Confronting Radicals


Book Description

New York City - the Big Apple - transformed to a ghost town, where peaceful citizens dare not tread. Macy's - symbol of American free enterprise - shut down. Rioting, looting, murder, attacks on police, destruction of monuments to American heroes in numerous American cities, all in the guise of "protests" against racism. In a year of wild insurrection, there was a disturbing, eerie silence - even words of support for rioters from leading Democrat politicians. Why justify or ignore blatant expressions of violence and hatred? Is there a broader political agenda? Could it be that thought police, Big Tech monopolies, and revisionist historians have had a role to play in all of this? The world was shocked by what seemed to be an outbreak of polarization in America, or even an attempted Marxist revolution, but Israelis were stunned by some striking parallels. As a nation of former slaves and exiles, Israel and the Jews have seen disproportionate persecution, hardship, and death, but have always emerged, from darkness to light. Furthermore, the modern State of Israel had struggled for decades with its own brand of socialism, and it continues to confront terrorist threats and propaganda warfare from radical Palestinians, along with sophisticated collusion by their supporters on the radical Left. There is, indeed, a radical plan to change the USA from a nation of traditional values - God, family, and hard work - to a neo-Marxist, gender and ethnically confused reality that sees the land of the free as an evil force in the world. What lessons can America learn from Israel - from its successes and from its mistakes? In Confronting Radicals: What America Can Learn from Israel, author David Rubin boldly identifies the critical, existential challenges facing America, and, most importantly, provides the necessary solutions, direct from the Biblical heartland of Israel.




Confronting the War Machine


Book Description

Focusing on the draft resistance movement in Boston in 1967-68, this study argues that these acts of mass civil disobedience turned the tide in the antiwar movement by drawing the Johnson administration into a confrontation with activists who were largely young, middle-class, liberal, and from suburban backgrounds--the core of Johnson's constituency.




Rules for Radicals


Book Description

“This country's leading hell-raiser" (The Nation) shares his impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.” First published in 1971 and written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.







Confronting Historical Paradigms


Book Description

Brings together broadly synthetic essays of interpretation that illuminate both the rethinking of history and paradigm that has taken place within the fields of African and Latin American history and the resonances between these fields. Three of the essay have previously been published in scholarly journals; three essays and a postscript were written expressly for this volume. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Confronting Religious Absolutism


Book Description

Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy provide the conceptual foundations of theocracy, which is to say religiously-based totalitarianism. These absolutist doctrines emerge for the very first time among the Victorians: they are not ancient beliefs at all. They appear in the 19th century, right alongside secular varieties totalitarian thought, and in response to all the same cultural anxieties. Reactionary religious leaders used these doctrines to oppose scholarly conclusions in geology and evolutionary biology. That much everyone knows. What's not as well known is the fact that their principal target was Christian-humanist biblical scholarship, an unbroken 500-year tradition of inquiry undertaken primarily by Christian clergy and seminary faculty. The alternative to faith-based totalitarianism is faith based upon the imagination, our most sophisticated cognitive skill. Faith rooted in the moral imagination does not depend upon abject deference to an array of rigid doctrines and improbable claims. Wallace contends that faith is best understood as a creative process, and religion is best understood as a multi-media art (and originally the Mother of all arts). The arts convince, they do not command. They persuade, they do not prove. The arts provide humane resources whereby we grapple with life's deepest mysteries. Symbolism, like quantum mathematics, is a tool for grappling with inescapable paradox at the heart of reality. It is an ancient strategy for articulating what we discover at the elusive mind-body interface. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }




Confronting Hitler


Book Description

The stories of the individual men and women who led German Social Democracy's failed efforts to fend off the Nazi onslaught in 1933 have largely been lost in the wake of the cataclysmic war, the Holocaust, and the division of Europe that followed Hitler's victory. Confronting Hitler recovers their stories and places them at center stage. In a series of biographical essays focusing on the experiences of ten leading Social Democratic activists, Smaldone examines their defeat in 1933 from the perspective of individuals enmeshed in political struggle. This study reveals what aspects of these activists' lives were most important in shaping their political outlook during the republic's final crisis and it illustrates the key factors that guided their actions in the effort to keep the republic alive. In addition, the biographies raise the important issue of the degree to which the defeat of German Social Democracy in 1933 is comparable to the experiences of other democratic socialist movements in the twentieth century.




Highlander


Book Description

and racial justice during a critical era in southern and Appalachian history. This volume is the first comprehensive examination of that extraordinary—and often controversial—institution. Founded in 1932 by Myles Horton and Don West near Monteagle, Tennessee, this adult education center was both a vital resource for southern radicals and a catalyst for several major movements for social change. During its thirty-year history it served as a community folk school, as a training center for southern labor and Farmers' Union members, and as a meeting place for black and white civil rights activists. As a result of the civil rights involvement, the state of Tennessee revoked the charter of the original institution in 1962. At the heart of Horton's philosophy and the Highlander program was a belief in the power of education to effect profound changes in society. By working with the knowledge the poor of Appalachia and the South had gained from their experiences, Horton and his staff expected to enable them to take control of their own lives and to solve their own problems. John M. Glen's authoritative study is more than the story of a singular school in Tennessee. It is a biography of Myles Horton, co-founder and long-time educational director of the school, whose social theories shaped its character. It is an analysis of the application of a particular idea of adult education to the problems of the South and of Appalachia. And it affords valuable insights into the history of the southern labor and the civil rights movements and of the individuals and institutions involved in them over the past five decades.




Paul Virilio Reader


Book Description

A critic of the art of technology, Paul Virilio has taught us that much media image is a strategy of war and that accident is becoming indistinguishable from attack. In these times of fierce conflict over which kind of capitalism is to take over the shrinking globe, and indeed which modernities we will live in during the twenty-first century, Paul Virilio is a significant contemporary theorist. But Virilio's work, originally published in French and stretching back to the 1950s, has until now been very difficult to access in full in English translation, available as it is in expensive little books or obscure catalogues and journals. The Paul Virilio Reader collects together for the first time readable extracts of Virilio's work from the entire range of his career. It is prefaced by an editorial introduction showing that Virilio has produced important - if controversial - 'theory at the speed of light' that can uncannily illuminate the impact of new information and communications technologies in a world which collapses time and distance as never before. Features* Extracts have been carefully selected to reflect the whole of Virilio's diverse career* A chronological ordering illustrates the development, and interconnectedness, of Virilio's work* Each extract is prefaced by a bibliographical and contextual commentary, and the book is completed by an innovative guide to reading Virilio.




Confronting American Labor


Book Description

Confronting American Labor traces the development of the American left, from the Depression era through the Cold War, by examining four representative intellectuals who grappled with the difficult question of labor's role in society. Since the time of Marx, leftists have raised over and over the question of how an intelligentsia might participate in a movement carried out by the working class. Their modus operandi was to champion those who suffered injustice at the hands of the powerful. From the late nineteenth through much of the twentieth century, this meant a focus on the industrial worker. The Great Depression was a time of remarkable consensus among leftist intellectuals, who often interpreted worker militancy as the harbinger of impending radical change. While most Americans waited out the crisis, listening to the assurances of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Marxian left was convinced that the crisis was systemic. Intellectuals who came of age during the Depression developed the view that the labor movement in America was to be the organizing base for a proletariat. Moreover, many came from working-class backgrounds that contributed to their support of labor.