Page 10 - Old Left News Today

by Malinda Seneviratne Revolutionaries, self-styled or otherwise, are hard to imagine as old people, the exception of course being Fidel Castro. Castro grew old with a Cuban Revolution that has demonstrated surprising resilience. Che Guevara was effectively stilled, literally and metaphorically when he was just 39, ensuring iconic longevity — and the wild haired image with a star pinned on a beret is a symbol of resistance and, as is often the case, used to endorse and inspire things and proc...

Stranded on the rocks of ‘Israel exceptionalism’ By Sally Bland - Mar 15,2021 - Last updated at Mar 31,2021 The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left Michael R. Fischbach Pp. 297   This is a companion piece to Michael Fischbach’s earlier book, “Black Power and Palestine” (2019), covering roughly the same time period, the 1960s and 1970s, but with a different focus. While the subject matter of the earlier book is obvious from the title,...

Fergal Kinney , March 15th, 2021 10:24 By 1995 Stereolab should have been at the peak of their powers, so why didnt it feel that way to Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier? Fergal Kinney examines the series of events that saw the band escape the dead end theyd ended up in culminating in the release of one of their most celebrated albums Viewed from the outside, by 1996 Stereolab must have seemed like a unit that could only ascend. Half a decade into the project, affectionately termed “the groop” b...

March 5, 2021 —  Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Canadian Dimension — Born poor on Belfast’s Shankill Road in the midst of the Great Depression was certainly no entré to a life that would cross paths with Bertrand Russell, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Ernest (Ernie) Tate would nevertheless work closely with luminaries such as these and many others who, like him, opposed the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. A lifelong revolut...

We are in a temporal loop. George Santayana’s 1905 observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” remains (ironically?) indelible, but it isn’t even the half of it. Repetition suggests a start, ending, and restart, but really we’ve been marching in place for some 30 years with no tangible resolution to speak of. Advertisement If you want a sense of how far we haven’t come, revisit the PC debates of the early ’90s. Names may have changed but the s...

Harvard’s Counter Teach-In, 50 Years Later How a student disruption prefigured the extremism of today’s college campuses Fifty years ago, some friends and I had the audacity to sponsor what we called the “Counter Teach-In: An Alternative View.” It took place at Harvard University on March 26, 1971, and argued in favor of American involvement in the Vietnam War—a position roughly as outrageous then on campus as arguing in universities now that Israel should defeat the Palestinians. Op...

Radical Son:HERE]. Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. In some parallel universe, David Horowitz never left the left. Instead he closed his eyes to the cracks in the Marxist ideal, zipped up his lip about the high crimes of his comrades, and, like them, reaped the rewards of his blind loyalty. He continued to write books that were lauded in the mainstream media; he was profiled glowingly in the New York Times Magazine and got the cover of Time; he won Pu...