Similar Posts

The Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal – Bob Pollin
UMass Amherst professor and PERI Co-Director Robert Pollin discuss his latest book that he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, about the Global Green New Deal and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in addressing the climate crisis. Hosted by Rob Johnson on his podcast Economics and Beyond.

America’s Twisted Iran Policy – Barbara Slavin
The Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), which the United States was a signatory to but abandoned under former President Trump, is unlikely to be revived. Barbara Slavin, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center and journalist with extensive experience reporting from Iran, underscores Iran’s desperate need for sanctions relief. She argues that the JCPOA is an outdated framework, given President Biden’s refusal to sign an executive order to bring the U.S. back into the deal, and that current twisted American foreign policy greenlights Israel’s maniacal plans to target Iran.

Biden Not Phasing Out Fossil Fuel, Relies on Carbon Capture – Robert Pollin
While better than Trump’s climate denial, a review of the Biden climate plan reveals an over reliance on unproven carbon capture and far too limited investment in solar and wind. Biden positions the plan as part of rivalry with China instead of climate cooperation. Bob Pollin joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Is Biden Risking War by Pushing Taiwan Independence? – Larry Wilkerson
With Biden increasingly treating Taiwan as an independent country, is he provoking a military response from China that could go nuclear? Larry Wilkerson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news.

What U.S. Foreign Policy and Pro Wrestling Have in Common – Paul Jay
On the Last Minute Wrestling podcast, Paul Jay discusses the situation in Ukraine and his film “Hitman Hart, Wrestling with Shadows”.

The Occupation of the American Mind – RAI with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters (pt 3/3)
This is an episode of Reality Asserts Itself, produced on March 23, 2016. Paul Jay speaks to Roger Waters and Sut Jhally about the new film “The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States.”
Have long enjoyed Gerald’s analysis. But it was only with this interview that I realized how exciting and profound a scholar he is.
This has been a very interesting analysis. Notice that this is written in the past tense. Now if I wrote, “This is an interesting analysis” it takes on a whole different meaning. Same idea with the writing of history when the historian draws a line between the past and the present. The past is portrayed as radically different than the present and there’s an invisible barrier that can never be crossed because the past is gone forever and never to be lived again by anyone. Then what is history? If you look at the classical historians they were the ones that wrote a grand story of an event that took place in the past and wrote the story to be read in the present. Much of it was written as a tall tale and if read today might be considered a work of fantasy, even a made up fiction. But somehow it’s believed to be true enough to be considered that it really happened. Even if there’s a giant and a three headed monster involved in the narrative. So the question becomes what are the facts in the history so there is truth behind the story? This is where stuff gets tricky because someone might ask, “What really is a fact?”
I don’t mean to sound tedious but history has been written the old way, the grand narrative way, for more than 3000 years and it’s not until we get to the last couple of hundred years that history starts to concern itself with uncovering the facts behind any truth. So when a historian goes to an archive and starts looking at accounting records and finds records about the slave trade then slavery becomes a fact. It really took place. There are records available and are even viewable on google scholar that illustrate slavery happening in real time. Now why did slavery take place? One approach would be to say that slavery became an economic necessity because there was a scarcity of labor in the new world. This might be true but does it really explain slavery? It’s not until you start looking at the belief of race, quite the vogue expression in the 19th century, and a desire to explain slavery as it stood back in the 1850s, that you find one dominant group, namely the southern white slave holders, considering themselves superior over blacks because of their race and running an entire economic system in the south through slavery.
If the writing of history is pushed back to the grand narrative event form then there will be a history that will be less true, more fantasy like, and more twisted to fit a mould created to deceive people. In this situation history will become just plain old bullshit. But if you want a real history you have to have facts to make it up, dress it up, take it out on a night on the town, and come home on the Mail Wagon at the crack of dawn.
Whereas Nietzsche elsewhere lamented a lack of historical perspective, he also compared the historian to the crab: he looks backward so long he begins to think backward too. In the interest of simplification it seems to me you are taking the history as more than it need be to the point it confuses. Or confuses your comment because I’m not quite sure what your point is. I’m not so sure Tacitus didn’t employ facts in his histories. And Howard Zinn made clear who makes real history: the collective actions of ordinary people and their quest for justice.