Reviews

Art and Activism: Danai Gurira’s Play, “Eclipsed,” Is More Relevant Than Ever

Lesley Becker May 7, 2021 Lesley Becker

Activism and Art are a potent combination for addressing problems that are both enduring and unendurable. The play, Eclipsed, transports the audience into the intimate dwelling of women struggling to survive while living as sexual slaves in a rebel forces encampment at the end of the Liberian civil war in 2003. The story follows a 15-year-old African girl as she escapes from the encampment to become a child soldier in the rebel forces.

The World is My Country: A Stunning New Film about World Citizen Garry Davis

Toward Freedom Editor April 28, 2021 Toward Freedom Editor

He was best known as “World Citizen # 1.”.He was a former WWII bomber pilot who was so pained about having bombed a civilian city that, in 1948, he gave up his US national citizenship and declared himself a citizen of the world.  Many more acts of defiance would follow, landing him in prison 34 times.  Now, the late Garry Davis (1921-2013), whose obituary appeared on the front page of the New York Times, is the subject of a newly released documentary by Arthur Kanegis and Melanie N. Bennett called The World is My Country. It is now airing on  public television stations across the country -- including Vermont broadcasts on May 2.

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

Lesley Becker March 23, 2021 Lesley Becker

The title of this book describes its mission, which is to move beyond surviving abuse or assault, and to organize for the purpose of addressing violence and the root causes of violence. Transformative Justice , if implemented widely and over time, will build community safety systems that can function independently of the criminal justice system. The essays in this book are first-hand accounts describing approaches for responding to and preventing violence and abuse without police and prisons.

Bolivia’s Five-Hundred-Year Rebellion

Peter Lackowski February 28, 2021 Peter Lackowski

In 1781, the Bolivian indigenous leader Tupac Katari led a rebellion in which La Paz, the Spanish colonial capital of “Upper Peru,” was besieged for 109 days. The siege ended with the arrival of a Spanish army. Katari was captured, he and his wife, Bartolina Sisa, were gruesomely executed, and thousands of indigenous people were massacred. For many years this was treated as a minor event in history books, but in the latter half of the twentieth century Katari and Sisa have been celebrated as symbols of the resistance to oppression by the indigenous majority, and as martyrs in a national revolution whose time has finally come.

All American Nativism: A Must Read on the Macabre History of America’s Long War on Immigrants

Jared Olson December 11, 2020 Jared Olson

The victory of Joe Biden occasions relief only insofar as we’ve prevented the immediate consolidation of twenty-first century fascism. But under Biden, a man who, along with President Obama, oversaw mass deportations of a scale surpassed only by Trump, the battle for ending border violence, and the system of global apartheid it upholds, will be a long one. Trump may have been one of the ugliest examples of All-American Nativism. But in a world buckling under the weight of climate change, inequality and militarism, fighting back against it means recognizing the problem goes far beyond just him.