Special Reports

In the early 1950s most publications ignored the anti-colonial campaigns in progress around the world and focused almost exclusively on the East-West “superpower” struggle between the USA and the USSR. But not Toward Freedom, which debuted at the end of 1952 as a modest three-page newsletter.

In 1954 the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen bomb. In the summer negotiations between France, Britain, Vietnam, China and the USSR ended the Indochina War. In Chicago, Toward Freedom’s education and organizing mission was taking shape.

George Orwell's journals assess events from the perspective of the past looking forward, rather than from the perspective of our present looking back. They thus refreshingly remind us of the uncertainty of the time, the contingency of history, and the moral and political complexity so often lost to the editors of historical volumes.

Vermont, the most progressive state in America, spent over $14 million last year to lock up Vermonters in for profit prison like Lee Adjustment Center in Kentucky. A dialogue about mass incarceration, budget crises, and privatization is unfolding. A group of Vermonters working out of Church basements and living rooms is attempting to build a movement to push this conversation forward by passing a historic law banning Vermont’s use of for-profit prisons.

It seems the world has survived December 21st. But will humanity survive the relentless and reckless pursuit of resources and wealth that capitalism continues to foist upon us? Or will the yearning for change represented by the Occupy movement and the Mayan ‘New Age’ of renewal help us make the ‘evolutionary leap’ to a new path for humanity? We hope so.