CounterVortex Podcast

In Episode 28 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg advances a progressive and anti-Zionist critique of Rep Ilhan Omar's controversial comments, which have posed the problem of US support for Israel in terms of "allegiance to a foreign country" -- the nationalist and xenophobic language of our enemies. As a Somali-American woman in a hijab, Omar is ultimately legitimizing reactionary forces that threaten her with the use of such nationalist rhetoric. As the massacres of Christchurch and Pittsburgh all too clearly demonstrate, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are fundamentally unified concerns -- and the way Jews and Muslims have been pitted against each other by the propaganda system is part of the pathology. Contrary to the canard of "dual loyalty," Weinberg declares himself a "zero-loyalist," repudiating both Zionism and America-first nationalism, calling for an anti-Zionism based on solidarity with the Palestinians, not "allegiance" to the imperial state. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

$30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are

currently up to $20.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 28 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes with trepidation Google’s plans to develop a censored search engine for China, and thereby be allowed back through the Great Firewall to access the world's largest market. But the next and more sinister step is imposing China's draconian standards for control of information on all Internet users, worldwide. Harbingers of this are already seen in Facebook's censorship of the Tibetan struggle, and of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey, as well as initiatives to suppress footage of Israeli war crimes. While protesting these moves is imperative, the potential for such abuses in inherent to the technology—and this, ultimately, is a deeper and more complex problem that also urgently demands a critique. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Tonkha" by Tenzin Choegyal

https://tenzinchoegyal.bandcamp.com/album/heart-strings

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

$30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are

currently up to $20.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 27 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Eben Egbe and Amy Dalton of the Global Initiative to end the Cameroons Colonial Conflict (Gi3C), who discuss the independence struggle in Ambazonia—a territory that was illegally annexed by Cameroon following the end of colonial rule in 1960. The past year has seen a terrible increase in state terror in Ambazonia from the French-backed neo-colonial Cameroon authorities, with protesters fired upon by helicopter gunships, and finally villages burned by military forces, sending the residents fleeing into the bush. Some 246,000 people have been internally displaced, with a further 20,000 having crossed the border into Nigeria as refugees. Cameroon also receives military aid from the US, ostensibly for the fight against Boko Haram in the north of the country—but this same military is now being unleashed against the civilian populace in the unrelated conflict in Ambazonia in the south. The Gi3C has issued an urgent call for the UN Human Rights Council, which convenes for its 40th annual meeting this week in Geneva, to send a fact-finding delegation to the region. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Ekongha Ya", traditional wedding song in Bayang language, by Etando Moh Manyu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICV9Cv9h5HM

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $19.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 26 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes contradictions and complexities in two world crises depicted in polarized terms by left, right and center alike. The indigenous Tatar people of Crimea, their autonomy and rights abrogated by the illegal Russian occupation, have been drawn into an alliance with Ukraine's ultra-nationalist Right Sector based on their mutual opposition to Putin's annexation of the peninsula. Ukrainian anarchists are meanwhile facing repression for their opposition to Right Sector. Putin, who is cracking down on Russian anarchists who oppose his own ultra-nationalist imperial agenda, has just sent a detachment of Cossack mercenaries to Venezuela to serve as a Praetorian Guard for the embattled Nicolás Maduro. In addition to being opposed by the right-wing pretender Juan Guaidó, Maduro also faces a challenge from an independent left that rejects his undemocratic rule as well as US imperial designs on Venezuela. Indigenous peoples such as the Pemón of the Orinoco Basin are also mounting resistance to extractive designs on their territory—regardless of who holds power in Caracas. Can anarchists and the independent left in Ukraine, Russia and Venezuela unite with indigenous peoples such as the Tatars and Pemón to defend freedom and autonomy, and repudiate reactionaries and imperialists on all sides? Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Erratum: Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela in 1999, not "about 12 years ago."

Music: "Bitter Life/Banish Misfortune (Lirnyk Medley)" by Julian Kytasty

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/julian-kytasty-mn0000257615

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $13.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 25 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg protests that he has now been deprived of phone and Internet access by Verizon for more than two months, and discusses the greater social implications of this dilemma. Donald Trump, who is a fascist by any reasonable definition, has now shut down the federal government and is threatening to declare a national emergency in order to build his border wall. Not only has lack of other net access at this critical moment forced Weinberg to use a cell phone in order to have any effectiveness as a writer and activist, but cellular technology is itself inherently abetting the descent into fascism. Not only does it create a totalizing propaganda environment, but it is degrading our attention spans, literacy and critical thinking skills. It also creates a totalizing surveillance environment that can ultimately be exploited by government as well as private interests. But we accept it in the name of "convenience" and the illusions of consumer "choice," and few even recognize technological "progress" (note: propaganda word) as something that needs to be resisted. This emerging dystopia combines the worst aspects of George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: we are complicit in the extinguishing of our own freedom because we have been conditioned. Weinberg calls for practical action to slow (at least) the totalizing aspect of this dystopia: keeping alive space for the print world and the meat world, and demanding that Verizon and other service providers maintain landline infrastructure. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Erratum: The New York Assembly member who hosted the community meeting of irate Manhattan landline users is Deborah Glick, not "Carolyn" Glick. (Sorry, Deb.)

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $13.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 24 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the historic strides toward liberation of the cannabis plant in 2018, from the fabled four corners of the Earth. Yet under the capitalist system, every advance also opens new contradictions. With the rise of "corporate cannabis," traditional small growers in places like California's Emerald Triangle stand to be pushed off the market as Central Valley agribusiness gets in on the act. Burdensome regulations and heavy taxation have kept some growers on the black market—and big police raids in the Emerald Triangle have continued even after "legalization." High taxes on cannabis have also actually closed the legal space for California's "compassionate care" providers—those who make free or discounted medical marijuana available to the ailing. There are concerns about the corporate privatization of ancient cannabis landraces long grown by small cultivators around the world. Meanwhile, even as overall cannabis arrests have dropped under more tolerant laws and enforcement policies in many states and localities, the racial disparity in those arrests that continue (e.g. for public use) is unabated. In a positive development, California has passed a "cannabis equity" law to address such concerns. But even the federal Farm Bill that just legalized industrial hemp and cannabinoids derived from it irrationally keeps cannabinoids derived from "marijuana" (high-THC strains) illegal. Weinberg calls for challenging the "marijuana" stigma, recognizing that cannabis liberation is an urgent question of human rights and racial justice, and adopting a stance of permanent struggle in fighting for it. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "La Cucaracha" by our very own Bill Weinberg

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $13.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 23 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the assassination of Raed Fares, a courageous voice of the civil resistance in besieged Idlib province, last remaining stronghold of the Syrian Revolution. The resistance in Idlib, which liberated the territory from the Bashar Assad regime in popular uprisings seven years ago, is now also resisting the jihadist forces in the province, expelling them from their self-governing towns and villages. Their hard-won zones of popular democracy face extermination if this last stronghold is invaded by Assad and his Russian backers. As Assad and Putin threaten Idlib, Trump's announced withdrawal of the 2,000 US troops embedded with Kurdish forces in Syria's northeast is a "green light" to Turkey to attack Rojava, the anarchist-inspired Kurdish autonomous zone. The two last pockets of democratic self-rule in Syria are each now gravely threatened. Yet with Turkey posing as protector of Idlib, the Arab revolutionary forces there have been pitted against the Kurds. The Free Syrian Army and Rojava Kurds were briefly allied against ISIS and Assad alike four years ago, before they were played against each other by imperial intrigues. Can this alliance be rebuilt, in repudiation of the foreign powers now seeking to carve up Syria? Or will the US withdrawal merely spark an Arab-Kurdish ethnic war in northern Syria? Weinberg calls for activists in the West to repudiate the imperial divide-and-rule stratagems, and demand the survival of liberated Idlib and Rojava alike. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Idlib (The Revolution Lives)" by Dylan Connor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5I9Bj2ouLk

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $13.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 22 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg rants in anguish about how he has been deprived of phone and Internet access by Verizon's cynical design to let its copper network deteriorate and impose the transition to cellular, fiber and wireless on consumers against their will. There is no reason to believe this outage will be temporary. The illusions of freedom of choice and communications convenience has left the CounterVortex editor and main ranter with no choice and no ability to communicate -- or to produce the journalism he needs to daily produce to make a living. Weinberg contends that his right to work -- guaranteed by Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- is being violated with impunity. Verizon is in violation of international law, as well as New York state law. Weinberg calls upon the New York Public Service Commission to enforce the law on Verizon. He also calls upon the New York Public Utility Law Project to reach out to metro-area consumers similarly left without land-line service, and organize a class-action lawsuit against Verizon. Much more ambitiously, he calls for a public expropriation of Verizon, and the redirection of its technology, infrastructure and capital toward serving the social good rather than private profit. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: none for this episode (that's part of the point)

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $17.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 21 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg rants in anguish about how he has been forced by market and technological forces beyond his control into the same matrix of digital media that is fast eroding the very concept of truth and lubricating the consolidation of a fascist order in the United States and the world. In the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, Weinberg documents Trump's complicity and virtual green-lighting of the attack, and calls out his rote condemnation as rank hypocrisy. From the wave of hate unleashed immediately upon his inauguration through the "false flag" theory he floated about the MAGA-bomber, Trump has played to anti-Semitism in barely veiled terms. The doublethink that now lets him get away with this blatantly disingenuous disavowal of the massacre is related to the post-truth environment fundamentally inherent to digital media.

Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $17.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 20 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses the

forgotten legacy of libertarian socialism -- considered by many today a

contradiction in terms. While the word "socialism" is suddenly viewed as

legitimate in American political discourse again for the first time in

generations, the word "libertarian" continues to be associated with the

free-market right -- despite its origins on the anarchist left. Weinberg

discusses his own involvement in New York's Libertarian Book Club -- founded

by anarchist exiles from Europe in the 1940s, to keep alive their ideals and

pass the torch to a new generation. Libertarian socialists seek inspiration in

such historical episodes as the Zapatistas in Mexico (1910-19), Makhnovists in

Ukraine (1917-21), Spanish anarchists in Catalonia (1936-7), and Zapatistas in

Mexico again (1994-date) -- peasants and workers who took back the land and

the factories, building socialism from below, without commissars or

politburos. Other movements inspired by this vision on the world stage today

include anarchist-influenced elements of Syria's civil resistance, and the

autonomous zone of northern Syria's Rojava Kurds. Weinberg argues that far

from being an irrelevant anachronism, a libertarian socialist vision is

necessary for human survival. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: Leon Rosselson's World Turned Upside Down, performed by Bill Weinberg

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $17.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.