AlternativeRadio

As a kid, did you ever play "What If"? Like, what if the Kennedys, Dr. King and Malcolm X weren't gunned down in the 1960s? Like, what if the votes in Florida were counted and Al Gore won the 2000 election? What if the U.S. did not support the jihadis in Afghanistan? What if the U.S. did not invade Iraq? History, the world would have been very different. And on a personal level: what if your partner didn't take that job baking bread you never would have met? What if you got stuck in traffic and missed your job interview? You get the point. Why do things happen? Random chance events can divert our lives and change everything. Social scientist Brian Klaas examines this phenomenon and the chaos it can sow. Recorded at Carleton College.

Fascism is being mentioned more and more in the context of U.S. and European elections. It is a term that is bandied about often rather loosely. Orwell wrote that it is understood to be "something not desirable." But it is a complex political and economic synergy that has racism, force and nationalism as its animating matrix. It involves heavy doses of propaganda and media manipulation. Mussolini, in one of his more honest moments said, "Fascism should be more properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." For Americans it is universally associated with despotic regimes in other countries. It can't happen here. Huey Long, the self-styled populist governor of Louisiana, once warned, "If fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag."

Barbara Ehrenreich was a renowned social critic, journalist, feminist and author. She was born in Butte, Montana and studied chemistry at Reed College in Oregon and later received a Ph.D. in cellular immunology at Rockefeller University in New York. But she left a possible career in science and teaching to become a seasoned muckraker in the tradition of Ida B. Wells and Lincoln Steffens. She wrote many books. Her articles appeared in Ms., Mother Jones, and The Progressive. She wrote incisively and with compassion about working people and the hardships they endure. To write about the underclass she went undercover and took low-wage jobs such as hotel maid, cleaning houses, nursing home aide and waitressing. Through her work, she made the invisible working poor visible. She was long active in the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America. In 2012 she founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, seeking to place the crisis of poverty and economic insecurity at the center of the national political conversation. Her best-known book Nickel and Dimed, a classic in social justice literature, has sold millions of copies. She passed away on September 1, 2022. Katha Pollitt in The Nation wrote “Barbara accomplished so much, but what I love most about her work is that it was never boilerplate. She always found a way to take her argument to a deeper level. And there was always empathy—for the people who are overlooked, whose struggles are disregarded, who have to fight for food and shelter and a halfway decent life, for every shred of dignity and recognition.”

The back story in journalism and scholarship uncovers vital information on important issues that had been obscured or omitted. For example, the origin of Zionism is usually traced to a pamphlet Theodor Herzl wrote in 1896 called The Jewish State. However, the eminent Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe writes "Many people do not know that Zionism began as an evangelical Christian project long before any Jew was thinking about Zionism. Christian Zionists were advocating the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine knowing very well that there were other people living there” but thought that the creation of a Jewish state would not only advance British imperial interests but also “precipitate the second coming of the Messiah.” Recorded at the University of Massachusetts.

The United States is moving toward a multiracial society. But that demographic development has sparked an authoritarian political backlash. Powerful forces like things just the way they are. Our political system makes the U.S. vulnerable to minority rule. Perhaps the most undemocratic mechanism enabling minority rule is the antiquated Electoral College. No other country has one. The Electoral College has given the presidency to a candidate that received fewer votes multiple times. Most recently, in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. It almost happened again in 2020 where a shift of a few thousand votes would have given the White House to Trump even though Joe Biden got seven million more votes. Recorded at the University of Notre Dame.

In Sanskrit, Maya means illusion or magic. Maya is at work among people and nations who project carefully crafted positive images of themselves. The U.S. and Israel are no different from other countries. They claim self-defense as they launch massive attacks. They invoke international law when it suits them then ignore it when it doesn’t. Then there’s always the standard line about our so-called values which justifies their actions. Most people don’t have a clue about Israel-Palestine because they depend on heavily biased corporate news. Instead, they cling to shopworn myths and fantasies about themselves and their country. The Gaza bloodbath is enabled by the U.S. Are we “good Germans” pretending not to see? Recorded at the Chinook Center.

The rise of AI, artificial intelligence, is a major development in human history. Its ramifications are profound. What is it exactly? AI provides a computer program with the ability to think and learn on its own. It is a simulation of human intelligence into machines to do things that normally humans do. A government advisory committee states that the emergence of AI as a dominant technological force has brought with it a wave of transformative possibilities for society ranging from medical breakthroughs to driverless cars to greater efficiency. However, potential dangers posed by unregulated AI range from biases in decision-making algorithms to massive unemployment, deep fakes, privacy issues, abuse of civil liberties, and even global security. AI is a classic double-edged sword, a mix of promise and peril. Recorded at King's College.

Holocaust, derived from the Greek, is a large-scale calamity involving fire. Today, the term is specifically used to describe the German genocide of the Jews. But it has a long history. The European mass murder of Indigenous peoples in North and South America killed 55 million or 90% of the population, between 1492 and 1600, in a little more than one hundred years. More bloodbaths were to follow. In Africa, many millions were killed in the Congo by Belgium. Germany wiped out the Herero and Nama peoples in Southwest Africa. In the Middle East, that was quickly followed by the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians. Then came Auschwitz. Since the end of World War Two, barbarisms and genocides have continued: in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar and Gaza. Naomi Klein says, “The Nazi Holocaust is finally being placed in history connected to the terrors that came before and after.” Recorded at Swarthmore College.

Guns, Guns, Guns. In the United States gun violence and shootings in schools, supermarkets, and malls are widespread and have almost become routine. The country is flooded with weapons. Americans may be the most heavily armed people on earth. Fascination with guns has its roots in the American Revolution when notions of patriotism fused with a belief in white male supremacy and maintaining racial and gender hierarchies. It’s patriotic to possess a gun. The corpses keep piling up and the rulers do little to ameliorate the situation beyond mouthing platitudes such as “our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims.” It’s astonishing that a country with so many gun-related deaths does not enact meaningful regulation. Recorded at the University of Oregon.

Gaza’s 2 million plus Palestinians are jam-packed in a small narrow enclave bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt and Israel. Since 2007 it has been ruled by Hamas. Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Israel immediately imposed a blockade. Since then, Gaza has routinely been called the world’s largest open-air prison. Its air, land and sea routes are controlled by Israel. On October 7th, Hamas attacked Israel resulting in over 1,100 Israelis dead and the taking of several hundred hostages. Israel, with one of the world’s most advanced militaries, responded. Today, Gaza is in ruins. Palestinians have been killed and wounded in the tens of thousands. It has become, the UN says, “a graveyard.” How did this catastrophic situation develop? How did Gaza become Gaza?