that little town.  He said he ain’t never even met Prince.  Okay?

“Oh?

“Okay.

“It’s a game, man.  Hm?”

MIKE D:  “So, I mean, last thing on that.  I know Tavis Smiley, after Prince—“

DICK GREGORY:  “Huh?”

MIKE D:  “After Prince passed, Tavis Smiley said that he introduced you to Prince and that you had talked.”  (c. 5:33)

DICK GREGORY:  [nodding his head, no]  “He introduced him to a show I did.  I’ve never met Prince.”

MIKE D:  “Okay.”

DICK GREGORY:  “I don’t hang out with entertainers, nor athletes.”

MIKE D:  “Okay.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Hm?”

MIKE D:  “So, you saw when he did the State of the Union Address and talked about the chem trails.”

DICK GREGORY:  “M-hm.”

MIKE D:  “You, you turned him on to something.”

DICK GREGORY:  “I don’t have to—the truth don’t have to be validated by ignorance.  Huh?  I don’t have to be validated—“

MIKE D:  “M-hm.”

DICK GREGORY:  “—especially by an entertainer.

MIKE D:  “So, since we last talked I know you said that Michael Jackson‘s passing—he was killed; but it had nothing to do with his Sony catalogue.  The estate just sold the rights back to The Beatles, the catalogue back.”

DICK GREGORY:  “That didn’t happen until after he was dead.  He bought The Beatles for $12 million.  After they killed him, they sold it for $2 million.

“That’s white supremacy.  Nigga you can’t own this.

MIKE D:  “Well, this may be unrelated.  I don’t know.  It just happened yesterday, as we tape this.  Yesterday, Tupac‘s mom just passed away.”

DICK GREGORY:  “Yeah.  Well, the important thing about Tupac‘s mom is the movie, that just came out last Friday with, uh, [long pause] the number one acting guy in the world, now.”

MIKE D:  “Oh, Tom Hanks?”

DICK GREGORY:  “Tom Hanks.”

MIKE D:  “The, um, hologram?”

DICK GREGORY:  “The first person to use a fuckin’ hologram was Tupac., after he died.  But d’you ever put that together?  And all at once?  He’s in Saudi Arabia.  Ain’t nobody seen the king in two years.  And the king shows up all of a—and, then, Thursday he’s dead.”

[End of Dick Gregory interview]

[Video cuts to a separate interview with Ice Cube and Deon Cole promoting Barber Shop: The Next Cut]

ICE CUBE:  “America promotes you to be Donal Trump.”

DEON COLE:  “Yeah.”

ICE CUBE:  “America promotes that this is the way you wanna be.  You wanna be rich.  You wanna be powerful.  You don’t wanna give a damn about nobody else.  You wanna do what you wanna do, say you what you wanna say.  Hey, I’m a capitalist.”

***

[PRINCE & THE NEW POWER GENERATION lyrics are property and copyright of their owners.  “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” lyrics are provided here for educational and personal use only.]

[21 APR 2016]

[Last modified  20:59 PDT  6 MAY 2016]

 

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Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (2014) by Dr. John Merriman, the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale

22 Thu Jan 2015

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Fascism, Anti-Totalitarianism, French History: 19th Century, History, Political Economy, Political Science, Sociology

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Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), Against the Grain, Communards, Dr. John M. Merriman (b. 1946), LA Times, Letters and Politics, Los Angeles Times, Mitch Jeserich, Napolean III (1808-1873), National Guard (France), republicanism, Sasha Lilley, Second French Empire (1852-1870), Siege of Metz (1870), Siege of Paris (1870-1871), socialism, The Paris Commune of 1871, The Washington Post

paris-commune-800x500LUMPENPROLETARIAT—On today’s edition of free speech radio’s Letters and Politics host Mitch Jeserich spoke with Dr. John Merriman about the Paris Commune, the radical socialist and revolutionary government, which ruled Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871.  Dr. Merriman is the author of numerous books, including Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune, which was published in 2014 by Basic Books.  Listen (and/or download) here. [1]

UPDATE—[5 DEC 2016]  On free speech radio’s Against the Grain broadcast for Monday, 5 DEC 2016, co-host Sasha Lilley aired an interview with Dr. John Merriman about The Life and Death of the Paris Commune.  Listen (and/or download) here. [2]

Messina

***

LA TIMES—[5 DEC 2014]  Review: ‘Massacre’ a sobering chronicle of the Paris Commune

Wendy Smith

The Paris Commune was a defining moment for the European left: the first self-consciously socialist uprising — as opposed to the liberal nationalist revolutions of 1830 and 1848 — that aimed to put working-class people in control of industry and government.

The Commune’s savage suppression in May 1871 by France’s fledgling Third Republic buttressed the international socialist movement’s contention that bourgeois democracies were as hostile to workers’ rights as any monarch. Because the Commune enabled activists at the local level to assert considerable political and social authority, it remains an icon to contemporary free-form movements like Occupy Wall Street that seek to avoid hierarchies and let power flow from the grass roots.

Yale historian John Merriman briefly covers the Commune’s attempts to help ordinary Parisians in his new book, “Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune,” which mentions decrees improving working conditions, establishing cooperative workshops with elected leadership and forbidding evictions for nonpayment of rent. He tips his hat to this “time of big dreams,” when women claimed equality with men and citizens played an active role in local governing bodies distributing food and fuel to the poor.

[snip]

Learn more at LA TIMES.

***

WASHINGTON POST—[2 JAN 2015]  Book review: ‘Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune‘ by John Merriman

Mary McAuliffe

The uprising that Victor Hugo so vividly commemorated and romanticized in “Les Misérables” was in fact a small affair, overshadowed by other eruptions that shook the City of Light during the 19th century.  The last of these, the Commune uprising of 1871, was by far the bloodiest and the most dramatic.  Yet despite the deaths of thousands of Communards and their supporters, this bloodbath has slipped into the shadows of history.  John Merriman, the Charles Seymour professor of history at Yale University, impressively rescues this revolution from obscurity in “Massacre,” his devastating account of the Commune uprising.

Merriman, whose many books include the classic “A History of Modern Europe” and the more recent “The Dynamite Club,” featuring turn-of-the-century French anarchists, provides the reader with welcome context, from the ignominy of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War to the miseries of everyday life for Parisian workers.  By the time the Commune uprising broke out, Paris and Parisians had suffered enormously, and those who suffered the most were, as always, the poor.

[snip]

Learn more at THE WASHINGTON POST.

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Letters and Politics.]

LETTERS AND POLITICS—[22 JAN 2015]  (synopsis)  “John Merriman, author of Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune.  Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution.”

MITCH JESERICH:  “This is Pacifica Radio’s Letters and Politics.  On today’s show:

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  Traditional, you know, lefties, like Marx and Lenin looked back to the Paris Commune because it seemed to be the moment when ordinary people had thrown away the chains, the chains of the equivalent of wage slavery.

MITCH JESERICH:  “A conversation on the Paris Commune of 1871, a seminal moment in leftist history.  Our guest is John Merriman, author of the book Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune.

“Then, later, Letters and Politics producer Elizabeth Proehl speaks to journalist Jonathan Eig about the history of birth control.”

JONATHAN EIG:  Our understanding of human reproduction was very crude.  People used to believe that the baby grew from the semen, which is in part why the Catholic Church is so strongly opposed to even something like masturbation, because they believes that the semen contained the soul.

MITCH JESERICH:  “Jonathan Eig is the author of the book, The Birth of the Pill.  That’s next on Letters and Politics.  But first the news.”

[KPFA News Headlines (read by Cameron Jones) omitted by scribe] [3]  (c. 6:30)

MITCH JESERICH:  “Good day and welcome to Letters and Politics.  I’m Mitch Jeserich.  It was known as Bloody Week, from May 21st to May 28th, 1871.  The French Provisional government’s army killed anywhere between 15 to 25 thousand people living in Paris.  It would be the end of what was known as the Paris Commune.  For the previous two months, socialists, anarchists, republicans, and everyday workers overtook the city in an attempt to create a new world in which the working class would control the reins of power.

“After its suppression, the Paris Commune would live on through the ideals of leftist revolutionaries ever since and would become a seminal moment in the history of the left.  Today, we’ll be in conversation about the Paris Commune.  My guest is John Merriman.  John Merriman is the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University and author of the book Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune.

“John Merriman, it is my very good pleasure to welcome you to our programme.”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Thank you.  It’s nice to be with you.”  (c. 7:23)

[snip]

[snip] (c. 59:59)

Learn more at LETTERS AND POLITICS.

[This transcript will be expanded as time constraints, and/or demand or resources, allow.]

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Against the Grain.]

AGAINST THE GRAIN—[5 DEC 2016]  The Death and Life of the Paris Commune  (synopsis)  “In 1871, the lower classes of the city of Paris rose up and established a worker-run government.  They flew the red flag, championed the rights of women, and separated church and state.  The Paris Commune had little time to put into place many of the Communards’ ideals before it was violently crushed by the French state.  The bloody repression was meted out on a massive scale, and—historian John Merriman argues—foreshadowed the state violence, that was to mark the 20th and 21st centuries.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “Today on Against the Grain, 145 years ago the City of Paris rose up and established a worker-run government.  They flew the red flag, championed the rights of women, and separated church and state.  The Paris Commune had little time to put into place many of the Communards’ ideals before it was violently crushed by the French state.  The bloody repression was meted out on a massive scale, and—historian John Merriman argues—foreshadowed the state violence, that was to mark the 20th and 21st centuries.

“I’m Sasha Lilley.  I’ll speak with him after these News Headlines with Aileen Alfandary.” (c. 1:54)

[KPFA News Headlines (read by Aileen Alfandary) omitted by scribe]  [4]  (c. 5:44)

SASHA LILLEY:  “From the studios of KPFA in Berkeley, California, this is Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio.  I’m Sasha Lilley.

“In the spring of 1871, for a fleeting period of time, the workers of Paris rose up and launched a remarkable experiment in self-rule.  It inspired radical movements, including those of May 1968 in France and remains an inspiration for many, who believe another way of organising the world is possible.

“But the experience of the Commune left a mark in a different, much bleaker, way, my guest argues, prefiguring in its repression, the intense state violence, that characterised the 20th century.  Historian John Merriman argues that in the nearly century and a half since the Commune, various myths have sprung up, foremost being that the Communards burned much of Paris and provoked the violence against them.

“In his book, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune, published by Basic Books, he documents the vastly disproportionate violence of the French state in stamping out the Commune.

“John, I wonder if we could start by talking about the context, in which the uprising, that led to the Paris Commune took place.  Who ruled France?  What kind of rule was it?  And what impact did the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, which had started the previous year, have on French society?”  (c. 7:22)

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Well, France is ruled by an empire, the Second Empire of Napolean III.  And they get swept away in the war against Prussia and some of its German allies.  And they’re replaced with a very conservative provisional government.  And when the provisional government wants to take the cannons back, of the Parisians, of the Parisian National Guard, that begins what’s known as the Paris Commune, which began in Montmartre on March 18th, 1871.

“And, so, the Provisional Government was in Versailles, run by a guy called Adolphe Thiers.  And its assembly was packed with monarchists.  And many Parisians had wanted to continue the fighting against Paris during the siege.  And the Commune begins when Thier sends the French regular army up to Montmartre to try to take the cannons back.” (c. 8:14)

SASHA LILLEY:  “So, what was life like for most Parisians in, obviously, quite a divided society in 1871 when the Paris Commune is established?”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Well, I mean they’d just gone through the Siege [of Paris].  And the Siege has lasted from early September [1870] until late January [1871].  And it was a time of coffins taking elderly people to their final destination, and young children and babies, who were most apt to not survive malnutrition.  It was a time of not much to eat and of diminishing hope in a very cold winter in which even the sand froze.

“So, these were tough times.  And lots of—particularly difficult in the more proletarian neighbourhoods, that had been—that they’d changed their own [indeed small(?)] district numbers in 1860 when the inner suburbs were [annexed(?)] to Paris for tax reasons and policing reasons.

“And, so, basically, the north-eastern quadrant was people, we would call People’s Paris.  It included lots of people kind of expelled by high costs from Paris during the rebuilding of Paris, the plumbing, sewers, and boulevards in the 1850s and ’60s and the newly arrived workers from the countryside.  And that would be the basis of the support for the Paris Commune.  It would be, now, what are known as the 12th [arrondissement], well, the 13th on the other side of the river and the—above all, the 17th, the 18th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements, or districts, People’s Paris.  So, it was a neighbourhood action.”  (c. 9:56)

SASHA LILLEY:  “So, what was the political culture amongst those sort of people, that part of Paris before the Commune was established?  Because, presumably, nothing, you know, comes out of the blue.”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Yeah, well, these were people who were republicans during the Empire, or socialists during the empire.  And they had been mobilised by a law, that the Empire had promulgated in 1868, that allowed public meetings.  So, there sort of apprenticeship of the Republic was learning and debating about the kind of political world and social world, that they imagined in which they would have rights as citizens and many women would have rights as women and as female citizens in some future regime.

“So, it was a place associated with contentious politics and with support for, basically, a radical republic, a radical socialist republic for many, in which Paris would have the right to have its own municipal government.” (c. 11:00)

SASHA LILLEY:  “How did these people seize power?  You gave us kind of a quick sketch of the events, that led up to the Paris Commune.  But how, in fact, did these workers take control of the capitol city of France?”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Yeah, well, it started with women because women in Montmartre were going to the market, hoping to find something they could afford to buy.  And they see these French troops wearing their bright red pants.  So, that would stop in 1914 ‘cos the Germans could pick them out through the fog.  But they wore bright red pants.  And they were up there with an inadequate number of horses to take back the cannons of the National Guard.  So, they went home and woke up the menfolk, and with children helping, too, basically, stopped the descent of the cannons down to [what], for the Versailles government, would be a safer location.

“And, so, the Commune began in Montmartre, you know, above Paris in the 18th arrondissement and spread to the rest of the proletarian neighbourhoods.  Thier takes his army outside of Paris.  And a second, and more horrible, siege began for the Parisians.  So, that’s how it happened.”  (c. 12:10)

SASHA LILLEY:  “How did the Communards establish power in the fleeting period of time when they actually had it, a mere ten or so weeks?  How did they self-organise?  It was—the Paris Commune has come down to us as this sort of remarkable experiment in worker self-organisation, and in—”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “It was that.  Yeah.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “—and in an attempt to establish a more egalitarian society.  So, what did it actually look like?”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Okay.  Well, there were two—there were, you know, what they called during the Russian Revolution, dual sovereignty sort of existed, that the people of Paris, the men only could vote.  The role of women was terribly important in the Commune was terribly important.  They vote for an organisation called La Commune, the Commune.

[snip]  (c. 43:10)

SASHA LILLEY:  “How did the experience of the Commune affect the kind of radicalism, the radical ideas, that were held by people in Paris and in France in the subsequent years?  You mentioned Émile Henry.  and his father being a Communard—”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Yeah.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “—and how he responded by becoming very, very critical of the state—”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “And also very violent.  He was a killer.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “—and, obviously, targeting the state, it sharpened a kind of anti-statist view.  Obviously, the, um, range of radical ideas would be why.  But I wonder to what degree can you see currents of thought, that were influenced by that.  And, also, around the question of kind of spontaneous self-organisation, uprising by workers; and any reflection on the power of the state to sort of repress—”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Yeah.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “—these sorts of—”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Okay.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “—experiments?”

DR. JOHN MERRIMAN:  “Yeah.  Well, the Communard—the anarchists began—attempted to organise an increasing number of their faithful by organising with the communidades(sp?); that is by neighbourhood.  So, that’s important.  But let me not leave anyone with the impression that the Commune was a radical experiment in creating this socialist state.  I mean stuff that the Commune the stuff that the Communards want are stuff that []  ”

[snip] (c. 59:59)

Learn more at AGAINST THE GRAIN.

[This transcript will be expanded as time constraints, and/or demand or resources, allow.]

***

[1]  Terrestrial radio transmission.

Also see:

  • La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) directed by Peter Watkins, a historical drama film directed by Peter Watkins about the Paris Commune.  A historical re-enactment in the style of a documentary, the film received much acclaim from critics for Watkins’ direction and political themes.

[2]  Terrestrial radio transmission.

[3]  Summary of KPFA News Headlines for 10:00 PST, 22 JAN 2015:

  • U.S. foreign policy:  John Kerry and ISIS
  • U.S. foreign policy:  Boehner, Netanyahu on Iranian nuclear issue
  • U.S. domestic policy:  Annual March for Life in Washington, D.C.
  • Yemen:  Al Jazeera reports President Has Resigned
  • Argentina:  Death of Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor investigating the bombing of a Jewish community center was not a suicide, as previously reported
  • U.S. foreign policy:  U.S.-Cuban relations update, moves toward normalising relations

[4]  Summary of KPFA News Headlines for 12:00 PST, 5 DEC 2016:

  • Local SF Bay Area:  Vigil tonight for art collective building ‘The Ghost Ship’ fire on Friday night, 2 DEC 2015 during a dance party kills at least 30 people.
  • 2016 Presidential Election:  Vote Recounts have begun, Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein leads the process
  • Washington, D.C.:  Fake news story compels North Carolina man “to self-investigate the online conspiracy theory” of a child sex ring being led by Hillary Clinton.  The man fired a rifle in a restaurant, but no one was injured.  [This news report is reminiscent of the post-FBI investigations of former Special Agent In Charge and head of the Los Angeles FBI Ted Gunderson before his death in 2011.]

***

[Image of a barricade during the Paris Commune by source, used via Fair Use.]

[5 DEC 2016]

[Last modified at 02:37 PST on 6 DEC 2016]

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