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…
Review of A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Vilage in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo
The Independent
24 October, 2008
Suze Rotolo has waited a long time to tell her side of the Bob Dylan story. “My instinct was to protect my privacy, and consequently his.” Despite her reticence, over the decades she’s become a central figure in the Dylan legend, and for good reason. read more…
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 21 September
Wherever there are inequalities, there will be no shortage of people rationalising or defending them. That’s easily explicable. Those who benefit from inequalities enjoy, by definition, greater resources and greater access to the public ear and eye. What’s sad for me is that blunt defenders of equality – not equality before the law or equality of opportunity, but practical, material equality – are these days so few and so muted. read more…
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 7 September
It’s a paradox. Barack Obama’s candidacy is hailed as “historic” for the very sound reason that he is the first African-American to become the presidential nominee of a major party. In a country whose history is permeated by race, that’s clearly a significant event, at the least a huge symbolic breakthrough. Yet in his widely praised acceptance speech Obama made no reference at all to race or to the history that made the occasion “historic”. read more…
You can hear Mike talk about If I Am Not for Myself on Against the Grain on KPFA (Berkeley, California), broadcast on July 1, 2008.
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 15 June 2008
Four years after it was stolen by masked gunmen in broad daylight, and two years after it was recovered in still undisclosed circumstances, The Scream has gone back on display at the Munch Museum in Oslo.
The Scream is one of the world’s most well known and widely reproduced painted images and its return to the pubic gaze is being properly celebrated. Nonetheless, as I examined the merchandise on sale at this remarkable museum – the tee-shirts, coffee mugs, mousepads, all adorned with the familiar image – I couldn’t help but feel that in this case familiarity has bred an alienating fog. The shock of the image has dissipated.
read more…
On The Book Depository website, Mike has listed and commented on his (provisional) “Top Ten” books.
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 1st June
“This is the end of political correctness in London,” exulted a Conservative as newly elected Mayor Boris Johnson entered city hall.
Nearly a month after the polls closed, it is still an extraordinary thought that London, of all places, is to be represented in the eyes of the world by a man like Johnson. read more…
New Humanist, May-June 2008
Israel’s 60th birthday is being celebrated lavishly in Britain. The programme includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades in London and Manchester.
Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they are seeking to remind the world of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948. read more…
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 4 May
Reading some English commentators on the Indian Premier League, you’d think it was the end of civilisation as we know it. For years there’s been a steady undercurrent of resentment at the expanding influence of India in world cricket. Now, with the IPL threatening to undermine the English domestic season, it’s grown to a chorus of dismay. The verities of cricket seem to be dissolving in the whirlwind of the global marketplace.
read more…
Mukul Kesevan reviews If I Am Not for Myself
B I B L I O, March-April 2 0 0 8
Mike Marqusee’s range as a writer is prodigious. The first book of his that I read was Anyone But England, a brilliant materialist history of cricket in England, one of the best books ever written on the game. I remember thinking then, how extraordinary it was to be informed about a game I had loved all my life, by an American who had grown up in the cricketing wilderness of suburban New York and who had only first encountered the game as an adult in England. And an American Marxist at that! It seemed beyond strange.
Marqusee has since then written studies of Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali in the frame of the 1960s and this book, as the title suggests, sets his own life in the embattled context of Jewish anti-Zionism. read more…
Outlook (India), 19 April
The International Olympic Committee is hoist on its own petard. On the one hand, it insists that politics and sport must be kept separate. On the other, it relies entirely on cooperation with governments to stage its quadrennial show. So keeping politics out of sport ends up meaning keeping whatever is politically inconvenient (especially to the host nation) out of sport.
It’s been that way since at least 1936, when the IOC persisted in holding the Olympics in Nazi Germany, in defiance of an international call for a boycott. read more…
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 19 April
Despite an average of 40 violent deaths a day in recent weeks, Iraq, the British Home office insists, is a safe place. Accordingly, 1,400 Iraqi asylum seekers have received letters informing them that they must return home or face homelessness and destitution in Britain. Those who agree to go back will be required to sign a waiver accepting that the U.K. government bears no responsibility for what happens to them or their families after their return. read more…
