AlternativeRadio

The number of dead and wounded in Palestine is staggering. Many look away. Why bother, you may ask? Because, unlike other conflicts, we can do something about it. It is the U.S., Canada and most of Europe that enable the genocide by supplying Israel with weapons. In Israel, there is mounting opposition. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians. We are committing war crimes.” Then he added, “Netanyahu and his government have done great damage to the moral integrity of Israel and the Israeli people.” Palestine is the moral issue of our time. Recorded at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

Nakba is Arabic for the 1948 catastrophe. where 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled and driven from their ancestral homes and lands. Today, 77 years later, the Nakba continues. This time, aided and abetted by the U.S., Israel declares it has "the most moral army in the world, which does everything to avoid harming non-combatants.” Watch Al Jazeera or read the reports from Amnesty International, B’Tselem or Gush Shalom and other human rights organizations to verify the Israeli claim. Netanyahu has declared that there will be no Palestinian state and that Israel will control Gaza. Will there ever be a viable Palestinian state? The keyword is viable, not just a collection of Bantustans crisscrossed by Israeli-only roads, walls, barriers and checkpoints. What will be the fate of millions of Palestinians? Is the Nakba permanent?

Authoritarianism can't happen here, you say. Look around. Open your eyes. No one is safe. Dissent is being criminalized. People are being arrested without due process. When Trump was asked if it was his job to uphold the Constitution, he said, "I don't know." Claudia de la Cruz says, “Trump and his cabinet full of billionaires are waging an all-out war on our communities. From slashing thousands of jobs to massively defunding critical programs that many working-class people rely on to survive. At this critical moment, we can’t simply lie down and allow his administration to roll back all the rights that our people’s movements have won. Now is the time to organize our communities and stand up to fight back!” In these dark times, we cannot be bystanders. We must resist and imagine and create a new world where peace, equality, dignity and justice are the norm. Recorded at KGNU.

Indigenous peoples often see themselves as an integral part of nature, not separate from it, and recognize the interconnectedness of all living beings and nature. Indigenous perspectives on the rights of nature emphasize a deep spiritual bond with the natural world, viewing it as a sacred entity and an essential part of their cultural and social fabric. Many Indigenous cultures believe that nature has inherent rights and that humans have responsibilities to respect, protect and maintain the health of the environment for the well-being of future generations. Indigenous communities are increasingly at the forefront of the rights of nature movement, working to incorporate their values and beliefs into legal frameworks and policies.

Langston Hughes, the great African American poet, said decades ago, “Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America.” Fascism can and has led to genocide. Progressive African American intellectuals, writers, poets, and musicians have had a long tradition and history of solidarity and resisting fascism and genocide, from Frederick Douglass to Gil Scott-Heron, from Sojourner Truth to Angela Davis, from W.E.B. Du Bois to John Lewis, from Paul Robeson to Amiri Baraka, from Ida B. Wells to Malcolm X, from Ella Baker to Dr. King, from Harry Belafonte to Sonny Rollins, from James Baldwin to Cornel West and up to the present moment where Robin D. G. Kelley warns “We're witnessing the consolidation of a fascist police state.” Recorded at the University of Massachusetts.

We are at an inflection point. A chill is sweeping the country. We ignore it at our peril. The warning signs are everywhere. Alaska GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski says, “We are all afraid.” Massachusetts Democratic Governor Maura Healey says, “The fear is real.” New York Times columnist Masha Gessen writes, “America’s Police State Has Arrived.” A Columbia University dean told students, “Nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times.” Conservative PBS commentator David Brooks calls for “a civic uprising to fight back and adds: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” Dissent is being criminalized. People are being deported without any kind of due process. Court rulings are being ignored. Democracy, civil liberties and free speech are all under attack. What can be done to reverse cowboy authoritarianism in America? Recorded at the University of British Columbia.

April 24th marks the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. I grew up in the 1950s in New York in the shadow of that tragedy. I was surrounded by survivors named Garabedian, Giragosian, Hagopian and others who always spoke fondly of “yergeer,” the country they were forced to abandon. My mother, Araxie, was from Dubneh, a village near Diyarbakir, and my father, Bedros, was from Nbishi, a village near Palu in what is now Eastern Turkey. Their memories, and those of others from the “old” country, filled my ears as did their tales of how they escaped death and got to America. I’d listened to their stories in Armenian, not understanding everything, but knowing for them, “yergeer” was a special place. It was home. Houshamadyan are precious memory books of a millennial-old civilization virtually lost but not forgotten. Recorded at the National Association of Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).

Monopoly isn’t just a board game it is the animating dynamic of our economic system. Really existing capitalism, which relies heavily on taxpayer support, embodies a near genetic drive to consolidate, to dominate and ultimately to eliminate competition. This leaves people with fewer choices and higher prices, exactly the outcome desired by the monopolists. Democracy, particularly in the U.S., has largely morphed into an oligarchy run by and for plutocrats. As corporate control of media increases and as inequality widens, and as the eco-crisis continues apace, one can expect a future of social unrest.

Noam Chomsky calls the Israel, U.S., and Palestine relationship a “Fateful Triangle.” He says,“ In no other region of the world are the problems so likely to lead to devastating regional conflict.” He adds, those problems “have only been aggravated by the irrationality and intolerance that has dominated discussion in the U.S. It will be unfortunate if this state of affairs persists,” he warns. Alas, Chomsky wrote those words more than 50 years ago. The U.S. has given Israel hundreds of billions in aid over the years. In addition, Washington provides crucial diplomatic, political and military support. Internationally, because of Gaza both the U.S. and Israel are increasingly isolated. General Moshe Yallon, former Israeli chief of staff and defense minister, says Israel is committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Interview by David Barsamian. Recorded at the Boulder Public Library.

Parts of the U.S. are an eco-disaster, a sacrifice zone. Take Newark, NJ. If you travel down a one-mile stretch of Doremus Avenue in Newark you pass a natural gas plant next to a sewage treatment facility next to an animal fat rendering plant next to a series of ominous-looking chemical storage containers behind acres of fencing. Airplanes pass overhead every two minutes, their engines rattling windows, while a putrid smell wafts from the open pools at the sewage treatment plant. Nationally, where are these polluters located? Overwhelmingly in poor communities of color like the Ironbound section of Newark where activists are organizing and fighting back to create a just, vibrant and sustainable community.

Bigotry and hatred, fear and loathing, are on the rise. Vulnerable groups are being targeted. It’s happened before. Decades ago, speaking to the National Jewish Congress, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr said, “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. There are Hitlers loose in America today, both in high and low places. As the tensions and bewilderment of economic problems become more severe, history's scapegoats, the Jews, will be joined by new scapegoats, the Negroes. The Hitlers will seek to divert people's minds and turn their frustrations and anger to the helpless, to the outnumbered.” Recorded at the University of Colorado.

History, “The past” as Faulkner wrote, “is never dead. It's not even past." Trauma, a Greek word for wound, takes on myriad shapes and forms. It often remains and reverberates through generations. There is individual trauma and collective trauma. However, just because you suffered does not give you permission to inflict suffering on others. Angela Davis said, “Victimization cannot be permitted to function as a halo of innocence.” Empathy is the ability to take on another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. Victims need our empathy, our compassion but not according to the world’s richest man. Elon Musk has said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, is led by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. It operates in virtual secrecy. Its slash and burn tactics have resulted in thousands of government workers losing their jobs, sometimes with little or no notice. Budgets are being hollowed out to pay for massive tax breaks for the oligarchs. Activist, organizer, politician Kshama Sawant warns, “We cannot understate the damage being done by Trump, Musk and company. It is austerity on steroids, deregulation on steroids, imperialism on steroids” and along with that she says it’s “the most dramatic concentration of executive power” in memory. There’s only one thing that will stop the Trump-Musk juggernaut. Collective citizen action. Workers! Fight Back! Recorded at the Langston Hughes Center for the Performing Arts.

When faced with adversity one can look away and do nothing. But for our own dignity and self-respect we must fight back and resist the depredations of the state and corporate sector. Historically speaking this is one of those critical inflection points. A lot of people are deeply concerned about the Trump regime and Elon Musk. The social safety net is being shredded while the gazillionaires make out like bandits. Tariq Ali says, “What the United States needs today is an opposition, which fights back politically, intellectually, and culturally with arguments, and, when necessary, comes out on the streets to defend democracy, a grassroots uprising. We need activists more than ever before.” Recorded at St. Thomas University.

Almost every country in Africa was colonized by Europe. Today, while nominally sovereign many of these countries are in the clutches of the big international banks. The old colonial masters Britain and France still have a foothold in Africa but the U.S. has been pushing them aside, moving in to capture resources and markets. Washington has established an Africa Command, deployed troops, and built a string of bases. But France won’t let go of its grip on its former colonies. The coup in Niger, a former French colony, is not your run-of-the-mill coup. It must be understood in the context of widespread discontent with ruling elites and their collaboration with imperialism. Genuine independence is still far off for Niger and other countries in the Sahel region of West and Central Africa.

The corporate takeover of food with its toxic chemical inputs poses serious health and environmental problems. Corporate agriculture, The New York Times states unequivocally "is causing irreparable harm to the planet." It is "ravaging the air, soil and water, destroying wildlife habitats and spurring climate chaos. The system, a vast web of industries and processes that stretches from seed to pasture, to packaging, to the supermarket, to the trash dump, produces at least a third of all human-caused greenhouse gases." There are alternatives. We can learn much from traditional organic farming techniques as practiced by indigenous farmers. In this program, Vandana Shiva describes the importance of biodiversity and the interconnectedness of all life. She says, "What we do to the Earth, what we do to the land, what we do to biodiversity eventually comes back to us. There is no separation."

The “Oppenheimer” movie and the Ukraine war have brought much-needed attention to the possibility of terminal war. The arms race will end the human race. To call nukes weapons of mass destruction comes nowhere near describing the level of devastation that their use would result in. To be clear, these are weapons of annihilation that would make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look trivial. And how are our great leaders addressing this existential threat? Instead of advocating universal nuclear disarmament countries led by the U.S. are spending billions to upgrade them. That’s a good definition of insanity. It’s nothing short of a miracle that nuclear war, the ending of the planet, has not happened. Can our luck last forever? The odds and logic say no. If we don’t reverse the insane arms race, we will be committing suicide.

The anti-Communist hysteria rampant in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s is often called the McCarthy period. But the red-baiting and persecution started even before McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1946. The notorious House Un-American Activities Committee led the crusade to ferret out alleged Communists in the U.S. They struck gold when they took on Hollywood, not because they actually found Communists but because of the public's media-fed fixation on movie stars. Perhaps the most interesting case involved the great director Elia Kazan who felt he had to name names and cooperate with HUAC. In this program Victor Navasky raises interesting moral choices and questions. His discussion of the actor Lee J. Cobb is most moving. Interview by David Barsamian and S.K. Levin. Recorded at KGNU.

States want to dominate the narrative with their version of events. There are two basic models. One follows Aldous Huxley, the other George Orwell. The latter is best known for 1984. Big Brother is brutal. He wields a big stick while Huxley uses a much softer carrot. Censorship is self-imposed because the journalist knows the boundaries of permissible thought. Essential assumptions are embedded unconsciously so they don’t even rise to the level of being challenged. The Huxley model is more subtle and relies on persuasion and getting people to focus on trivialities. Orwell is straight-out coercion. Sing the tune I’ve told you to or else. Recorded at First Parish Church at an event marking the 25th anniversary of South End Press.

Why has the United States intervened so often in foreign lands? What are its origins? Having expanded its borders largely through its destruction of Indigenous peoples the U.S. went on to project its power globally. Today, its empire of bases rings the Earth. According to Monthly Review the U.S. “has at least eight hundred military bases located in eighty-five countries.” Historically, military interventions and invasions have been a bi-partisan affair. Republicans and Democrats will only question tactics. It wasn’t always that way. There was a period in U.S. history when there was a fierce debate about Washington’s use of force around the world. It centered on two factions, one led by Theodore Roosevelt and the other by none other than Mark Twain. The themes and debates of the past resonate today. The names change but policy is fairly constant.