RAMIN MAZAHERI—When I got home a colleague sent me this video. It’s of a young man named Sam Mena, a photojournalist for a local CBS-affiliated media in Arizona. The commotion was because he had set his left arm on fire in protest. Stunning. Adding to the this was the fact that he was screaming, “We spread the misinformation.” This wasn’t just a protest of Washington’s complicity in the Gaza genocide – it was also a protest against the US mainstream media’s coverage of it by a US mainstream media journalist. It’s a shocking scene, and it’s not easy to watch. This is probably the best video of it out there.
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HAMMI—In this insightful episode, I sit down with political scientist and author Norman Finkelstein to discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the implications of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Finkelstein examines the progression of Israel’s military strategy toward Gaza, tracing it from past operations to the current crisis, and offers his perspective on the U.S. candidates and what their potential leadership means for the future of American foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Join us as Finkelstein shares his unfiltered analysis on one of today’s most urgent issues, providing historical context and a candid look at what’s ahead.
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EDITOR—Israel’s latest airstrike on Iran does not impress Ray McGovern. In this chat he explains his reasons, and why he thinks the power equation in the Middle East has changed or is about to change—for the better. Ray came to Washington from his native Bronx in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985. Ray is an expert in Russian history and culture, and a man who chooses to live by honouring moral integrity, which he does not see his compatriots in high places doing now or even when he was young and thought they did.
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EDITOR—The fall of Fascism, subsequent nationalizations, the entrance of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) into government, the rise of workers’ commissions, the mobilization of urban and rural protest, and land occupations held the world in thrall, if only for a short time. In the end, the corporatist bureaucratic state apparatus and its economic partners emerged renewed, chastened, and not unscathed. Chilcote singles out the durability and continuity of the state apparatus as a major factor in the prevailing hegemonic bloc and blames the fractiousness of the Left for failing to replace it. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, the attempts to create a counter-hegemonic bloc paved the way for democratic, pluralistic politics in Portugal.
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BRUCE LERRO—In the 19thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.
