Recent Reading

Recently finished Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, which was just so good. It's about the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement and League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Black-led, smart, and dynamic, DRUM and the League didn't die in hail of bullets and had a number of important successes. The only complaint was that it was originally written so soon after it had peaked (It was roughly from 1968 to 1972 and the book was published in 1975), that a much longer afterward about what lasted, what didn't, and why and a "where did everyone end up" section would've been nice. Currently reading, or at least perusing, several books in the South End Press Classics Series, which are all just so good.

When is Our Enemies in Blue by Kristian Williams going to be released? It's always about to be released. As soon as it is, it'll be added to the library. Several of us went and saw Christian Parenti speaking about Iraq and when asked about the January thirty elections and people's thinking about them there, he said people on the ground just dismissed them as an imperial sham.


Today is the nineteenth anniversary of the invasion of East Timor and Chomsky's Birthday. Here's a good quote of his from Chronicles of Dissent: Propaganda in the US vs in the USSR, (October 24, 1986):

"[In] Democratic societies ... the state can't control behavior by force. It can to some extent, but it's much more limited in its capacity to control by force. Therefore, it has to control what you think. ... One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there's a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate."