The April B-List

Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the briarpatch.

Get the B-List in your inbox: go to www.briarpatchmagazine.com and scroll down the right-hand column.

1. Shakespeare and War
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
March 31, 2007

The wasteland and anarchy of Iraq in the aftermath of our illegal 2003 invasion is reflected in so many of Shakespeare’s plays that one can move effortlessly between the tragedies and the histories to read of present-day civil war Baghdad.

2. The militarization of Canadian culture
By Murray Dobbin
Rabble.ca
April 10, 2007

What we are doing in Afghanistan is unsupportable. But what we are doing to ourselves is not so obvious. As long as we stay in Afghanistan, we are corrupting our political culture.

3. What is Stephen Harper reading?
By Yann Martel
whatisstephenharperreading.ca
April 14, 2007

For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website.

The story behind the website:
http://whatisstephenharperreading.ca/the_story_behind_this_website.html

4. A Very Canadian Coup d’état in Haiti
By Richard Saunders et al.
Press for Conversion!
March 2007

This 50-page issue of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade’s magazine, Press for Conversion!, exposes ten ways in which Canada’s Liberal government was deeply complicit in aiding and abetting the 2004 coup d’état in Haiti that ousted President Aristide’s democratically-elected government and supporting the illegal, coup-installed regime that was responsible for the two-year, human-rights catastrophe that followed.

5. The Baghdad gulag
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
April 14, 2007

In the last chapter of my book Globalistan — titled “Condofornia vs Slumistan” — I argue that the future now revolves around the tension between gated communities and unruly slums, “secure environments” and black waves of anger. Wherever both meet — from Baghdad to Sao Paulo — we may see endless replays of Black Hawk Down.

The Baghdad gulag is a Pentagon-enforced Condofornia imposed over an Arab Slumistan. Let no one be fooled: it’s being conducted as a technical experiment, with live Iraqis as guinea pigs, and is bound to be replicated in other areas of the Pentagon-created “arc of instability” from the Andes to the Horn of Africa to Arabia to Central Asia.

6. So it went: Kurt Vonnegut was a writer for our times
By Ian Williams
The Guardian
April 12, 2007

Endlessly inventive, Vonnegut is often accused of practicing black humour. That is unfair. His sweet and sour humour was defensively cynical about the world, but relentlessly optimistic about human decency.

7. Insurgent American’s 35-Point Practical Guide for Action
By Stan Goff et al.
InsurgentAmerican.net
February 2007

It’s easy enough for any of us to say, “Stop lamenting this reality, and do something.” But we need to have some idea what to do.

We exist to promote a fundamental transformation of the power relations within our society. Most folks agree that this is needed.

Anyone can commit to this vision, and anyone can actively work to bring it about. And it doesn’t require capering around with a gun, dressed up like Che Guevara, or issuing long-winded manifestos. There are small, relatively do-able steps anyone can take that accumulate into bigger steps, then qualitative leaps.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
–Dave Oswald Mitchell