The simple fact is that mindless militarization is being challenged by neither the Congress nor the media.  Defense spending is excessive; base agreements are being expanded; large-scale land and air exercises are being resumed; and multilateral embargoes are being expanded on dual-use technology.  Later this month, NATO will conduct the largest air exercise in its history.  Air Defender 23 will involve 25 nations, 10,000 participants, and 220 aircraft that will gratuitously raise the level of tension throughout Europe.  A similar exercise in Europe 40 years ago, Able Archer, led to a war scare in the Soviet Union. More

lynching Black men is nothing new, except in the past, the lynchers didn’t get paid. Maybe the local economy thrived when families attended lynchings in a carnival atmosphere. Souvenirs were sold. The taverns were filled. Perhaps a piano player playing Theodore A. Metz’s “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Photographers who snapped photos of tourists posing next to the lynched got paid. But the average lyncher in those days did it for kicks. You see white men and women often in the company of their children, leering, grinning, and smirking up a storm as a smoking Black corpse is swinging above them. More

There is something distinctive about the contemporary literature of class war, and how it revisits old conflicts in all their national, regional, and cultural singularity. More so than in in previous moments when heightened militancy met with literary efflorescence – from England in the early nineteenth century through France during the Paris Commune to Russia in the 1920s or China in the 1930s – today’s narratives of class war read their specific conflicts as part of a struggle that is territorially grounded but also internationally expansive. More