The three texts this book, classic writings by four famous revolutionaries —The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, Reform or Revolution (1899) by Rosa Luxemburg and Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965) by Ernesto Che Guevara — illuminate a shared socialist ideology that spans two centuries. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.

PREFACE TO MANIFESTO

“KARL MARX, ROSA LUXEMBURG, AND CHE GUEVARA” 

BY ADRIENNE RICH

If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to “do something,” you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book.

The essays in Manifesto were written by three relatively young people — Karl Marx when he was 30, Rosa Luxemburg at 27, Che Guevara at the age of 37. Born into different historical moments and different generations, they shared an energy of hope, an engagement with history, a belief that critical thinking must inform action, and a passion for the world and its human possibilities. That society as it was materially constructed would have to undergo radical change in order for such possibilities, stifled or denied under existing conditions, to be realized, all three affirmed in their lives and work. They were educated, reflective people who sharpened their thinking powers on that endeavor.

Marx lived most of his prodigiously creative life in poverty and exile. Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara were targeted and assassinated for their intellectual and active leadership in socialist movements. Any one of them might have led the life of a relatively comfortable professional. Each made a different choice. Yet reading what they wrote, including the essays in this book, one feels not the grimness of a tooth-gritting, dogma-driven politics, but the verve and exuberance of mind that accompanies creative indignation. For all three, feeling intensely alive translated into the vision of an integrated society, in which each person could become both individuated and socially responsible: “an association,” as a famous phrase from The Communist Manifesto expresses it, “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” [1] Or, as Che told a group of Cuban medical students and health workers in 1960:

The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of human beings’ individual capacity.

What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity. [2]

None of them was thinking in isolation or in a historical vacuum. They had the past and its earlier thinkers to learn from and critique; they observed and participated in social movements; they worked out and argued ideas and strategies, sometimes fiercely, with comrades (Marx especially with Friedrich Engels, Luxemburg with Leo Jogiches, Clara Zetkin, Karl Kautsky and others of the German Social Democratic Party, Che Guevara with Fidel Castro, other Latin Americans and with leaders of the “nonaligned” nations). They saw themselves not as “public intellectuals” but as witnesses of and contributors to the growing consciousness of a class which produced wealth and leisure without sharing in it, a class fully capable of reason and enlightened action, though often lacking the formal education that could lead to political power.

That the working people who produced the wealth of the world could move toward political and economic emancipation, they did not simply believe but saw as a necessary evolution in human history. Revolutions were all around them, mass movements, strikes, international organizing. But it was not just the temper of their times that drew them into activity. (Many professionals and writers, especially when young, have been attracted by a moment’s flaring promise of social change, only to pull back as the windchill of opposition begins to freeze the air.) Rather, they observed around them the accelerating relationship between private wealth and massive suffering, capital’s devouring appetite for expansion of its markets at whatever human cost (including its wars); and in that awareness they also saw the meaning of their lives.

As a young medical student traveling through Latin America, Che Guevara noted this concretely:

I went to see an old woman with asthma… The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition. It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice of a system in which only a month ago this poor woman was still earning her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. [3]

It was Marx first of all who described how capital not only dispossesses and forces the vast majority of people “to sell themselves piecemeal,” but contains, ultimately, its own undoing:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. [4]

But he first lays forth an exposition of the history of capitalism, the emergence of bourgeois or owning-class power and the effects of that power, a panorama so prescient of 21st century social conditions that it transcends its own moment of writing. As Che was to observe in 1964:

The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, foresees the future. But in addition to foreseeing it (by which he would meet his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: it is not enough to interpret the world, it must be transformed. [5]

And in fact, over more than 150 years The Communist Manifesto has become the most influential, most translated, reprinted (and demonized) single document of modern history. It’s a work of extraordinary literary power fused with historical analysis; a document of its time yet resonant, as we see here, for later generations. A document which can be, has been, critiqued and argued with — even by its author — but which will be carried into any future that is bearable to contemplate.

Marx, Luxemburg and Guevara were revolutionaries but they were not romantics. Their often poetic eloquence is grounded in their study and critical analysis of human society and political economy from the earliest communistic arrangements of prehistory to the emergence of modern capitalism and imperialist wars. They did not idealize past societies or attempt to create marginal communities of lifestyle purists, but — beginning with Marx — they scrutinized the illusions of past and contemporary reformers and rebels in the light of history, aware how easy it can be for parties and leaders to lose momentum, drift off and settle down with existing relationships of power. (It is this kind of compromise that Luxemburg addresses in Reform or Revolution.)

So what have we here?

The Communist Manifesto was so named because at a certain moment the emerging German League of Communists asked Marx and Engels to draft a platform. Thus, Marx is both setting forth a new theory of history and making a program manifest: asking, what in economic history has produced the need for Communism as a movement and what does Communism in 1848 actually stand for? He describes, with admiration as well as condemnation, the contradictory achievements of industrial capitalism. He notes, sometimes with scorching wit, the “spectral” interpretations of Communism floating abroad, and defines its real goalas common ownership of the means of production.

Fifty years later, in 1899, Luxemburg vigorously analyzes the reformist “opportunism” that would keep the old systemic relations of ownership and production in place under the guise of socialist reform. She dissects this opportunism in the ideas of Eduard Bernstein, an elder leader of the German Marxist Social Democratic Party with the additional cachet of being Engels’ literary executor. Her confrontation is coming from a young person, a foreigner, and a woman in a party rife with “virulent male chauvinism.” [6] Coming from anyone, it would have constituted a brilliant intellectual autopsy.

Luxemburg makes it clear that to be antireformist is not to be antireform:

For Social Democracy there exists an indissoluble tie between social reform and revolution. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its goal. [7]

With her critique of Bernstein’s article as a springboard, she goes on to enunciate ideas that acquire renewed pungency and suggestiveness today:

The fate of the socialist movement is not bound to bourgeois democracy; but the fate of democracy, on the contrary, is bound to the socialist movement. Democracy does not acquire greater chances of life in the measure that the working class renounces the struggle for its emancipation; on the contrary, democracy acquires greater chances of survival as the socialist movement becomes sufficiently strong to struggle against the reactionary consequences of world politics and the bourgeois desertion of democracy. He who would strengthen democracy must also want to strengthen and not weaken the socialist movement; and with the renunciation of the struggle for socialism goes that of both the labor movement and democracy. [8]

Legal reform and revolution are not different methods of historical progress that can be picked out at pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. They are different moments in the development of class society which condition and complement each other, and at the same time exclude each other reciprocally…

In effect, every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for legal reforms does not itself contain its own driving force independent from revolution. [9]

In 1965, Che Guevara, as participant-theorist of an actual ongoing revolution, writes to an Uruguayan editor friend a letter obviously intended to make manifest the experience of the emerging Cuban society. By then, Che, an Argentine, had traveled on his continent, studied Marxism in Guatemala, fought along with Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, [10] served in the new Cuban revolutionary government, and was beginning to work for the extension of socialism in Latin America and among the “nonaligned” nations of Africa and Asia. He is writing of the labor pains of a transitional revolutionary society. How is it to be born? There is the idea, socialism, and there is also “the human being” — incomplete, coming alive in new conditions where labor becomes shared social responsibility, but also initially dwelling as it were between two vastly different worlds: “The new society in formation has to compete fiercely with the past.” [11] Commodity relationships are still imprinted on the mind. This phase of revolutionary process is new and unstable and anxiety may seek relief in autocratic rigidity. The leadership in such a transition has need for a vigilant, well-calibrated self-criticism. Rosa Luxemburg had written: “Revolutions are not ‘made’ and great movements of the people are not produced according to technical recipes that repose in the pockets of the party leaders.” [12] Che envisioned that “[s]ociety as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school” [13]; those who hope to educate must be in constant and responsive touch with those who are learning: teachers must also be learners.

In this connection it’s necessary to think about art and culture. Marx writes of how

the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society... [U]ninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…[14]

And, in a system of commodity relationships, “the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science” become “paid wage laborers” who must “sell themselves piecemeal” and “are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of exploitation, all the fluctuations of the market.” For the artist, this can also mean censorship by the market.

Che elaborates this theme:

The superstructure [of capitalism] imposes a kind of art in which the artist must be educated. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents [I read this phrase as in ironic quotes] may create their own work. The rest become shamefaced hirelings or are crushed… Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated. [15]

But he also points to the blinders of earlier socialist revolutions-in-process, where “an exaggerated dogmatism” has tried to address the question of culture, demanding “the formally exact representation of nature” in art, followed by “a mechanical representation of the social reality they wanted to show: the ideal society, almost without conflicts or contradictions, that they sought to create.” [16]

Che struggles here with the dialectic of art as simultaneously embodiment and shaper of consciousness, rooted in past forms and materials even as it gestures toward a still unachieved reality. What is to be the freedom of the artist in the new Cuba? It can be difficult, living under present conditions, to conceive of how a freedom expanded to all, to each and every person, might expand, not limit, the freedom of the imaginative artist, and the very possibilities of art. Difficult for those who are already artists — even as, outraged, we are forced to market ourselves piecemeal and struggle for what Marx called “disposable time” [17] — to see the “invisible cage” within which we work. Difficult, too, perhaps, for the navigators of a new society to apprehend the peculiar, but not exceptional, labor of the artist.

In the words of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci:

…to be precise, one should speak of a struggle for a “new culture” and not for a “new art” (in the immediate sense)… [P]erhaps it cannot even be said that the struggle is for a new artistic content apart from form because content cannot be considered abstractly, in separation from form. To fight for a new art would mean to fight to create new individual artists, which is absurd since artists cannot be created artificially. One must speak of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately engrained in “possible artists” and “possible works of art.” [18]

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a self-indulgent or self-deceiving life. Patience, realism and critical imagination are required of both kinds of creativity. Yet all the writers in this book speak emotionally of the human condition and of human realization, not as “losing oneself” within a mass collectivity but as release from the frozen senses, the dumbed-down alienation of mass society: Marx of “the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses [from the mere sense of having]… The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object” [19]; Rosa Luxemburg of “social happiness,” of the mass strike as “creativity,” of “freedom” as no “special privilege” and of the “love of every beautiful day.” And Che of the revolutionary as “moved by great feelings of love” though this may “seem ridiculous” in bourgeois politics; of the need for a “new human being” created through responsible participation in a society belonging to all.

As Aijaz Ahmad has written, “The first resource of hope is memory itself.” [20] Marxism is founded on the historical memory of how existing, apparently immutable, human relationships came to be as they are. In the essays that follow we hear voices from three different generations of people who believed, as recent enormous antiwar and anti-imperialist gatherings on every continent have been asserting, that “another world is possible.” If for some today this still only means trying to regulate and refurbish the runaway engine of capitalism, for an ever-growing number of others it means changing the direction of the journey, toward an utterly different, still-forming reality. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.

—Adrienne Rich, March 2004

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1. see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p53.

2. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Speech to Medical Students and Health Workers,” Che Guevara Reader, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p115.

3. Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p70.

4. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p35.

5. “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” Che Guevara Reader, p123.

6. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 2nd ed., (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p27.

7. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p71.

8. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p126.

9. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p128.

10. The revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro that overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba (1959). Its name commemorated Fidel’s July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada army barracks.

11. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p154.

12. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, eds., The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), p328.

13. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p155.

14. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p33.

15. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p161.

16. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p162.

17. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. Martin Nicolaus, (New York: Penguin USA, 1983), p708.

18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds., tr. William Boelhower, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p98.

19. “Private Property and Communism,” The Portable Karl Marx, Eugene Kamenka, ed., (New York: Penguin USA, 1983), p151.

20. “Resources of Hope: A Reflection on Our Times,” in Frontline (India) Vol. 18 #10, May 15–25, 2001.

Dan Wakefield’s NYT obituary gives a great sense of the beauty and range of the man. I just want to add that he and Kurt Vonnegut shared a publisher in Seymour Lawrence, who introduced the two, asking the older Vonnegut to show the younger Wakefield around. Vonnegut took Wakefield under his wing. And after Vonnegut’s death Wakefield repaid his friend by editing Vonnegut’s letters for Random House, setting a new standard for Vonnegut studies at the time. And then, together with Jerry Kinkowitz, also editing, for Seven Stories, Vonnegut’s Complete Stories, a phenom of a story collection, weighing in at over a thousand pages in an oversized volume for which our art director Stewart Cauley created a font based on Vonnegut’s lettering. Dan Wakefield’s passion, for people, for books, and for his fellow writers was unparalleled.

—Dan Simon

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Dan Wakefield, Multifaceted Writer on a Spiritual Journey, Dies at 91

He was prolific and acclaimed, producing novels, journalism, essays, criticism, screenplays and, in a memoir, an account of his path from faith to atheism and back again.

By David Stout, March 14, 2024

David Stout, a former editor and reporter with The Times, died in 2020. Alex Traub contributed reporting.

Dan Wakefield, a protean and prolific journalist, novelist, screenwriter, critic and essayist who explored subjects as diverse as life in New York City in the 1950s, the American civil rights movement, the wounds that war inflicts on individuals and society, and, not least, his personal journey from religious faith to atheism and back again, died on Wednesday in Miami. He was 91.

His death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Will Higgins, who from 2016 to 2017 hosted a public radio show with Mr. Wakefield, “Uncle Dan’s Story Hour,” on which Mr. Wakefield told stories about his life and career from the Red Key Tavern, an old bar in Indianapolis, his hometown. His health began to decline late last year after he had a stroke, prompting his move to Miami, Mr. Higgins said.

Mr. Wakefield achieved early and stunning success as a writer and was still writing well into his last years. He had more than 20 books to his credit; most of them were nonfiction, but he also wrote novels. Critics and other authors praised his work as showing a reporter’s instincts combined with graceful prose.

He began to build his reputation shortly after graduating from Columbia University in 1955 with honors in English, writing articles, essays and stories for Esquire, The Nation, Playboy, Commentary and other magazines. Not long after his graduation, The Nation sent him to Mississippi to cover the Emmet Till murder trial, one of the catalysts of the civil rights movement.

After the trial was over, with an all-white jury’s acquittal of the white men involved in one of the most heinous racial murders in American history, Mr. Wakefield wrote, “The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it.”

He went on to find acclaim before he was 27, with the publication in 1959 of his first book, “Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem,” an account of the six months he spent living in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of Manhattan.

“To read Mr. Wakefield’s book is to walk into 100th Street in Spanish Harlem and suddenly share its life, its problems and its tragedies,” Harrison E. Salisbury of The New York Times, who had himself written about New York’s Puerto Ricans, declared in a review. Mr. Wakefield’s reporting on the neighborhood’s crime and other social problems, he added, “should bring civic conscience to a boil — if such a conscience does, in fact, exist.”

Mr. Wakefield’s next book, “Revolt in the South” (1962), explored resistance to the civil rights movement in the old Confederacy. While praising his “humility and compassion,” Claude Sitton, who covered the civil rights movement for The Times in the 1950s and ’60s, faulted the book in a Times review for “errors of fact and judgment” and for overlooking differences among the Southern states.

In 1970, his first novel, “Going All the Way,” achieved a level of recognition that most writers find only in their dreams. Nominated for a National Book Award, it told the story of two young Korean War veterans returning to their homes in Indianapolis in the summer of 1954 and finding that the middle-class values they had grown up with were no longer enough.

The novel was praised by critics and some major writers. Gay Talese called it “wonderful, sad and funny.” One critic said Mr. Wakefield was a bit like Norman Mailer but without the “rhetorical boom and self-idolatry.” Another pronounced it simply “a great book.”

Kurt Vonnegut, who had attended the same Indianapolis high school as Mr. Wakefield about a decade before him, wrote in a foreword that “Going All the Way” was “a richer book than ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’” and with “wider concerns and more intricate characters” than that Philip Roth classic.

Mr. Vonnegut was similarly effusive about “Going All the Way” in Life magazine. In 2015, Mr. Wakefield told The Times that he regarded Mr. Vonnegut as the “godfather” of “Going All the Way,” for the praise he had heaped upon it. The two writers became good friends. In 2017, Mr. Wakefield coedited a volume of Mr. Vonnegut’s complete stories.

Mr. Wakefield’s other novels were “Starting Over” (1973), about a divorced man torn between a new love and his ex-wife; “Home Free” (1977), about a slacker on a cross-country trip in the countercultural America of the 1960s; “Under the Apple Tree” (1982), a coming-of-age tale set in small-town Illinois during World War II; and “Selling Out” (1985), about a college professor and serious short-story writer who goes to Hollywood to write a sophisticated television series — an experience not unlike Mr. Wakefield’s own.

Lance Kerwin, in the title role, and Kate Jackson, as a guest star, in scene in 1977 from “James at 15,” an NBC drama series created by Mr. Wakefield.
Credit: 20th Century Fox, via Everett Collection

His television credits included “James at 15,” an NBC drama about the life of a teenage boy, which he created. He quit the show early in 1978, just a few months after its premiere, after a dispute with the network over an episode in which the protagonist loses his virginity. (He accused NBC of playing down the script’s references to birth control.) The series was canceled shortly afterward.

He also wrote the screenplay for the 1997 movie adaptation of “Going All the Way,” which starred Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and other young actors. “Starting Over,” too, was the basis for a movie, released in 1979, with Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh.

Mr. Wakefield began his writing career as a columnist for his high school newspaper in Indianapolis and a sports stringer for The Indianapolis Star. (At a convention for high school journalists, he roomed with another young sports columnist, Richard G. Lugar, who later was elected mayor of Indianapolis and to the United States Senate. Both youths were Eagle Scouts.)

Mr. Wakefield studied journalism at Harvard in 1963 and 1964 under a Nieman fellowship. His other awards included a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1968. Over the years, he taught and lectured at several colleges and universities and numerous writers’ workshops.

Dan Wakefield — his birth name was Dan, not Daniel — was born in Indianapolis on May 21, 1932, to Ben and Brucie (Ridge) Wakefield. He was raised Presbyterian and became a Baptist. But as he morphed from an awkward, acne-afflicted adolescent into a young adult, a spiritual emptiness replaced his faith. He agonized as his parents divorced, he had troubled relationships with women, and he found little solace in talk therapy. By the time he was 24, he recalled in an essay in The Times, “I had bourboned myself into near oblivion.”

He used alcohol and drugs to fight off a “sense of blank, nameless pain in the pit of my very being,” he wrote in “Returning: A Spiritual Journey” (1988). The next year, in an essay in The Times, he wrote that his way back to belief was marked by logic — he recalled a physicist asking, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — as well as contemplation.

On Christmas Eve 1980, he attended a service at King’s Chapel, a Unitarian Universalist church in Boston (the minister was a neighbor). He became active in the church, having found himself in the presence of a “larger force or purpose or higher power I identify as God,” he wrote in “Returning.”

Mr. Wakefield lived his final years in Indianapolis. He moved back there in 2011 after living in Miami for 17 years as a writer in residence at Florida International University. He had also lived in New York, Boston, Hollywood and Venice, Calif.

In his later years, he led workshops on spirituality at churches and synagogues across the United States and at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y.

His marriage to Alice Jokela Stewart ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive.

Mr. Wakefield had a paternal relationship with his goddaughter, Karina Corrales, whose mother took a writing class with him in Miami after his move there. He met Ms. Corrales when she was toddler and ultimately paid for her to attend college. He had spent time with her and her husband toward the end of his life.

Asked to define his philosophy of life, Mr. Wakefield quoted Philo, the ancient philosopher of Alexandria, Egypt: “Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a great battle.” As for his life beyond writing, reading and reflecting, he said, “No golf, no horseshoes, no stamp-collecting, no hobbies.” And, he added, “No regrets.”

UPDATE: the New Rochelle Library event for Voices of a People's History of the United States in the 21st Century has been rescheduled to April 18th at 6:30pm.

It has come to our attention that the New Rochelle Public Library has pulled out of hosting an event with authors Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, originally scheduled for Thursday, March 21st, in which Arnove and Pessin were to discuss their book Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance. They were informed the event would be indefinitely postponed due to complaints about the authors’ vocal support for Palestine. It is unacceptable for New Rochelle public institutions to promote censorship and silence pro-Palestinian voices. This is similar to book bannings we’ve seen in libraries across the US and echoes authoritarian efforts to silence and oppress opinions that do not support their agenda. Libraries should serve as spaces to expand our thinking, not constrict it.

The New Rochelle Public Library's decision to indefinitely postpone this event is alarming. Our ask is that NRPL continue with the event as scheduled, and to take a strong stance against censorship of any sort. Please email or call the Board of Trustees using the scripts posted below. We will not be silenced!

EMAIL SCRIPT:

EMAIL: Director of the NRPL, Tom Geoffino, tgeoffino@nrpl.org

SUBJECT LINE: Event Cancelation- Arthur Arnove & Haley Pessin

Dear Mr. Geoffino,
I am emailing today because it has come to my attention that Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin’s book event was indefinitely postponed due to their support for Palestine. Silencing their voices goes against everything our community stands for. The library should serve as a non-political space for ALL voices to be heard. Please see that their event continues as originally scheduled.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

CC THESE EMAILS:
Whitney Barrat, President: wbarrat@nrpl.org
Corey Galloway, Vice President: cgalloway@nrpl.org
Lucille Renwick, Secretary, lrenwick@nrpl.org
Beth Acocella: bacocella@nrpl.org
Rhiannon Navin: rnavin@nrpl.org
Tatiana Infante: tinfante@nrpl.org
Fela Cortes: fcortes@nrpl.org

PHONE SCRIPT:

- Call the New Rochelle Public Library: (914) 632-7878
- On the menu, wait for dial name to speak. Then, type TOM to speak to the director, Tom Geoffino.

SCRIPT:
"Hi Mr. Geoffino, I am calling to voice my concern over the indefinite postponing of Anthony and Haley's event next week due to their pro-Palestinian views. The library should serve as a non- political space that welcomes voices from all backgrounds. Silencing pro- Palestinian voices goes against everything New Rochelle and public libraries stand for. I would like to see their event continue as originally scheduled."

We are extremely pleased to report that Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn, has been longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize!

Rodrigo Blanco Calderón has established himself as one of the great voices of Latin American literature with his debut novel The Night, and his short story collection Sacrifices. His latest book to be translated into English, Simpatía is a suspenseful novel with unexpected twists and turns about the agony of Venezuela and the collapse of Chavismo.

Simpatía is set in the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro amid a mass exodus of the intellectual class who have been leaving their pets behind. Ulises Kan, the protagonist and a movie buff, receives a text message from his wife, Paulina, saying she is leaving the country (and him). Ulises is not heartbroken but liberated by Paulina's departure. Two other events end up disrupting his life even further: the return of Nadine, an unrequited love from the past, and the death of his father-in-law, General Martín Ayala. Thanks to Ayala’s will, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission—to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a shelter for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it in time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina.

This novel centers on themes of family and orphanhood in order to address the abuse of power by a patrilineage of political figures in Latin America, from Simón Bolívar to Hugo Chávez. The untranslatable title, Simpatía, which means both sympathy and charm, ironically references the qualities these political figures share. In a morally bankrupt society, where all human ties seem to have dissolved, Ulises is like a stray dog picking up scraps of sympathy. Can you really know who you love? What is, in essence, a family? Are abandoned dogs proof of the existence or non-existence of God? Ulises unknowingly embodies these questions, as a pilgrim of affection in a post-love era.

Each year the International Booker Prize introduces readers to the best novels and short story collections from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.  

The prize recognises the vital work of translators with the £50,000 prize money divided equally: £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators). In addition, there is a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).  

The 13 books on the longlist have been chosen by the 2024 judging panel: broadcaster and journalist Eleanor Wachtel, as chair; award-winning poet Natalie Diaz; internationally acclaimed novelist Romesh Gunesekera;  groundbreaking visual artist William Kentridge; and writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson.  

Their selection was made from 149 books published between 1 May 2023 and 30 April 2024 and submitted by publishers – the highest number since the prize was relaunched in its current format in 2016. 2024’s submissions were made up of books originally written in 32 languages, up from 27 in 2023. Since 2016, books representing 63 languages have been submitted for the prize, ranging from Farsi and Vietnamese to Kikuyu and Welsh.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on 9 April 2024. The winning title will be announced at a ceremony on 21 May 2024, which will be livestreamed.

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Rodrigo Blanco Calderón © Emilio Morales

This week marks Ralph Nader's 90th birthday. To celebrate, we're proud to publish some excerpts from his book Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2000-2015. Covering 15 years of Ralph's one-sided correspondences with Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Return to Sender not only demonstrates the steadfast moral resolution that guides Ralph Nader's political endeavors, but also offers a damning portrait of a United States government that, almost 10 years after Nader sent his final letter to Barack Obama, repeatedly makes the same mistakes, and repeatedly commits the same egregious crimes against its citizens and against foreign nations alike.

The letters excerpted below primarily focus on America's foreign policy — specifically, the diasterous "War on Terror" (2003), the continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (2013), the United States’ bombing campaign in Syria (2013), and the United States' military and financial support for the Israeli army's invasion of Lebanon (2006) and continued assault on Palestine (2008).

We have also included a letter from Ralph Nader to President Obama written from the perspective of an E.coli bacteria in German Laboratory in Bavaria. While it can act as a sort of palate cleanser, ultimately Nader's repeated references to the United States' foreign policy failures and domestic torture programs offer another window into his consistent advocacy for human rights and against imperialism. He's a remarkably consistent man.

Happy Birthday, Ralph, and thank you for everything.

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LETTERS TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

December 21, 2008

Protect Gaza

Dear President Bush,

Congressman Barney Frank said recently that Barack Obama’s declaration that “there is only one president at a time” overestimated the number. He was referring to the economic crisis. But where are you on the Gaza crisis where the civilian population of Gaza, its civil servants and public facilities are being massacred and destroyed respectively by U.S.-built F-16s and U.S.-built helicopter gunships?

The deliberate suspension of your power to stop this terrorizing of 1.5 million people, mostly refugees, blockaded for months by air, sea and land in their tiny slice of land, is in cowardly contrast to the position taken by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. That year he single-handedly stopped the British, French, and Israeli aircraft attack against Egypt during the Suez Canal dispute.

Fatalities in Gaza are already over 400 and injuries close to 2,000 so far as is known. Total Palestinian civilian casualties are 400 times greater than the casualties incurred by Israelis.

But why should anyone be surprised at your blanket support for Israel’s attacks given what you have done to a far greater number of civilians in Iraq and now in Afghanistan?

Confirmed visual reports show that Israeli warplanes and warships have destroyed or severely damaged police stations, homes, hospitals, pharmacies, mosques, fishing boats, and a range of public facilities providing electricity and other necessities.

Why should this trouble you at all? It violates international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Charter. You too have repeatedly violated international law and committed serious constitutional transgressions.

Then there is the matter of the Israeli government blocking imports of critical medicines, equipment such as dialysis machines, fuel, food, water, spare parts, and electricity at varying intensities for almost two years. The depleted  U.N. aid mission there has called this illegal blockade a humanitarian crisis especially devastating to children, the aged and the infirm. Chronic malnutrition among children is rising rapidly. U.N. rations support 80 percent of this impoverished population.

How do these incontrovertible facts affect you? Do you have any empathy or what you have called Christian charity?

What would a vastly shrunken Texas turned in an encircled Gulag do up against the 4th most powerful military in the world? Would these embattled Texans be spending their time chopping wood?

Gideon Levy, the veteran Israeli columnist for Haaretz, called the Israeli attack a “brutal and violent operation” far beyond what was needed for protecting the people in its south. He added: 

“The diplomatic efforts were just in the beginning, and I believe we could have got to a new truce without this bloodshed—to send dozens of jets to bomb a total helpless civilian society with hundreds of bombs—just today, they were burying five sisters. I mean, this is unheard of. This cannot go on like this. And this has nothing to do with self-defense or with retaliation even. It went out of proportion, exactly like two-and-a-half years ago in Lebanon.”

Apparently, thousands of Israelis, including some army reservists, who have demonstrated against this destruction of Gaza agree with Mr. Levy. However, their courageous stands have not reached the mass media in the U.S., whose own reporters cannot even get into Gaza due to Israeli prohibitions on the international press.

Your spokespeople are making much ado about the breaking of the six-month truce. Who is the occupier? Who is the most powerful military force? Who controls and blocks the necessities of life? Who has sent raiding missions across the border most often? Who has sent artillery shells and missiles at close range into populated areas? Who has refused the repeated comprehensive peace offerings of the Arab countries issued in 2002 if Israel would agree to return to the 1967 borders and agree to the creation of a small independent Palestinian state possessing just 22 percent of the original Palestine?

The “wildly inaccurate rockets,” as reporters describe them, coming from Hamas and other groups cannot compare with the modern precision armaments and human damage generated from the Israeli side.

There are no rockets coming from the West Bank into Israel. Yet, the Israeli government is still sending raiders into that essentially occupied territory, further entrenching its colonial outposts that are still taking water and land and increasing the checkpoints. This is going on despite a most amenable West Bank leader, Mahmoud Abbas, whom you have met with at the White House and praised repeatedly. Is it all vague words and no real initiatives with you and your emissary Condoleezza Rice?

Peace was possible, but you provided no leadership, preferring instead to comply with all wishes and demands by the Israeli government—even resupplying it with the still-active cluster bombs in south Lebanon during the invasion of that country in 2006.

The arguments about who started the latest hostilities go on and on with Israel always blaming the Palestinians to justify all kinds of violence and harsh treatment against innocent civilians.

From the Palestinian standpoint, you would do well to remember the origins of this conflict, which was the dispossession of their lands. To afford you some empathy, recall the oft-quoted comment by the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who told the Zionist leader, Nahum Goldmann: “There has been anti-Semitism—the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz—but was that their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Alfred North Whitehead once said: “Duty arises out of the power to alter the course of events.” By that standard, you have shirked mightily your duty over the past eight years to bring peace to both Palestinians and Israelis and more security to a good part of the world.

The least you can do in your remaining days at the White House is adopt a modest profile in courage, and vigorously demand and secure a ceasefire and a solidly based truce. Then your successor, President-elect Obama, can inherit something more than the usual self-censoring Washington puppet show that eschews a proper focus on the national interests of the United States.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader 

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Lebanon

Dear President Bush,

You have been a weak president, despite your strutting and barking, when it comes to doing the right things for the American people within the Constitution and its rule of law. This trait is now in bold relief over the Israeli government’s escalating war crimes pulverizing the defenseless people and country of Lebanon.

With systematic efficiency, the Israeli government has already destroyed innocent homes and basic public facilities— ports, airports, highways, bridges, power stations—which are critical to delivery of food, medicines, health care, ambulances, water, and other essentials for a civilian population. This bombardment, by U.S.-made bombers, military vehicles, ships, and missiles with American taxpayer subsidies, places an inescapable responsibility upon your shoulders, which does not mix with your usual vacuous messianic rigidity.

As the leading player in official Washington’s puppet show, it is time for you to assert the interests of the American people and those of the broad Israeli and Palestinian peace movements by standing up to the puppeteers. For without this conflict, Hezbollah would not be in today’s news.

The time has come for you to return to Texas for a private meeting with your father, his former national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and his former secretary of state, James Baker. You need to say to them “I can’t trust my advisors anymore; there have been so many tragic blunders. What do you advise me to do about the destruction of a friendly nation by the world’s fifth most powerful military?”

Here is what I think they should say to you:

1. Take personal command of an immediate rescue effort for the tens of thousands of Americans trapped in Lebanon by Israel’s calculated blocking of air, land, and sea escape routes. You’ve said the safety of Americans is your top priority. Prove it by using the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy facilities to immediately evacuate all our people desperate to escape the terrorization of Lebanon.

2. You have been so docile and permissive to Israeli demands that any modest deviation from this posture will make your next move credible. Announce that you are sending two prominent negotiators—perhaps James Baker (Republican) and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (Democrat) to Israel and Lebanon to arrange for a cease fire between the combatants.

Announced at a televised White House news conference with your two envoys, you can punctuate your seriousness by raising the questions of violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act. Using U.S.-supplied weapons systems to commit civilian atrocities on homes and fleeing vehicles with children and to inflict collective punishment on mass civilian populations is not using these weapons for legitimate self-defense and internal policing, as our federal law requires. Israeli planes have even fire bombed wheat silos and gasoline stations in Lebanon. More mayhem is on the way.

3. Stop acting like an impulsive, out-of-control West Texas sheriff and start reading, thinking, and listening for a change. When Israel, Britain, and France violated international treaties against aggression in 1956 by invading the Suez Canal, President Dwight Eisenhower used his influence to make them withdraw from Egypt. In 1982, following a year without any PLO skirmishes over the Lebanese-Israeli border, Israeli armed forces invaded Lebanon anyway. They created a path of destruction all the way to Beirut and militarily occupied south Lebanon for 18 years before they withdrew, except for retaining Shebaa Farms. In 1982 the New York Times reported “indiscriminate bombing” of Beirut by Israeli planes. At least 20,000 Lebanese civilians lost their lives in that invasion and many more were injured. From that conflict Hezbollah was born, composed of many people whose relatives were casualties in that illegal invasion.

History, George, does not start two weeks or two months ago. You must read about past U.S. presidents who, at least, sent high-level emissaries to quell similar border fighting. It worked and prisoners were often exchanged.

You are doing and saying nothing about what the rest of the world believes is a hugely disproportionate attack against innocent adults and children in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter and other treaties and federal statutes. You’ve sworn to uphold these laws. Do so. Because of the Israeli government’s overwhelming military power, the imbalance of terror against civilians and their property has always been to its advantage. As has its occupation of Palestine and confiscation of land and water sources.

4. You can’t take sides and be an honest broker. Just about all our knowledgeable retired military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials believe resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to deflating other agitations in the region.

Freedom and justice for the Palestinian state and security and stability for the Israeli state must both be achieved.

You have turned your back on the courageous and prominent Israeli peace movement which normally reflects the positions of half of the Israeli population. You’ve never met with any of its leaders—even those in the Knesset or former officials in the military, intelligence, and justice ministries.

Hundreds of reserve combat officers and soldiers of the IDF have refused, in their words, “to fight beyond the 1967 borders to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people.” They pledged only to fight for Israel’s legitimate defense.*

5. Once in a while, ask your aides for a sample of Israeli opinion that rejects the notion that there can be a military solution to this conflict, despite the military imbalance. For example, reports and editorials in Haaretz, arguably the most respected newspaper in Israel, would educate your judgment. In a recent editorial, Haaretz argued that the present Israeli government has “lost its reason” through the brutal incarceration, devastation, and deprivation of innocent people in Gaza.

In another Haaretz commentary dated July 16th, Gideon Levy writes:

“In Gaza, a soldier is abducted from the army of a state that frequently abducts civilians from their homes and lock them up for years without a trial—but only we’re allowed to do that. And only we’re allowed to bomb civilian population centers.”

6. One final bit of advice could come from Papa Bush’s circle. If the Israeli army decides to invade Lebanon with troops, your support of the aggression can possibly unleash a domino of warring actions and reactions over there. As it is, Americans are increasingly fed up with the Iraq quagmire.

Moreover, we know they don’t like many of your domestic policies favoring the wealthy, the post-Katrina debacle, exporting jobs, and among our conservative base, your enormous deficits.

So, your Republican Party’s control of government is at stake in November. Don’t you have your hands full with Iraq, whose invasion we all urged you to avoid in 2003?

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

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March 10, 2003

A Man Who Has Stopped Listening

Dear President Bush,

After the completion of your long overdue full-scale news conference on March 7th, Senator Robert Byrd remarked: “He talked last night like a man who is not willing to listen any further. He has stopped listening.” There are many engaged citizens who wonder whether you ever started listening or at least directly hearing views contrary to your determination to start a war, invasion, and lengthy occupation of Iraq. Indeed, it appears you have not met with a single domestic antiwar delegation, despite numerous requests from varied constituencies for a meeting.

Many commentators and reporters—having spoken with people inside your administration—have noted the isolation, the solitude, and the exclusionary characteristic of your office on this subject. Others such as Bob Woodward, who interviewed you, tell readers of your self-description as being a “black and white” type of person, of a man who makes decisions “from the gut” or from instinct. Combined with isolation from many informed contrary views, this attitude is made more disquieting by your continual invoking of God when it comes to Iraq. Viewed from abroad, this appears to millions of people as if you are embarking on a religious war. From stateside, you will forgive those Americans who instead view such allusions as indicative of a refusal to entertain empirical inputs and broader policy arguments from Americans, many of whom have been following, experiencing or studying the Iraqi situation longer than some in your very tight ideological circle of advisors.

In the past several weeks alone, a distinguished array of groups has written you about issues and has requested a personal meeting with you in the White House. Now is the time to spend a few hours listening to cogent presentations by these Americans of widely different backgrounds and insights, but mostly similar in their opposition to war/invasion/occupation. According to press reports, your travel schedule over the next two weeks has been sharply reduced to concentrate on the United Nations and other related situations which should include a decent respect for the opinions of those organizations who have asked for an audience with you.

The country is deeply and almost evenly divided according to numerous polls that ask more comprehensive questions.

Meeting with representatives of these groups, which oppose your proposed policies, would afford you an opportunity for a two- way exchange. There have been too many monologues, which serve their purpose of course, but a dialogue tends to probe and clarify the issues and test the strength of opposing views.

The benefits of these meetings, were you to allow them to occur, are more than what may be described as good public relations on your part. For example, leaders of veterans’ groups and former military leaders, whose letter is on its way, can convey the horrific toxic aftermath of the war/invasion to both Iraqis and U.S. troops. They know about the first Gulf War firsthand and have been closely associated with the treatment of over 200,000 soldiers who were disabled and have been receiving disability payments.

Even were you to take this country to war, you would benefit from their knowledge of how under-trained and inadequately equipped U.S. soldiers are to defend themselves against what you have said is the likely prospect of chemical warfare by Iraq’s brutal dictator.

From women’s groups, including those back from numerous trips to Afghanistan, you’ll learn about the terrible effect on the civilian population long after hostilities ended, due in part to the lack of promised follow-through assistance by the United States to the Kabul government. They can also convey the likely consequences on Iraqi families whose elderly, mothers, and children will especially suffer from lack of food, spreading disease, fires, score-settling, and fleeing refugee conditions of an awful nature.

From the perspective of working families, you will hear why this is the first time that major labor unions, with the encouragement of the AFL-CIO, have ever opposed a war by the United States, in part because it is an unprovoked war.

From the business executives, you will hear concerns about the further instability and decline of our economy with its effects on standards of living, employment and neglected domestic budgets.

From representatives of the clergy, including your own Bishop, as well as from many other Christian denominations and other major religions, you will learn the depth of their disagreement with you regarding the moral justification for this war and what they have learned from their visits to Iraq.

From leading physicians having serious experience with health conditions and capacity in Iraq, you will be informed of the scale of civilian mortality and morbidity from the looming devastation. Notwithstanding assurances to the contrary in 1991, there was severe destruction of the drinking water infrastructure leading to epidemics that most cruelly took the lives of many tens of thousands of Iraqi children.

In recent weeks, you took the time to travel to Pennsylvania and to a Washington hotel to meet with doctors complaining about their insurance premiums and malpractice lawsuits.

Surely you can meet in the White House with physicians whose compassion, insight and knowledge about the fate of millions reflect the highest obligation of the medical profession, which is prevention.

Consider how much more enriched your perspective will become after exchanging views and information with the other groups who have also asked to see you. These include: elected representatives of city councils representing tens of millions of Americans; environmental organizations knowledgeable about the environmental devastation to the region and the planet on a level even greater than 1991 that is likely from this proposed war; international intelligence specialists with past governmental experience who will tell you what many dissenters inside the Pentagon and the State Department cannot say to you about consequences and alternatives; prominent academics, historians, and civic leaders; and the next generation, from groups representing millions of college students.

More than a dozen of these letters were sent to you. Most of them have not received the courtesy of a response. None have been accorded an affirmative invitation.

The organizations requesting to meet with you represent a broad cross section of the American people. They seek a dialogue with you not out of political partisanship but because they have not been convinced that war with Iraq is necessary.

These attached requests ask for meetings of short duration but, in the retrospect of history, long significance for historians who will judge your decision-making process on the road to war-invasion-occupation.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

 

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LETTERS TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

September 22, 2013

Barry O’Bomber and the Rush to War

Dear President Obama,

Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii know, watching you race up and down the basketball court, how prescient they were when they nicknamed you “Barry O’Bomber.”

Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes, international treaties and the separation of power at depths equal to or beyond the George W. Bush regime.

Nor would many of the voters who elected you in 2008 have conceived that your foreign policy would rely so much on brute military force at the expense of systemically waging peace. Certainly, voters who knew your background as a child of Third World countries, a community organizer, a scholar of constitutional law and a critic of the Bush/Cheney years, never would have expected you to favor the giant warfare state so pleasing to the military-industrial complex.

Now, as if having learned nothing from the devastating and costly aftermaths of the military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, you’re beating the combustible drums to attack Syria—a country that is no threat to the U.S. and is embroiled in complex civil wars under a brutal regime.

This time, however, you may have pushed for too many acts of war. Public opinion and sizable numbers of members of both parties in Congress are opposed. These lawmakers oppose bombing Syria in spite of your corralling the cowardly leaders of both parties in the Congress.

Thus far, your chief achievement on the Syrian front has been support for your position from al-Qaeda affiliates fighting in Syria, the pro-Israeli government lobby, AIPAC, your chief nemesis in Congress, House Speaker John Boehner, and Dick Cheney. This is quite a gathering and a telling commentary on your ecumenical talents. Assuming the veracity of your declarations regarding the regime’s resort to chemical warfare (first introduced into the Middle East by Winston Churchill’s Royal Air Force’s plastering of Iraqi tribesmen in the nineteen-twenties), your motley support group is oblivious to the uncontrollable consequences that might stem from bombing Syria. One domestic consequence may be that Speaker Boehner expects to exact concessions from you on domestic issues before Congress in return for giving you such high visibility bipartisan cover.

Your argument for shelling Syria is to maintain “international credibility” in drawing that “red line” regardless, it seems, of the loss of innocent Syrian civilian life, casualties to our foreign service and armed forces in that wider region, and retaliation against the fearful Christian population in Syria (one in seven Syrians are Christian). But the more fundamental credibilities are to our Constitution, to the neglected necessities of the American people, and to the red line of observing international law and the U.N. Charter (which prohibit unilateral bombing in this situation).

There is another burgeoning cost—that of the militarization of the State Department whose original charter invests it with the responsibility of diplomacy. Instead, Mr. Obama, you have shaped the State Department into a belligerent “force projector” first under Generalissima Clinton and now under Generalissimo Kerry. The sidelined foreign service officers, who have knowledge and conflict avoidance experience, are left with reinforced fortress-like embassies as befits our empire reputation abroad.

Secretary John Kerry descended to gibberish when, under questioning this week by a House Committee member, he asserted that your proposed attack was “not war” because there would be “no boots on the ground.” In Kerry’s view, bombing a country with missiles and air force bombers is not an act of war.

It is instructive to note how government autocracy feeds on itself. Start with unjustified government secrecy garnished by the words “national security.” That leads to secret laws, secret evidence, secret courts, secret prisons, secret prisoners, secret relationships with selected members of Congress, denial of standing for any citizen to file suit, secret drone strikes, secret incursions into other nations and all this directed by a president who alone decides when to be secret prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. What a republic, what a democracy, what a passive people we have become!

Voices of reason and experience have urged the proper path away from the metastasizing war that is plaguing Syria. As General Ban Ki-moon, and other seasoned diplomats and retired military, vigorous leadership by you is needed for an international peace conference with all parties at the table, including the countries supplying weapons to the various adversaries in Syria.

Mr. Obama, you may benefit from reading the writings of Colman McCarthy, a leading advocate of peace studies in our schools and universities. He gives numerous examples of how waging peace avoided war and civil strife over the past 100 years.

Crowding out attention to America’s serious domestic problems by yet another military adventure (opposed by many military officials), yet another attack on another small, non- threatening Muslim country by a powerful Christian nation (as many Muslims see it) is aggression camouflaging sheer madness.

Please, before you recklessly flout Congress, absorb the wisdom of the World Peace Foundation’s Alex de Waal and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Writing in the New York Times, they strongly condemn the use of nerve gas in Syria, brand the perpetrators as war criminals to be tried by an international war crimes tribunal and then declare:

“But it is folly to think that airstrikes can be limited: they are ill-conceived as punishment, fail to protect civilians and, most important, hinder peacemaking . . . . Punishment, protectionand peace must be joined . . . An American assault on Syria would be an act of desperation with incalculable consequences. To borrow once more from Sir William Harcourt [the British parliamentarian who argued against British intervention in our Civil War (which cost 750,000 American lives)]: ‘We are asked to go we know not whither, in order to do we know not what.’”

If and when the people and Congress turn you down this month, there will be one silver lining. Only a Left-Right coalition can stop this warring. Such convergence is strengthening monthly in the House of Representatives to stop future war crimes and the injurious blowback against America of the wreckages from empire. 

History teaches that empires always devour themselves.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

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May 3, 2013

End the Guantanamo Blot on Our National Character

Dear President Obama,

Notwithstanding Section 1028 (a)(1) of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, you are empowered to end Guantanamo Bay’s affront to due process by releasing from imprisonment the 86 inmates whom your administration or its predecessor have found to be neither enemy combatants nor war criminals; and permitting them to arrange for travel to any foreign nation of their choosing. Section 1028 (a)(1) only limits your authority to transfer them into the “custody or control of the individual’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity . . .” But simple release, without more, is not prohibited. Of the remaining 80 prisoners, you should either charge and prosecute them for alleged war crimes or release them from Guantanamo Bay prison like the aforementioned 86.

No statute or other legal limitation blocks you from this enlightened course of action, which you have commended as who we are as a people. We are supposed to be willing to take risks that other countries shun because we find imprisoning, killing, or otherwise punishing the innocent to be morally reprehensible.

You cannot escape responsibility for the dubious legal limbo of Guantanamo Bay. You cannot simply blame Congress. President Harry S. Truman’s famous Oval Office desk sign acknowledged that “The Buck Stops Here.” Your oath of office compels you to honor the Constitution, not to evade it.

You must terminate forthwith Guantanamo Bay’s blot on the character of this nation that gratuitously provokes retaliation and enmity.

Sincerely,

Bruce Fein

Ralph Nader

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June 3, 2011

Letter from E.coli O104:H4

Dear President Obama,

My name is E.coli O104:H4. I am being detained in a German Laboratory in Bavaria, charged with being “a highly virulent strain of bacteria.” Together with many others like me, the police have accused us of causing about 20 deaths and nearly five hundred cases of kidney failure—so far. Massive publicity and panic all around. You can’t see me, but your scientists can. They are examining me and I know my days are numbered. I hear them calling me a “biological terrorist,” an unusual combination of two different E.coli bacteria cells. One even referred to me as a “conspiracy of mutants.”

It is not my fault, I want you to know. I cannot help but harm innocent humans, and I am very sad about this. I want to redeem myself, so I am sending this life-saving message straight from my petri dish to you.

This outbreak in Germany has been traced to food—location unknown. What is known to you is that invisible terrorism from bacterium and viruses takes massively greater lives than the terrorism you are spending billions of dollars and armaments to stop in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Malaria, caused by infection with one of four species of Plasmodium, is a parasite transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes that destroys a million lives a year. Many of the victims are children and pregnant women. Mycobacterium tuberculosis takes over one million lives each year. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes over a million deaths each year. Many other microorganisms in the water, soil, air, and food are daily weapons of mass destruction. Very little in your defense budget goes for operational armed forces against this kind of violence. Your agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control, conduct some research but again nothing compared to the research for your missiles, drones, aircraft, and satellites.

Your associates are obsessed with possible bacteriological warfare by your human enemies. Yet you are hardly doing anything on the ongoing silent violence of my indiscriminate brethren.

You and your predecessor George W. Bush made many speeches about fighting terrorism by humans. Have you made a major speech about us?

You speak regularly about crushing the resistance of your enemies. But you splash around so many antibiotics (obviously I don’t like this word and consider it genocidal) in cows, bulls, chickens, pigs, and fish that your species is creating massive antibiotic resistance, provoking our mutations, so that we can breed even stronger progeny. You are regarded as the smartest beings on Earth, yet you seem to have too many neurons backfiring.

In the past two days of detention, scientists have subjected me to “enhanced interrogation,” as if I have any will to give up my secrets. It doesn’t work. What they will find out will be from their insights about me under their microscopes. I am lethal, I guess, but I’m not very complicated.

The United States, together with other countries, needs more laboratories where scientists can detain samples of us and subject us to extraordinary rendition to infectious disease research centers. Many infectious disease scientists need to be trained, especially in the southern hemispheres to staff these labs.

You are hung up on certain kinds of preventable violence without any risk/benefit analysis. This, you should agree, is utterly irrational. You should not care where the preventable violence comes from except to focus on its range of devastation and its susceptibility to prevention or cure!

Well, here they come to my petri dish for some more waterboarding. One last item: You may wonder how tiny bacterial me, probably not even harboring a virus, can send you such a letter. My oozing sense is that I’m just a carrier, being used by oodles of scientists taking advantage of a high-profile infectious outbreak in Europe to catch your attention.

Whatever the how does it really matter to the need to act now?

E-cologically yours,

E.coli O104:H4 (for the time being)

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United States 

Racism, anti-immigrant sentiments, and threats to democracy remained pressing human rights problems in the United States in 2023. The national poverty rate rose dramatically following the choice to cease a pandemic-period child tax credit. Economic inequality also rose, and the racial wealth gap remained high. The incarceration rate also increased, despite the US already having one of the highest rates in the world, with Black people vastly overrepresented in prisons and jails. 

In its foreign policy, the US held human rights abusers accountable through targeted sanctions and provided new support to international justice mechanisms such as the investigation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) into the conflict in Ukraine. The US also undermined its stated commitment to human rights by providing military assistance to human rights-abusing states. 

The administration of US President Joe Biden banned the government’s use of abusive commercial spyware and issued some policies aimed at improving racial equity in efforts to tackle climate change at home and abroad. The US Supreme Court issued decisions reinforcing laws aimed at protecting the right to vote. 

However, states enacted an increasing number of laws that restrict access to reproductive care, including abortion, and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. The federal government has not taken sufficient steps necessary to limit global warming, even though the US is among the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters. State and federal authorities continued to pursue policies aimed at deterring people from seeking asylum in the US, in flagrant violation of international human rights law, pushing them to take more dangerous routes. 

A federal task force documented harassment and threats against election officials, revealing the need to better protect election administrators from intimidation and to address the spread of misinformation and disinformation. 

Racial Justice 

The racial wealth gap remained stark, with Black families having 24 cents and Hispanic families having 23 cents for every US$1 of white family wealth, and has changed very little over the last 50 years. Numerous studies have shown that drastic economic intervention, including reparations in a variety of forms, is needed to address this gap as well as continuing racial disparities in access to adequate health, nutrition, education, employment, and housing, among other things. 

In May, US Representative Cori Bush introduced a resolution urging the federal government to provide reparations for enslavement and its legacies and to support existing proposals such as H.R. 40. H.R. 40 is a House of Representatives bill that proposes establishing a federal commission to study and make recommendations on reparations, which has been introduced every congressional session since 1989 but has yet to pass. Congressional leadership did not bring either the new resolution or the House bill to the floor for a vote. 

While federal efforts stalled, states made progress on reparations. In May, a California reparations task force, created by 2020 legislation, submitted reparatory proposals to the state governor for consideration. Also in May, Washington state enacted a law to create a downpayment assistance program for people directly affected by past racist housing covenants. In June, the New York state legislature passed a bill to study the economic impacts of enslavement and the government’s role in supporting that institution, which the governor had not signed at time of writing. 

In July, a lawsuit seeking reparations for the last three known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was dismissed by an Oklahoma judge. The survivors appealed, and in August, the Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. In October, Hughes Van Ellis, who at 102 was the youngest of the three living survivors, died. 

Economic Justice 

After two years of historic declines in poverty due to expanded social protection in response to Covid-19, the US Supplemental Poverty Measure, which incorporates the influence of government assistance and geographical cost of living differences, rose dramatically, jumping to 12.4 percent in 2022 from 7.8 percent in 2021. Income inequality in the US is very high compared to other wealthy countries, with the top 10 percent of earners capturing nearly half of all income and the bottom 50 percent getting just 13 percent. 

After taxes and government transfers are considered, the Gini index, a statistical measure of income inequality, for the US has increased by 3.2 percent since 2021. Wealth inequality is similarly stark, with the poorest 50 percent of the US population owning only just 1.5 percent of the country’s private wealth. 

Criminal Justice 

The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with roughly 2 million people held in state and federal jails, prisons, and immigration detention facilities on any given day, and millions more on parole and probation. Despite some reductions in incarceration rates for Black people, they remain vastly overrepresented in jails and prisons. 

In 2021, the most recent year for which such data is available, the rate at which people were incarcerated in jails and prisons nationwide increased for the first time since 2005, although it remained below pre-pandemic levels. 

Widespread calls to reduce overreliance on policing and address societal problems instead with investments in housing, health care, and education were largely drowned out by calls for more police funding and the rollback of police reforms. The latter calls were driven by persistent misinformation and misleading narratives about rising crime rates and decreased public safety, often generated and manipulated by law enforcement, despite substantial evidence of the success of reforms and community investments. 

Local governments criminalized unhoused communities across the country and expanded forced or coerced treatment to address people living on the streets. 

Most US police departments refuse to report data on their use of force, necessitating nongovernmental data collection and analysis. As of September 28, police had killed over 800 people in 2023, similar to numbers in prior years. On a per capita basis, police kill Black people at almost three times the rate they kill white people. 

Youth Justice 

Children continue to be tried as adults in all 50 states, despite international standards repudiating the practice. Those transferred to the adult system are disproportionately youth of color, with racial and ethnic disparities persisting at almost every point of contact with the justice system, including arrests, pre-disposition detention, and post-adjudication incarceration. 

In 2023, three states took steps toward eliminating the sentence of life without parole (LWOP) for children. In total, 33 states and Washington, DC, have now banned it or have no one serving such a sentence. Despite this progress, the US remains the only country in the world to sentence children convicted of crimes to die in prison. 

Child Labor 

In February, the US Department of Labor reported a sharp increase in child labor violations, and investigations carried out by media outlets showed children, often unaccompanied migrants, working in dangerous and exploitative conditions, sacrificing their health, safety, and education. Some states moved to roll back child labor protections. Longstanding exemptions in US labor laws allow children as young as 12 to work legally in agriculture, the deadliest sector for child workers. 

Drug Policy 

Overdose deaths continued to rise, reaching another record level. They first surpassed 100,000 in the 12-month period ending April 2021 and increased to 111,355 in the 12-month period ending April 2023. Racial disparities in overdose deaths also continued to widen, with the rate of Black deaths exceeding those of white ones, due in part to racial bias in policies and access to treatment. 

Federal and state authorities continue to rely significantly on criminalization to address harmful drug use, even though harm reduction strategies that offer health-centered care and access to voluntary treatment have proven more effective. 

In 2022, the Biden administration became the first US administration to invest in harm reduction, but stronger and more robust investments in health-centered approaches are needed. In March, the US Food and Drug Administration approved naloxone, the first over-the-counter drug used to reverse opioid overdose. 

Immigrants’ Rights and Border Communities 

The 2020 Title 42 summary expulsions policy expired in May but was replaced by a new labyrinthine asylum rule. Under Title 42, justified as an emergency measure to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration summarily expelled people 2.3 million times without screening them for asylum. 

Under the new asylum rule, many asylum seekers face expedited removals, arbitrary detention, prosecution, and a five-year ban on returning to the US unless they make an appointment at select US land border ports of entry using “CBP One” prior to crossing the border. CBP One is a difficult-to-access phone app that often fails to recognize faces with darker skin tones. This process can take several months and exposes asylum seekers to systematic targeting by cartels and Mexican government officials for kidnapping, extortion, sexual assault, and other harms. 

As a candidate, Biden pledged to end private immigration detention, but as of July, 90 percent of the 30,000 non-citizens who are in detention on average each day in the US were held in private facilities. 

In June, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ramped up his already ruthless border approach by installing razor wire and buoys with circular saws in or near the Rio Grande. Under Operation Lone Star, high-speed vehicle pursuits and the accidents they cause in communities throughout south Texas are a threat to public safety, with harmful consequences for migrant passengers and Texas residents alike. Human Rights Watch found that at least 74 people have been killed and 189 injured since the policy began in March 2021. 

Democracy 

The battle to defend multiracial democracy in the US continued. In June, the US Supreme Court, in Allen v. Milligan, struck down Alabama’s gerrymandered congressional maps, reaffirming that racial discrimination in voting laws, maps, and practices is illegal. Also in June, the US Supreme Court, in Moore v. Harper, upheld the right of people in the US to seek a remedy for voting rights violations in state courts. However, at least 14 states passed laws in 2023 that make it more difficult to vote. 

State-level lawmakers continued to undermine democracy by banning books and passing laws that restrict truthful classroom discussions of race, history, sexual orientation, and gender. This censorship has the potential to undermine civic participation by erasing the galvanizing stories of ordinary citizens who organized to promote human rights. 

The movement for universal suffrage earned victories. New Mexico and Minnesota passed laws that allow individuals to vote upon release from prison. A federal court overturned Mississippi’s lifetime voting ban for individuals convicted of some felony offenses, calling the practice cruel and unusual. 

For the first time in US history, a former president faced significant sanctions, including criminal and civil charges, in part for his efforts to overturn the 2020 elections, a serious infringement of the right to vote. New studies by the federal government and civil society groups, revealed vulnerabilities in US democracy, including the need to better protect elections administrators from threats and intimidation, which continued to increase. Since 2020, when the US Department of Justice opened a task force into the matter, 14 investigations into attempts to threaten election workers have been initiated, 9 of which had resulted in findings of wrongdoing at time of writing. The year also revealed the need to better address the spread of misinformation and disinformation through social media platforms. 

Climate Change Policy and Impacts 

The US remains the world’s largest oil and gas producer and historically is the country that has most contributed to the climate crisis. It also remains among the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters. 

The Biden administration issued an executive order that directs all federal agencies to incorporate the pursuit of environmental justice into their missions and announced the creation of a new policy committee to coordinate efforts to prioritize public health, economic development, and equity in tackling the global plastics pollution crisis. Virtually all plastics are derived from fossil fuels. 

However, the US is also on track to be responsible for the world’s largest expansion in oil and gas extraction from 2023 to 2050. Fossil fuels are the single largest contributor to global warming and can be linked to human rights harms. These impacts are disproportionately borne by already marginalized communities—including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color and low-income communities—and perpetuate systemic racism. 

Women’s and Girls’ Rights 

The June 2022 US Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the constitutionally protected right to abortion, continued to have reverberating negative impacts on women, girls, and other people in the US who can become pregnant. 

As of September 15, 22 states had banned abortion or restricted access to abortion at earlier stages and 14 states had enacted laws that criminalize healthcare providers who perform abortions. Some states also made it a crime for anyone, including healthcare providers, to assist pregnant people in obtaining an abortion. As a result, approximately 22 million women and girls of reproductive age, as well as other people who can become pregnant, now live in US states where abortion access is heavily restricted or inaccessible. 

In August 2023, a federal appeals court, attempting to reconcile two conflicting lower court opinions issued within minutes of each other—one revoking the approval of mifepristone, a safe and effective drug used for medical abortions, and the other keeping it available—ruled that access to the drug should be limited in certain contexts: when mailed and prescribed via telemedicine. The US Department of Justice and the manufacturer appealed the decision. 

Racial disparities in access to health care continue to leave millions of women of color at risk. Cervical cancer is a highly preventable and treatable disease, yet over 4,200 women die from it each year in the US, disproportionately Black women in the South. 

Disability Rights 

People with disabilities are three times less likely to be employed, and those who are employed often earn less than their peers for doing the same work. Public spaces, including transit systems and voting locations, often remain inaccessible. 

Wellness checks for mental health crises by police are still prone to have fatal and harmful consequences for people with mental health conditions. Authorities have been slow to adopt alternative approaches featuring nonpolice emergency response teams. 

Older People’s Rights 

In January, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), fulfilling a 2022 Biden commitment, announced it would audit the appropriateness of nursing homes’ schizophrenia diagnoses to reduce the misuse of antipsychotic drugs to control behavior, known as “chemical restraints.” In August, CMS proposed minimum nursing home staffing levels of only 3 hours of direct care per resident per day, lower than the minimum 4.1 hours per day recommended by a CSM-funded study and the Institute of Medicine. 

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity 

At the state level, lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills aiming to restrict the rights of LGBT people—more than in any prior year—and dozens of them were enacted into law. 

The majority of these efforts have targeted transgender people, particularly transgender children in schools. As of September 2023, 22 states ban at least some best-practice medical care for transgender children, and 5 of these states criminalize such care as a felony offense; 23 states prohibit transgender children from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity; 11 states ban various discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools; and 9 states prohibit transgender people from using bathrooms consistent with their gender identity in K-12 schools, with some of these bans encompassing other public facilities as well. 

Positive developments have failed to keep pace. Michigan is the only state where lawmakers adopted a comprehensive LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination law in 2023, making it the 22nd state to do so. The US has failed to enact comprehensive federal legislation that would expressly protect LGBT people from discrimination in areas such as education, housing, public accommodations, and federally funded programs. 

Technology and Human Rights 

The US continues to lack a human rights-centered federal data protection law, leaving personal data open to abuse by both government and private actors, particularly commercial tech sector actors with advanced data collection, profiling, and targeting abilities. 

Numerous federal agencies are considering how to regulate powerful new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). Regulations should contain rights protections and enforcement mechanisms and be informed by civil society inputs on human rights harms. 

Workers recruited by digital labor platforms to provide ride-hailing and delivery services continue to experience low, unpredictable wages and unsafe working conditions. 

The Biden administration in March issued an executive order banning government agencies from using commercial spyware that has been misused to target political dissent or perpetuate discrimination and marginalization. Commercial spyware continues to be a pervasive threat to human rights and human rights workers globally, including Human Rights Watch staff. 

Guantanamo 

At time of writing, 30 foreign Muslim men remained detained at the US military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including 5 charged with involvement in the attacks on September 11, 2001. Talks stalled on a deal for the five 9/11 accused to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences, after President Biden rejected the men’s requests for care to help them recover from Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture and to not serve their sentences in solitary confinement. A judge found one 9/11 defendant not mentally competent to stand trial. 

Two detainees from Malaysia agreed to plead guilty before Guantanamo’s fundamentally flawed military commissions in connection with the deadly 2002 bombings in Bali and a 2003 bombing of a Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. They were expected to be transferred to Malaysia after sentencing in January 2024. 

Two other men awaited trial and a third awaited sentencing at Guantanamo. Nineteen have never been charged. Only one man still held at Guantanamo has been convicted by a military commission. 

Foreign Policy 

President Biden strongly criticized the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7 that resulted in the killing of hundreds of Israeli and other civilians. He committed increased support for Israel’s defense beyond already approved annual military aid. Such security assistance and arms transfers violated US domestic laws and policies that condition US military aid on ensuring partners are not in violation of international law. US officials publicly and privately urged Israel to minimize civilian harm in its military response and allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza. 

The US continued to provide significant military and economic support to Ukraine in 2023 in opposition to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. In July, President Biden authorized the sharing evidence of international crimes being committed in Ukraine with the ICC. Also in July, Biden approved the transfer of US cluster munitions to Ukraine. These weapons are banned by an international treaty due to the dangers they pose to civilians, but neither the US nor Ukraine are parties to that treaty. 

After conflict broke out in Sudan in April, the US Treasury imposed sanctions on a leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) armed group and visa restrictions on an RSF commander in West Darfur state. Three private Sudanese companies and a private Emirati company were sanctioned under a May executive order. The State Department set up a “Sudan Observatory” with civil society to document atrocities in the conflict. 

At the United Nations Human Rights Council in October, the US supported a successful resolution to establish an international fact-finding mission for Sudan. At the UN Security Council that same month, the US co-sponsored with Ecuador a resolution, which was then adopted, to authorize a Kenya-led multinational security force to Haiti; it also vetoed a resolution that both condemned Hamas and called for all sides involved in the hostilities in Israel and Palestine to comply with international humanitarian law. In November, the US abstained from voting on a UN Security Council resolution calling for extended humanitarian pauses in Gaza and the release of Israelis held hostage. The US abstention allowed the resolution to be adopted. 

In March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken formally determined that all parties to the conflict in northern Ethiopia had committed war crimes. He noted that the Ethiopian government forces and its allies, including Eritrea, were responsible for crimes against humanity. In late June, the administration notified Congress that the government was no longer engaging in a “pattern of gross violations of human rights,” allowing it to qualify for US and international financial assistance, despite the ongoing commission of abuses. 

In June, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi received a state dinner at the White House and delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress, despite increasing human rights abuses by his party and its supporters. 

A new Conventional Arms Transfer Policy announced in February allows the State Department to deny a sale if a country would “more likely than not” harm civilians with US weapons. In September, the State Department created a Civilian Harm Incident Response Group (CHIRG) to analyze allegations of US military aid being used to harm civilians in recipient countries. 

The Egyptian government receives $1.3 billion in US military aid annually. Although Congress has conditioned a portion of these funds on actions that include strengthening human rights, in September, the Biden administration used a national security waiver to allow $235 million to go to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government. Another $85 million was withheld because of Egypt’s poor record on political prisoners. In September, members of Congress changed course and placed a hold on the previously approved $235 million following the indictment of Senator Robert Menendez for allegations of corruption that benefited the Egyptian government. 

Iran released five Americans imprisoned on unproven charges in exchange for five Iranians imprisoned in the US. In parallel, the US Treasury issued a waiver allowing Iran access to $6 billion in frozen Iranian oil revenue via banks in Doha for humanitarian use. However, in October, the US reportedly blocked access to these funds following the Hamas attacks in Israel. 

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the Biden administration prioritized efforts to restrict the flow of migrants and refugees traveling north. While the Biden administration took steps to defend the right to vote in Brazil and Guatemala and to limit deforestation in the Amazon, its responses to other pressing human rights situations, including in Mexico and Cuba, often prioritized domestic implications and politics, undermining its credibility on human rights. 

(Angela Davis, February 2022. Photograph by Jessica Chou/The Guardian. Styling by Indya Brown.)

Today is the 80th birthday of Dr. Angela Y. Davis.

To celebrate her life and work, we're excited to share this excerpt from Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, an extended set of interviews with Dr. Davis. We're also offering 30% off both Abolition Democracy and her other incredible short work, Are Prisons Obsolete?.

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Angela Davis, you are probably one of the top five most important black women in American history. In 1974, your book Angela Davis: An Autobiography was published by Random House. Since then it has become a classic of African-American letters that is central to the traditions of black women writers and black political thinkers. In many ways your autobiography also harkens back to the tradition of black slave narratives. How do you see this work now with thirty years hindsight?

Well, thanks for reminding me that this is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my autobiography. At the time I wrote the book I did not see myself as a conventional autobiographical subject and thus did not locate my writing within any of the traditions you evoke. As a matter of fact, I was initially reluctant to write an autobiography. First of all, I was too young. Second, I did not think that my own individual accomplishments merited autobiographical treatment. Third, I was certainly aware that the celebrity—or notoriety—I had achieved had very little to do with me as an individual. It was based on the mobilization of the State and its efforts to capture me, including the fact that I was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. But also, and perhaps most importantly, I knew that my potential as an autobiographical subject was created by the massive global movement that successfully achieved my freedom. So the question was how to write an autobiography that would be attentive to this community of collective struggle. I decided then that I did not want to write a conventional autobiography in which the heroic subject offers lessons to readers. I decided that I would write a political autobiography exploring the way in which I had been shaped by movements and campaigns in communities of struggle. In this sense, you can certainly say that I wrote myself into the tradition of black slave narratives.

In what way do you think that the black political biography plays a role within this tradition of American letters?

Well of course the canon of American letters has been contested previously, and if one considers the autobiography of Malcolm X as an example, which, along with literature by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, that has clearly made its way into the canon, one can ask whether the inclusion of oppositional writing has really made a difference. Has the canon itself has been substantively transformed? It seems to me that struggles to contest bodies of literature are similar to the struggles for social change and social transformation. What we manage to do each time we win a victory is not so much to secure change once and for all, but rather to create new terrains for struggle.

Since we are talking about canons, it seems to me that your work fits within another tradition—the philosophical canon. If we think of the work of Boethius, of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Antonio Gramsci, Primo Levi . . . these are philosophical figures who have reflected upon their prison experiences. Do you see your work contributing to this philosophical tradition of prison writing, and if so, how?

Well, often times prison writing is described as that which is produced in prison or by prisoners, and certainly Gramsci’s prison notebooks provide the most interesting example. It is significant that Gramsci’s prison letters have not received the consideration they deserve. It would be interesting to read Gramsci’s letters alongside those of George Jackson. These are two examples of prison intellectuals who devoted some of their energies to the process of engaging critically with the implications of imprisonment—at a more concrete philosophical level. Personally, I found it rather difficult to think critically about the prison while I was a prisoner. So I suppose I follow in the tradition of some of the thinkers you mention. However, I did publish a piece while I was in jail that could be considered a more indirect examination of issues related to imprisonment. I wrote an article entitled “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,”10 which helped me formulate some of the questions that I would later take up in my efforts to theorize the relationship between the institution of the prison and that of slavery. I produced another piece—a paper I wrote for the conference for the Society for the Study of Dialectical Materialism, associated with the American Philosophical Association—entitled “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” Both pieces were published in The Angela Y. Davis Reader in 1998. If They Come in the Morning, the book on political prisoners I wrote and edited with Bettina Aptheker, is another example of my prison writing. Finally, I also wrote an extended study of fascism which was never published. But it was only after I was released that I felt I had sufficient critical distance to think more deeply about the institution of the prison, drawing from and extending the work of the prison intellectual George Jackson.

You were trained as a philosopher, yet you teach in a program called the History of Consciousness at the University of California. Do you think that philosophy can play a role in political culture in the United States? And, has philosophy influenced your work on aesthetics, jazz, and in particular, the way in which you analyze the situation of black women?

Absolutely, and I think that I draw from my background in philosophy in that I try to ask questions about contemporary and historical realities that tend to be otherwise foreclosed. Philosophy provides a vantage point from which to ask questions that cannot be posed within social scientific discourse that presumes to furnish overarching frameworks for understanding of our social world. I have earned a great deal from Herbert Marcuse about the relationship between philosophy and ideology critique. I draw particular inspiration from his work Counterrevolution and Revolt that attempts to directly theorize political developments of the late 1960s. But at the same time the framework is philosophical. How do we imagine a better world and raise the questions that permit us to see beyond the given?

There are beautiful pages in your autobiography about your relationship with Herbert Marcuse, who was your teacher and mentor, and part of the Frankfurt School. You spent some years in Frankfurt in the late 1960s. You also studied with Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Max Horkheimer. Do you see yourself as a critical theorist in this Frankfurt School sense?

Well, I’ve certainly been inspired by critical theory, which privileges the role of philosophical reflection while simultaneously recognizing that philosophy cannot always by itself generate the answers to the questions it poses. When philosophical inquiry enters into conversation with other disciplines and methods, we are able to produce much more fruitful results. Marcuse crossed the disciplinary borders that separate philosophy, sociology, and literature. Adorno brought music and philosophy into the conversation. These were some of the first serious efforts to legitimate interdisciplinary inquiry.

You ran twice as the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party in the United States before leaving the party in the 1990s. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, what role, if any, can communism play today?

Although I am no longer a member of the Communist Party, I still consider myself a communist. If I did not believe in the possibility of eventually defeating capitalism and in a socialist future, I would have no inspiration to continue with my political work. As triumphant as capitalism is assumed to be in the aftermath of the collapse of the socialist community of nations, it also continually reveals its inability to grow and develop without expanding and deepening human exploitation. There must be an alternative to capitalism. Today, the tendency to assume that the only version of democracy available to us is capitalist democracy poses a challenge. We must be able to disentangle our notions of capitalism and democracy so to pursue truly egalitarian models of democracy. Communism—or socialism—can still help us to generate new versions of democracy.

Do you think that the anti-globalization movement—the anti-WTO movement—can take up the role that Karl Marx assigned to the proletariat? In other words, can we say, “anti-globalists of the world unite”?

Well, this transition is a little too easy. But this is not to dismiss the importance of creating global solidarities, cross-racial solidarities attentive to struggles against economic exploitation, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia. And there is a link, it seems to me, between the internationalism of Karl Marx’s era and the new globalisms we are seeking to build today. Of course, the global economy is far more complicated than Marx could ever imagine. But at the same time his analyses have important contemporary resonances. The entire trajectory of Capital is initiated by an examination of the commodity, that seemingly simple unit of the capitalist political economy. As it turns out, of course, the commodity is a mysterious thing. And perhaps even more mysterious today than during Marx’s times. The commodity has penetrated every aspect of people’s lives all over the world in ways that have no historical precedent. The commodity—and capitalism in general—has insinuated itself into structures of feeling, into the most intimate spaces of people’s lives. At the same time human beings are more connected than ever before and in ways we rarely acknowledge. I am thinking of a song performed by Sweet Honey and the Rock about the global assembly line, which links us in ways contingent on exploitative practices of production and consumption. In the Global North, we purchase the pain and exploitation of girls in the Global South, which we wear everyday on our bodies.

The sweatshops of the world.

The global sweatshops. And the challenge is, as Marx argued long ago, to uncover the social relations that are both embodied and concealed by these commodities.

There is a great tradition of African-American political thought that has been deeply influenced by Marxism and communism. But one way that we sometimes talk about black political thought is in terms of two figures in tension. For example, there are the comparisons made by John Brown versus Frederick Douglass; Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois; Malcom X versus Martin Luther King. And in this we are able to discuss the tensions between black nationalism and assimilation or integration. How do you see yourself in relationship to the tension between nationalism and integration?

Well, of course it is possible to think about black history as it has been shaped by these debates in various eras. And we shouldn’t forget the debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. But I actually am interested in that which is foreclosed by the conceptualization of the major issues of black history in terms of these debates between black men. And I say men because the women always tend to be excluded. Where, for example, do Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells stand in these debates? But I am interested precisely in what gets foreclosed by this tension between nationalism and integration. And perhaps not primarily because the actors are male, but because questions regarding gender and sexuality are foreclosed.

So you see your work as contesting this way of viewing the black tradition of political thought . . .

Yes.

. . . that way of making sense of integration.

Exactly.

So you wanted to displace the focus and say there’s another way in which black political thought can proceed.

Absolutely, and I think that the assumption today that black political thought must either advocate nationalism or must disavow black formations and black culture is very misleading.

Yes, but one of the things that is attributed to globalization is the end of nationalisms. Do you think that there is a role for black nationalism in the United States? Has it become entirely obsolete, an anachronism?

Well, in one sense it has become obsolete, but in another sense one can argue that the nationalisms that have helped to shape black consciousness will endure. First of all, I should say that I don’t think that nationalism is a homogeneous concept. There are many versions of nationalism. I’ve always preferred to identify with the pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois who argued that black people in the West do have a special responsibility to Africa, Latina America, and Asia—not by virtue of a biological connection or a racial link, but by virtue of a political identification that is forged in struggle. We should be attentive to Africa not simply because this continent is populated by black people, not only because we trace our origins to Africa, but primarily because Africa has been a major target of colonialism and imperialism. What I also like about Du Bois’s pan-Africanism is that it insists on Afro-Asian solidarities. This is an important feature that has been concealed in conventional narratives of pan-Africanism. Such an approach is not racially defined, but rather discovers its political identity in its struggles against racism.

In addition to the recent thirtieth anniversary of your autobiography, we are also celebrating fifty-plus years of Brown v. Board of Education. Do you think that the forces of black integration, the forces of civil rights, have been betrayed and somehow rolled-back by the past two decades of Rehnquist serving as the Reagan-appointed chief justice?

The promise of those struggles has been betrayed. But I don’t think it is helpful to assume that an agenda that gets established at one point in history will forever claim success on the basis of its initial victories. It is misleading to assume that this success will be enduring, that it will survive all of the changes and mutations of the future. The civil rights movement managed to bring about enormous political shifts, which opened doors to people previously excluded from government, corporations, education, housing, etc. However, an exclusively civil rights approach—as even Dr. King recognized before he died—cannot by itself eliminate structural racism. What the civil rights movement did, it seems to me, was to create a new terrain for asking new questions and moving in new directions. The assumption that the placement of black people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the heart of government would mean progress for the entire community was clearly fallacious. In this, there were no guarantees, to borrow from Stuart Hall. The civil rights movement demanded access, and access has been granted to some. The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded. This is the only way the promise of freedom can be extended to masses of people.

But don’t you worry about the conservative court? I mean if we think about the role of the Warren Court in advancing the racial justice agenda . . .

Oh, absolutely!

The justices in today’s Supreme Court are very outspoken about their conservatism. What does this mean for racial justice in the future?

Of course I’m worried about that. The only point I’m attempting to make is that past struggles cannot correct current injustices and that people who tend to sit back and bemoan the betrayal of the civil rights movement are not prepared to imagine what might be necessary at this moment to challenge the conservatism of the Supreme Court. It’s very difficult to recognize contemporary racisms, especially when they are not linked to racist laws and attitudes and when they differently affect individuals who claim membership in racialized communities. I’m suggesting that we need a new age—with a new agenda— that directly addresses the structural racism that determines who goes to prison and who does not, who attends university and who does not, who has health insurance and who does not. The old agenda facilitates assaults on affirmative action, as Ward Connerly pointed out in his campaign for Proposition 209 in California. From his vantage point, what is most important today is the protection of the civil rights of white men.

Right. But very smart strategies are being used, ones that displace attention from issues of racial justice by speaking in terms of multiculturalism. An example is last year’s court decision in Michigan—Grutter v. Bollinger—that says that affirmative action must be administered for the sake of preserving multicul-turalism. What is the difference between multiculturalism and racial justice?

There’s a huge difference. Diversity is one of those words in the contemporary lexicon that presumes to be synonymous with antiracism. Multiculturalism is a category that can admit both progressive and deeply conservative interpretations. There’s corporate multiculturalism because corporations have discovered that it is more profitable to create a diverse work place.

Benetton multiculturalism.

Yes. They have discovered that blacks and Latinos and Asians are willing to work as hard, or even harder, than their white counterparts. But this means that we should embrace a strong politically inflected multiculturalism, which emphasizes cross-racial community and continued struggles for equality and justice. That is to say cross-racial community not for the purpose of creating a beautiful “bouquet of flowers” or an enticing “bowl of salad”—which are some of the metaphorical representations of multiculturalism—but as a way of challenging structural inequalities and fighting for justice. This version of multiculturalism has radical potential.

And along with the question of multiculturalism and racial justice, there’s another question that tremendously worries me personally, existentially. That is, we keep talking about the “browning” of the United States; that by the year 2050 a quarter of the American population will be of Latino descent. Do you think that this browning of America will entail an eclipse of the quest for racial justice?

Why should it?

Conservatives claim that questions of racial justice are essentially black questions . . . and that multiculturalism and racial integration of Latinos are separate from racial justice work, affirmative action or reparations.

Well, you see, that’s the problem, and it seems to me that contemporary ideologies encourage this assumption that racial competition and conflict are the only possible relationships across communities of people of color. It is as if these communities are always separate and never intersect. But, if one looks at the labor movement, for example, there are numerous historical examples of Black-Latino solidarity and alliances. Regardless of which community might be numerically larger, without such solidarities and alliances, there can be no hope for an anti-racist future. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that this is a new era. Conditions of postcoloniality here in the United States and throughout the world convey the message that the “West” has been forever changed. Europe is not what it used to be. It is no longer defined by its whiteness. The same thing, of course, is true in the U.S. among black people who are used to being the “superior minority.” We must let go of this claim. There is this prevalent idea that because black people established the historical anti-racist agenda for the United States of Amer- ica, they will always remain its most passionate advocates. But black people as a collective cannot live on the laurels of its historical past. We have recently received harsh lessons about conservative possibilities in black communities. “Black” can not simply be considered an uncontestable synonym of progressive politics. The work of progressive activists is to build opposition to conservatism—regardless of the racial background of its proponents. That black and Latino communities cannot find common cause is one example of this conservatism. Our job today is to promote cross-racial communities of struggle that arise out of common—and hopefully radical—political aspirations.

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Take 30% off Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy by Dr. Angela Y. Davis

For more writings against the prison industrial complex, check out Abolish!: A Reading List on Police, Prisons, and Protest

Revelations about U.S. policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world's leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted list." She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.

Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.

In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration," and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

A Free E-book Against Police Repression

"The ideas that can and will sustain our movement for total freedom and dignity of the people cannot be imprisoned, for they are to be found in the people, all the people, wherever they are. As long as the people live by the ideas of freedom and dignity, there will be no prison that can hold our movement down.” ―Huey P. Newton

Defund the Police. Abolish Prisons. Refuse State Repression.

Contents:
- “Fighting to Win” from Full Spectrum Resistance: Building Movements and Fighting to Win by Aric McBay (2019)
- “The Problem is Civil Obedience” from The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy, Updated and Expanded 2nd Edition by Howard Zinn (2009)
- “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison” from Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (2005)
- “Women in Prison: How We Are” by Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard), 1978, from Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (2014)
- “We Remember the Days of Glory but Tend to Forget They Were Fourteen-Hour Days” from ’68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (2019)
- “Even Liars Know the Truth” from ’68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (2019)
- “Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?: January 3, 1970” by Huey P. Newton (1969), from The New Huey P. Newton Reader, edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise (2020)”

In the following review, originally published in the New York Times Book Review, NYTBR Poetry editor Gregory Cowles explores our picture book adaptations of José Saramago's childhood memoir, Small Memories, translated by Margaret Jull Costa — The Silence of Water, illustrated by Yolanda Mosquera, and An Unexpected Light, illustrated by Armando Fonseca.

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JOSE SARAMAGO'S CHILDHOOD MEMOIR INSPIRES COMPANION PICTURE BOOKS

The Nobel laureate’s “Small Memories” is a mix of peasant life, boyhood adventure and wide-eyed wonder.

By Gregory Cowles

Jan. 18, 2024

Early in José Saramago’s 2006 memoir, “Small Memories,” he tells readers that he briefly considered calling it “The Book of Temptations” instead. His reasons were characteristically elliptical and charming: something about Bosch, and sainthood, and the fat prostitute who “in a weary, indifferent voice” invited a 12-year-old Saramago up to her room. (He doesn’t report his answer, but given how candid the book is elsewhere, it’s safe to assume he declined.) In the end, though, he decided that the title “Small Memories” better suited the book’s contents: “nothing of great note,” in Saramago’s estimation; simply “the small memories of when I was small.”

But for a great writer, of course, there are no small moments, and Saramago (1922-2010) was one of the best. Celebrated for spare, allegorical novels including “Blindness,” “All the Names” and “Death With Interruptions,” he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1998, and remains the only Portuguese author ever to have done so.

Saramago’s memoir, which appeared in English translation the year before he died, is a winsome look back at his coming-of-age in the small village of Azinhaga and later in Lisbon.

With its mix of peasant life, boyhood adventure and wide-eyed wonder, it makes perfect fodder for a couple of new picture books: “The Silence of Water,” illustrated by Yolanda Mosquera and translated (like “Small Memories”) by Margaret Jull Costa, and the forthcoming “An Unexpected Light,” illustrated by Armando Fonseca and again translated by Costa.

THE SILENCE OF WATER (Triangle Square/Seven Stories Press, 24 pp., $17.95, ages 5 and up) tells the story of a young boy fishing in a local river without success until a monster barbel takes the bait and snaps the line, leaving the boy with a “ridiculous, useless rod” and a stubborn desire for revenge: “I decided to run home, get another line, float and sinker for my rod and return to settle accounts once and for all.” The plan is futile — even the boy calls it “the most absurd idea of my entire life” — but it offers him a lesson in the virtues and limits of pluck and determination.

It also, happily, offers a canvas for Mosquera’s textured landscape illustrations, which portray the river and sky in undulating white and the other components (the boy, his dog, the teeming plant life and assorted villagers) in layered earth tones. There’s a suitably old-fashioned feeling to the art, which rewards close attention and includes parallel story lines and characters evocative of Saramago’s memoir: a girl in braids catching a frog, a young mother in a polka-dot dress holding her wading toddler’s hand.

If “The Silence of Water” is about the one that got away, AN UNEXPECTED LIGHT (Triangle Square/Seven Stories Press, 32 pp., $18.95, ages 5 and up), which will be published this spring, is about a surprise encounter that lingers.

The book recounts a story that Saramago tells twice in “Small Memories,” about walking to the city with his uncle to sell suckling pigs. It’s a journey of a dozen miles — “four country leagues at piglet pace,” Saramago writes — and so the pair has to spend the night at a farm along the way, sleeping in a manger like the holy family. When his uncle wakes him in the small hours of the morning, the young Saramago is startled to find “a milky light over the night and the surrounding landscape,” the result of a huge white moon the likes of which he knows he will never see again. The nearness and the brightness of that moon strike him with all the force of a visitation.

This story is accompanied by Fonseca’s illustrations in ink and watercolor, their dark palette of grays and blacks a fitting accessory to Saramago’s dreamy moodiness — though in their whimsy and sense of motion, they’re more Matisse than Bosch.

In one drawing, the pigs seem to be dancing on the hills. In another, the boy or his uncle clings to the stem of a fantastical plant to avoid being carried off by the wind.

Besides the muted colors and the dream landscape, Fonseca also leans into the story’s nighttime feel with shooting stars and whirling constellations that look like geometric doodles. The moon, when it appears, is so large that its top is cut off by the edge of the page; by comparison, the boy and his uncle are insignificant enough to become nearly lost amid the plants that surround them.

“An Unexpected Light” ends with a scene I didn’t remember from the memoir, and couldn’t find when I searched for it: The boy and his uncle, returning home, run into a rainstorm that wholly encircles them yet somehow leaves them dry.

“​​No one could see me, and yet I could see the whole world,” Saramago writes. “It was then that I swore to myself that I would never die.”

I can’t guess why Costa and her editors chose to replace the original scene with the new one (which presumably hails from elsewhere in Saramago’s extensive catalog), unless it was to play into the story’s religious overtones and end on an upbeat note.

I’m not sure they needed to. People do die, after all, Saramago notably among them.

One takeaway from his memoir is that children are aware of more than they get credit for, and readier to accept it.

In its way, this is also the implicit message of “The Silence of Water,” with its young fisherman coming face to face with the weight of disappointment. More than most, Saramago knew there was consolation even in an empty line. None of the hours he spent at the river were in vain, he writes in “Small Memories,” because, “without my realizing it, I was ‘fishing’ for things that would be just as important for me in the future: images, smells, sounds, soft breezes, sensations.”

Saramago may be gone, but it’s lovely to see his work resurrected for a new generation.

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Gregory Cowles is the poetry editor of the Book Review and senior editor of the Books desk. More about Gregory Cowles

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An urgent, groundbreaking, and visually stunning new collection of graphic story-telling, edited by Persepolisauthor Marjane Satrapi, Woman, Life, Freedom is a collaboration of activists, artists, journalists, and academics working together to depict the historic uprising — with comics that show what would be censored in photos and film in Iran — in solidarity with the Iranian people, in defense of feminism.

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