MikeMarqusee.com

Mike Marqusee with British hero William Blake. Photo: Felix Clay

The Guardian, 16 February

In my case, the past is literally “another country”. I spent my first 18 years in the US, moved to Britain in 1971, and have been ensconced here ever since. But I applied for British citizenship only a few months ago. read more…

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 7 February 2010

Another version of this article, with comment from readers, is published on The Guardian’s Comment is free website.

Whenever a commentator declares that “politics is the art of the possible”, I’m on my guard. What I’m being told, I suspect, is to accept apparent present conditions as immutable facts of life, and to trim my goals accordingly. I’m being told to let injustices stand.

Like all banalities, the familiar dictum contains an obvious truth. read more…

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING
Red Pepper, Feb-March 2010

This article has appeared in a revised form on The Guardian’s Comment is free website.

Flamenco is a name widely known but a music little understood, at least beyond its Andalusian heartland. Forget about Hollywood images of flounces and castanets. Even the bravura solo guitarists and dance troupes are peripheral. The heart of flamenco is the cante, the art of flamenco song. It’s most compelling spectacle is starkly simple: a lone cantaor (singer) and a lone guitarist sitting on straight-backed chairs on a bare stage, plumbing the “cante jondo”, the “deep songs” associated with the gypsies of southern Spain.
read more…

New in paperback
From Verso: ISBN 978-1-84467-435-0; 320 pages
Only £9.99 /$19.99

“A tour-de-force of political and cultural analysis of various aspects of Jewish, Zionist and anti-Zionist history and politics. Marqusee touches on many painful spots … The comparisons he draws between Zionism, Hindu nationalism, and other similar and dissimilar political phenomena are incisive and accurate. He shies away from no controversy, and his accounts of incidents in and around the anti-war movement are penetrating and intellectually honest…. a manifesto for a whole generation of Jewish radical activists who refuse to be deterred by the threat of being labelled, and libelled, as self-haters.” – Daphna Baram, The Guardian read more…

Match abandoned at the Kotla

The Guardian, Comment is free
12 January 2010

Visiting friends in Delhi, I found the local media celebrating India’s performance at Copenhagen, from which it had emerged unburdened by the slightest commitment to reducing carbon emissions. This “climate nationalism” seemed particularly grotesque given that north India’s river systems are threatened by receding Himalayan glaciers and its coastal areas by inundation. read more…

Using the martial metaphor for something as complex as cancer makes the disease ripe for political and financial exploitation

The Guardian
Tuesday 29 December 2009

For the extensive web-feedback to this article go to Comment is Free.

Obituaries routinely inform us that so-and-so has died “after a brave battle against cancer”. Of course, we will never read that so-and-so has died “after a pathetically feeble battle against cancer”. But one thing that I have come to appreciate since being diagnosed with multiple myeloma (a cancer of the blood) two years ago is how unreal both notions are. It’s just not like that.
read more…

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 3 January 2009

It’s now been confirmed that Britain’s GDP fell by 4.75% over the last year, much more than the 3.5% shrinkage forecast by the Treasury as recently as March. Since the onset of recession, 8.5% of all manufacturing jobs have been lost and 3.8% of jobs in finance and business services. Unemployment is up to more than two and half million, some 8% of the workforce, with youth unemployment running at 18%.

But the headline grabbing figure has been the £178 billion deficit in the public accounts, amounting to 12.4% of GDP. Around this, a new consensus has congealed. read more…

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING
Red Pepper, December-January

Rolling back the new ‘common sense’ of spending cuts may seem like a difficult job, but it’s not impossible, says Mike Marqusee

It’s now clear that cuts in public spending, and resistance to them, will be the stand-out issue in domestic British politics during the coming years. The three major parties, the mass media (from the Mail to the Guardian, BBC to talk radio), think-tanks, pundits and the OECD all insist that large-scale cuts must be made, that they are the only way to address the projected gap between state revenues and spending, and that this gap is the number one problem facing the British economy.

It’s been a remarkably deft manoeuvre. read more…

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING
Red Pepper, October-November 2009

Obituaries routinely inform us that so-and-so has died “after a brave battle against cancer”. I’m waiting for the day I get to read one that says so-and-so has died “after a pathetically feeble battle against cancer… ”

One thing I’ve come to appreciate since I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma (a cancer of the blood) two years ago is how unreal both notions are. It’s just not like that. read more…

Poems by Mike Marqusee

Published by Level Playing Field, August 2009.

A collection of poems written over the past twelve years.

To order a copy, click here.

read more…

[This essay was published in 2007 in the book Selling US Wars, edited by Achin Vanaik, Olive Tree Press.]

I am so terrifed, America,
Of the iron click of your human contact.
And after this
The winding-sheet of your selfless ideal love.
Boundless love
Like a poison gas.

DH Lawrence, “The Evening Land”, 1923

read more…

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING
Red Pepper, August-September 2009

Cricket emerges as the world’s first, modern organised team sport in the late 18th century, and is indelibly marked by that early origin. Its fate was intertwined with the political and economic revolutions of the era, and was shaped from the outset by a paradoxical mixture of backward- and forward-looking, democratic and feudal, individual and collective. It was driven by money (gambling) but claimed adherence to a higher ethos. read more…

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING
Red Pepper, June-July 2009

“This interment was a scene to affect and to wound any sensible heart. Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help but feel most acutely.”

The occasion for this lament was the sparsely attended funeral of Thomas Paine, who died, two hundred years ago, in June 1809, at the age of 72, and was buried in the small farm he owned in what was then the rural hamlet of New Rochelle, twenty miles north of New York City. read more…

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING
Red Pepper, April-May 2009

['Contending for the Living' is Mike's new column for Red Pepper.]

Something special took place in Durban in February and though the media have rushed past, we should pause. In solidarity with the people of Gaza, dockworker members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union refused to unload a ship carrying Israeli cargo. Here was a local intervention in global politics, driven not by national, ethnic or religious affinity but by principle, experience and common humanity. read more…

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

The Hindu, 8 March

Something special took place in Durban last month when dockworkers, members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), refused to unload a ship carrying Israeli cargo. It was an intervention from below in global politics, driven not by national, ethnic or religious affinity but by principle, experience and common humanity. read more…

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 9 February

Madeira's north coast

In 1420, a genuinely epochal event took place on a small, isolated, previously uninhabited island in the Atlantic, some 360 miles west of Morocco. That year, the Portuguese fleet – the most advanced in the world at the time, thanks to Prince Henry the Navigator – located Madeira. Within two years they had established an agricultural colony there.

It was the first great stride in European imperialism, the first of the west’s extra-European, extra-Mediterranean possessions, the first overseas colony to be settled and developed for the benefit of the motherland. From the outset, and through its near 600 year history, Madeira’s economy and society have played a part in and been dependent on emergent global systems. read more…

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 25 January

2009 will be marked by the usual crop of anniversaries. Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 200 hundred years since the death of Tom Paine, forty years since Woodstock, and on a micro-scale, thirty years since my first visit to India. A life-changing event for me, as it turned out.

Like so many critical turning points, it came about by accident. read more…

From The Nation:

MOST VALUABLE PROGRESSIVES OF 2008:
MOST VALUABLE BOOK (INTERNATIONAL POLICY):
Mike Marqusee’s If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Verso)

One need not be a Zionist or an anti-Zionist to benefit from the insights contained in this remarkable memoir by Marqusee, the author of such books as Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s. The personal story is rich and exciting, ranging from the Bronx to suburbia to Pakistan, Morocco and finally London. The thinking about “what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century” is bold and innovative. No one can read this book without having his or her perspective on the Middle East, religion and the left, expanded.
- John Nichols, The Nation

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 11 January

Marching amid the 50,000 protesters in London bearing witness against the Israeli offensive on Gaza, I spotted a hand-made placard inscribed with the words of the radical Brazilian educator Paolo Freire: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” read more…

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 28 December

There is one sad, near certainty about 2009: the war in Afghanistan will grow bloodier, more brutal and more dangerous to the region as a whole. read more…