Washington Babylon

Paul Buhle is a prolific historian and comic art editor. He is co-founder of the Oral History of the American Left. Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is an activist, former farmer, writer, and host of the Voices for Nature and Peace podcast. Please consider supporting us with as little as $1 per month via our Washington Babylon Patreon account. Every little bit helps and will keep us delivering great coverage

SUPPORT US VIA Patreon.com/DCBABYLON! Ken and Andrew speak with Prof. Marcie Smith of John Jay College, author of a pair of articles published by Nonsite about nonviolence guru Gene Sharp. Over the past 45 years, Sharp's philosophy of "revolutionary nonviolence" has become a hegemonic ideology within the various protest movements. But as Dr. Smith shows in her scholarship, Sharp was also a significant Cold War ideologue whose philosophy is more synoptic with neoliberalism than traditional radical Left praxis, be it Marxism, Leninism, or anarchism. Sharpian nonviolence has dominated the methods and strategies of protest, discouraging radicals to engage in taking state power, precisely at the moment when reactionary forces have waged a successful campaign to take control of government so to demolish the welfare state created during the New Deal to Great Society governing coalitions.

This week, Ken and Andrew speak with Dr. Micheal Meeropol, an economics and history professor with a long history of engagement in racial justice activism. His birth parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were political prisoners executed by the state, and his adoptive parents, Abel and Anne Meeropol, were progressive songwriters, with Abel authoring Billie Holiday's classic anti-lynching ballad "Strange Fruit." Andrew also has a brief conversation with Dr. Johnny Eric Williams about the spike of anti-racism book sales charted by the New York Times Bestseller List. And is that Unrepentant Marxist Louis Proyect making a cameo?

This week we bring you the one and only Noam Chomsky! We discuss the Sanders campaign, the current political landscape, hopes for the future, internationalism, and more!

This week Andrew and Sam Husseini discuss Vote Pact, a voter organizing strategy that offers a small-d democratic third option which both negates the spoiler accusation and is not a form of vote swapping.

First we talk with prolific historian Dr. Gerald Horne about the 1619 Project and a recent bizarre rebuke to the project featuring a coterie of Ivy League scholars who clearly have nothing better to do, The Wall Street Journal, and the ultra-bonkers Trotskyist World Socialist Website. Next up, we are syndicating here an older interview Andrew recorded in 2016 with the Providence-based union organizer and civil rights activist Mike Arajo where he speaks about the life of his boxer father George, a legend in New England African American sports.

This week, Ken and Andrew speak with radical anti-ICE organizer Sherrie André, who is going to trial on January 7th, 2020 for blockading the entrance to a Massachusetts ICE detention facility in August 2018. Here’s how else you can support Sherrie: Register if you are planning to attend the trialSign this letter of support for SherrieDonate to help cover the logistical and legal costs of the trialJoin FANG’s Shut Down ICE campaignRead more about the trial and the action that Sherrie was arrested at Note: Permission is hereby granted for other media outlets to syndicate and/or extract clips of this interview for their own purposes with proper accreditation granted.

Johnny E. Williams is the author of African-American Religion and the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas (University Press of Mississippi 2003) and Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics (Lexington Books 2016). The former book examines the role of religious culture in motivating civil rights protest among African-Americans while the latter investigates the  complex role racialized culture plays in delimiting how genome researchers think about human genetic variation. He is the author of  numerous articles examining culture’s role in politics, social movement mobilization and scientific knowledge production.

Since October 2019, filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have been making it known in the press their disdain for Marvel Comics superhero films and how they are impacting the film industry. With all this going on we decided to syndicate our interview from last year with Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs, a professor of mass communication and print journalism whose most brilliant book Marvel’s Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography, From Stan Lee to Ta-Nehisi Coates, available from Diasporic Africa Press, is one that we cannot recommend enough. Originally recorded when longtime Marvel creator and editor Stan Lee passed away, the conversation quickly embraced the wider history of Marvel and its brand of Cold War liberalism.

This week, we sit down for an extended conversation with Dr. Anthony Monteiro about our contemporary domestic and foreign politics. Monteiro brings to his analysis a lens informed by the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the finest philosophers of the last century. Venezuela, China, Tulsi Gabbard, Russia, all this and more for listeners to think about!