:: Critical Voices ::

"Take the word terrorism. It has become synonymous now with anti-Americanism, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being critical of the United States, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being unpatriotic. That's an unacceptable series of equations. The definition of terrorism has to be more precise, so that we are able to discriminate between, for example, what it is that the Palestinians are doing to fight the Israeli military occupation and terrorism of the sort that resulted in the World Trade Center bombing." -- Edward W. Said

• Stop US Military Training of Terrorists: Shut Down School of the Americas

  SOA Watch, an organization fully committed to nonviolence, condemns the attacks on NYC and DC, and all acts of terror. The recognition that some of the alleged perpetrators of these crimes were recipients of military training by US forces or with U.S. aid grieves us deeply. This type of military training is embodied by the School of the Americas. It is important that the "war on terrorism" by President Bush includes shutting down the School of Americas so that the United States trains no more terrorists to kill innocent people.





• Give War a Chance Michael Moore

  Fellow liberals, lefties, Greens, workers, and even you loveable Gore voters and recovering Democrats -- let me tell you why I think this war on Afghanistan is good for all of us.
  
  
  

• Signs of the Times Naomi Klein

  Many political opponents of anticorporate activism are using the symbolism of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks to argue that young activists, playing at guerrilla war, have now been caught out by a real war. The obituaries are already appearing in newspapers around the world: "Anti-Globalization Is So Yesterday," reads a typical headline. It is, according to the Boston Globe, "in tatters." Is it true? Our activism has been declared dead before. Indeed, it is declared dead with ritualistic regularity before and after every mass demonstration: our strategies apparently discredited, our coalitions divided, our arguments misguided. And yet those demonstrations have kept growing larger, from 50,000 in Seattle to 300,000, by some estimates, in Genoa.
  
  
  

• Postmodern Blackness bell hooks

  The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency.
  
  
  

• Blowback Chalmers Johnson

  "Blowback," a CIA term first used in 1954 in a report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of US covert operations abroad. The CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded. Installing the Shah in power brought twenty-five years of fierce repression to the Iranian people and elicited the Ayatollah Khomeini's fundamentalist and virulently anti-American revolution.

  Blowback has also marked U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Read Chalmers Johnson for the full story.






• Interview with Cornell West
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Critical Theory and the Crisis of Social Theory Douglas Kellner

  As an antidote to the frequently non-critical quantitative approaches within mainstream social science and theory, critical theory provides a potentially more useful and politically relevant alternative than poststructuralist and postmodernist theory. In opposition to the subjectivism and relativism, often bordering on nihilism, advanced by some of these postmodernist perspectives, critical theory, by contrast, advances the conception of a critical and normative theory which is committed to emancipation from all forms of oppression, as well as to freedom, happiness, and a rational ordering of society.





• Global Apartheid Salih Booker & William Minter

  Global apartheid, stated briefly, is an international system of minority rule whose attributes include: differential access to basic human rights; wealth and power structured by race and place; structural racism, embedded in global economic processes, political institutions and cultural assumptions; and the international practice of double standards that assume inferior rights to be appropriate for certain "others," defined by location, origin, race or gender.





• Slow Food Alexander Stille

  The slow food movement, which began in Italy, is dedicated to preserving and supporting traditional ways of growing, producing and preparing food. It is a movement that defends biodiversity and opposes the homogenizing effects of large agribusinesses. With the lingering panic over mad cow disease, the recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease, and the debate over genetically modified food, Slow Food -- with its emphasis on natural, organic methods -- has suddenly acquired a political importance and popularity that has surprised even its own leaders.





• You want fries with that?

  An interview with Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.





• Debt to Society

  Mother Jones Zine critically examines the United States prison-industrial complex. Issues addressed include why the prison population has exploded, how incarceration affects prisoners and society, the failed war on drugs, institutional racism, ethical considerations concerning imprisonment, financial costs to the public, and alternatives to the current system of law.