Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein

Paul Auster: In Remembrance

Paul Auster roamed the plains of American letters, producing works ranging from experimental to commercial fiction, every book something completely new, never repeating himself, producing a half-century of significant contributions, one after another. It would be impossible to conceive of contemporary American literature without him. Truly one of the greats of his generation—a poet and translator turned memoirist and novelist—always hungry to expand the boundaries of what a book can be. Not least, he bridged the cultures of Big and Independent publishing. His last book, Baumgartner, from the independent publisher Grove, is a strong novel, not at all a book you’d think could have been written by a sick man, although Paul was already very sick with cancer when he wrote it. The Invention of Solitude, his first book, is certainly one of the towering works of the second half of the 20th century—there’s never been a debut like it.

We published Paul’s A Life in Words, a book-length series of conversations with a Danish academic, I.B. Siegumfeldt, who specializes in Paul Auster studies. It has him telling the story of each of his books from The Invention of Solitude (1982) to Sunset Park (2010).

Paul was someone who talked to you on the phone, not via email. He would call, and you could call him. For most of the years I knew him, he didn’t have an assistant. He embodied all that makes American writing so particular, the savage grace that grows from us still being a young frontier country after all. We will always miss him now.

—Dan Simon for Seven Stories Press
 

 

To mark the publication of We Live Here, a graphic biography of Detroit Eviction Defense written by Jeffrey Wilson and illustrated by Bambi Kramer, we are proud to share Wilson’s introductory note, in which he offers a history of housing in Detroit and the specific methods that banks, corporations, and collections agencies work to evict or otherwise displace longterm residents.

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SOLIDARITY AND HOME DEFENSE
THE CASE OF DETROIT

By Jeffrey Wilson

This comic centers on the fourth anniversary celebration of Detroit Eviction Defense (DED). During the festivities, members recounted their stories fighting housing dispossession. In doing so, they offer a model of place-based struggle that has won some eighty homes back from the brink of eviction. Emerging out of the Occupy Movement of 2011, DED is a grassroots coalition of homeowners, anarchists, faith-based activists, union members, and community advocates. To understand DED’s strategies, it is helpful to have a clear picture of the city’s housing history and modes of eviction. 

DISPOSSESSION BY THE NUMBERS 

Housing displacement in Detroit typically takes two forms: mortgage and/or tax foreclosure. A mortgage foreclosure happens when a financial institution takes possession of a property for nonpayment and is the central focus of this book. Tax foreclosure, detailed in the appendix, is when the local municipality takes possession of a property for three consecutive years of nonpayment and subsequently auctions the house, more often than not to real estate speculators. 

Between 2005–2013 Detroit recorded nearly 70,000 mortgage foreclosures impacting approximately 30 percent of residential properties (Akers & Seymour, 2019). One activist describes these mortgage foreclosures and the subsequent fallout as a “hurricane without water” (Interview, 2016). The sentiment seems correct and the problem grows significantly when taking mortgage and tax foreclosures together. Between 2005 and 2015, 1 in 3 properties in the city faced either a mortgage or tax foreclosure (Kurth, 2015). Approximately 160,000 foreclosures were executed, impacting 120,000 homes or 48 percent of all residential properties. Of these homes, 27,000 experienced a kind of double dispossession of a mortgage foreclosure and then a tax foreclosure (Akers & Seymour, 2019).

While mortgage foreclosures have devastated individual families, some of these properties also cost the city millions. As the Detroit News reported, nearly 56 percent of these mortgage-foreclosed homes were in some state of disrepair as of 2015, with nearly 13,000 slated for demolition, costing Detroit $200 million (Kurth, 2015). 

Mortgage foreclosures in Detroit are not isolated, but are built upon a frenzy of subprime lending. In the four years leading up to the housing market crash of 2008, nearly $4 billion in predatory loans was injected into the city’s housing market. Such lending practices are a contemporary iteration of what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has termed “predatory inclusion.” The fair housing era facilitated more robust access to the housing market for many African Americans. Yet this was not the end of discrimination or segregation. Black people continued to pay exorbitant rates and face unequal terms for housing that was often of substandard quality, as Taylor comments. This inclusion was another way that “Black bodies become vessels through which racial capital extracts value” (Denvir, 2020). Detroit before the 2008 market crash is a reminder of the impacts of predatory inclusion. While subprime lending averaged 24 percent of the national market, a kind of predatory inclusion drove rates in Detroit to an average 68 percent in 2005. In some targeted neighborhoods this number rose to 80 percent of all mortgages (Kurth & MacDonald, 2015). 

While the pre-2008 mortgage regime produced inclusionary practices, the post housing market crash strengthened exclusionary practices. A Bridge Michigan analysis of mortgages found that in 2007 African Americans received 75 percent of mortgage loans in Detroit but by 2017 this decreased to 48 percent, despite the fact that Black people make up nearly 80 percent of the city's population. White people comprised only 10 percent of Detroit’s population but received 17 percent of loans in 2007 and 58 percent in 2017. Several Detroit neighborhoods, which had once generated 600 mortgages in 2007, produced zero in 2017 (Wilkinson, 2019). Homes are still being purchased in Detroit, but for many residents nontraditional and much riskier arrangements such as land contracts or rent-to-own are the only avenues for homeownership. Housing advocates estimate that 1 in 10 evictions result from land contracts, yet these numbers might be much higher as such agreements are not required to be registered by the city (Einhorn & Mondry, 2021).

The waning of mortgage foreclosures by the mid-2010s was followed by a series of catastrophic tax foreclosures. Approximately 100,000 tax foreclosures were triggered in the city between 2011 and 2015 (Atuahene, 2020). The peak was 24,793 foreclosures occurring in 2015 (Aguilar, 2020). In tax foreclosure, homes that are behind three years are then sent to tax auction. These auctions have moved online since 2015, facilitating speculators from around the world in buying properties in Detroit, as the appendix of this book outlines. 

Tax foreclosure as dispossession is only part of the story. Wayne County now leverages Detroit’s tax debt to make a profit. The City of Detroit is paid annually for an individual’s delinquent taxes by Wayne County. Essentially this makes it so that Detroit does not have unpaid taxes on the ledger. In order to lend Detroit this money, the county borrows annually from individual investors or banks. To pay off these loans Wayne County then collects unpaid property taxes from delinquent Detroit homeowners, charging them an additional 4 percent interest rate or higher. As Bridge Magazine notes, “profit [for the county] comes from borrowing at 5 percent or less and getting up to 22-percent return on delinquent taxes, creating the surplus controlled by the county treasurer.” Key to this is that the largely white suburbs get to control the surplus generated from Black residents of Detroit. The article continues by noting, “in 2004, Wayne County began to collect Detroit’s delinquent taxes, doubling the county’s surplus of fees and interest from delinquent taxes to an average of $33 million from $15 million per year” (Kurth et al., 2017). 

As a consequence, Detroit, once a city known as a center of Black homeownership, has shifted from a city in which homeowners were the majority to a city in which renters are the majority. The housing stock now has 124,000 owned units and 140,000 rentals (Ruggiero et al., 2020). Coupled with the pandemic, this shift has placed struggles against housing dispossession on different footing. At the forefront now are tenant rights. 

WE LIVE HERE: DETROIT EVICTION DEFENSE 

This book is a celebration of place-based struggle against the forces of dispossession outlined above. Recounted are stories by Detroiters, primarily Black women, who fought and organized to save their homes from a mortgage foreclosure. Together with local activist group DED, these women answer the question “what will Detroit look like in the future?” by asserting that “there is no Detroit without us!” Told in eight chapters, families who have lived in the city for generations detail their deeply personal stories of falling behind on mortgage payments, going through the eviction process, and fighting to keep their homes. In doing so, these stories work against the unexamined assumption that foreclosures are caused by individual irresponsibility. As each family discusses their particular situation, this idea is upended and we can discern that it is not individual fault but rather the contours of racial capitalism that usurp Black and Latinx wealth. While each story has its own particular points of emphasis, the heart of this book is about transformation, resistance, and solidarity in the face of housing loss. 

These stories contradict a popular image of the city as a kind of blank canvas. A canvas to be painted as a collection of cheap properties that entice real estate speculators from around the world, as a creative playground for artists or a landscape for billionaires to resculpt downtown, and as a spot for suburban tourists. Tying these activities together is a view of the city as a functionally empty frontier in need of resettlement. Yet beyond these conventional players in urban growth and development are groups like DED that expand our ability to imagine possible resistances to the future of housing implicit in these exploitative visions. 

Central to DED’s work are direct action tactics to keep Detroiters in their homes. This ranges from physically stopping bailiffs from entering and evicting families to strategies such as packing the courtroom with DED members during eviction hearings. These tactics emerge from DED’s broader organizing, in which homeowners build support in their neighborhoods to mount a defense against eviction. Those facing an impending eviction are urged by DED to go to family, friends, and neighbors to let them know their situation in order to build support for a home defense. 

These acts are not insignificant. People facing eviction often feel ashamed and these moments of community building around dinner tables or in church halls creates the solidarity that is necessary to save a home. 

In solidarity with the pro-Palestine student actions at Columbia University, NYU, University of California Berkeley, University of Minnesota, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and many other universities throughout the country, we are proud to offer free downloads of Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos by Mark Edelman Boren.

A sweeping, two-volume recent history of student protest, Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos not only highlights successful resistance students movements of the past 20+ years, but also examines the ways that new technologies further enable direct actions and other tactics for resistance to administrative and police repression.

As Mark Boren writes, "Student resistance throws into relief the relationships within our societies between the rulers and the people. It defines cultural moments and indicates the directions in which nations are heading. And if student activism has a rich and storied past, it is just as true that student movements are shaping the world more than they ever have before. ... The explosion of protests in the world has shown us that there are millions of people — many of them young and altruistic — who are willing to stand up to forces of oppression, to risk their bodies, their freedom, and their lives to make the future better than the past, and that is humbling, inspiring, and hopeful for the future."

Student resistance in the first decade of the 21st century was the single most powerful liberating force around the globe during those years. Challenging governments—in a few cases, overturning governments—at a time when representational democracies appeared weak and authoritarian regimes were on the rise. In Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos, Book 1, Mark Boren goes continent by continent, country by country, to show us the contours of the new frontlines of resistance, the sacrifices that were made, the seismic changes caused by the Internet, and the new powers of surveillance and military technology that governments across the globe used to monitor and suppress student groups, raising the stakes and the human cost of resistance in many countries.

Student resistance in the second decade of the 21st century has increased in both quantity and quality, supercharged by social media, to the point where it has become the single most powerful force for change in the world today, embodying the hopes of hundreds of millions of citizens to finally address climate change, the condition of women and other major issues. Student resistance movements are the vanguard that can jumpstart wider social movements that put governments on notice at a time when corruption and stagnation plague democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. In Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos, Book 2, Mark Boren details the increasing technological sophistication of student movements, as the stakes continue to rise and the movements grow ever larger. With 1.5 billion students in the world, student activists today use technology to turn local movements into national and international ones. Armed with sophisticated communications and cell phone cameras to record police violence, linked to websites for broadcasting and encrypted apps for privacy, today's student activists have already done much to stop genocide and ensure government reform or regime change in scores of countries. 

Greg Ruggiero, one of America’s top editors of leftist nonfiction, returned in November 2023 to Seven Stories Press, where he began his career in book publishing.

Ruggiero started out as a pamphleteer, hawking works by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky from street corners with his cohort Stuart Sahulka. Together, they founded Open Magazine and, in 1991, the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, publishing, among many others, Edward Said, Loretta Ross, Manning Marable, Mike Davis, Thomas Frank, The United Nations, and the Dalai Lama.

In 1998, he partnered with Seven Stories Press to create the Open Media series, which pioneered a new kind of political pamphlet in book form, most notably Noam Chomsky’s 9-11 and Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, but also works from less well-known authors, such as Tanya Reinhardt's Israel/Palestine.

Ruggiero was also co-editor, with Juana Ponce de Leon, of Our Word Is Our Weapon, the collected writings of Subcommandante Marcos, released in 2000. While in Chiapas, Mexico, working on that book, he was detained and interrogated, and given a week to leave the country.

In 2005, he left Seven Stories, moving to City Lights in early 2006. At City Lights his notable publications include The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane, and a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with lecture notes by Angela Davis. After 17 years, Ruggiero left City Lights in 2023. 

His first acquisition for Seven Stories was MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within, which hit regional and national bestseller lists in its first week of sales in February 2024. Subsequent acquisitions include Talking About Abolition by Sonali Kolhatkar (January 2025), Reversing the Pipeline: Black Boarding Schools and Mass Incarceration by Tamar Sarai, Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth by Stan Cox, Todd Miller’s Dammed: Climate Change, Borders, and the Emerging Water Wars, and From Gaza to Paradise by Ramzy Baroud.

* * *

For further information:
Ruth Weiner
Seven Stories Press
914-309-8570
ruth@sevenstories.com
 

The three texts this book, classic writings by four famous revolutionaries —The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, Reform or Revolution (1899) by Rosa Luxemburg and Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965) by Ernesto Che Guevara — illuminate a shared socialist ideology that spans two centuries. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.

PREFACE TO MANIFESTO

“KARL MARX, ROSA LUXEMBURG, AND CHE GUEVARA” 

BY ADRIENNE RICH

If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to “do something,” you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book.

The essays in Manifesto were written by three relatively young people — Karl Marx when he was 30, Rosa Luxemburg at 27, Che Guevara at the age of 37. Born into different historical moments and different generations, they shared an energy of hope, an engagement with history, a belief that critical thinking must inform action, and a passion for the world and its human possibilities. That society as it was materially constructed would have to undergo radical change in order for such possibilities, stifled or denied under existing conditions, to be realized, all three affirmed in their lives and work. They were educated, reflective people who sharpened their thinking powers on that endeavor.

Marx lived most of his prodigiously creative life in poverty and exile. Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara were targeted and assassinated for their intellectual and active leadership in socialist movements. Any one of them might have led the life of a relatively comfortable professional. Each made a different choice. Yet reading what they wrote, including the essays in this book, one feels not the grimness of a tooth-gritting, dogma-driven politics, but the verve and exuberance of mind that accompanies creative indignation. For all three, feeling intensely alive translated into the vision of an integrated society, in which each person could become both individuated and socially responsible: “an association,” as a famous phrase from The Communist Manifesto expresses it, “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” [1] Or, as Che told a group of Cuban medical students and health workers in 1960:

The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of human beings’ individual capacity.

What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity. [2]

None of them was thinking in isolation or in a historical vacuum. They had the past and its earlier thinkers to learn from and critique; they observed and participated in social movements; they worked out and argued ideas and strategies, sometimes fiercely, with comrades (Marx especially with Friedrich Engels, Luxemburg with Leo Jogiches, Clara Zetkin, Karl Kautsky and others of the German Social Democratic Party, Che Guevara with Fidel Castro, other Latin Americans and with leaders of the “nonaligned” nations). They saw themselves not as “public intellectuals” but as witnesses of and contributors to the growing consciousness of a class which produced wealth and leisure without sharing in it, a class fully capable of reason and enlightened action, though often lacking the formal education that could lead to political power.

That the working people who produced the wealth of the world could move toward political and economic emancipation, they did not simply believe but saw as a necessary evolution in human history. Revolutions were all around them, mass movements, strikes, international organizing. But it was not just the temper of their times that drew them into activity. (Many professionals and writers, especially when young, have been attracted by a moment’s flaring promise of social change, only to pull back as the windchill of opposition begins to freeze the air.) Rather, they observed around them the accelerating relationship between private wealth and massive suffering, capital’s devouring appetite for expansion of its markets at whatever human cost (including its wars); and in that awareness they also saw the meaning of their lives.

As a young medical student traveling through Latin America, Che Guevara noted this concretely:

I went to see an old woman with asthma… The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition. It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice of a system in which only a month ago this poor woman was still earning her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. [3]

It was Marx first of all who described how capital not only dispossesses and forces the vast majority of people “to sell themselves piecemeal,” but contains, ultimately, its own undoing:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. [4]

But he first lays forth an exposition of the history of capitalism, the emergence of bourgeois or owning-class power and the effects of that power, a panorama so prescient of 21st century social conditions that it transcends its own moment of writing. As Che was to observe in 1964:

The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, foresees the future. But in addition to foreseeing it (by which he would meet his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: it is not enough to interpret the world, it must be transformed. [5]

And in fact, over more than 150 years The Communist Manifesto has become the most influential, most translated, reprinted (and demonized) single document of modern history. It’s a work of extraordinary literary power fused with historical analysis; a document of its time yet resonant, as we see here, for later generations. A document which can be, has been, critiqued and argued with — even by its author — but which will be carried into any future that is bearable to contemplate.

Marx, Luxemburg and Guevara were revolutionaries but they were not romantics. Their often poetic eloquence is grounded in their study and critical analysis of human society and political economy from the earliest communistic arrangements of prehistory to the emergence of modern capitalism and imperialist wars. They did not idealize past societies or attempt to create marginal communities of lifestyle purists, but — beginning with Marx — they scrutinized the illusions of past and contemporary reformers and rebels in the light of history, aware how easy it can be for parties and leaders to lose momentum, drift off and settle down with existing relationships of power. (It is this kind of compromise that Luxemburg addresses in Reform or Revolution.)

So what have we here?

The Communist Manifesto was so named because at a certain moment the emerging German League of Communists asked Marx and Engels to draft a platform. Thus, Marx is both setting forth a new theory of history and making a program manifest: asking, what in economic history has produced the need for Communism as a movement and what does Communism in 1848 actually stand for? He describes, with admiration as well as condemnation, the contradictory achievements of industrial capitalism. He notes, sometimes with scorching wit, the “spectral” interpretations of Communism floating abroad, and defines its real goalas common ownership of the means of production.

Fifty years later, in 1899, Luxemburg vigorously analyzes the reformist “opportunism” that would keep the old systemic relations of ownership and production in place under the guise of socialist reform. She dissects this opportunism in the ideas of Eduard Bernstein, an elder leader of the German Marxist Social Democratic Party with the additional cachet of being Engels’ literary executor. Her confrontation is coming from a young person, a foreigner, and a woman in a party rife with “virulent male chauvinism.” [6] Coming from anyone, it would have constituted a brilliant intellectual autopsy.

Luxemburg makes it clear that to be antireformist is not to be antireform:

For Social Democracy there exists an indissoluble tie between social reform and revolution. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its goal. [7]

With her critique of Bernstein’s article as a springboard, she goes on to enunciate ideas that acquire renewed pungency and suggestiveness today:

The fate of the socialist movement is not bound to bourgeois democracy; but the fate of democracy, on the contrary, is bound to the socialist movement. Democracy does not acquire greater chances of life in the measure that the working class renounces the struggle for its emancipation; on the contrary, democracy acquires greater chances of survival as the socialist movement becomes sufficiently strong to struggle against the reactionary consequences of world politics and the bourgeois desertion of democracy. He who would strengthen democracy must also want to strengthen and not weaken the socialist movement; and with the renunciation of the struggle for socialism goes that of both the labor movement and democracy. [8]

Legal reform and revolution are not different methods of historical progress that can be picked out at pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. They are different moments in the development of class society which condition and complement each other, and at the same time exclude each other reciprocally…

In effect, every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for legal reforms does not itself contain its own driving force independent from revolution. [9]

In 1965, Che Guevara, as participant-theorist of an actual ongoing revolution, writes to an Uruguayan editor friend a letter obviously intended to make manifest the experience of the emerging Cuban society. By then, Che, an Argentine, had traveled on his continent, studied Marxism in Guatemala, fought along with Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, [10] served in the new Cuban revolutionary government, and was beginning to work for the extension of socialism in Latin America and among the “nonaligned” nations of Africa and Asia. He is writing of the labor pains of a transitional revolutionary society. How is it to be born? There is the idea, socialism, and there is also “the human being” — incomplete, coming alive in new conditions where labor becomes shared social responsibility, but also initially dwelling as it were between two vastly different worlds: “The new society in formation has to compete fiercely with the past.” [11] Commodity relationships are still imprinted on the mind. This phase of revolutionary process is new and unstable and anxiety may seek relief in autocratic rigidity. The leadership in such a transition has need for a vigilant, well-calibrated self-criticism. Rosa Luxemburg had written: “Revolutions are not ‘made’ and great movements of the people are not produced according to technical recipes that repose in the pockets of the party leaders.” [12] Che envisioned that “[s]ociety as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school” [13]; those who hope to educate must be in constant and responsive touch with those who are learning: teachers must also be learners.

In this connection it’s necessary to think about art and culture. Marx writes of how

the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society... [U]ninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…[14]

And, in a system of commodity relationships, “the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science” become “paid wage laborers” who must “sell themselves piecemeal” and “are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of exploitation, all the fluctuations of the market.” For the artist, this can also mean censorship by the market.

Che elaborates this theme:

The superstructure [of capitalism] imposes a kind of art in which the artist must be educated. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents [I read this phrase as in ironic quotes] may create their own work. The rest become shamefaced hirelings or are crushed… Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated. [15]

But he also points to the blinders of earlier socialist revolutions-in-process, where “an exaggerated dogmatism” has tried to address the question of culture, demanding “the formally exact representation of nature” in art, followed by “a mechanical representation of the social reality they wanted to show: the ideal society, almost without conflicts or contradictions, that they sought to create.” [16]

Che struggles here with the dialectic of art as simultaneously embodiment and shaper of consciousness, rooted in past forms and materials even as it gestures toward a still unachieved reality. What is to be the freedom of the artist in the new Cuba? It can be difficult, living under present conditions, to conceive of how a freedom expanded to all, to each and every person, might expand, not limit, the freedom of the imaginative artist, and the very possibilities of art. Difficult for those who are already artists — even as, outraged, we are forced to market ourselves piecemeal and struggle for what Marx called “disposable time” [17] — to see the “invisible cage” within which we work. Difficult, too, perhaps, for the navigators of a new society to apprehend the peculiar, but not exceptional, labor of the artist.

In the words of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci:

…to be precise, one should speak of a struggle for a “new culture” and not for a “new art” (in the immediate sense)… [P]erhaps it cannot even be said that the struggle is for a new artistic content apart from form because content cannot be considered abstractly, in separation from form. To fight for a new art would mean to fight to create new individual artists, which is absurd since artists cannot be created artificially. One must speak of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately engrained in “possible artists” and “possible works of art.” [18]

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a self-indulgent or self-deceiving life. Patience, realism and critical imagination are required of both kinds of creativity. Yet all the writers in this book speak emotionally of the human condition and of human realization, not as “losing oneself” within a mass collectivity but as release from the frozen senses, the dumbed-down alienation of mass society: Marx of “the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses [from the mere sense of having]… The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object” [19]; Rosa Luxemburg of “social happiness,” of the mass strike as “creativity,” of “freedom” as no “special privilege” and of the “love of every beautiful day.” And Che of the revolutionary as “moved by great feelings of love” though this may “seem ridiculous” in bourgeois politics; of the need for a “new human being” created through responsible participation in a society belonging to all.

As Aijaz Ahmad has written, “The first resource of hope is memory itself.” [20] Marxism is founded on the historical memory of how existing, apparently immutable, human relationships came to be as they are. In the essays that follow we hear voices from three different generations of people who believed, as recent enormous antiwar and anti-imperialist gatherings on every continent have been asserting, that “another world is possible.” If for some today this still only means trying to regulate and refurbish the runaway engine of capitalism, for an ever-growing number of others it means changing the direction of the journey, toward an utterly different, still-forming reality. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.

—Adrienne Rich, March 2004

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1. see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p53.

2. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Speech to Medical Students and Health Workers,” Che Guevara Reader, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p115.

3. Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p70.

4. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p35.

5. “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” Che Guevara Reader, p123.

6. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 2nd ed., (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p27.

7. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p71.

8. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p126.

9. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p128.

10. The revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro that overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba (1959). Its name commemorated Fidel’s July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada army barracks.

11. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p154.

12. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, eds., The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), p328.

13. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p155.

14. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p33.

15. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p161.

16. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p162.

17. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. Martin Nicolaus, (New York: Penguin USA, 1983), p708.

18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds., tr. William Boelhower, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p98.

19. “Private Property and Communism,” The Portable Karl Marx, Eugene Kamenka, ed., (New York: Penguin USA, 1983), p151.

20. “Resources of Hope: A Reflection on Our Times,” in Frontline (India) Vol. 18 #10, May 15–25, 2001.

Dan Wakefield’s NYT obituary gives a great sense of the beauty and range of the man. I just want to add that he and Kurt Vonnegut shared a publisher in Seymour Lawrence, who introduced the two, asking the older Vonnegut to show the younger Wakefield around. Vonnegut took Wakefield under his wing. And after Vonnegut’s death Wakefield repaid his friend by editing Vonnegut’s letters for Random House, setting a new standard for Vonnegut studies at the time. And then, together with Jerry Kinkowitz, also editing, for Seven Stories, Vonnegut’s Complete Stories, a phenom of a story collection, weighing in at over a thousand pages in an oversized volume for which our art director Stewart Cauley created a font based on Vonnegut’s lettering. Dan Wakefield’s passion, for people, for books, and for his fellow writers was unparalleled.

—Dan Simon

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Dan Wakefield, Multifaceted Writer on a Spiritual Journey, Dies at 91

He was prolific and acclaimed, producing novels, journalism, essays, criticism, screenplays and, in a memoir, an account of his path from faith to atheism and back again.

By David Stout, March 14, 2024

David Stout, a former editor and reporter with The Times, died in 2020. Alex Traub contributed reporting.

Dan Wakefield, a protean and prolific journalist, novelist, screenwriter, critic and essayist who explored subjects as diverse as life in New York City in the 1950s, the American civil rights movement, the wounds that war inflicts on individuals and society, and, not least, his personal journey from religious faith to atheism and back again, died on Wednesday in Miami. He was 91.

His death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Will Higgins, who from 2016 to 2017 hosted a public radio show with Mr. Wakefield, “Uncle Dan’s Story Hour,” on which Mr. Wakefield told stories about his life and career from the Red Key Tavern, an old bar in Indianapolis, his hometown. His health began to decline late last year after he had a stroke, prompting his move to Miami, Mr. Higgins said.

Mr. Wakefield achieved early and stunning success as a writer and was still writing well into his last years. He had more than 20 books to his credit; most of them were nonfiction, but he also wrote novels. Critics and other authors praised his work as showing a reporter’s instincts combined with graceful prose.

He began to build his reputation shortly after graduating from Columbia University in 1955 with honors in English, writing articles, essays and stories for Esquire, The Nation, Playboy, Commentary and other magazines. Not long after his graduation, The Nation sent him to Mississippi to cover the Emmet Till murder trial, one of the catalysts of the civil rights movement.

After the trial was over, with an all-white jury’s acquittal of the white men involved in one of the most heinous racial murders in American history, Mr. Wakefield wrote, “The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it.”

He went on to find acclaim before he was 27, with the publication in 1959 of his first book, “Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem,” an account of the six months he spent living in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of Manhattan.

“To read Mr. Wakefield’s book is to walk into 100th Street in Spanish Harlem and suddenly share its life, its problems and its tragedies,” Harrison E. Salisbury of The New York Times, who had himself written about New York’s Puerto Ricans, declared in a review. Mr. Wakefield’s reporting on the neighborhood’s crime and other social problems, he added, “should bring civic conscience to a boil — if such a conscience does, in fact, exist.”

Mr. Wakefield’s next book, “Revolt in the South” (1962), explored resistance to the civil rights movement in the old Confederacy. While praising his “humility and compassion,” Claude Sitton, who covered the civil rights movement for The Times in the 1950s and ’60s, faulted the book in a Times review for “errors of fact and judgment” and for overlooking differences among the Southern states.

In 1970, his first novel, “Going All the Way,” achieved a level of recognition that most writers find only in their dreams. Nominated for a National Book Award, it told the story of two young Korean War veterans returning to their homes in Indianapolis in the summer of 1954 and finding that the middle-class values they had grown up with were no longer enough.

The novel was praised by critics and some major writers. Gay Talese called it “wonderful, sad and funny.” One critic said Mr. Wakefield was a bit like Norman Mailer but without the “rhetorical boom and self-idolatry.” Another pronounced it simply “a great book.”

Kurt Vonnegut, who had attended the same Indianapolis high school as Mr. Wakefield about a decade before him, wrote in a foreword that “Going All the Way” was “a richer book than ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’” and with “wider concerns and more intricate characters” than that Philip Roth classic.

Mr. Vonnegut was similarly effusive about “Going All the Way” in Life magazine. In 2015, Mr. Wakefield told The Times that he regarded Mr. Vonnegut as the “godfather” of “Going All the Way,” for the praise he had heaped upon it. The two writers became good friends. In 2017, Mr. Wakefield coedited a volume of Mr. Vonnegut’s complete stories.

Mr. Wakefield’s other novels were “Starting Over” (1973), about a divorced man torn between a new love and his ex-wife; “Home Free” (1977), about a slacker on a cross-country trip in the countercultural America of the 1960s; “Under the Apple Tree” (1982), a coming-of-age tale set in small-town Illinois during World War II; and “Selling Out” (1985), about a college professor and serious short-story writer who goes to Hollywood to write a sophisticated television series — an experience not unlike Mr. Wakefield’s own.

Lance Kerwin, in the title role, and Kate Jackson, as a guest star, in scene in 1977 from “James at 15,” an NBC drama series created by Mr. Wakefield.
Credit: 20th Century Fox, via Everett Collection

His television credits included “James at 15,” an NBC drama about the life of a teenage boy, which he created. He quit the show early in 1978, just a few months after its premiere, after a dispute with the network over an episode in which the protagonist loses his virginity. (He accused NBC of playing down the script’s references to birth control.) The series was canceled shortly afterward.

He also wrote the screenplay for the 1997 movie adaptation of “Going All the Way,” which starred Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and other young actors. “Starting Over,” too, was the basis for a movie, released in 1979, with Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh.

Mr. Wakefield began his writing career as a columnist for his high school newspaper in Indianapolis and a sports stringer for The Indianapolis Star. (At a convention for high school journalists, he roomed with another young sports columnist, Richard G. Lugar, who later was elected mayor of Indianapolis and to the United States Senate. Both youths were Eagle Scouts.)

Mr. Wakefield studied journalism at Harvard in 1963 and 1964 under a Nieman fellowship. His other awards included a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1968. Over the years, he taught and lectured at several colleges and universities and numerous writers’ workshops.

Dan Wakefield — his birth name was Dan, not Daniel — was born in Indianapolis on May 21, 1932, to Ben and Brucie (Ridge) Wakefield. He was raised Presbyterian and became a Baptist. But as he morphed from an awkward, acne-afflicted adolescent into a young adult, a spiritual emptiness replaced his faith. He agonized as his parents divorced, he had troubled relationships with women, and he found little solace in talk therapy. By the time he was 24, he recalled in an essay in The Times, “I had bourboned myself into near oblivion.”

He used alcohol and drugs to fight off a “sense of blank, nameless pain in the pit of my very being,” he wrote in “Returning: A Spiritual Journey” (1988). The next year, in an essay in The Times, he wrote that his way back to belief was marked by logic — he recalled a physicist asking, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — as well as contemplation.

On Christmas Eve 1980, he attended a service at King’s Chapel, a Unitarian Universalist church in Boston (the minister was a neighbor). He became active in the church, having found himself in the presence of a “larger force or purpose or higher power I identify as God,” he wrote in “Returning.”

Mr. Wakefield lived his final years in Indianapolis. He moved back there in 2011 after living in Miami for 17 years as a writer in residence at Florida International University. He had also lived in New York, Boston, Hollywood and Venice, Calif.

In his later years, he led workshops on spirituality at churches and synagogues across the United States and at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y.

His marriage to Alice Jokela Stewart ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive.

Mr. Wakefield had a paternal relationship with his goddaughter, Karina Corrales, whose mother took a writing class with him in Miami after his move there. He met Ms. Corrales when she was toddler and ultimately paid for her to attend college. He had spent time with her and her husband toward the end of his life.

Asked to define his philosophy of life, Mr. Wakefield quoted Philo, the ancient philosopher of Alexandria, Egypt: “Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a great battle.” As for his life beyond writing, reading and reflecting, he said, “No golf, no horseshoes, no stamp-collecting, no hobbies.” And, he added, “No regrets.”

UPDATE: the New Rochelle Library event for Voices of a People's History of the United States in the 21st Century has been rescheduled to April 18th at 6:30pm.

It has come to our attention that the New Rochelle Public Library has pulled out of hosting an event with authors Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, originally scheduled for Thursday, March 21st, in which Arnove and Pessin were to discuss their book Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance. They were informed the event would be indefinitely postponed due to complaints about the authors’ vocal support for Palestine. It is unacceptable for New Rochelle public institutions to promote censorship and silence pro-Palestinian voices. This is similar to book bannings we’ve seen in libraries across the US and echoes authoritarian efforts to silence and oppress opinions that do not support their agenda. Libraries should serve as spaces to expand our thinking, not constrict it.

The New Rochelle Public Library's decision to indefinitely postpone this event is alarming. Our ask is that NRPL continue with the event as scheduled, and to take a strong stance against censorship of any sort. Please email or call the Board of Trustees using the scripts posted below. We will not be silenced!

EMAIL SCRIPT:

EMAIL: Director of the NRPL, Tom Geoffino, tgeoffino@nrpl.org

SUBJECT LINE: Event Cancelation- Arthur Arnove & Haley Pessin

Dear Mr. Geoffino,
I am emailing today because it has come to my attention that Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin’s book event was indefinitely postponed due to their support for Palestine. Silencing their voices goes against everything our community stands for. The library should serve as a non-political space for ALL voices to be heard. Please see that their event continues as originally scheduled.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

CC THESE EMAILS:
Whitney Barrat, President: wbarrat@nrpl.org
Corey Galloway, Vice President: cgalloway@nrpl.org
Lucille Renwick, Secretary, lrenwick@nrpl.org
Beth Acocella: bacocella@nrpl.org
Rhiannon Navin: rnavin@nrpl.org
Tatiana Infante: tinfante@nrpl.org
Fela Cortes: fcortes@nrpl.org

PHONE SCRIPT:

- Call the New Rochelle Public Library: (914) 632-7878
- On the menu, wait for dial name to speak. Then, type TOM to speak to the director, Tom Geoffino.

SCRIPT:
"Hi Mr. Geoffino, I am calling to voice my concern over the indefinite postponing of Anthony and Haley's event next week due to their pro-Palestinian views. The library should serve as a non- political space that welcomes voices from all backgrounds. Silencing pro- Palestinian voices goes against everything New Rochelle and public libraries stand for. I would like to see their event continue as originally scheduled."

We are extremely pleased to report that Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn, has been longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize!

Rodrigo Blanco Calderón has established himself as one of the great voices of Latin American literature with his debut novel The Night, and his short story collection Sacrifices. His latest book to be translated into English, Simpatía is a suspenseful novel with unexpected twists and turns about the agony of Venezuela and the collapse of Chavismo.

Simpatía is set in the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro amid a mass exodus of the intellectual class who have been leaving their pets behind. Ulises Kan, the protagonist and a movie buff, receives a text message from his wife, Paulina, saying she is leaving the country (and him). Ulises is not heartbroken but liberated by Paulina's departure. Two other events end up disrupting his life even further: the return of Nadine, an unrequited love from the past, and the death of his father-in-law, General Martín Ayala. Thanks to Ayala’s will, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission—to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a shelter for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it in time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina.

This novel centers on themes of family and orphanhood in order to address the abuse of power by a patrilineage of political figures in Latin America, from Simón Bolívar to Hugo Chávez. The untranslatable title, Simpatía, which means both sympathy and charm, ironically references the qualities these political figures share. In a morally bankrupt society, where all human ties seem to have dissolved, Ulises is like a stray dog picking up scraps of sympathy. Can you really know who you love? What is, in essence, a family? Are abandoned dogs proof of the existence or non-existence of God? Ulises unknowingly embodies these questions, as a pilgrim of affection in a post-love era.

Each year the International Booker Prize introduces readers to the best novels and short story collections from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.  

The prize recognises the vital work of translators with the £50,000 prize money divided equally: £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators). In addition, there is a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).  

The 13 books on the longlist have been chosen by the 2024 judging panel: broadcaster and journalist Eleanor Wachtel, as chair; award-winning poet Natalie Diaz; internationally acclaimed novelist Romesh Gunesekera;  groundbreaking visual artist William Kentridge; and writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson.  

Their selection was made from 149 books published between 1 May 2023 and 30 April 2024 and submitted by publishers – the highest number since the prize was relaunched in its current format in 2016. 2024’s submissions were made up of books originally written in 32 languages, up from 27 in 2023. Since 2016, books representing 63 languages have been submitted for the prize, ranging from Farsi and Vietnamese to Kikuyu and Welsh.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on 9 April 2024. The winning title will be announced at a ceremony on 21 May 2024, which will be livestreamed.

‍

Rodrigo Blanco Calderón © Emilio Morales

This week marks Ralph Nader's 90th birthday. To celebrate, we're proud to publish some excerpts from his book Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2000-2015. Covering 15 years of Ralph's one-sided correspondences with Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Return to Sender not only demonstrates the steadfast moral resolution that guides Ralph Nader's political endeavors, but also offers a damning portrait of a United States government that, almost 10 years after Nader sent his final letter to Barack Obama, repeatedly makes the same mistakes, and repeatedly commits the same egregious crimes against its citizens and against foreign nations alike.

The letters excerpted below primarily focus on America's foreign policy — specifically, the diasterous "War on Terror" (2003), the continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (2013), the United States’ bombing campaign in Syria (2013), and the United States' military and financial support for the Israeli army's invasion of Lebanon (2006) and continued assault on Palestine (2008).

We have also included a letter from Ralph Nader to President Obama written from the perspective of an E.coli bacteria in German Laboratory in Bavaria. While it can act as a sort of palate cleanser, ultimately Nader's repeated references to the United States' foreign policy failures and domestic torture programs offer another window into his consistent advocacy for human rights and against imperialism. He's a remarkably consistent man.

Happy Birthday, Ralph, and thank you for everything.

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LETTERS TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

December 21, 2008

Protect Gaza

Dear President Bush,

Congressman Barney Frank said recently that Barack Obama’s declaration that “there is only one president at a time” overestimated the number. He was referring to the economic crisis. But where are you on the Gaza crisis where the civilian population of Gaza, its civil servants and public facilities are being massacred and destroyed respectively by U.S.-built F-16s and U.S.-built helicopter gunships?

The deliberate suspension of your power to stop this terrorizing of 1.5 million people, mostly refugees, blockaded for months by air, sea and land in their tiny slice of land, is in cowardly contrast to the position taken by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. That year he single-handedly stopped the British, French, and Israeli aircraft attack against Egypt during the Suez Canal dispute.

Fatalities in Gaza are already over 400 and injuries close to 2,000 so far as is known. Total Palestinian civilian casualties are 400 times greater than the casualties incurred by Israelis.

But why should anyone be surprised at your blanket support for Israel’s attacks given what you have done to a far greater number of civilians in Iraq and now in Afghanistan?

Confirmed visual reports show that Israeli warplanes and warships have destroyed or severely damaged police stations, homes, hospitals, pharmacies, mosques, fishing boats, and a range of public facilities providing electricity and other necessities.

Why should this trouble you at all? It violates international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Charter. You too have repeatedly violated international law and committed serious constitutional transgressions.

Then there is the matter of the Israeli government blocking imports of critical medicines, equipment such as dialysis machines, fuel, food, water, spare parts, and electricity at varying intensities for almost two years. The depleted  U.N. aid mission there has called this illegal blockade a humanitarian crisis especially devastating to children, the aged and the infirm. Chronic malnutrition among children is rising rapidly. U.N. rations support 80 percent of this impoverished population.

How do these incontrovertible facts affect you? Do you have any empathy or what you have called Christian charity?

What would a vastly shrunken Texas turned in an encircled Gulag do up against the 4th most powerful military in the world? Would these embattled Texans be spending their time chopping wood?

Gideon Levy, the veteran Israeli columnist for Haaretz, called the Israeli attack a “brutal and violent operation” far beyond what was needed for protecting the people in its south. He added: 

“The diplomatic efforts were just in the beginning, and I believe we could have got to a new truce without this bloodshed—to send dozens of jets to bomb a total helpless civilian society with hundreds of bombs—just today, they were burying five sisters. I mean, this is unheard of. This cannot go on like this. And this has nothing to do with self-defense or with retaliation even. It went out of proportion, exactly like two-and-a-half years ago in Lebanon.”

Apparently, thousands of Israelis, including some army reservists, who have demonstrated against this destruction of Gaza agree with Mr. Levy. However, their courageous stands have not reached the mass media in the U.S., whose own reporters cannot even get into Gaza due to Israeli prohibitions on the international press.

Your spokespeople are making much ado about the breaking of the six-month truce. Who is the occupier? Who is the most powerful military force? Who controls and blocks the necessities of life? Who has sent raiding missions across the border most often? Who has sent artillery shells and missiles at close range into populated areas? Who has refused the repeated comprehensive peace offerings of the Arab countries issued in 2002 if Israel would agree to return to the 1967 borders and agree to the creation of a small independent Palestinian state possessing just 22 percent of the original Palestine?

The “wildly inaccurate rockets,” as reporters describe them, coming from Hamas and other groups cannot compare with the modern precision armaments and human damage generated from the Israeli side.

There are no rockets coming from the West Bank into Israel. Yet, the Israeli government is still sending raiders into that essentially occupied territory, further entrenching its colonial outposts that are still taking water and land and increasing the checkpoints. This is going on despite a most amenable West Bank leader, Mahmoud Abbas, whom you have met with at the White House and praised repeatedly. Is it all vague words and no real initiatives with you and your emissary Condoleezza Rice?

Peace was possible, but you provided no leadership, preferring instead to comply with all wishes and demands by the Israeli government—even resupplying it with the still-active cluster bombs in south Lebanon during the invasion of that country in 2006.

The arguments about who started the latest hostilities go on and on with Israel always blaming the Palestinians to justify all kinds of violence and harsh treatment against innocent civilians.

From the Palestinian standpoint, you would do well to remember the origins of this conflict, which was the dispossession of their lands. To afford you some empathy, recall the oft-quoted comment by the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who told the Zionist leader, Nahum Goldmann: “There has been anti-Semitism—the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz—but was that their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Alfred North Whitehead once said: “Duty arises out of the power to alter the course of events.” By that standard, you have shirked mightily your duty over the past eight years to bring peace to both Palestinians and Israelis and more security to a good part of the world.

The least you can do in your remaining days at the White House is adopt a modest profile in courage, and vigorously demand and secure a ceasefire and a solidly based truce. Then your successor, President-elect Obama, can inherit something more than the usual self-censoring Washington puppet show that eschews a proper focus on the national interests of the United States.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader 

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Lebanon

Dear President Bush,

You have been a weak president, despite your strutting and barking, when it comes to doing the right things for the American people within the Constitution and its rule of law. This trait is now in bold relief over the Israeli government’s escalating war crimes pulverizing the defenseless people and country of Lebanon.

With systematic efficiency, the Israeli government has already destroyed innocent homes and basic public facilities— ports, airports, highways, bridges, power stations—which are critical to delivery of food, medicines, health care, ambulances, water, and other essentials for a civilian population. This bombardment, by U.S.-made bombers, military vehicles, ships, and missiles with American taxpayer subsidies, places an inescapable responsibility upon your shoulders, which does not mix with your usual vacuous messianic rigidity.

As the leading player in official Washington’s puppet show, it is time for you to assert the interests of the American people and those of the broad Israeli and Palestinian peace movements by standing up to the puppeteers. For without this conflict, Hezbollah would not be in today’s news.

The time has come for you to return to Texas for a private meeting with your father, his former national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and his former secretary of state, James Baker. You need to say to them “I can’t trust my advisors anymore; there have been so many tragic blunders. What do you advise me to do about the destruction of a friendly nation by the world’s fifth most powerful military?”

Here is what I think they should say to you:

1. Take personal command of an immediate rescue effort for the tens of thousands of Americans trapped in Lebanon by Israel’s calculated blocking of air, land, and sea escape routes. You’ve said the safety of Americans is your top priority. Prove it by using the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy facilities to immediately evacuate all our people desperate to escape the terrorization of Lebanon.

2. You have been so docile and permissive to Israeli demands that any modest deviation from this posture will make your next move credible. Announce that you are sending two prominent negotiators—perhaps James Baker (Republican) and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (Democrat) to Israel and Lebanon to arrange for a cease fire between the combatants.

Announced at a televised White House news conference with your two envoys, you can punctuate your seriousness by raising the questions of violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act. Using U.S.-supplied weapons systems to commit civilian atrocities on homes and fleeing vehicles with children and to inflict collective punishment on mass civilian populations is not using these weapons for legitimate self-defense and internal policing, as our federal law requires. Israeli planes have even fire bombed wheat silos and gasoline stations in Lebanon. More mayhem is on the way.

3. Stop acting like an impulsive, out-of-control West Texas sheriff and start reading, thinking, and listening for a change. When Israel, Britain, and France violated international treaties against aggression in 1956 by invading the Suez Canal, President Dwight Eisenhower used his influence to make them withdraw from Egypt. In 1982, following a year without any PLO skirmishes over the Lebanese-Israeli border, Israeli armed forces invaded Lebanon anyway. They created a path of destruction all the way to Beirut and militarily occupied south Lebanon for 18 years before they withdrew, except for retaining Shebaa Farms. In 1982 the New York Times reported “indiscriminate bombing” of Beirut by Israeli planes. At least 20,000 Lebanese civilians lost their lives in that invasion and many more were injured. From that conflict Hezbollah was born, composed of many people whose relatives were casualties in that illegal invasion.

History, George, does not start two weeks or two months ago. You must read about past U.S. presidents who, at least, sent high-level emissaries to quell similar border fighting. It worked and prisoners were often exchanged.

You are doing and saying nothing about what the rest of the world believes is a hugely disproportionate attack against innocent adults and children in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter and other treaties and federal statutes. You’ve sworn to uphold these laws. Do so. Because of the Israeli government’s overwhelming military power, the imbalance of terror against civilians and their property has always been to its advantage. As has its occupation of Palestine and confiscation of land and water sources.

4. You can’t take sides and be an honest broker. Just about all our knowledgeable retired military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials believe resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to deflating other agitations in the region.

Freedom and justice for the Palestinian state and security and stability for the Israeli state must both be achieved.

You have turned your back on the courageous and prominent Israeli peace movement which normally reflects the positions of half of the Israeli population. You’ve never met with any of its leaders—even those in the Knesset or former officials in the military, intelligence, and justice ministries.

Hundreds of reserve combat officers and soldiers of the IDF have refused, in their words, “to fight beyond the 1967 borders to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people.” They pledged only to fight for Israel’s legitimate defense.*

5. Once in a while, ask your aides for a sample of Israeli opinion that rejects the notion that there can be a military solution to this conflict, despite the military imbalance. For example, reports and editorials in Haaretz, arguably the most respected newspaper in Israel, would educate your judgment. In a recent editorial, Haaretz argued that the present Israeli government has “lost its reason” through the brutal incarceration, devastation, and deprivation of innocent people in Gaza.

In another Haaretz commentary dated July 16th, Gideon Levy writes:

“In Gaza, a soldier is abducted from the army of a state that frequently abducts civilians from their homes and lock them up for years without a trial—but only we’re allowed to do that. And only we’re allowed to bomb civilian population centers.”

6. One final bit of advice could come from Papa Bush’s circle. If the Israeli army decides to invade Lebanon with troops, your support of the aggression can possibly unleash a domino of warring actions and reactions over there. As it is, Americans are increasingly fed up with the Iraq quagmire.

Moreover, we know they don’t like many of your domestic policies favoring the wealthy, the post-Katrina debacle, exporting jobs, and among our conservative base, your enormous deficits.

So, your Republican Party’s control of government is at stake in November. Don’t you have your hands full with Iraq, whose invasion we all urged you to avoid in 2003?

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

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March 10, 2003

A Man Who Has Stopped Listening

Dear President Bush,

After the completion of your long overdue full-scale news conference on March 7th, Senator Robert Byrd remarked: “He talked last night like a man who is not willing to listen any further. He has stopped listening.” There are many engaged citizens who wonder whether you ever started listening or at least directly hearing views contrary to your determination to start a war, invasion, and lengthy occupation of Iraq. Indeed, it appears you have not met with a single domestic antiwar delegation, despite numerous requests from varied constituencies for a meeting.

Many commentators and reporters—having spoken with people inside your administration—have noted the isolation, the solitude, and the exclusionary characteristic of your office on this subject. Others such as Bob Woodward, who interviewed you, tell readers of your self-description as being a “black and white” type of person, of a man who makes decisions “from the gut” or from instinct. Combined with isolation from many informed contrary views, this attitude is made more disquieting by your continual invoking of God when it comes to Iraq. Viewed from abroad, this appears to millions of people as if you are embarking on a religious war. From stateside, you will forgive those Americans who instead view such allusions as indicative of a refusal to entertain empirical inputs and broader policy arguments from Americans, many of whom have been following, experiencing or studying the Iraqi situation longer than some in your very tight ideological circle of advisors.

In the past several weeks alone, a distinguished array of groups has written you about issues and has requested a personal meeting with you in the White House. Now is the time to spend a few hours listening to cogent presentations by these Americans of widely different backgrounds and insights, but mostly similar in their opposition to war/invasion/occupation. According to press reports, your travel schedule over the next two weeks has been sharply reduced to concentrate on the United Nations and other related situations which should include a decent respect for the opinions of those organizations who have asked for an audience with you.

The country is deeply and almost evenly divided according to numerous polls that ask more comprehensive questions.

Meeting with representatives of these groups, which oppose your proposed policies, would afford you an opportunity for a two- way exchange. There have been too many monologues, which serve their purpose of course, but a dialogue tends to probe and clarify the issues and test the strength of opposing views.

The benefits of these meetings, were you to allow them to occur, are more than what may be described as good public relations on your part. For example, leaders of veterans’ groups and former military leaders, whose letter is on its way, can convey the horrific toxic aftermath of the war/invasion to both Iraqis and U.S. troops. They know about the first Gulf War firsthand and have been closely associated with the treatment of over 200,000 soldiers who were disabled and have been receiving disability payments.

Even were you to take this country to war, you would benefit from their knowledge of how under-trained and inadequately equipped U.S. soldiers are to defend themselves against what you have said is the likely prospect of chemical warfare by Iraq’s brutal dictator.

From women’s groups, including those back from numerous trips to Afghanistan, you’ll learn about the terrible effect on the civilian population long after hostilities ended, due in part to the lack of promised follow-through assistance by the United States to the Kabul government. They can also convey the likely consequences on Iraqi families whose elderly, mothers, and children will especially suffer from lack of food, spreading disease, fires, score-settling, and fleeing refugee conditions of an awful nature.

From the perspective of working families, you will hear why this is the first time that major labor unions, with the encouragement of the AFL-CIO, have ever opposed a war by the United States, in part because it is an unprovoked war.

From the business executives, you will hear concerns about the further instability and decline of our economy with its effects on standards of living, employment and neglected domestic budgets.

From representatives of the clergy, including your own Bishop, as well as from many other Christian denominations and other major religions, you will learn the depth of their disagreement with you regarding the moral justification for this war and what they have learned from their visits to Iraq.

From leading physicians having serious experience with health conditions and capacity in Iraq, you will be informed of the scale of civilian mortality and morbidity from the looming devastation. Notwithstanding assurances to the contrary in 1991, there was severe destruction of the drinking water infrastructure leading to epidemics that most cruelly took the lives of many tens of thousands of Iraqi children.

In recent weeks, you took the time to travel to Pennsylvania and to a Washington hotel to meet with doctors complaining about their insurance premiums and malpractice lawsuits.

Surely you can meet in the White House with physicians whose compassion, insight and knowledge about the fate of millions reflect the highest obligation of the medical profession, which is prevention.

Consider how much more enriched your perspective will become after exchanging views and information with the other groups who have also asked to see you. These include: elected representatives of city councils representing tens of millions of Americans; environmental organizations knowledgeable about the environmental devastation to the region and the planet on a level even greater than 1991 that is likely from this proposed war; international intelligence specialists with past governmental experience who will tell you what many dissenters inside the Pentagon and the State Department cannot say to you about consequences and alternatives; prominent academics, historians, and civic leaders; and the next generation, from groups representing millions of college students.

More than a dozen of these letters were sent to you. Most of them have not received the courtesy of a response. None have been accorded an affirmative invitation.

The organizations requesting to meet with you represent a broad cross section of the American people. They seek a dialogue with you not out of political partisanship but because they have not been convinced that war with Iraq is necessary.

These attached requests ask for meetings of short duration but, in the retrospect of history, long significance for historians who will judge your decision-making process on the road to war-invasion-occupation.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

 

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LETTERS TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

September 22, 2013

Barry O’Bomber and the Rush to War

Dear President Obama,

Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii know, watching you race up and down the basketball court, how prescient they were when they nicknamed you “Barry O’Bomber.”

Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes, international treaties and the separation of power at depths equal to or beyond the George W. Bush regime.

Nor would many of the voters who elected you in 2008 have conceived that your foreign policy would rely so much on brute military force at the expense of systemically waging peace. Certainly, voters who knew your background as a child of Third World countries, a community organizer, a scholar of constitutional law and a critic of the Bush/Cheney years, never would have expected you to favor the giant warfare state so pleasing to the military-industrial complex.

Now, as if having learned nothing from the devastating and costly aftermaths of the military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, you’re beating the combustible drums to attack Syria—a country that is no threat to the U.S. and is embroiled in complex civil wars under a brutal regime.

This time, however, you may have pushed for too many acts of war. Public opinion and sizable numbers of members of both parties in Congress are opposed. These lawmakers oppose bombing Syria in spite of your corralling the cowardly leaders of both parties in the Congress.

Thus far, your chief achievement on the Syrian front has been support for your position from al-Qaeda affiliates fighting in Syria, the pro-Israeli government lobby, AIPAC, your chief nemesis in Congress, House Speaker John Boehner, and Dick Cheney. This is quite a gathering and a telling commentary on your ecumenical talents. Assuming the veracity of your declarations regarding the regime’s resort to chemical warfare (first introduced into the Middle East by Winston Churchill’s Royal Air Force’s plastering of Iraqi tribesmen in the nineteen-twenties), your motley support group is oblivious to the uncontrollable consequences that might stem from bombing Syria. One domestic consequence may be that Speaker Boehner expects to exact concessions from you on domestic issues before Congress in return for giving you such high visibility bipartisan cover.

Your argument for shelling Syria is to maintain “international credibility” in drawing that “red line” regardless, it seems, of the loss of innocent Syrian civilian life, casualties to our foreign service and armed forces in that wider region, and retaliation against the fearful Christian population in Syria (one in seven Syrians are Christian). But the more fundamental credibilities are to our Constitution, to the neglected necessities of the American people, and to the red line of observing international law and the U.N. Charter (which prohibit unilateral bombing in this situation).

There is another burgeoning cost—that of the militarization of the State Department whose original charter invests it with the responsibility of diplomacy. Instead, Mr. Obama, you have shaped the State Department into a belligerent “force projector” first under Generalissima Clinton and now under Generalissimo Kerry. The sidelined foreign service officers, who have knowledge and conflict avoidance experience, are left with reinforced fortress-like embassies as befits our empire reputation abroad.

Secretary John Kerry descended to gibberish when, under questioning this week by a House Committee member, he asserted that your proposed attack was “not war” because there would be “no boots on the ground.” In Kerry’s view, bombing a country with missiles and air force bombers is not an act of war.

It is instructive to note how government autocracy feeds on itself. Start with unjustified government secrecy garnished by the words “national security.” That leads to secret laws, secret evidence, secret courts, secret prisons, secret prisoners, secret relationships with selected members of Congress, denial of standing for any citizen to file suit, secret drone strikes, secret incursions into other nations and all this directed by a president who alone decides when to be secret prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. What a republic, what a democracy, what a passive people we have become!

Voices of reason and experience have urged the proper path away from the metastasizing war that is plaguing Syria. As General Ban Ki-moon, and other seasoned diplomats and retired military, vigorous leadership by you is needed for an international peace conference with all parties at the table, including the countries supplying weapons to the various adversaries in Syria.

Mr. Obama, you may benefit from reading the writings of Colman McCarthy, a leading advocate of peace studies in our schools and universities. He gives numerous examples of how waging peace avoided war and civil strife over the past 100 years.

Crowding out attention to America’s serious domestic problems by yet another military adventure (opposed by many military officials), yet another attack on another small, non- threatening Muslim country by a powerful Christian nation (as many Muslims see it) is aggression camouflaging sheer madness.

Please, before you recklessly flout Congress, absorb the wisdom of the World Peace Foundation’s Alex de Waal and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Writing in the New York Times, they strongly condemn the use of nerve gas in Syria, brand the perpetrators as war criminals to be tried by an international war crimes tribunal and then declare:

“But it is folly to think that airstrikes can be limited: they are ill-conceived as punishment, fail to protect civilians and, most important, hinder peacemaking . . . . Punishment, protectionand peace must be joined . . . An American assault on Syria would be an act of desperation with incalculable consequences. To borrow once more from Sir William Harcourt [the British parliamentarian who argued against British intervention in our Civil War (which cost 750,000 American lives)]: ‘We are asked to go we know not whither, in order to do we know not what.’”

If and when the people and Congress turn you down this month, there will be one silver lining. Only a Left-Right coalition can stop this warring. Such convergence is strengthening monthly in the House of Representatives to stop future war crimes and the injurious blowback against America of the wreckages from empire. 

History teaches that empires always devour themselves.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

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May 3, 2013

End the Guantanamo Blot on Our National Character

Dear President Obama,

Notwithstanding Section 1028 (a)(1) of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, you are empowered to end Guantanamo Bay’s affront to due process by releasing from imprisonment the 86 inmates whom your administration or its predecessor have found to be neither enemy combatants nor war criminals; and permitting them to arrange for travel to any foreign nation of their choosing. Section 1028 (a)(1) only limits your authority to transfer them into the “custody or control of the individual’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity . . .” But simple release, without more, is not prohibited. Of the remaining 80 prisoners, you should either charge and prosecute them for alleged war crimes or release them from Guantanamo Bay prison like the aforementioned 86.

No statute or other legal limitation blocks you from this enlightened course of action, which you have commended as who we are as a people. We are supposed to be willing to take risks that other countries shun because we find imprisoning, killing, or otherwise punishing the innocent to be morally reprehensible.

You cannot escape responsibility for the dubious legal limbo of Guantanamo Bay. You cannot simply blame Congress. President Harry S. Truman’s famous Oval Office desk sign acknowledged that “The Buck Stops Here.” Your oath of office compels you to honor the Constitution, not to evade it.

You must terminate forthwith Guantanamo Bay’s blot on the character of this nation that gratuitously provokes retaliation and enmity.

Sincerely,

Bruce Fein

Ralph Nader

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June 3, 2011

Letter from E.coli O104:H4

Dear President Obama,

My name is E.coli O104:H4. I am being detained in a German Laboratory in Bavaria, charged with being “a highly virulent strain of bacteria.” Together with many others like me, the police have accused us of causing about 20 deaths and nearly five hundred cases of kidney failure—so far. Massive publicity and panic all around. You can’t see me, but your scientists can. They are examining me and I know my days are numbered. I hear them calling me a “biological terrorist,” an unusual combination of two different E.coli bacteria cells. One even referred to me as a “conspiracy of mutants.”

It is not my fault, I want you to know. I cannot help but harm innocent humans, and I am very sad about this. I want to redeem myself, so I am sending this life-saving message straight from my petri dish to you.

This outbreak in Germany has been traced to food—location unknown. What is known to you is that invisible terrorism from bacterium and viruses takes massively greater lives than the terrorism you are spending billions of dollars and armaments to stop in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Malaria, caused by infection with one of four species of Plasmodium, is a parasite transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes that destroys a million lives a year. Many of the victims are children and pregnant women. Mycobacterium tuberculosis takes over one million lives each year. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes over a million deaths each year. Many other microorganisms in the water, soil, air, and food are daily weapons of mass destruction. Very little in your defense budget goes for operational armed forces against this kind of violence. Your agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control, conduct some research but again nothing compared to the research for your missiles, drones, aircraft, and satellites.

Your associates are obsessed with possible bacteriological warfare by your human enemies. Yet you are hardly doing anything on the ongoing silent violence of my indiscriminate brethren.

You and your predecessor George W. Bush made many speeches about fighting terrorism by humans. Have you made a major speech about us?

You speak regularly about crushing the resistance of your enemies. But you splash around so many antibiotics (obviously I don’t like this word and consider it genocidal) in cows, bulls, chickens, pigs, and fish that your species is creating massive antibiotic resistance, provoking our mutations, so that we can breed even stronger progeny. You are regarded as the smartest beings on Earth, yet you seem to have too many neurons backfiring.

In the past two days of detention, scientists have subjected me to “enhanced interrogation,” as if I have any will to give up my secrets. It doesn’t work. What they will find out will be from their insights about me under their microscopes. I am lethal, I guess, but I’m not very complicated.

The United States, together with other countries, needs more laboratories where scientists can detain samples of us and subject us to extraordinary rendition to infectious disease research centers. Many infectious disease scientists need to be trained, especially in the southern hemispheres to staff these labs.

You are hung up on certain kinds of preventable violence without any risk/benefit analysis. This, you should agree, is utterly irrational. You should not care where the preventable violence comes from except to focus on its range of devastation and its susceptibility to prevention or cure!

Well, here they come to my petri dish for some more waterboarding. One last item: You may wonder how tiny bacterial me, probably not even harboring a virus, can send you such a letter. My oozing sense is that I’m just a carrier, being used by oodles of scientists taking advantage of a high-profile infectious outbreak in Europe to catch your attention.

Whatever the how does it really matter to the need to act now?

E-cologically yours,

E.coli O104:H4 (for the time being)

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