There are some 23 topics tackled, including keeping hope and humor alive in the Time of Plague, and even afterwards if you want; the case of Julian Assange: freedom tortured; neo-fascism, but a rose is a rose even when black; communism or barbarism, the see-saw can make you seasick; digital colonialism, and other stims; the frailty of privacy, the timelines they keep: go to sleep; inter-nationalism, clowns all around; capitalism, off with their heads; technology, tech-ignorancy; love, meh; debt, still owin' after all these years; whistleblowers, and deep throats; language, and master meta; and so much circus more.
SreÄ"ko Horvat gets the festivities rolling in the introduction by citing Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard (later made into a film by Luchino Visconti), which, chronicles the struggle of the Sicilian aristocracy to survive in the face of civil war and revolution, and, essentially, reminds us that a leopard can't change its spots, and we must be alert to their maneuvers to seem to do so. As Horvat explains:
In a similar way, forced by the Covid-19 crisis, our contemporary ruling class is well aware that a deep transformation is taking place and that the only way for things to remain the same is the emergence of a new social and political arrangement that can keep them in power.
Beware any sudden humanity. A minotaur is a minotaur is a minotaur.
The Woodstock of Words continues with Vijay Prishad. Dialoguing with Horvat in "The Cost of Covid-19 Must Not Bankrupt the People," Prishad, the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, has written extensively on developing countries and neoliberalism. Most recently, Prishad edited a collection of essays on human monsters, Strongmen: Trump / Modi / ErdoÄŸan / Duterte / Putin (OR Books, 2018). He also worked with the late Howard Zinn, and the two worked together to produce The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World.
In Everything Must Change, Prishad underscores the unequal burden lower classes, everywhere, must bear in the fight to keep safe from Covid-19. In India, for example, Prishad points out that 1.4 billion people have been directed to 'self-isolate,' but that only about a third of that lot will be able to do so. He observes,
Those who don't live in slums are able to feel the claustrophobia of entering their homes and shutting the door, but much of the planet is made up of day laborers, people who rely on a daily wage, and unless we change the system, those people are going to get obliterated, not only by this virus but of course by the many viruses that put pressure on their lives.
We don't hear from these daily laborers. We'll never know how they fared during Covid-19 until some lefty mean-well dishes up, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, his account of slumming it for liberty.
Later in his conversation with Horvat, the two agree that "analysis" of the global situation is fine, but insufficient. Horvat alludes to a continental consciousness of the unrest and unpreparedness: "In many countries in Europe, a decade of austerity has ruined the public infrastructure that is so needed in this situation of crisis." They discuss Prishad's enumerated 16-point plan of action to direct vectors of force in organized and sensible directions, rather than in an anarchic, piecemeal approach, toward the People.
Horvat then converses with Noam Chomsky to talk about "Covid-19: What Is at Stake?" Chomsky is quick to deride the hoax president and knocking back notions that Trump's rally blather are like Hitler's broad rants:
It's not that he's a fascist--he doesn't have that much of an ideology, he's just a sociopath, an individual concerned with himself--but the mood and the fear is similar, and the idea that the fate of the country and the world is in the hands of a sociopathic buffoon is shocking.
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