One of the biggest flaws in the major news media is its apparent allergy to important historical context. Past events that help explain complex present-day contours of wealth and power are either inconvenient or uninteresting to reporters and editors, often rushing to make deadline or publish something splashy that will grab readers and boost revenue.
Even the BBC, often seen as the premier international news channel, recently ran a series of stories along these lines. (more…)
On Sunday leading former members of the Young Lords Party, a militant Puerto Rican community organization active from 1969 to 1971, gathered at the First Spanish Methodist Church in East Harlem to reflect on the impact of the group. The New York Young Lords took over the church the first time in 1969 an attempt to use it as a base for community food and health programs. Months later they occupied it again, this time brandishing weapons, in protest of the hanging of Julio Roldan, a Young Lords member who was found dead in his cell after a police raid.
It’s unfortunate that the Young Lords are not as well known among broader public as the Black Panthers. The group was arguably more progressive for its time. Patriarchy and other oppressions within the Young Lords started to break down quickly when members challenged those hierarchies inherited from society. The Lords had deep roots in and support from the “El Barrio” community.
Which makes the New York Lords’ sudden and swift decline all the more puzzling. Why did the group fall apart after just two years of success? What can radicals learn from the Young Lords?
I cannot find any audio or video from Sunday’s forum online, oddly, to help answer those questions. You can hear Democracy Now co-host and Lords co-founder Juan Gonzalez speak on his experience in this interview.
I attempted to answer the question posed above myself last year in a paper for a ‘Radical Social Movements’ class. I’m posting it online now, to share it with y’all and Google’s indexer. The paper is entitled “The Young Lords: Examining Its Deficit of Democracy and Decline. Read it here →
An opening summary paragraph is below, but consider reading the paper itself. It analyzes the Lords’ rise and fall in some detail. (more…)
Photo by Duncan Davidson
On June 30, while I was on a mountain in Chile, one of the top 100 most-trafficked websites on the Internet was sold by a group of Swedish geeks to a corporation for $7.8 million. The Pirate Bay as we know it, under constant fire from governments and their patron corporations, is gone after almost six years of defiantly coordinating the sharing of data and culture on a massive scale among users from all over the planet. (Complete coverage at TorrentFreak.)
It’s not clear why the sale happened or what Peter Sunde and the rest of the crew will do now. But it likely had to do with the Bay’s founders being sentenced in April to a huge fines and jailtime. The presiding judge just happened to be a member of several traditional copyright lobbying and trade groups, it was revealed, but there will be no retrial.
So it’s worth revisiting Free and Open Software: Paradigm for a New Intellectual Commons, a talk given in March at Seattle University’s Law of the Commons Conference. The speaker was Eben Moglen, one-time Supreme Court law clerk, now Columbia University professor and award-winning director of the Software Freedom Law Center.
I watched Moglen’s talk a few weeks ago and was blown away. Speaking without notes, he comprehensively packages together a crucial set radical truths about power, technology and society in sixty minutes. Richard Stallman is better known, as the face and founder of the Free Software movement, but he’s an uninspiring (disgusting at times, actually) public figure. Let’s pay more attention to Moglen, who’s collaborated with Stallman over the years, from now on.
20 key points that stood out for me, without Moglen’s eloquence and context, are below. The video too. (more…)
I got the chance to interview Howard Zinn three years ago, in a sparse hotel room near the University of Texas campus. It was a cloudy day and with the lights turned off, the room was very blue. Zinn sat on the bed across from me and my co-interviewer in his socks. I wondered if there was a more down-to-earth, wry, and knowledgeable historian in the country. I read his seminal work, “A People’s History of the United States” a few months later.
Zinn spoke a few weeks ago at the 100th Anniversary of the Progressive Magazine. Speaking without notes, he proceeded to lay out a common-sense rebuttal to what passes for common sense in this country – the idea that the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War II were all necessary and just wars. Good wars, as many call them. It’s a talk that, like his book, fundamentally challenges the normative identity of America. Watch it here.
He does speak slowly. That might make the talk less accessible to some people, understandably. So if you’re pressed for time, listen to the edited version of the speech below. I shaved about 12 minutes of mostly dead air off the original recording and it moves along more quickly. But in this version you do miss Zinn’s wry humor, which is hilarious at times. Have a listen, and pass it on. Embed code here, mp3 here.
Liberal press watchdog group Fair and Accuracy in Reporting takes the New York Times to task for its attempt to smear Studs Terkel as a Marxist who somehow insidiously injected Communist politics into his ground-breaking oral histories. They link to Howard Zinn’s defense of Terkel, too. At the FAIR Blog.
