POPULAR CULTURE:
COMIX ARTIST HARVEY PEKAR DIES AT 70:




A blast from the past today. One of the icons of American comix, Harvey Pekar, died today. Now it's been perhaps too many years since I was a great comics fans and collector, but Pekar's work on American Splendor sticks out in my memory. Pekar had the unique talent to make the seemingly trivial events of everyday life shine with luminous meaning. His style was, of course, not for everyone, but his concerns and subject matter were universal (or at least pertinent to the 99% of us who are neither rich, famous nor members of a cult, either religious or political). He'll be sorely missed.



I sold my first comic collection almost a quarter century ago, and have been only peripherally a fan since then. Turns out I've missed a lot, at least in terms of Pekar. Here's one of the many tributes to the man, this one from the Care2 site.
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Harvey Pekar, the Mark Twain of Comics, Dies at 70
His work has been compared to Mark Twain and Anton Chekov. Harvey Pekar, the "genius of the mundane," a neurotic, obsessive, erudite comic book writer and cultural historian died early Monday morning in Cleveland. It's a great loss to American arts and letters.

A pioneer in underground comics, Pekar brought the voices and lives of everyday people to the forefront of his work. While cranky and irascible, Pekar wrote of class concerns with empathy and clarity. His work was an equalizing force kin to Studs Terkels' oral histories (which makes it unsurprising that his last full-length work was a graphic adaptation of Terkel's Working.) As Joanna Connors of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote:

"Unlike the superheroes who ordinarily inhabit the pages of comic books, Pekar could neither leap tall buildings in a single bound, nor move faster than a speeding bullet. Yet his comics suggested a different sort of heroism: The working-class, everyman heroics of simply making it through another day, with soul -- if not dignity -- intact."

From off the streets of Cleveland...
Pekar is perhaps best known for his biographical comic American Splendor, which elegantly catalogued the unexpected pleasures and frustrations of life in Cleveland, Ohio. Pekar was a file clerk at a VA hospital by day, but wrote prolifically about jazz and literature in his off hours.

Pekar's work broke open comics as a medium that served a greater purpose sans the superheroics. They elevated daily life to something beyond humdrum--in Pekar's hands, finding the right pair of shoes for a song at the thrift store was a meditation on style and passing trends. He paved the way for future generations of independent comic artists dedicated to replicating the unsung morsels of daily life.

Top Ten
Pekar was politically outspoken, particularly about the undue influences of corporations. In the late 1980s, Pekar was a recurring guest on Late Night with David Letterman, until he became critical of General Electric on the air (GE owned NBC at the time).

Pekar worked with peace activist Heather Roberson on the book Macedonia, ultimately producing a case study about a country that, despite heavy political pressures, has never descended into war like its neighbor Kosovo. Other works include histories of the Beat poets and Students for a Democratic society.

Pekar's work merged the personal and the political in a highly accessible way. It embodies a core democratic sentiment: That all people should have access to art and politics--and that even the most unexpected sources have something to contribute to the conversation. To see some of his last works, visit The Pekar Project.


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I have already admitted that I missed a lot of Pekar's later work which if you were to judge from the above made was what originally the more or less implicit political content of his work into something quite explicit. I think that his early work, set as it was in the depressing city of Cleveland ( probably even worse than Winnipeg )and dealing only with the events of everyday life was a much needed corrective to the tendency of all opponents of the way things are to drift into a fantasy world of spectacle. There is a direct line between this concern for the ordinary person and his later efforts. Anyways, here's his obit as published in the British newspaper The Guardian.

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Harvey Pekar obituary

Harvey Pekar, who has died aged 70, was the writer of American Splendor, an autobiographical comic in which he wrote about the everyday, often mundane, aspects of his life. Pekar experimented with the narrative form and used a shifting roster of artists on his comics, but it was the sheer ordinariness of the stories that slowly earned him a strong following, critical acclaim and comparisons with Chekhov and Dostoevsky.

Set in the rundown neighbourhoods of Cleveland, Ohio, American Splendor's world was revealed without exaggeration or self-aggrandisement. Pekar, opinionated and curmudgeonly, was often the most frustrating and aggravating character to appear in his books. The writer became a regular guest on the talkshow Late Night With David Letterman, but his confrontational style led to him being banned from it.

In 1990, Pekar was diagnosed with lymphoma and underwent chemotherapy. Heavy medication led to hallucinations and occasional paralysis, but the cancer went into remission. His wife, Joyce Brabner, kept detailed notes during this period and collaborated with him on Our Cancer Year (1994), an unflinching account of their relationship, illustrated by Frank Stack.

Our Cancer Year was central to the 2003 movie American Splendor, directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, and starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar and Hope Davis as Brabner. Pekar and Brabner also appeared as themselves in the film, which won major prizes at the Sundance and Cannes festivals.

When asked in an interview whether he thought the film was an accurate account of his life, Pekar replied: "I don't know what's normal because I don't see too many movies ... but yeah, it felt right. It felt true." Not surprisingly, he gave his own account of the film-making process in his 2004 collection, American Splendor: Our Movie Year.

Born in Cleveland, he was the eldest son of Saul and Dora Pekar, Polish Jews who had recently moved to the US from Białystok. Pekar grew up in a working-class neighbourhood, where his father ran a grocery store. After graduating from Shaker Heights high school in 1957, he held down a series of short-lived jobs, including stints as a janitor and an elevator operator.

He attended Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland but dropped out after a year. He was also briefly in the navy – as he later recounted in his 2005 comic, The Quitter, drawn by Dean Haspiel. In 1965 he settled into a dull but stable job as a clerk at a Veterans Affairs medical centre in Cleveland, where he remained until his retirement in 2001.

Pekar had read comic books from the age of six but lost interest in them after a few years because he found the stories cliched and repetitive. In 1959 he began writing jazz reviews for magazines. His interest in comics was rekindled in 1962 when he met the 19-year-old artist Robert Crumb.

Crumb was already involved in the nascent "comix" scene of artists who were creating underground, counterculture strips. Pekar, although impressed by the freedom of expression offered by this new movement, felt that they concentrated on a bohemian lifestyle which he – as a wage slave – did not share.

Pekar enjoyed the directness of writers such as Henry Miller and felt that even his workaday life had its moments of humour and drama. In the early 1970s he began writing stories, using stick figures and laying out the scripts as storyboards. He showed these to Crumb, who offered to illustrate some of the stories. Their collaboration appeared in Crumb's The People's Comics in 1972 and Pekar's autobiographical tales were featured in other underground titles, including Bizarre Sex, Flaming Baloney, Snarf and Flamed-out Funnies.

In 1975 he conceived the idea of self-publishing so that he could write longer, more involved stories. Although he lost money on the first issue of American Splendor, published in 1976, later annual issues – which ran to around 60 pages – slowly found an audience. By the early 90s, American Splendor had a print run of 10,000 copies per issue.

Pekar continued to review books and records and write essays, often for the alternative press. From 1992 to 1996, he also penned a series of comic strips about jazz, drawn by Joe Sacco, for the Village Voice newspaper. Doubleday published the collection American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar in 2006. A sequel, More American Splendor, came out the following year.

American Splendor was published by Dark Horse Comics from 1994 to 2002 and Vertigo (DC Comics) from 2006 to 2008, giving Pekar the financial stability to work on other projects, including Unsung Hero (illustrated by David Collier, 2003), about the experiences in Vietnam of an African-American colleague at the VA hospital where Pekar worked.

Pekar wrote Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History (drawn by Gary Dumm, 2008) and Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation (drawn by various artists, 2009). He also contributed to The Beats: A Graphic History (various artists, 2009).

He divorced twice before marrying Joyce in 1983. The couple adopted a daughter, Danielle, in 1998. They survive him, along with his younger brother, Allen.

• Harvey Lawrence Pekar, comics writer, born 8 October 1939; died 12 July 2010
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And here is my favourite Harvey Pekar quote, taken from an interview which he gave to Walrus Comix.
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"NO… ACTUALLY, I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SELL OUT!! I mean if I KNEW how to sell out... I mean I haven’t given in to commercialism because I DON’T KNOW HOW TO give in to commercialism... If I DID, I might have done it a long time ago!! "

No doubt Harvey will find lots to grumble about in heaven. RIP.

PEOPLE:

R.I.P. HOWARD ZINN:

Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922-January 27, 2010) has passed on to that great anarcho-syndicalist commune in the sky. Very much self-educated, despite his post WW2 degrees in history, his greatest education was when, as an airman in WW2 he participated in an April 1945 napalm raid on a group of German soldiers trying to wait out the end of the war in Royan France. The raid incidentally fried a number of French civilians and had absolutely no military value beyond racking up "promotion points" for the officers who directed it. This incident set Zinn on a lifetime anti-war commitment that informed his subsequent works as a libertarian activist and historian. His most popular work was 'A People's History of the United States', but his anti-war, civil rights and general anti-government activities spanned decades. While never what one might describe as an "orthodox anarchist", if that is not a contradiction in terms, Zinn embodied what was best in the American tradition of anarchism, a pragmatic and issue focused way of viewing the world. Grand ideological visions were alien to his way of being. The reader can gather an idea of his life and works from this Wikipedia article on him. Here's the notice of his death from CNN. The notice points out how he continued up until his death at 87 years to try and clarify the politics of his native country, especially relevant as the Obama presidency degenerates into the usual imperialism sweetened with an icing of high liberal rhetoric.

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'People's History' author Howard Zinn dead at 87:
From Cristy Lenz, CNN
Howard Zinn's daughter says her father believed that there is no "just war."
(CNN) -- Noted author and social activist Howard Zinn died of a heart attack Wednesday while traveling, his daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn, said.

Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United States," was 87. Kabat-Zinn said her father, who lived in Auburndale, Massachusetts," died while traveling in Santa Monica, California.

"A People's History of the United States," first published in 1980, tells a history not often in seen in other books -- from the perspective of those not in a seat of power.

The book was the inspiration for a 2009 documentary, narrated by Zinn, called "The People Speak." The film highlighted people who spoke up for social change, according to the Web site of the History Channel, which aired the program.

Zinn was a shipyard worker and Air Force bombardier before he went to college under the GI Bill and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University, according to his Web site. He taught at numerous universities, including Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Kabat-Zinn said of her father that he lived a "very full and exciting life" and that there were many social issues that were very important to him. Above all, she said, her father believed that there is no "just war."

Zinn's death on the day of President Obama's first State of the Union address was underscored by his contribution to a recently released special from The Nation magazine called "Obama at One."

"I've been searching hard for a highlight," he wrote. "The only thing that comes close is some of Obama's rhetoric; I don't see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies."

Zinn said he was not "terribly disappointed because I didn't expect that much," noting that he has been "a traditional Democratic president" on foreign policy -- "hardly any different from a Republican" -- and has been cautious in domestic policy.

"On health care, for example, he starts out with a compromise, and when you start out with a compromise, you end with a compromise of a compromise, which is where we are now," Zinn said.

Zinn also cautioned "that Obama is going to be a mediocre president -- which means, in our time, a dangerous president -- unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction."

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Here's another obituary from the Associated Press via the New York Times.

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'People's History' Author Howard Zinn Dies at 87:
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist ''A People's History of the United States'' became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favorite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87.

Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Mass.

Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, ''A People's History'' was -- fittingly -- a people's best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including ''Voices of a People's History,'' a volume for young people and a graphic novel

''I can't think of anyone who had such a powerful and benign influence,'' said the linguist and fellow activist Noam Chomsky, a close friend of Zinn's. ''His historical work changed the way millions of people saw the past.''

At a time when few politicians dared even call themselves liberal, ''A People's History'' told an openly left-wing story. Zinn charged Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

Even liberal historians were uneasy with Zinn. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: ''I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian.''

In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Zinn acknowledged he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter -- not the last -- of a new kind of history.

''There's no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,'' Zinn said. ''My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.''

''A People's History'' had some famous admirers, including Matt Damon and Affleck. The two grew up near Zinn, were family friends and gave the book a plug in their Academy Award-winning screenplay for ''Good Will Hunting.'' When Affleck nearly married Jennifer Lopez, Zinn was on the guest list.

''He taught me how valuable -- how necessary dissent was to democracy and to America itself,'' Affleck said in a statement. ''He taught that history was made by the everyman, not the elites. I was lucky enough to know him personally and I will carry with me what I learned from him -- and try to impart it to my own children -- in his memory.''

Oliver Stone was a fan, as well as Springsteen, whose bleak ''Nebraska'' album was inspired in part by ''A People's History.'' The book was the basis of a 2007 documentary, ''Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind,'' and even showed up on ''The Sopranos,'' in the hand of Tony's son, A.J.
Zinn himself was an impressive-looking man, tall and rugged with wavy hair. An experienced public speaker, he was modest and engaging in person, more interested in persuasion than in confrontation.

Born in New York in 1922, Zinn was the son of Jewish immigrants who as a child lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and responded strongly to the novels of Charles Dickens. At age 17, urged on by some young Communists in his neighborhood, he attended a political rally in Times Square.

''Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people. I couldn't believe that,'' he told the AP.

''And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant. ... It was a very shocking lesson for me.''

War continued his education. Eager to help wipe out the Nazis, Zinn joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and even persuaded the local draft board to let him mail his own induction notice. He flew missions throughout Europe, receiving an Air Medal, but he found himself questioning what it all meant. Back home, he gathered his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on top: ''Never again.''

He attended New York University and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in history. In 1956, he was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women's school in then-segregated Atlanta.

During the civil rights movement, Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. Zinn also published several articles, including a then-rare attack on the Kennedy administration for being too slow to protect blacks.

He was loved by students -- among them a young Alice Walker, who later wrote ''The Color Purple'' -- but not by administrators. In 1963, Spelman fired him for ''insubordination.'' (Zinn was a critic of the school's non-participation in the civil rights movement.) His years at Boston University were marked by opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school's president, John Silber.

Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses' strike. Over the years, he continued to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.

''The happy thing about Howard was that in the last years he could gain satisfaction that his contributions were so impressive and recognized,'' Chomsky said. ''He could hardly keep up with all the speaking invitations.''

Besides ''A People's History,'' Zinn wrote several books, including ''The Southern Mystique,'' ''LaGuardia in Congress'' and the memoir, ''You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train,'' the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn that Damon narrated. He also wrote three plays.

One of Zinn's last public writings was a brief essay, published last week in The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration.

'I've been searching hard for a highlight,'' he wrote, adding that he wasn't disappointed because he never expected a lot from Obama.

''I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president -- which means, in our time, a dangerous president -- unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.''

Zinn's longtime wife and collaborator, Roslyn, died in 2008. They had two children, Myla and Jeff.

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Here's yet another obituary from the Boston Globe via the AK Press Blog.

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Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87:
By AK Press January 27, 2010
Sad news from the Boston Globe…
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Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87 :
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff
Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers —many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out—but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and Silber. Dr. Zinn twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of academe.”

Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979.

After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against “the BU Five” were soon dropped, however.

Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before joining the Army Air Force during World War II. Serving as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, he won the Air Medal and attained the rank of second lieutenant.

After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University as a 27-year-old freshman on the GI Bill. Professor Zinn, who had married Roslyn Shechter in 1944, worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.

Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were the novelist Alice Walker, who called him “the best teacher I ever had,” and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children’s Defense Fund.

During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.

Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.

The focus of his activism now became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at countless rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and another leading antiwar activist, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.

Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967) and “Disobedience and Democracy” (1968). He had previously published “LaGuardia in Congress” (1959), which had won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Prize; “SNCC: The New Abolitionists” (1964); “The Southern Mystique” (1964); and “New Deal Thought” (1966).Dr. Zinn was also the author of “The Politics of History” (1970); “Postwar America” (1973); “Justice in Everyday Life” (1974); and “Declarations of Independence” (1990).

In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement so as to concentrate on speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: “Emma,” about the anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and “Daughter of Venus.”

Dr. Zinn, or his writing, made a cameo appearance in the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting.” The title characters, played by Matt Damon, lauds “A People’s History” and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.

Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, “The People Speak,” which ran on the History Channel in 2009. Damon was the narrator of a 2004 biographical documentary, “Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”

On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did so.

Dr. Zinn’s wife died in 2008. He leaves a daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington; a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaugthers; and two grandsons.

Funeral plans were not available.

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Like most every significant hostorical figure various political farces will try to claim Howard Zinn as their own. This is made particularily easy by the fact that the anarchist position is very much an unknown amongst the general population, except in characture. Zinn was very m7uch an anarchist, though, as I have said, of an unorthodox american strain. Here's an interview from the AK Press Blog with Ziga Vodovnik about Howard Zinn's anarchism.

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An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism: Rebels Against Tyranny:
Since most mainstream/Left/liberal accounts of Howard Zinn’s legacy are likely to gloss over the man’s actual politics, here’s a 2008 interview by AK author, Ziga Vodovnik.
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An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Rebels Against Tyranny
By Ziga Vodovnik
Howard Zinn, 85, is("was"-Molly) a Professor Emeritus of political science at Boston University. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1922 to a poor immigrant family. He realized early in his youth that the promise of the “American Dream“, that will come true to all hard-working and diligent people, is just that—a promise and a dream. During World War II he joined US Air Force and served as a bombardier in the “European Theatre“. This proved to be a formative experience that only strengthened his convictions that there is no such thing as a just war. It also revealed, once again, the real face of the socio-economic order, where the suffering and sacrifice of the ordinary people is always used only to higher the profits of the privileged few.

Although Zinn spent his youthful years helping his parents support the family by working in the shipyards, he started with studies at Columbia University after WWII, where he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in 1958. Later he was appointed as a chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College, an all-black women’s college in Atlanta, GA, where he actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement.

From the onset of the Vietnam War he was active within the emerging anti-war movement, and in the following years only stepped up his involvement in movements aspiring towards another, better world. Zinn is the author of more than 20 books, including A People’s History of the United States that is “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories…” (Library Journal)

Zinn’s most recent book is entitled A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, and is a fascinating collection of essays that Zinn wrote in the last couple of years. Beloved radical historian is still lecturing across the US and around the world, and is, with active participation and support of various progressive social movements continuing his struggle for free and just society.

Ziga Vodovnik: From the 1980s onwards we are witnessing the process of economic globalization getting stronger day after day. Many on the Left are now caught between a “dilemma”—either to work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital; or to strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization and that is equally global. What’s your opinion about this?

Howard Zinn: I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. In a certain sense, the movement towards globalization where capitalists are trying to leap over nation state barriers, creates a kind of opportunity for movement to ignore national barriers, and to bring people together globally, across national lines in opposition to globalization of capital, to create globalization of people, opposed to traditional notion of globalization. In other words to use globalization—there is nothing wrong with idea of globalization—in a way that bypasses national boundaries and of course that there is not involved corporate control of the economic decisions that are made about people all over the world.

ZV: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once wrote that: “Freedom is the mother, not the daughter of order.” Where do you see life after or beyond (nation) states?

HZ: Beyond the nation states? (laughter) I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! Of collectives of different sizes, depending on the function of the collective, having contacts with one another. You cannot have self-sufficient little collectives, because these collectives have different resources available to them. This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice.

ZV: Do you think that a change can be achieved through institutionalized party politics, or only through alternative means—with disobedience, building parallel frameworks, establishing alternative media, etc.

HZ: If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the “Left” are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over —first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.

ZV: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?

HZ: I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn’t matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.

We saw this in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.

When some people ask me about voting, they would say will you support this candidate or that candidate? I say: “I will support this candidate for one minute that I am in the voting booth. At that moment I will support A versus B, but before I am going to the voting booth, and after I leave the voting booth, I am going to concentrate on organizing people and not organizing electoral campaign.”

ZV: Anarchism is in this respect rightly opposing representative democracy since it is still form of tyranny —tyranny of majority. They object to the notion of majority vote, noting that the views of the majority do not always coincide with the morally right one. Thoreau once wrote that we have an obligation to act according to the dictates of our conscience, even if the latter goes against the majority opinion or the laws of the society. Do you agree with this?

HZ: Absolutely. Rousseau once said, if I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority? No, majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok.

That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things—proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. And also has to take into account that majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. So yes, people have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.

ZV: Where do you see the historical origins of anarchism in the United States?

HZ: One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists. The word was first used by Proudhon in the middle of the 19th century, but actually there were anarchist ideas that proceeded Proudhon, those in Europe and also in the United States. For instance, there are some ideas of Thomas Paine, who was not an anarchist, who would not call himself an anarchist, but he was suspicious of government. Also Henry David Thoreau. He does not know the word anarchism, and does not use the word anarchism, but Thoreau’s ideas are very close to anarchism. He is very hostile to all forms of government. If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist. You do not really encounter anarchism until after the Civil War, when you have European anarchists, especially German anarchists, coming to the United States. They actually begin to organize. The first time that anarchism has an organized force and becomes publicly known in the United States is in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair.

ZV: Where do you see the main inspiration of contemporary anarchism in the United States? What is your opinion about the Transcendentalism —i.e., Henry D. Thoreau, Ralph W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, et al.—as an inspiration in this perspective?

HZ: Well, the Transcendentalism is, we might say, an early form of anarchism. The Transcendentalists also did not call themselves anarchists, but there are anarchist ideas in their thinking and in their literature. In many ways Herman Melville shows some of those anarchist ideas. They were all suspicious of authority. We might say that the Transcendentalism played a role in creating an atmosphere of skepticism towards authority, towards government.

Unfortunately, today there is no real organized anarchist movement in the United States. There are many important groups or collectives that call themselves anarchist, but they are small. I remember that in 1960s there was an anarchist collective here in Boston that consisted of fifteen (sic!) people, but then they split. But in 1960s the idea of anarchism became more important in connection with the movements of 1960s.

ZV: Most of the creative energy for radical politics is nowadays coming from anarchism, but only few of the people involved in the movement actually call themselves “anarchists”. Where do you see the main reason for this? Are activists ashamed to identify themselves with this intellectual tradition, or rather they are true to the commitment that real emancipation needs emancipation from any label?

HZ: The term anarchism has become associated with two phenomena with which real anarchist don’t want to associate themselves with. One is violence, and the other is disorder or chaos. The popular conception of anarchism is on the one hand bomb-throwing and terrorism, and on the other hand no rules, no regulations, no discipline, everybody does what they want, confusion, etc. That is why there is a reluctance to use the term anarchism. But actually the ideas of anarchism are incorporated in the way the movements of the 1960s began to think.
I think that probably the best manifestation of that was in the civil rights movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—SNCC. SNCC without knowing about anarchism as philosophy embodied the characteristics of anarchism. They were decentralized. Other civil rights organizations, for example Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were centralized organizations with a leader—Martin Luther King. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were based in New York, and also had some kind of centralized organization. SNCC, on the other hand, was totally decentralized. It had what they called field secretaries, who worked in little towns all over the South, with great deal of autonomy. They had an office in Atlanta, Georgia, but the office was not a strong centralized authority. The people who were working out in the field—in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi—they were very much on their own. They were working together with local people, with grassroots people. And so there is no one leader for SNCC, and also great suspicion of government.

They could not depend on government to help them, to support them, even though the government of the time, in the early 1960s, was considered to be progressive, liberal. John F. Kennedy especially. But they looked at John F. Kennedy, they saw how he behaved. John F. Kennedy was not supporting the Southern movement for equal rights for Black people. He was appointing the segregationists judges in the South, he was allowing southern segregationists to do whatever they wanted to do. So SNCC was decentralized, anti-government, without leadership, but they did not have a vision of a future society like the anarchists. They were not thinking long term, they were not asking what kind of society shall we have in the future. They were really concentrated on immediate problem of racial segregation. But their attitude, the way they worked, the way they were organized, was along, you might say, anarchist lines.

ZV: Do you think that pejorative (mis)usage of the word anarchism is direct consequence of the fact that the ideas that people can be free, was and is very frightening to those in power?

HZ: No doubt! No doubt that anarchist ideas are frightening to those in power. People in power can tolerate liberal ideas. They can tolerate ideas that call for reforms, but they cannot tolerate the idea that there will be no state, no central authority. So it is very important for them to ridicule the idea of anarchism to create this impression of anarchism as violent and chaotic. It is useful for them, yes.

ZV: In theoretical political science, we can analytically identify two main conceptions of anarchism —a so-called collectivist anarchism limited to Europe, and on another hand individualist anarchism limited to US. Do you agree with this analytical separation?

HZ: To me this is an artificial separation. As so often happens analysts can make things easier for themselves, like to create categories and fit movements into categories, but I don’t think you can do that. Here in the United States, sure there have been people who believed in individualist anarchism, but in the United States have also been organized anarchists of Chicago in 1880s or SNCC. I guess in both instances, in Europe and in the United States, you find both manifestations, except that maybe in Europe the idea of anarcho-syndicalism became stronger in Europe than in the US. While in the US you have the IWW, which is an anarcho-syndicalist organization and certainly not in keeping with individualist anarchism.

ZV: What is your opinion about the “dilemma” of means—revolution versus social and cultural evolution?

HZ: I think here are several different questions. One of them is the issue of violence, and I think here anarchists have disagreed. Here in the US you find a disagreement, and you can find this disagreement within one person. Emma Goldman, you might say she brought anarchism, after she was dead, to the forefront in the US in the 1960s, when she suddenly became an important figure. But Emma Goldman was in favor of the assassination of Henry Clay Frick, but then she decided that this is not the way. Her friend and comrade, Alexander Berkman, he did not give up totally the idea of violence. On the other hand, you have people who were anarchistic in way like Tolstoy and also Gandhi, who believed in nonviolence.

There is one central characteristic of anarchism on the matter of means, and that central principle is a principle of direct action—of not going through the forms that the society offers you, of representative government, of voting, of legislation, but directly taking power. In case of trade unions, in case of anarcho-syndicalism, it means workers going on strike, and not just that, but actually also taking hold of industries in which they work and managing them. What is direct action? In the South when black people were organizing against racial segregation, they did not wait for the government to give them a signal, or to go through the courts, to file lawsuits, wait for Congress to pass the legislation. They took direct action; they went into restaurants, were sitting down there and wouldn’t move. They got on those buses and acted out the situation that they wanted to exist.

Of course, strike is always a form of direct action. With the strike, too, you are not asking government to make things easier for you by passing legislation, you are taking a direct action against the employer. I would say, as far as means go, the idea of direct action against the evil that you want to overcome is a kind of common denominator for anarchist ideas, anarchist movements. I still think one of the most important principles of anarchism is that you cannot separate means and ends. And that is, if your end is egalitarian society you have to use egalitarian means, if your end is non-violent society without war, you cannot use war to achieve your end. I think anarchism requires means and ends to be in line with one another. I think this is in fact one of the distinguishing characteristics of anarchism.

ZV: On one occasion Noam Chomsky has been asked about his specific vision of anarchist society and about his very detailed plan to get there. He answered that “we can not figure out what problems are going to arise unless you experiment with them.” Do you also have a feeling that many left intellectuals are loosing too much energy with their theoretical disputes about the proper means and ends, to even start “experimenting” in practice?

HZ: I think it is worth presenting ideas, like Michael Albert did with Parecon for instance, even though if you maintain flexibility. We cannot create blueprint for future society now, but I think it is good to think about that. I think it is good to have in mind a goal. It is constructive, it is helpful, it is healthy, to think about what future society might be like, because then it guides you somewhat what you are doing today, but only so long as this discussions about future society don’t become obstacles to working towards this future society. Otherwise you can spend discussing this utopian possibility versus that utopian possibility, and in the mean time you are not acting in a way that would bring you closer to that.

ZV: In your A People’s History of the United States you show us that our freedom, rights, environmental standards, etc., have never been given to us from the wealthy and influential few, but have always been fought out by ordinary people—with civil disobedience. What should be in this respect our first steps toward another, better world?

HZ: I think our first step is to organize ourselves and protest against existing order—against war, against economic and sexual exploitation, against racism, etc. But to organize ourselves in such a way that means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create kind of human relationship that should exist in future society. That would mean to organize ourselves without centralize authority, without charismatic leader, in a way that represents in miniature the ideal of the future egalitarian society. So that even if you don’t win some victory tomorrow or next year in the meantime you have created a model. You have acted out how future society should be and you created immediate satisfaction, even if you have not achieved your ultimate goal.

ZV: What is your opinion about different attempts to scientifically prove Bakunin’s ontological assumption that human beings have “instinct for freedom”, not just will but also biological need?

HZ: Actually I believe in this idea, but I think that you cannot have biological evidence for this. You would have to find a gene for freedom? No. I think the other possible way is to go by history of human behavior. History of human behavior shows this desire for freedom, shows that whenever people have been living under tyranny, people would rebel against that.

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WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER HOWARD ZINN ?:

Molly feels obliged to add this coda to what has been published above in tribute to Howard Zinn. I have to point out that Zinn began his radical career and continued in it under a traditional assumption that there was an "objective reality" that could be uncovered by radical effort. This is something quite different from the fashion in academia and leftism today where it is assumed, like Hitler assumed, that "truth" depends upon its utility. To be quite frank, given the slightest "political pressure" the post-modernist leftists of today will become the fascists of tomorrow. They, after all, have abandoned the idea of objective truth, and their fashions are hardly the sort of thing to die for or even get fired for.

What Zinn represents is an "older radicalism", one that predates the acceptance of one of the fundamentals of fascist thought by "the left" ie that "truth" is relative to interests. To be fair this sort of thought is also Stalinist. Those death camps may be more in the line of genealogy of post-modernism than fascism is, but both fascism and Stalinism share a contempt for objective truth.

Is this degeneration inevitable ? Personally I don't think so, and the last sentence of the above gives me hope. I have always known , for instance, that a large part of human behavior is genetically determined. Forty years ago when I first became a "leftist" such a belief was the occasion of physical assault here in the "west". In years gone by it, and other much more established realities, were the occasional of "death" in 'workers' paradises". Most of those tyrannies are now past, and those that still exist are so pressed for their survival that they don't have the leisure, and self confidence, to imagine that they can govern biology. Only post modernists in American universities have such hubris.

What I will say below is merely "feeling". It may be grossly wrong. Post-modernism is basically 'Stalinism with a human face'. It posits that there is no objective truth beyond some sort of "readings of texts"- to be as crude as the proponents of this view often are. This, of course, is in direct opposition to the usual socialist, anarchist and otherwise, view that there is an objective set of facts that justifies their views. It is, however, very much in tune with the subjectivism of fascism where "facts" have to be interpreted according to a "race", orm some other privileged part of the population-yes this can include "leftist privileged parts of a popukation". Put it in modern terms and you get such things as "gender interpretations" or other transpositions of fascism into modern leftism. By the way, I haven't exited from facts to feelings yet. Here are the feelings.

What I "feel" is that this fashion is passing. I'm sure that there will be academics that will continue to teach in a post-modernist way until their senility or retirement, whichever comes first. I'm also sure-I've had it demonstrated to me in no uncertrain terms- that there will continue to be political efforts within oppositional groups to divert them to the sort of "psychotherapy politics" that is the end result of such ideology. . At the same time I have, over the course of decades, seem such things gradually decreasing, and I can extrapolate into the future that they will decrease even more to the point of extinction. Well, I hope anyhow.

To return to the question...will there be other Howard Zinns in the future ? Frankly I don't know. The present academic mileau gives all sorts of incentive to so-called "radical" views that are actually nothing of the sort, and, worst of all, it denigrates the essential arguement that opposition to power has always depended upon ie that there is an independent reality that can be known logically. Classical fascism, of course, denigrated this argument just as academic leftists do.

On the OTHER HAND...consider that not just Howard Zinn but many other American radicals passed through a purgatory that was equal to the political correctness of today ie the 1950's consensus. What they did others may do as well. THAT is my hope. Perhaps eventualy we may get a common sense radicalism from academia or, if that fails, a common sense intellectualism outside of academia. Either one is possible.

PEOPLE:

CANADA'S OLDEST PEACE ACTIVIST DIES AT 100:

Last weekend a long standing Canadian pacifist, Muriel Duckworth, died at the age of 100. Through he long life she stood firm in her convictions and fought the good fight against state violence. Here's a tribute to here from today's Halifax Metro News.

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Duckworth's biographer remembers the 'Raging Granny':
HILARY BEAUMONT
METRO HALIFAX
A capacity crowd clapped along to a soul-filled rendition of Happy Birthday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium last fall.

Halifax peace activist Muriel Duckworth, who died over the weekend, was celebrating her 100th birthday on Oct. 31, with friends and family surrounding her.

Sitting in a wheelchair on stage that day, Duckworth’s face lit up with a smile of appreciation. “It’s been wonderful to have this celebration,” she told the crowd. “I’ve never dreamed of anything like this.”

“That was a rare, rare moment for any of us to see -- somebody who deeply deserved it to be honoured in her own community,” remembered Marion Douglas Kerans, a friend who wrote the biography, Muriel Duckworth: A Very Active Pacifist.

The Quebec-born Duckworth, who moved to Halifax in 1947, died in palliative care in a Quebec hospital on Saturday.

“She showed women how to become true leaders in their community, and in the world, without losing any feminine grace,” Kerans said yesterday.

Duckworth helped found the Nova Scotia Voice Of Women (VOW) and also served on the Oxfam Canada board of directors in the 1970s. During the Vietnam War, she and other VOW members spoke out against the violence -- a strong opposition that eventually led her to leave the United Church of Canada and join the Quakers after the church refused to denounce the conflict Time didn’t slow Duckworth down. In her later years, she became a vocal member of peaceful activist group the Halifax Raging Grannies.

“She lived exactly what she taught,” Kerans said.

Duckworth is survived by her three children, 11 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. Plans for her funeral are still being arranged.

PEOPLE:

MALALAI JOYA:

The following is an interesting mini-bio of that most rare of all breeds, a politician who actually stands on principle. Here, from Z Communications (originally published in The Independent) is the story of the Afghani woman Malalai Joya.

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Joya: The Woman Who Will Not Be Silenced:

By Johann Hari

Source: The Independent

Johann Hari's ZSpace Page
I am not sure how many more days I will be alive," Malalai Joya says quietly. The warlords who make up the new "democratic" government in Afghanistan have been sending bullets and bombs to kill this tiny 30-year-old from the refugee camps for years - and they seem to be getting closer with every attempt. Her enemies call her a "dead woman walking". "But I don't fear death, I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice," she says plainly. "I am young and I want to live. But I say to those who would eliminate my voice: 'I am ready, wherever and whenever you might strike. You can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of the spring.'"

The story of Malalai Joya turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out. In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for. Here is a young Afghan woman who set up a secret underground school for girls under the Taliban and - when they were toppled - cast off the burka, ran for parliament, and took on the religious fundamentalists.

But she says: "Dust has been thrown into the eyes of the world by your governments. You have not been told the truth. The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women. Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords. (That is) what your soldiers are dying for." Instead of being liberated, she is on the brink of being killed.

The story of Joya is the story of another Afghanistan - the one behind the burka, and behind the propaganda.
"We are our sisters' keepers"
I meet Joya in a London apartment where she is staying with a supporter for a week, to talk about her memoir - but even here, her movements have to be kept secret, as she flits from one safe house to another. I am told not to mention her location to anyone. She is standing in the corridor, small and slim, with her hair flowing freely, and she greets me with a solid handshake. But, when our photographer snaps her, she begins to giggle girlishly: the grief etched on to her sallow face melts away, and she laughs in joyous little squeaks. "I can never get used to this!" she says.

Then, as I sit her down to talk through her life-story, the pain soaks into her face once more. Her body tightens into a tense coil, and her fists close.

Joya was four days old when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. On that day, her father dropped out of his studies to fight the invading Communist army, and vanished into the mountains. She says: "Since then, all we have known is war."

Her earliest memory is of clinging to her mother's legs while policemen ransacked their house looking for evidence of where her father was hiding. Her illiterate mother tried to keep her family of 10 children alive as best she could. When the police became too aggressive, she took her kids to refugee camps across the border in Iran. In these filthy tent-cities lying on the old Silk Road, Afghans huddled together and were treated as second-class citizens by Iran. At night, wild animals could wander into the tents and attack children. There, word reached the family that Joya's father had been blown up by a landmine - but he was alive, after losing a leg.

There were no schools in the Iranian camps, and Joya's mother was determined her daughters would receive the education she never had. So they fled again, to camps in western Pakistan. There, Joya began to read - and was transformed. "Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are," she says. Starting in her early teens, she inhaled all the literature she could - from Persian poetry to the plays of Bertolt Brecht to the speeches of Martin Luther King. She began to teach her new-found literacy to the older women in the camps, including her own mother.

She soon discovered that she loved to teach - and, when she turned 16, a charity called the Organization for Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities (OPAWC) made a bold suggestion: go to Afghanistan, and set up a secret school for girls, under the noses of the Taliban tyranny.

So she gathered her few clothes and books and was smuggled across the border - and "the best days of my life" began. She loathed being forced to wear a burka, being harassed on the streets by the omnipresent "vice and virtue" police, and being under constant threat of being discovered and executed. But she says it was worth it for the little girls. "Every time a new girl joined the class, it was a triumph," she says, beaming. "There is no better feeling."

She only just avoided being caught, again and again. One time she was teaching a class of girls in a family's basement when the mother of the house yelled down suddenly: "Taliban! Taliban!" Joya says: "I told my students to lie down on the floor and stay totally silent. We heard footsteps above us and waited a long time." On many occasions, ordinary men and women - anonymous strangers - helped her out by sending the police charging off in the wrong direction. She adds: "Every day in Afghanistan, even now, hundreds if not thousands of ordinary women act out these small gestures of solidarity with each other. We are our sisters' keepers."

The charity was so impressed with her they appointed her their director. Joya decided to set up a clinic for poor women just before the 9/11 attacks. When the American invasion began, the Taliban fled her province, but the bombs kept falling. "Many lives were needlessly lost, just like during the September 11 tragedy," she says. "The noise was terrifying, and children covered their ears and screamed and cried. Smoke and dust rose and lingered in the air with every bomb dropped."

As soon as the Taliban retreated, they were replaced - by the warlords who had ruled Afghanistan immediately before. Joya says that, at this point, "I realized women's rights had been sold out completely... Most people in the West have been led to believe that the intolerance and brutality towards women in Afghanistan began with the Taliban regime. But this is a lie. Many of the worst atrocities were committed by the fundamentalist mujahedin during the civil war between 1992 and 1996. They introduced the laws oppressing women followed by the Taliban - and now they were marching back to power, backed by the United States. They immediately went back to their old habit of using rape to punish their enemies and reward their fighters."

The warlords "have ruled Afghanistan ever since," she adds. While a "showcase parliament has been created for the benefit of the U.S. in Kabul", the real power "is with these fundamentalists who rule everywhere outside Kabul". As an example, she names the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan. He set up his own "vice and virtue" squads which terrorized women and smashed up video and music cassettes. He had his own "private militias, private jails". The constitution of Afghanistan is irrelevant in these private fiefdoms.

Joya discovered just what this meant when she started to set up the clinic - and a local warlord announced that it would not be allowed, since she was a woman, and a critic of fundamentalism. She did it anyway, and decided to fight this fundamentalist by running in the election for the Loya jirga ("meeting of the elders") to draw up the new Afghan constitution. There was a great swelling of support for this girl who wanted to build a clinic - and she was elected. "It turned out my mission," she says, "would be to expose the true nature of the jirga from within."
"I would never again be safe"
As she stepped past the world's television cameras into the Loya jirga, the first thing Joya saw was "a long row with some of the worst abusers of human rights that our country had ever known - warlords and war criminals and fascists".

She could see the men who invited Osama bin Laden into the country, the men who introduced the misogynist laws later followed by the Taliban, the men who had massacred Afghan civilians. Some had got there by intimidating the electorate, others by vote-rigging, and yet more were simply appointed by Hamid Karzai, the former oilman installed by the U.S. army to run the country. She thought of an old Afghan saying: "It's the same donkey, with a new saddle."

For a moment, as these old killers started to give long speeches congratulating themselves on the transition to democracy, Joya felt nervous. But then, she says, "I remembered the oppression we face as women in my country, and my nervousness evaporated, replaced by anger."

When her turn came, she stood, looked around at the blood-soaked warlords on every side, and began to speak. "Why are we allowing criminals to be present here? They are responsible for our situation now... It is they who turned our country into the centre of national and international wars. They are the most anti-women elements in our society who have brought our country to this state and they intend to do the same again... They should instead be prosecuted in the national and international courts."

These warlords - who brag about being hard men - could not cope with a slender young woman speaking the truth. They began to shriek and howl, calling her a "prostitute" and "infidel", and throwing bottles at her. One man tried to punch her in the face. Her microphone was cut off and the jirga descended into a riot.

"From that moment on," Joya says, "I would never again be safe... For fundamentalists, a women is half a human, meant only to fulfil a man's every wish and lust, and to produce children and toil in the home. They could not believe that a young woman was tearing off their masks in front of the eyes of the Afghan people."

A fundamentalist mob turned up a few hours later at her accommodation, announcing they had come to rape and lynch her. She had to be placed under immediate armed guard - but she refused to be protected by American troops, insisting on Afghan officers.

Her speech was broadcast all over the world - and cheered in Afghanistan. She was flooded with support from the people of her country, delighted that somebody had finally spoken out. One dirt-poor village pooled its cash to send a delegate hundreds of miles across the country to explain how pleased they were.

An extremely old woman was brought to her in a rickety wheelbarrow, and she explained she had lost two sons - one to the Soviets, one to the fundamentalists. She told Joya: "I am almost 100 years old, and I am dying. When I heard about you and what you said, I knew that I had to meet you. God must protect you, my dear."

She handed over her gold ring, her only valuable possession, and said: "You must take it! I have suffered so much in my life, and my last wish is that you accept this gift from me."

But the U.S. and NATO occupiers instructed Joya that she must show "politeness and respect" for the other delegates. When Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. Ambassador, said this, she replied: "If these criminals raped your mother or your daughter or your grandmother, or killed seven of your sons, let alone destroyed all the moral and material treasure of your country, what words would you use against such criminals that will be inside the framework of politeness and respect?"

She leans forward and quotes Brecht: "He says, 'He who does not know the truth is only a fool. He who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal.'"

The attempts to murder her began then with a sniper - and have not stopped since. But she says plainly, with her fist clenched: "I wanted the warlords to know I was not afraid of them."�
So she ran for parliament - and won in a landslide. "I would return again to face those who had ruined my country," she explains, "and I was determined that I would stand straight and never bow again to their threats."
"In every corner is a killer"
Joya looked out across the new Afghan parliament on her first day and thought: "In every corner is a killer, a puppet, a criminal, a drug lord, a fascist. This is not democracy. I am one of the very few people here who has been genuinely elected." She started her maiden speech by saying: "My condolences to the people of Afghanistan..."

Before she could continue, the warlords began to shout that they would rape and kill her. One warlord, Abdul Sayyaf, yelled a threat at her. Joya looked him straight in the eye and said: "We are not in [the area he rules by force] here, so control yourself."

I ask if she was frightened, and she shakes her head. "I am never frightened when I tell the truth." She is speaking fast now: "I am truly honoured to have been vilified and threatened by the savage men who condemned our country to such misery. I feel proud that even though I have no private army, no money, and no world powers behind me, these brutal despots are afraid of me and scheme to eliminate me."

She says there is no difference for ordinary Afghans between the Taliban and the equally fundamentalist warlords. "Which groups are labeled 'terrorist' or 'fundamentalist' depends on how useful they are to the goals of the U.S.," she says. "You have two sides who terrorize women, but the anti-American side are 'terrorists' and the pro-American side are 'heroes'."

Karzai rules only with the permission of the warlords. He is "a shameless puppet" who will win next month's presidential elections because "he hasn't yet stopped working for his masters, the U.S. and the warlords ... At this point in our history, the only people who get to serve as president are those selected by the U.S. government and the mafia that holds power in our country."

Whenever she would despair in parliament, she would meet yet more ordinary Afghan women - and get back in the fight. She tells me about a 16-year-old constituent of hers, Rahella, who ran away to an orphanage Joya had helped to set up in her constituency. "Her uncle had decided to marry her off to his son, who was a drug addict. She was terrified. So of course we took her in, educated her, helped her." One day, her uncle turned up and apologized, saying he had learnt the error of his ways. He asked if she could come home for a weekend to visit her family. Joya agreed - and when she got back to her village, Rahella was forced into marriage and spirited away to another part of Afghanistan. They heard six months later that she had doused herself in petrol and burned herself alive.

There has been an epidemic of self-immolation by women across the "new" Afghanistan in the past five years. "The hundreds of Afghan women who set themselves ablaze are not only committing suicide to escape their misery," she says, "they are crying out for justice."

But she was not allowed to raise these issues in the supposedly democratic parliament. The fundamentalist warlords who couldn't beat Joya at the ballot box or kill her chanced upon a new way to silence her. The more she spoke, the angrier they got. She called for secularism in Afghanistan, saying: "Religion is a private issue, unrelated to political issues and the government... Real Muslims do not require political leaders to guide them to Islam." She condemned the new law that declared an amnesty for all war crimes committed in Afghanistan over the past 30 years, saying "You criminals are simply giving yourselves a get-out-of-jail free card." So the MPs simply voted to kick her out of parliament.

It was illegal and undemocratic - but the President, Hamid Karzai, supported the ban. "Now the warlord criminals are unchallenged in parliament," she says. "Is that democracy?"

We in the West have been fed "a pack of lies" about what Afghanistan looks like today. "The media are 'free' only if they do not try to criticize warlords and officials," she says in her book, Raising My Voice. As an example, she names a specific warlord: "If you write anything about him, the next day you will be tortured or killed by the Northern Alliance warlords." It is "a myth" to say girls can now go to school outside Kabul. "Only five per cent of girls, according to the UN, can follow their education to the 12th grade."

And it is "false" to say Afghan culture is inherently misogynistic. "By the 1950s, there was a growing women's movement in Afghanistan, demonstrating and fighting for their rights," she says. "I have a story here" - she rifles through her notes - "from The New York Times in 1959. Here! The headline is 'Afghanistan's women lift the veil'. We were developing an open culture for women - and then the foreign wars and invasions crushed it all. If we can regain our independence, we can start this struggle again."

Many of her friends urge her to leave the country, before one of her wannabe-assassins gets lucky. But, she says, "I can never leave when all the poor people that I love are living in danger and poverty. I am not going to search for a better and safer place, and leave them in a burning hell." Apologizing for her English - which is, in fact, excellent - she quotes Brecht again: "Those who do struggle often fail, but those who do not struggle have already failed."

Today, she fights for democracy outside parliament. But, she says, any Afghan democrat today is "trapped between two enemies. There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns." She wants to help the swelling movement of ordinary Afghans in between, who are opposed to both. "With the withdrawal of one enemy, the occupation forces, it (will be) easier to fight against these internal fundamentalist enemies."

If she were president of Afghanistan, she would begin by referring all the country's war criminals to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. "Anybody who has murdered my sisters and brothers should be punished," she says, "from the Taliban, to the warlords, to George W Bush." Then she would ask all foreign troops to leave immediately. She says that it is wrong to say Afghanistan will simply collapse into civil war if that happens. "What about the civil war now? Today, people are being killed - many, many war crimes. The longer the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan doing what they are doing, the worse the eventual civil war will be for the Afghan people."

The Afghan public, she adds, are on her side, pointing to a recent opinion poll showing 60 percent of Afghans want an immediate NATO withdrawal. Many people in Afghanistan were hopeful, she says, about Barack Obama - "but he is actually intensifying the policy of George Bush ... I know his election has great symbolic value in terms of the struggle of African-Americans for equal rights, and this struggle is one I admire and respect. But what is important for the world is not whether the president is black or white, but his actions. You can't eat symbolism."

U.S. policy is driven by geopolitics, she says, not personalities. "Afghanistan is in the heart of Asia, so it's a very important place to have military bases - so they can control trade very easily with other Asian powers such as China, Russia, Iran and so on.

"But it can be changed by Americans," she adds. She is passionate now, her voice rising. "I say to Obama - in my area, 150 people were blown up by U.S. troops in one incident this year. If your family had been there, would you send even more troops and even more bombs? Your government is spending $18m (�11m) to make another Guantanamo jail in Bagram. If your daughter might be detained there, would you be building it? I say to Obama - change course, or otherwise tomorrow people will call you another Bush."
"It's hard to be strong all the time"
"It's not good to show my enemies any weakness, (but) it's hard to be strong all the time," Joya says with a sigh, as she runs her hands through her hair. She has been speaking so insistently - with such preternatural courage- that it's easy to forget she was just a girl when she was thrust into fighting fundamentalism. She was never allowed an adolescence. The fierce concentration on her face melts away, and she looks a little lost. "Yes, my mother is proud of me," she says, "but you know how mothers are - they worry. Whenever I speak to her on the phone, the first sentence and the last sentence are always 'Take care'."

Two years ago, she got married in secret. She can't name her husband publicly, because he would be killed. Her wedding flowers had to be checked for bombs. She will only say that they met at a press conference, "and he supports everything I do". She has not seen him "for two months", she says. "We meet in the safe houses of supporters. I cannot sleep in the same house two nights running. It is a different home every evening."

Where does this courage come from? She acts as if the answer is obvious - anyone would do it, she claims. But they don't. Perhaps it comes from her belief that the struggle is long and our individual lives are short, so we can only advance our chosen cause by inches, knowing others will pick up our baton. "When I die, others will come. I am sure of that," she says.

She certainly has a strong sense of belonging to a long history of Afghans who fought for freedom. "My parents chose my first name after Malalai of Maiwand. She was a young woman who, in 1880, went to the front line of the second Anglo-Afghan war to tend the wounded. When the fighters were close to collapse, she picked up the Afghan flag and led the men into battle herself. She was struck down - but the British suffered a landmark defeat, and, in the end, they were driven out."

When she ran for office, she had to choose a surname for herself, to protect her family's identity. "I named myself after Sarwar Joya, the Afghan poet and constitutionalist. He spent 24 years in jails, and was finally killed because he wouldn't compromise his democratic principles ... In Afghanistan we have a saying: the truth is like the sun. When it comes up, nobody can block it out or hide it."

Malalai Joya knows she could be killed any day now, in our newly liberated Warlord-istan. She hugs me goodbye and says, "We must keep in touch." But I find myself bleakly wondering if we will ever meet again. Perhaps she senses this, because she suddenly urges me to look again at the last paragraph of her memoir, Raising My Voice. "It really is how I feel," she says. It reads: "If I should die, and you should choose to carry on my work, you are welcome to visit my grave. Pour some water on it and shout three times. I want to hear your voice." I look up into her face, and she is giving me the bravest smile I have ever seen.

'Raising My Voice' by Malalai Joya is published by Rider. All profits will go to supporting the cause of women's rights in Afghanistan.