Every Month is Black History Month

TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
THE U.S. INVASION OF IRAQ, 20 YEARS LATER

Truth — as Howard Zinn demonstrates in his classic text Terrorism and War — is the first casualty of war, and one can see evidence of this from the beginnings of the American empire, through our military operations around the world today. By March 2003, less than two years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. war machine of military propaganda reached a fever pitch with “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq. Now, 20 years later, we can see the truth of the matter: that we should have never invaded Iraq in the first place, and that doing so led to millions of unnecessary deaths, incalculable trauma for survivors and their families, and widespread environmental and socioeconomic destruction.

On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, we are offering 30% off our "Iraq War, 20 Years Later Reading List," a timely selection of titles on U.S. imperialism, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and the so-called War on Terror. 

From Mona Damluji, author of Together with illustrations by Innosanto Nagara, a poem for her children, an attempt to explain the Iraq War as a family with roots in Iraq and Lebanon:

How do I speak with my children about war? I have no idea. And yet I struggle to find the words to begin. Twenty years ago today the United States invaded Iraq. I offer this poem as a way to begin.

I want you to know that you came from a people and a place that was beautiful. I want you to know that your ancestors loved and laughed and danced and played and worked and cared in this place surrounded by their own beauty. That they called this place home.

I want you to know that they weren’t perfect, your ancestors, because no one is. But they lived in dignity.

I want you to know that what took it away, what made this place unsafe, was greed. The greed of people from another place who already had more than they need. Those people who had it all, and still wanted more. They made war. They made horrible, ugly, impossible war.

The war took away buildings. Took away homes. It took away families. Made it unsafe to breathe. Unsafe to drink. Unsafe to stay. Made so many leave.

And the thing about war is that it does not end when the generals say so. War keeps burning. It burns in the hearts, in the minds, in the pockets, in the limbs. It keeps burning in all those who witnessed, all those displaced, and all those who remember. It burns in our questions. It burns in our pain.

The war is a fire that set ablaze to the street my grandparents called home. It turned off the lights. It made day into night. And so they left, like all those who left before.

That fire burns inside of me. The fire that made it unsafe to stay, that keeps me from returning one day. 

And it’s inside of you too. I want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because if you don’t see it, it might still grow.

However far away we are now, however many miles, however many years, I want you to know you are still of the place that your ancestors know. The one that they called home. 

—Mona Damluji

March 20, 2023

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TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
THE U.S. INVASION OF IRAQ, 20 YEARS LATER

Truth — as Howard Zinn demonstrates in his classic text Terrorism and War — is the first casualty of war, and one can see evidence of this from the beginnings of the American empire, through our military operations around the world today. By March 2003, less than two years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. war machine of military propaganda reached a fever pitch with “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq. Now, 20 years later, we can see the truth of the matter: that we should have never invaded Iraq in the first place, and that doing so led to millions of unnecessary deaths, incalculable trauma for survivors and their families, and widespread environmental and socioeconomic destruction.

On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, we are offering 30% off our Iraq War, 20 Years Later Reading List, a timely selection of titles on U.S. imperialism, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and the so-called War on Terror. 

With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.

In this excerpt, adapted from a speech addressed to the 15,000 marchers at the 2020 Brooklyn March for Black Trans Lives, Okra Project Founder Ianne Fields Stewart explores what it would mean to truly eradicate transphobia, to "bring that violence into the light and crush it beneath our feet."

A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.

Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.

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Ianne Fields Stewart is a Black transfeminine actor, storyteller, and activist and is the founder of The Okra Project, which works to address food insecurity in Black transgender communities. Stewart gave the following speech before a crowd of fifteen thousand people at the 2020 Brooklyn March for Black Trans Lives, the largest such gathering to date.

 

IANNE FIELDS STEWART, "TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF TRANS OPPRESSION" (June 14, 2020)

 

Good afternoon. My name is Ianne Fields Stewart. I use they/them/she/her pronouns.

Today I call upon each and every one of you to make a commitment. Today I urge you to commit, that today is the very last day that transphobia will claim the lives, loves, and joys of Black trans people!

For too long, Black trans people have fought for our humanity, and for too long, cis people have been acting like they don’t know what the fuck we talking about.

So today is the last day that a Black trans woman fears for her life, when she names and claims herself, in front of a man, whose hatred of himself is stronger than his love for her.

Today is the last day that a Black trans man fears occupying physical space because he can’t find his binder or is without it, and he fears that, because he fears being misgendered, because he fears brutality. It is the last day.

Today is the last day that Black nonbinary people feel forced to fake themselves into a binary that doesn’t exist.

Today is the last day that cis people use trans people as an encyclopedia when Google is right there.

Today is the last day. And today, I demand that you commit that there will be no more hashtags. There will be no more elevated rates of incarceration, housing insecurity and unemployment for Black trans people.

Today I demand that the state be held accountable for our murders.

Today I demand that the state be held accountable for continuously ignoring us, abusing us, while profiting off of us in the shadows.

Today we bring that violence into the light and crush it beneath our feet.

To summarize I have one simple thing to say: transphobia ends today. And it doesn’t end because your nonprofit made a grant off of it. It doesn’t end because you put a trans flag on a credit card. It doesn’t even end because you said to your white family that trans lives matter. It doesn’t end because you fuck us and still misgender us to your friends. Transphobia ends today because if you ain’t with us, you are learning today what it means to be against us.

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IANNE FIELDS STEWART is a black, queer, and transfeminine New York-based storyteller working at the intersection of theatre and activism. Their work and she are dedicated to interrupting the exclusivity of  luxury by making things like entertainment, nourishment, and self care accessible to the most marginalized in their community. In a world that is constantly traumatizing Black bodies she believes that Black queer and trans people should have the space and time to center collective emotional, physical, and sensual pleasure.

 

To celebrate the paperback release of our bilingual edition of No More / C’est Tout by Marguerite Duras, we are proud to share an excerpt from the book: a short portion from the beginning of Duras’ final text, paired with introductory notes by translator Richard Howard and French publisher Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens.

 

 

 

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

It was Chateaubriand who initiated a literature explicitly from the other side, posthumous writing, d’outre-tombe. There are subsequent French instances — Drieu La Rochelle’s Récit secret, Gide’s mortuary pillow-book Ainsi soit-il, some late Jouhandeau, quite a lot of Montherlant, perhaps Céline’s last three volumes — the mere instancing of these ominous names suggests the ethical risk of such an enterprise. Who makes book here — isn’t there always someone else, someone not entirely to be trusted who will have to collect the disjecta verba, to straighten things out —in Duras’s case her last young lover, appearing so mysteriously as a gruesome interlocutor, the angel of death masked as the last coital gasp, drowning out all foregoing competition during these inter-comatose manifestations of that special literary fanaticism which asserts not merely that this is happening (after all, Duras has written a hundred works, novels, stories, plays, films; expression is her trade) but that this is happening to me!

No attempt will be made to please, to beguile the (loathed?) reader. Nor to identify anything so trivial as circumstance. We are in the abstract — and perhaps fraudulently dated — halls of Dis where only glints of consciousness, when they come, will suffice: angry, dismissive, these are the intermittences not of the heart, as in Proust, but of the spleen. Baudelaire indeed is the plausible prototype, though what scorn M.D. would have for all his formal scruples, his attention to the classi cism of ruin. Here is nothing but what the French call hargne (surliness, resentment, bad temper . . .), tense and often mocking observations of the still-articulate soul, betrayed by the still-longing body. This is one of the fiercest little books in our culture, the converse of the Stoic manual of proper dying. Give it the last inch on your bedside table to remind you (like the slave whose function it is to slap the victorious Roman general before he sets out on his Triumphal March) of the degradations of mortality: greedy, illicit, profound. Odi et amo. 

—Richard Howard
Spring 1998  
New York City

 

FOREWORD

It was toward the end of August 1995 that Yann Andréa brought me the beginnings of C’est Tout: a few typed sheets which went from November 20, 1994 to August 1, 1995. We published them right away, and Marguerite Duras was able to see the book. Everyone knew at the time that she was mortally ill. Then a few days after her death on March 3, 1996, Yann gave me the pages which end on February 29. In the notes she herself wrote or in those retranscribed by Yann, the striking thing, for anyone who knew Marguerite Duras toward the end of her life, is that immediately recognizable voice, her outrageous and powerful way of forcing the language to obey her thought, a way which has here become lapidary, on account of the urgency of the message and the fear of silence. She spoke exactly as she wrote, or the other way around. It is for what they say, and also for her will to speak to the very end, that I find these pages — poorly typed on an old machine, not even an electric typewriter — so overwhelming. And also because the whole of her work is to be found in them, in fragments and flashes and echoes, as always reworked and revisited, this ultimate time, truly the last.

—Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens
Spring 1998 
Paris, France

 

November 21, afternoon, rue Saint-Benoît.

Y.A. [Yann Andréa]: What would you say for yourself?

M.D.: Duras.

Y.A.: What would you say for me?

M.D.: Unintelligible.
 

Later, the same afternoon.

Sometimes I am empty for a very long time.

I have no identity. 

At first it is frightening. And then it

turns to an impulse of happiness. And then it stops.

Happiness: I mean dead, somewhat.

Somewhat missing from the place where I am speaking.

 

Later still.

It is a question of time. I shall

write a book.

I want to, but it’s not certain I am

writing this book.

It is aleatory.

 

November 22, afternoon, rue Saint-Benoît.

Y.A.: Are you afraid of death?

M.D.: I don’t know. I don’t know how to

answer. I don’t know anything anymore

since I’ve reached the sea.

Y.A.: And with me?

M.D.: Before and now it is love between us, between you and me.

Death and love. It will be whatever you want, whatever you are.

Y.A.: Your definition of yourself?

M.D.: I don’t know, just as right now

I don’t know what to write.

Y.A.: Which of your books do you prefer to all the rest?

M.D.: The Sea Wall, childhood.

 

Y.A.: And you’ll go to paradise?

M.D.: No. That makes me laugh.

Y.A.: Why?

M.D.: I don’t know. I don’t believe in

such a thing.

Y.A.: And after death, what’s left?

M.D.: Nothing. Except the living who smile, who remember.

 

Y.A.: Who will remember you?

M.D.: Young readers. Students.

 

Y.A.: What is on your mind?

M.D.: Writing. A tragic occupation, at least in relation to the

course of life.

I am in that without effort.

 

Later, the same afternoon.

Y.A.: Do you have a title for the next book?

M.D.: Yes. The vanishing act.

 

November 23 in Paris, 3 in the afternoon.

I want to talk about someone.

About a man of twenty-five

at the most. He is a beautiful man who wants

to die before being marked by

death.

You loved him.

More than that. 

The beauty of his hands,

Yes, that’s right.

His hands which move forward with

the hill—distinct now, bright,

as luminous as a child’s

grace.

I kiss you.

I wait for you the way I wait for

someone who will destroy this failed

grace, gentle and still warm.

Given to you, wholly, with my whole

body, this grace.

 

Later the same afternoon.

I wanted to tell you

that I loved you.

To shout it.

No more.
 

To celebrate the release of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange by Kevin Gosztola, we are proud to share journalist Abby Martin's foreword to the book, in which Martin refreshes readers on both the political context and the overarching stakes of the U.S. government’s prosecution of Julian Assange, as well as offering a personal account of Wikileaks’ impact on the formation of her political ideology.

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Foreword to Guilty of Journalism

By Abby Martin

When I first became aware of Julian Assange, it was a time of great hope. It was also a time of great horror.

The 9/11 attacks created a climate of dutiful stenographers and imperial apologia that allowed the Bush administration to wage war on the planet under the auspices of a never-ending “War on Terrorism.” But war is terrorism, and the United States was committing unspeakable amounts of it under the cover of darkness.

As a freshman in college, I remember the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, surrounded by cheering students when the US bombed Baghdad like a video game. I remember the debilitating confusion when so-called opposition leader Nancy Pelosi said impeachment was off the table for the criminals that lied a nation into war, tortured with impunity, and shamelessly profited from their heinous acts. I felt utterly defeated, awash in a sea of propaganda and unquestioning patriotism.

The nation was on the brink at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, and President Barack Obama came in to placate the anti-war agitation. Yet the wars raged on, and the war criminals walked free. They wanted Obama to rehabilitate the empire, but WikiLeaks helped cement its true legacy.

The Iraq War Logs, heroically divulged by Chelsea Manning, dropped during this crucial time, when Americans were forced to confront the truth of what the United States government was doing in our names. The Collateral Murder video, which showed an Apache helicopter indiscriminately mowing down journalists and civilians, then firing on a rescue vehicle while soldiers laughed, changed everything. Suddenly, questioning the legality and morality of the US was mainstream.

The Logs gave proof to Iraqi society of the extent to which US forces had been killing civilians. Just as Washington, through Sec- retary of Defense Robert Gates, was in Baghdad trying to extend the US military presence in the country, WikiLeaks made this untenable. Who knows what turn the war could have taken were it not for these revelations?

Julian Assange boosted the potential for accountability. As an aspiring journalist, I was moved by his conviction and willingness to make great personal sacrifices to represent this powerful truthtelling effort. The overwhelming sense of despair I felt turned to hope in the potential for great change.

Authoritarian governments shook. The US Empire was unmasked, and the imperial project was in danger of unraveling. It was a time of incredible optimism and inspiring mass movements, with the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and organizations such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks using technology to take huge risks to expose the seemingly impenetrable elite.

It was during this transformative era that I moved to Washington, DC, to work at Russia Today, and came to know and appreciate the work of journalist Kevin Gosztola. I was immediately impressed with Kevin’s intellect and meticulousness through his coverage of WikiLeaks.

He was one of the only journalists to report on Manning’s court-martial, tirelessly documenting every detail while being one of the leading advocates for her freedom. I spoke to him frequently on my show Breaking the Set, about the injustices of her case as well as the plight of whistleblowers and revelations of WikiLeaks. Ever since then, he has been my primary source for these pivotal subjects.

Kevin’s coverage of Assange is built on his coverage of Manning’s court-martial. Weaving in what he recalls from the Manning case adds an extra level of credibility to his journalism on Assange.

Years after the liberal establishment — who once heaped praise upon Assange — abandoned him in droves, Kevin has not relented in his dedication to the case. He is one of the only journalists to provide ongoing and consistent coverage of the intricacies of Assange’s trial, which Kevin reports with impressive depth and honesty.

He warned us years ago of the profound implications that indicting Assange would have, and the story he tells here should serve as a beacon for us.

For years, the US government has prosecuted whistleblowers with extreme prejudice. No one embarrasses the Empire without paying dearly in prison. But Assange was only publishing the leaks. He never committed any crime. He only published evidence of the crimes. WikiLeaks released more classified information than the rest of the world’s media combined, which is a testament to the utter failure of the world’s media to fulfill their primary function –– hold power to account.

After being told he was a Russian agent since 2016, the indictment and extradition against Assange today has nothing to do with the 2016 election or Russia. It has everything to do with the Iraq and Afghanistan War logs. Exposing war crimes and war criminals. Tainting the image of the United States. Showing the world this is how the US imposes its world order under the hypocritical banner of “human rights” and “democracy.”

They’ve come at Assange with the full brunt of their power because they have to set fear in the rest of us. They have to instill a chilling effect that will reverberate for generations: this is what can happen to you if you try to replicate Assange’s work. This can be your fate, if you dare to challenge us.

Today, the model they used to discredit Assange is now deployed against anyone in the media who contradicts official war narratives.

The burgeoning hope of transparency and accountability of the WikiLeaks era has been extinguished. The internet is now carefully curated and crafted for us by tech overlords, who work hand in hand with state forces.

Assange’s story is of major historical importance –– both for exposing the crimes of the past and setting a precedent for the future. Against a wall of coverage that aims to attack and discredit him, works such as this book, which accurately document his case, are essential for today and for tomorrow.

We need to organize the resistance to the Empire with eyes wide open, and that cannot happen without this story being properly told. The ramifications of his case for journalists everywhere will keep imperial crimes in the shadows, and if we simply give up and allow Assange to wither away in that black box, this country is beyond saving. Prosecuting Assange will be its death knell.

With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.

In this excerpt, originally published by Blue Note Review, Brittany "Bree" Newsome, a filmmaker and community organizer from North Carolina, shares a public statement on her arrest following her courageous act of civil disobedience. With the help of fellow activists, Newsome had used a climbing harness to scale the thirty-foot flagpole outside the South Carolina State Capitol building and take down a large Confederate flag that had been displayed for decades, even though it was long considered a symbol of racist terror and white supremacist violence.

A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.

Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.

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Bree Newsome became an overnight hero for daring to accomplish in a day what years of waiting on legislators had failed to do. With the help of fellow activists, she scaled the thirty-foot flagpole outside the South Carolina State Capitol building and took down the Confederate flag. The flag’s origins lie in the Civil War, when states seceded from the Union in order to preserve the Southern system of slavery. It has remained a symbol of racist terror ever since. Three days after her bold action, which led to her arrest, Newsome described why she risked arrest to remove the flag and why she could not have succeeded alone.

Bree Newsome, “Now Is the Time for True Courage” (June 30, 2015), originally published by Blue Note Review

For far too long, white supremacy has dominated the politics of America resulting in the creation of racist laws and cultural practices designed to subjugate non-whites. And the emblem of the confederacy, the stars and bars, in all its manifestations, has long been the most recognizable banner of this political ideology. It’s the banner of racial intimidation and fear whose popularity experiences an uptick whenever Black Americans appear to be making gains economically and politically in this country.

It’s a reminder how, for centuries, the oppressive status quo has been undergirded by white supremacist violence with the tacit approval of too many political leaders.

The night of the Charleston Massacre, I had a crisis of faith. The people who gathered for Bible study in Emanuel AME Church that night—Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson and Rev. Clementa Pinckney (rest in peace)—were only doing what Christians are called to do when anyone knocks on the door of the church: invite them into fellowship and worship.

The day after the massacre I was asked what the next step was and I said I didn’t know. We’ve been here before and here we are again: Black people slain simply for being Black; an attack on the Black church as a place of spiritual refuge and community organization.

I refuse to be ruled by fear. How can America be free and be ruled by fear? How can anyone be?

So, earlier this week I gathered with a small group of concerned citizens, both Black and white, who represented various walks of life, spiritual beliefs, gender identities and sexual orientations. Like millions of others in America and around the world, including South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and President Barack Obama, we felt (and still feel) that the confederate battle flag in South Carolina, hung in 1962 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, must come down.

We discussed it and decided to remove the flag immediately, both as an act of civil disobedience and as a demonstration of the power people have when we work together. Achieving this would require many roles, including someone who must volunteer to scale the pole and remove the flag. It was decided that this role should go to a Black woman and that a white man should be the one to help her over the fence as a sign that our alliance transcended both racial and gender divides. We made this decision because for us, this is not simply about a flag, but rather it is about abolishing the spirit of hatred and oppression in all its forms.

I removed the flag not only in defiance of those who enslaved my ancestors in the southern United States, but also in defiance of the oppression that continues against Black people globally in 2015, including the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Dominican Republic. I did it in solidarity with the South African students who toppled a statue of the white supremacist, colonialist Cecil Rhodes. I did it for all the fierce Black women on the front lines of the movement and for all the little Black girls who are watching us. I did it because I am free.

To all those who might label me an “outside agitator,” I say to you that humanitarianism has no borders. I am a global citizen. My prayers are with the poor, the afflicted and the oppressed everywhere in the world, as Christ instructs. If this act of disobedience can also serve as a symbol to other peoples’ struggles against oppression or as a symbol of victory over fear and hate, then I know all the more that I did the right thing.

You see, I know my history and my heritage. The Confederacy is neither the only legacy of the south nor an admirable one. The southern heritage I embrace is the legacy of a people unbowed by racial oppression. It includes towering figures of the Civil Rights Movement like Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers and Ella Baker. It includes the many people who rarely make the history books but without whom there is no movement. It includes pillars of the community like Rev. Clementa Pinckney and Emanuel AME Church.

As you are admiring my courage in that moment, please remember that this is not, never has been and never should be just about one woman. This action required collective courage just as this movement requires collective courage. Not everyone who participated in the strategizing for this nonviolent direct action volunteered to have their names in the news so I will respect their privacy. Nonetheless, I’m honored to be counted among the many freedom fighters, both living and dead.

I see no greater moral cause than liberation, equality, and justice for all God’s people. What better reason to risk your own freedom than to fight for the freedom of others? That’s the moral courage demonstrated yesterday by James Ian Tyson who helped me across the fence and stood guard as I climbed. History will rightly remember him alongside the many white allies who, over the centuries, have risked their own safety in defense of Black life and in the name of racial equality.

It is important to remember that our struggle doesn’t end when the flag comes down. The Confederacy is a southern thing, but white supremacy is not. Our generation has taken up the banner to fight battles many thought were won long ago. We must fight with all vigor now so that our grandchildren aren’t still fighting these battles in another fifty years. Black Lives Matter. This is non-negotiable.

I encourage everyone to understand the history, recognize the problems of the present and take action to show the world that the status quo is not acceptable. The last few days have confirmed to me that people understand the importance of action and are ready to take such action. Whether the topic is trending nationally or it’s an issue affecting our local communities, those of us who are conscious must do what is right in this moment. And we must do it without fear. New eras require new models of leadership. This is a multi-leader movement. I believe that. I stand by that. I am because we are. I am one of many.

This moment is a call to action for us all. All honor and praise to God.

With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.

In this excerpt, originally published as an op-ed in Tallahassee Democrat, Rita Lasar, a founding member of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, offers a personal account of the devastation caused by the attacks on September 11, 2001, which took the life of her younger brother, to argue for the United States to become a state that exists in concert with and as a partner to the rest of the world, rather than in opposition to it. 

A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.

Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.

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Rita Lasar, a founding member of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, lost her brother Avrame (“Abe”) Zelmanowitz, on September 11, 2001. He could have escaped, but stayed behind to help a quadriplegic coworker, Ed Beyea. When President Bush mentioned Abe’s heroic actions in a speech at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, Lasar expressed outrage that her brother’s sacrifice was being used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan. After the assault on Afghanistan began, Lasar joined a delegation to visit families who lost loved ones in the US assault and to witness first-hand the impact of the bombings. Just before the one-year anniversary of her brother’s death, she wrote this commentary.

Rita Lasar, “To Avoid Another September 11, United States Must Join the World” (September 5, 2002), originally published in Tallahassee Democrat

When the planes hit the World Trade Center last September 11, my brother Avrame, who was in the North Tower, refused to join the evacuation because he was concerned for the safety of his close friend and fellow worker, a quadriplegic who could not easily leave. So Avrame stayed, hoping that help would arrive. When it didn’t, he and his life-long associate died together, along with thousands of others innocent New Yorkers.

That day changed my life. It changed the lives of all those who lost loved ones in the towers.

It changed the lives of the relatives of those on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. It changed the lives of hundreds of families who lost loved ones in the Pentagon. And, perhaps to a lesser extent, it changed the lives of most people living in the United States.

In the months after the disaster, I often heard how September 11 changed the world. But I don’t think the attacks changed the world. And to the extent that Americans believe that September 11 changed the world, it is because they don’t know much about the world in which they live.

I have never heard anyone say that the horrific massacres of 1994 in Rwanda—which took more than five hundred thousand lives— changed the world. Nor have I ever been told that Indonesia’s massacre of two hundred thousand East Timorese during a twenty-year span changed the world. I have not even heard that the daily loss of eight thousand souls in sub-Saharan Africa due to AIDS changed the world. Were these people less important than my dear brother?

Despite my own personal grief, I must conclude that, in light of these far greater calamities, September 11 did not change the world. What it did, in its own terrible way, was invite Americans to join the world, which is already a very troubled place. The question is whether we will accept that invitation.

Sadly, President Bush has no interest in doing so. He does not want the United States to join, or even cooperate with, the new International Criminal Court. He has also withdrawn the United States from the long-standing Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia, even as India and Pakistan shudder on the verge of nuclear war. He refuses to support international agreements that would alleviate global warming, and he will not seek to ratify the treaty banning land mines, leaving the United States in the company of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Bush’s “axis of evil.”

And now the president is planning for a war against Iraq. Never mind that Iraq has committed no act of aggression against us that justifies war, that there has been no evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks. Neither does the president seem to care that the world is opposed to an invasion of Iraq.

The international coalition that fought the first Gulf War was cemented by the principle that one country cannot invade another without provocation. Now the White House is poised to dismiss the coalition to launch an unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

An isolated United States is an unsafe country. As September 11 showed, there are no barricades high enough, no bombs big enough, no intelligence sophisticated enough to make America invulnerable.

We Americans have a choice.

We can conclude that we are alone, that we owe the world nothing and that the world owes us everything. This is the assumption implicit in Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” stance, which is a short-sighted and self-centered philosophy. Or we can open our eyes and see the abundance of opportunities for making the planet a safer and more just place, by actively participating in international organizations, multilateral treaties and protocols that advocate peace and social equality.

We can no longer afford a go-it-alone approach. If we want the world’s help in getting at the roots of terrorism, we are going to have to start helping the rest of the world. We are going to have to comprehend that there are millions of people around the globe who understand all too well the horror of tragedies like September 11.

When that realization occurs, only then will we glimpse how September 11 changed the world.

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Rita Lasar (1931-2017) was a peace activist, a businesswoman, and one of the founding members of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Her brother, Abe Zelmanowitz died at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001.

With nine weeks left until the highly anticipated publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.

In the first excerpt, originally published as an interview with Sarah Jaffe in The Baffler, Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, offers a personal account of the intersecting, often overlapping struggles of taxi workers and Muslim immigrants in the post-9/11 United States, framed within the context of the Trump administration's executive order banning travelers from five majority-Muslim countries.

A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from the Black Lives Matter movement, the #MeToo campaign, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.

Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.

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On January 28, 2017, protesters converged on airports around the country seeking to defend refugees and migrants impacted by President Donald Trump’s executive order imposing an anti-Muslim travel ban. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance called on drivers to refuse to pick up riders at JFK Airport. In an interview with journalist Sarah Jaffe, Bhairavi Desai spoke about this critical protest and the history of taxi worker organizing.

Bhairavi Desai, “A Moment of Urgency” (February 16, 2017), originally published in The Baffler

I am Bhairavi Desai. I am the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. We are a workforce that is largely Muslim and Sikh and almost universally immigrant. Over 94 percent of the drivers in New York City are immigrants, and across the country we are a largely immigrant workforce. When the executive order came down, there was a definite sense of urgency and a lot of anger. We really were just starting to talk about all the different members we knew who would be affected and the fact that even though the majority of our Muslim members are not from one of the seven countries in the executive order, still the hysteria around Islamophobia and the fact that fear leads to hate crimes is a major concern of ours. We felt that we really needed to act.

On Saturday, the day after the executive order was signed, when we saw folks coming out to the airport and protesting, it just felt like the most natural thing to do was for us to stand in solidarity and participate in that action in the best way that we know how, which was by striking and holding down that lot.

I think people were really touched that here was a workforce on the front lines of these hateful policies and also the economic margins of what we have seen is a growing sector of the economy which is piecemealing and turning a full-time profession into part-time gigs. People out there know that taxi drivers are really hardworking and that people really struggle day to day to make ends meet. The idea that they would put their incomes on the line and it would be a workforce that is so vulnerable, particularly in these times, to surveillance and deportations and further policing, that they would be the ones to stand up. It seemed to really touch people and we were so moved by their reaction. I think it was a beautiful start to solidarity with our movement.

A few years ago, people will recall, there was a lot of controversy in New York City that down the street from Ground Zero an Islamic Center had opened. Many of the well-known Islamophobes had taken up the issue as their main cause and created a lot of hysteria around it. Folks like Sarah Palin, who at the time was more relevant than today, heavily weighing in. The rhetoric was quite hateful and strong. Well, in the midst of all of that, one of our members, Ahmed Sharif—this is during Ramadan—he picks up a fare, a pretty young guy. [He] started talking to him and at one point the passenger asked Ahmed, “Are you Muslim?” And when Ahmed answered “yes,” [the passenger] took out a knife and he slashed him across the neck.

We have seen through the years, right after 9/11 I remember, so many neighborhoods, primarily immigrant neighborhoods where taxis would be parked and overnight the tires would be slashed. The yellow cab went from being kind of a cultural icon, a symbol of New York City, to a symbol of Muslim workers. We would see profanities carved into the taxi with a knife. Already, drivers are twenty times more likely to be killed on the job than other workers. We are one of the most visible immigrant and Muslim workforces. Our members tend to be on the frontlines of that hate and violence.

I remember, after 9/11, I remember our members being subject to a lot of verbal abuse and physical assaults, and at the same time they lost so much work, because all of these streets were closed down and they still had to pay for their lease out of pocket. We did a survey and we found that one out of four drivers had received an eviction notice from their home. People were in debt by as much as $25,000 because they were paying for everything out of pocket and just borrowing money and taking out credit cards.

At the same time, they were contending with the fact that this country was beginning to discuss military action within the Middle East in the same countries where many of the members were from. You can’t keep somebody whole and ignore a large part of their life and particularly one when it comes to something as deeply rooted as racism and workplace violence, which given that we represent a workforce that’s in the public, the two often intersect in drivers’ daily lives.

One of the most beautiful things that happened out of the defense of our strike, every single day, we are still getting postcards in the mail from across the country. It is so lovely. You see that each family member has signed their own name because you see the different handwriting on different postcards coming in. And emails. It has been amazing to see. It is such a wonderful feeling, particularly for us, because we are a workforce that is isolated by the nature of the job itself. When you consider 94 percent immigrant, mostly people of color, non-employees on the edge of the economy, we have been politically isolated for so long. It is an amazing feeling for us when the larger community opens their eyes and their hearts to our struggle.

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Bhairavi Desai is the President of the National Taxi Workers Alliance and co-founder and Executive Director of the 19,000-member New York Taxi Workers Alliance. She has been organizing taxi workers since 1996. Read more about her in this Lux Magazine profile by Kim Kelly.

To celebrate the release our new paperback edition of (the first ever!) National Book Award-winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren, we are proud to share Algren scholar Colin Asher’s foreword to this reissue, in which Asher explores Algren's dedication to the underdog, and his lifelong effort to humanize those who'd been pushed to the margins by mid-century American society.

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We Are All Members of One Another

The Chicago contained within these pages both is and is not the city Nelson Algren was raised in, helped to document while working for the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression, and then returned to after the conclusion of World War II when his service in Europe ended—thirty-six years old, single, his career stalled. The world of The Man with the Golden Arm shares geography, vernacular, and some history with that corporeal city, but every detail has been refracted through Algren’s aesthetic and moral sensibility. In here, the city’s cold beauty has been distilled to poetry, its shortcomings clarified and brought into relief, and its occupants feel more worthy of empathy than any of their equivalents you’re likely to encounter outside of these confines.

In its earliest incarnation—as an idea Algren pitched to a publisher in early 1946 in hopes of securing a contract that would allow him to write and avoid finding a job—Golden Arm was going to be a war novel. It was to begin as World War II was ending, and the narrative would focus on a protagonist living in France and supporting himself off the black market while he forestalled his return to the US. Algren had been stationed in Marseille after V-J Day, so he could see that part of the novel clearly, could remember what it felt like to live in a city hovering between the brutality and tedium of war and occupation and the promise of a future people were only just beginning to envision.

But writing about America after the war would require research. Like the New Journalists who came to prominence a generation later, Algren collected material for his writing by immersing himself in the environments he was interested in. So, he explored Chicago. He reacquainted himself with the Polish Triangle, which he had lived in and written about before being inducted. He spent time on West Madison Street, the city’s skid row, and befriended a group of petty thieves and addicts; soon he was a steady presence in their apartment, lingering in the background of their lives. And he became a regular at police lineups. He had been mugged before entering the service, and afterward, the police presented him with a card that entitled him to observe as detectives questioned detained men and women. Years later, he still used the card to collect material.

The Chicago that Algren rediscovered through that process was not the violent, Prohibition-era city he grew up in, and it wasn’t the beleaguered, war-weary, and ration-card-hungry city that he had been living in when he was drafted in the summer of 1943. Post-war Chicago was an ascendant place, a newly christened standard bearer of the America Dream—wealthier than he remembered, but colder as well. In this new Chicago, consumption and virtue were joined as one, and the sacrifices and nobler objectives of the war had been cheapened and transformed into commercial appeals: “Get Your Post-War Kitchen Now!” and “Santa Loves a Champion!”

On the city’s margins, Algren could meet or reconnect with people who had been written out of Chicago’s new narrative. He saw that their lives hadn’t changed, in material terms, after the Depression and the war ended, but that their spirits were newly burdened by the realization that they were being abandoned—people who, he later wrote, “live out their hand-to-mouth hours without friendship or love. They belong to no particular street in no particular city. They pass from furnished room to furnished room, and belong not even to their own time; not even to themselves.”

Since the beginning of his career, Algren wrote to reflect the moment in time he was living through, so he quickly lost interest in writing about the war and began to envision the book you’re holding. “[I]f you’re going to write a war novel, you have to do it while you’re in the war,” he explained later. “Two months after the war it was gone; but I was living in a living situation . . . I mean, the neighborhood I was living in, and these people, were a lot more real than the Army was.”

The Man with the Golden Arm is informed by Algren’s research, but not tethered to it. He often transcribed overheard conversations and interviews, and he would organize that material into lists of vernacular and snippets of dialog. From that raw material, he crafted characters who were amalgams of the people he knew and interacted with, and built a world for them to occupy that was constructed of mellifluous prose that transitions fluidly ix between observation and dialogue—melding characters and environment into a cohesive whole.

The war has ended in Golden Arm, and in its wake, the city has grown hostile to Algren’s people. They are grifters, card dealers, drunks, bartenders, and thieves, and each knows “the great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one.” Their lives revolve around the Tug & Maul Bar, the apartments inside Schwabatski “The Jailer’s” building at 1860 West Division Street, and the Saloon Street police station. And they have names so evocative they are almost stories in their own right. Arranged in stanzas, they read like poetry.

Frankie “Machine” Majcinek, “Zosh,” and Solly “Sparrow” Saltskin

“Record Head” Bednar, Antek Witwicki, and “Zero” Schwiefka

Molly Novotny and Drunkie John

Louie Fomorowski

Piggy-O

Most directly, Golden Arm is about Frankie Machine—a veteran, a card dealer who presides over a backroom game, and a husband. His wife, Sophie—“ Zosh,” to Frankie—is confined to a wheelchair. She had been in the passenger seat when Frankie drove a car into a light post and then a billboard. On the night in question, they had been celebrating the end of the war by drinking triple shots. Her injuries seemed minor but several days later—on the night of V-J Day—she claimed that her legs had stopped working. “The blessed, cursed, wonderful-terrible God’s-own-accident that had truly married them at last,” she calls it.

When Frankie first appears, he is twenty-nine years old and, though his service ended months earlier, still wearing a faded uniform and service brogans. He was wounded in the war, and the treatment he received for his injuries left him addicted to morphine, which he’s desperate to quit. Unlike most other characters in the book, he is attuned to the world growing skyward around him and susceptible to its judgments. He hides his addiction assiduously, and faced with authority, he seeks respect through reference to his service. (I got the “right kind” of discharge, he says, “and the purple heart.”) He often adopts a wry, self-effacing tone. In the army, he says, “I was the guy had to pick the fly crap out of the pepper with boxin’ gloves.”

Frankie is a bit of a striver, but the novel’s other characters are decidedly not. He aspires to become a professional musician, to leave his marriage, and kick his addiction. But they are content and certain of their worth. Louie Fomorowski, a morphine dealer who has outlasted most of his conx temporaries, makes no apologies for informing on friends to the police. Snitching, he says, is a racket like any other. Piggy-O, a blind man who sells for Louie and moves about resplendent in filth, asserts: “I got my kind of pride ’n you got yours.” And Solly “Sparrow” Saltskin—Frankie’s sidekick— proudly defends his lifestyle. He is a steerer for Frankie’s card game, a dog thief, and a shoplifter. But he insists his line of work is as respectable as any other. “Back me up with five grand tonight ’n tomorrow mornin’ I get a invitation to join the Chamber of Commerce ’n no questions asked,” he says.

Algren’s characters invite judgment with their choices—drinking and thieving and snitching and, in Frankie’s case, trying and failing to break dysfunctional habits—and Golden Arm gives voice to that instinct in the person of Captain “Record Head” Bednar. He is a career officer, nearing his pension, who presides over the Saloon Station lineup. When the novel opens, he is questioning Frankie and Sparrow and then quickly dismissing them. “You’re both a couple loose bums livin’ off the weaker bums,” he says.

Algren had created similar characters earlier in his career. In his second novel, Never Come Morning, a captain named One-Eye Tenczara presides over a police lineup. A version of the same character also appears in Algren’s short story “A Bottle of Milk for Mother.” And a character called simply the Captain passes judgment over a seemingly endless line of arrestees in “The Captain Has Bad Dreams.” All three had a nihilistic edge, their exposure to predation having calcified into callous indifference. But Bednar, so long into his career and so familiar with the people he encounters each night, has begun to entertain doubts about his role. He feels tainted by the guilt of the people who appear before him. In his dreams, he is pursued.

There is a priest who appears once before Bednar. The man has been defrocked, and when Bednar mocks him, asking why he had been laicized, the priest replies evenly, and in total: “Because I believe we are all members of one another.” Bednar is shaken by the line. The priest’s words plague him, and through his tribulations, Algren forces his readers to wrestle with their own culpability—dares them to deny the priest’s edict. Bednar has spent his life passing judgment, sorting the sinners from the saved, and he begins to fear that he never had any right to do so, that he has damned himself. He feels impaled, and yearns to leave his post and install himself on the other side of the jail’s bars, among the “innocents.”

Algren was no polemicist by the time he wrote Golden Arm, but he could be a scold. Eventually, Bednar comes to understand the harm he has done—realizes that the accused who paraded before him, and whom he xi had demeaned and condemned, for years, “had all along been members of himself.” But he lacks the strength to atone for his sins, and the price he pays for his weakness is severe. “All errors must ultimately be punished,” Algren wrote, and for the Captain, a man who had saved “himself at the cost of others less cunning than himself, the punishment must be simply this: more lost, more fallen and more alone than any man at all.”

In the literary traditions that Algren’s work grew out of—the naturalists and the proletarian writers movement—characters like Frankie and Sparrow and Zosh and Louie and Piggy-O would have been vessels of suffering. They would be conjured only to be destroyed and readers would be required only to pity them. But Algren’s aim is identification—he would have us reconcile ourselves to the knowledge that his people are people, no more or less a part of the human story than any others, or deny that knowledge and suffer Bednar’s fate. He had faith in the power of literature, but not blind faith. He believed that the written word could make clear the stakes for each of us, and that every person has the agency to choose whether to be a part of binding together or tearing asunder the human community—but he did not delude himself that he could convince everyone to choose well.

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When I first encountered The Man with the Golden Arm in 2009, during the Great Recession, the aspects of the text that struck me most profoundly were its moral clarity and its prescience. Algren gave voice to his values by making Bednar suffer for excluding people and passing judgment on them for their poverty and shortcomings. And his sympathetic, detailed psychological portraits of Frankie and the Tug and Maul’s other habitués read like an assertion of their intrinsic value.

Algren’s prescience is evident in the construction of the world he has those characters navigate. In Golden Arm, irrelevance is both sin and punishment, and jails and prisons are purgatories for people who never learned a trade because they sense “no work had any point to it.” People are so divided and lacking in charity that someone in need cannot “find five dollars in a city of four million people, most of them millionaires.” The logic of wrapping “all the little troubles into one big trouble” and escaping into drink or opioids seems self-evident. And the country has begun to atomize— its people stripped of their sense of belonging, their identities. Even Frankie Machine, a veteran with the “right” kind of discharge, has been abandoned. The conclusion of the war brought him nothing but hardxii ship—his addiction is the result of a battle wound that ended his service; he wrecked a car, wounding Zosh, while celebrating the dropping of the first atomic bomb; she stopped walking on V-J Day—and now, within the country whose freedom he was ostensibly fighting for, he feels displaced, alienated.

“You know who I am?” he asks.

“You know who you are? You know who anybody is any more?”

Algren’s world seemed outré to many readers in 1949. Even one of Golden Arm’s most positive reviews referred to his people as “warped” and “twisted,” and mentioned their “depravity.” But when I first opened the book during the Great Recession—one desperate and debt-laden person among many millions of others, as the opioid epidemic, mass incarceration, and homelessness claimed headlines each day—it felt very familiar. In some ways, thirteen years later, it feels more familiar still.

“The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed,” William Gibson said in 2003. Algren, working more than five decades earlier, had the same insight. When he returned from Europe, he was not distracted by the country’s triumphalist tone. He intuited that the truest measure of the country’s moral health was not the presence of a car in every driveway or the valuation of its largest corporations, but the quality of the lives being lived at the margins—that their present was a preview of our common future, that their fates would be everyone’s.

—Colin Asher