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THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR IS TRUTH Anti-War Paper
Launched
A new, nationwide anti-war newspaper began publication in Oakland,
Calif. in February, hoping to promote what it bills as a more humane,
less jingoistic alternative to the gung-ho militarism of President Bush.
Bob Wing, managing editor of War Times, said he was disturbed by
the U.S. government's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Instead of conducting a police action to bring the Sept. 11 murderers to
justice, Wing said the Bush administration was killing innocent Afghans,
threatening more than 60 countries and trampling on civil liberties and
civil rights at home.
While other Americans were mounting flags on their cars, Wing began
talking to everyone he knew about a project that could counter what he
saw as a warmongering atmosphere taking hold of the nation.
The result is War Times, a bilingual English/Spanish publication
launched by Wing and a group of Bay Area writers and activists with the
support of nationally known intellectuals and human rights advocates
such as Nobel Prize winner Noam Chomsky. After publishing a prospectus
of War Times online, Wing said the public response was
overwhelming. A first run of 100,000 copies is 10 times the number
originally planned by the group. War Times is being published
every six weeks and distributed in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and
Puerto Rico.
“The thing blew up on us,'' he said. Requests for copies came from
every corner of the country, and the idea of starting small and
targeting only active peace groups ended. War Times is still avidly
looking for additional distributors and financial supporters. They can
be contacted through their Website at www.war-times.org.
The first issue of War Times featured an interview with Danny
Glover, an actor and activist who shares the view that bombing
Afghanistan was wrong. Other articles criticize U.S. military deployment
in the Philippines, stepped-up attacks on Palestinians, racial profiling
and attacks on immigrants in the U.S., Bush’s new policies of
preemptive military strikes, and the cost of the war on terrorism.
The lead article of the premier edition, by Jung Hee Choi, a War
Times editor, profiles a New Yorker who lost her brother in the
World Trade Center and an Afghan-American woman who lost a large number
of family members in U.S. airstrikes on Kandahar. The two women met
recently, and have used their personal tragedies as a platform for
opposing the U.S. war.
“Our viewpoint will be, in general, war hurts a lot of people,'' from
Afghan villagers who lost their homes to non-citizen airport employees
in the U.S. who are losing their jobs.
Wing is a writer and editor who honed his activism during the student
strikes at University of California-Berkeley in the 1960s. More
recently, he founded and edited ColorLines magazine, which focuses on
issues of race and organizing. Launching a newspaper
to protest government policy is a venerable American tradition, and one
with strong roots in the Bay Area. But Wing points out that the
landscape for publishing has changed since the '60s. Now there are free
alternative weeklies in every coffee shop, and a small anti-war
publication has to carve out its own niche. Wing wants to emulate the
muckraking work of journalist I.F. Stone and the social commentary of
African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois.
"We need thousands of people like you to share War Times with other
people who question war, racial profiling and the curtailment of civil
liberties,'' the editors write in their first editorial.
The paper is free, and interested readers are being asked to help
distribute it. Distribution will be national, and the editors hope in
particular to reach readers in the middle of the country, where anti-war
viewpoints are not as accepted as in the Bay Area.
For more information, contact War Times at
wartimes@attbi.com
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 29
December 2011
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