The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War by Greg Grandin is based on the belief that the Cold War was more than just a battle of ideologies, nations and political leaders, but a dramatic struggle waged by everyday people whose illuminating stories were buried.
Source: San Francisco Bay Guardian
When John Ross left Terminal Island, the federal prison in Los Angeles, after serving a couple of years for refusing the Vietnam draft, the warden shook his head and said: “Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”
I’m not writing the epitaph for whatever gravestone he has or doesn’t have, wherever it might be in the world, but that’s what I’d put on it: “John Ross, 1938-2011. Never learned how to be a prisoner.”
Source: The Nation
As we awake to the nightmare of the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Congressional liberals face an immediate test on the Latin American front. Two fanatically right-wing Congress members from South Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Connie Mack, now control the Foreign Affairs Committee and the subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, respectively, and Honduras is at the top of their agenda. They are already aggressively challenging the Obama administration on what they regard as its softness toward Honduras’s deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected leader who was ousted in a June 28, 2009, military coup. They are also attacking the administration’s initial reluctance to give the coup regime its unqualified support.
The wave of a peoples’ revolution has swept over Tunisia and pushed President Ben Ali to exile in Saudi Arabia.
Source: Democracy Now
Today is the federal holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King. He was born January 15th, 1929. He was assassinated April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just thirty-nine years old. While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People’s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Dr. King was also a fierce critic of US foreign policy and the Vietnam War. We play his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, which he delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, as well as his last speech, “I Have Been to the Mountain Top,” that he gave on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated.
It was two years before the first Earth Day in 1970 when Garrett Hardin penned the famous essay “Tragedy of the Commons,” and it fit a certain bleak and despairing mood of the time.
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