The Anti-Empire Project in 2020 and 2021
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2020 has been a hell of a year
It’s been made more tolerable by connecting with you this way - and by hearing from you. If you’ve just signed up, welcome - you can probably tell that these mailings aren’t all that frequent; I am working towards doing something more regular in 2021.
I won’t give you a summary of what’s been happening out in the world - this is just one email after all. But I’ll review what’s been happening with the Anti-Empire Project in 2020. In fact, 2020 is when I changed the name of my blog, podcast, etc. to the AEP. The name change was helpful in focusing on what I’d been trying to do all along, and also gave me a way to invite others into the project.
At the end of 2019, Fernwood/Roseway published my thriller about a group of heroes breaking the siege on Gaza, Siegebreakers. Queen Mob’s Teahouse published my short story, Under the Mountain, about people in Kashmir coping with the intensification of the siege there. In 2020, when I started under the new name, I self-published a novella about someone gradually learning about leftism, The Path of the Unarmed, on Wattpad.
In 2020 my new book, America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo, came out. I’ve been really happy with the responses so far and I’ve had some great conversations and generous reviews. So far I’ve talked about the book with George Galloway on RT Sputnik; and with Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman on By Any Means Necessary;with Netfa Freeman on Voices with Vision; with Joe Emersberger on Counterpunch; The book has been reviewed by Ann Garrison on Black Agenda Report.As well as by Jeremy Kuzmarov in Covert Action Magazine. It’s a long book, with a lot of history and a lot of detail, so you may not have read it yet. I am hoping to change the way Rwanda and the DRC are talked about, so I am hoping that the book keeps rippling out there.
Other writing in 2020: I continued writing for the Independent Media Institute as a Globetrotter fellow, including two pieces about the past and present of policing. I’ve tried harder than in the past to bring the Anti-Empire Project concept to these writings - making them more historically informed and showing continuities in imperial policy from the more overt imperialist era.
The Policing System is Rooted in the Colonial Past Oct 20, 2020
Can we address that British eugenics scandal? Sept 11, 2020
Policing is irrelevant for public safety – here are some alternatives June 19, 2020
Economists’ solutions to health crises can be disastrous March 28, 2020
The people of Colombia are cracking up the walls of war and authoritarianism January 29, 2020
Then there’s been a whole lot of podcasting! I was part of the launch of the Brief Podcast and kept up as a co-host until my work schedule changed. At that point, I started working with a retiree who luckily flexibility - my old history teacher Dave Power, on the Civilizations Series. I don’t know how much you are enjoying it, but I am absolutely loving the research and the chance (and the requirement) of going over the history I learned and filling in the gaps of things I never learned and always meant to. The regular podcast has continued too, and we’ve continued to cover Venezuela, India, Pakistan, Yemen, Haiti — just scrolling back over recent 2020 episodes. Expect more Civilizations, more regular guests and more special correspondents on the Anti-Empire Project as well, in 2021.
Speaking of research, I wanted to mention a few of the sources that I’ve discovered and gravitated towards over the course of 2020 - I’d call them anti-empire projects. You all probably know that Chomsky is a foundation stone for this project. I’ve discovered a couple of other foundation stones - two I only recently found, Domenico Losurdo and Bernard Magubane, and another that I had no excuse for not reading until now, W.E.B. Du Bois. I also read all 2000 pages of Amaresh Misra’s War of Civilizations: India AD 1857, in 2020; discovered Sina Rahmani’s The East is a Podcast, got myself on the Qiao Collective and Dong Feng Collective mailing lists to learn more about China, and most recently Indi Samarajiva. The pre-2020 discoveries that I continued to follow closely: The Yellowhead Institute, Caitlin Johnstone, The Grayzone, are among the daily media roundup.
My views of social media and how to use it have been changing (they’re always changing, but I thought I’d share). I realized that I have gravitated entirely away from “debating” with others online. Others (I think Chomsky included) have said that “debating” is not a very good structure. You’re basically locked in a position yourself, and then you try to assert it against someone else. The reason I don’t like to do this these days is because if I’ve already convinced myself of something, and settled the question, I want to spend my time reading and studying something else, something I haven’t settled. I don’t want to try to hammer someone who clearly disagrees with my own zeal. I do, however, want to share what I’ve learned with people who do - which is why I’ve been thinking more and more about educational resources (like Civilizations, which we see as a resource for history teachers as well as students), pedagogy, writing in different media. In 2020 I was briefly banned (maybe by twitter mistake) from twitter and it reminded me of how precarious we all are on these corporate platforms, and how undignified it is to beg twitter or facebook or youtube to reinstate us. There is Mastodon and Planetary out there, which appear to be great alternatives, but there is a lot of thinking to be done about what can be achieved on a corporate internet and within increasingly corporatized educational institutions. Hope to think with you all about this in 2021 as well.
In 2021 our (Joe Emersberger and my) new book, Extraordinary Threat, about 20 years of US coup attempts against Venezuela, will come out with Monthly Review Press. I’m planning to do some extensive guides to key issues on the blog, and more writing of the type you would imagine. If there are things you’d like to see the AEP do in 2021, please let me know! I’d love to hear.
We lost many people to the pandemic and, really, to imperialism as well, in 2020. We salute them and fight on in 2021. Let me know how you’re doing.
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