Summary
1968 was one of the most seismic years in recent history -- Vietnam, the Prague spring, Black Power at the Olympics and protests on the streets of Paris and London so this evening's programme -- Rana Mitter's extended interview with Tariq Ali -- is part commemoration, part reassessment. What remains of that turbulent time and where can we discern its features in our political landscape today? Rana takes Tariq back to his life as a boy in Lahore - a city where his radical parents regularly hosted the likes of Pakistan's great 20th century poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and brings him via his first hand experience of wartime Vietnam and his intellectual engagement with the Russian revolution to the present where he offers assessments of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn and the US President, Donald Trump. There's time too for a diversion into literature. Tariq shares his love of Kipling and in the longer version of the interview available as one of our Arts and Ideas podcasts - he reads from his novel Night of the Golden Butterfly featuring a character based on the painter, Tassaduq Sohail.
Tariq Ali has chosen a mixtape for Radio 3's Late Junction broadcast this week.
Producer: Zahid Warley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello, I'm Ron Amitter. |
| 0:33.7 | Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas Discussion Program, which brings together leading artists, |
| 0:38.9 | writers and thinkers in conversation and debate. If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe. |
| 0:44.4 | Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, |
| 0:48.9 | please rate and review us. It'll help other people find us. This is the BBC. |
| 0:56.3 | Hello, my guest today once declared of President Obama, |
| 1:00.3 | proximity to power has an unsurprising ability |
| 1:02.9 | to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly. |
| 1:07.6 | Well, no such jellification is likely to emerge in the next 45 minutes as I talk to the |
| 1:12.4 | journalist, novelist and activist Tarik Ali. Tarak was born in British India in 1943 and came to |
| 1:18.9 | prominence in the 60s as one of the most powerful voices in Britain to voice opposition to the US-directed |
| 1:24.8 | Vietnam War. There was this general suffused consciousness that the Vietnamese have done it, |
| 1:32.5 | and if they can do it against such a powerful enemy, surely we can do it against us. |
| 1:37.6 | Over the years, Tarik has written numerous books on politics, |
| 1:41.1 | completed the Islam Quintet sequence of novels, written plays and screenplays, |
| 1:45.9 | and lent his name to a range of causes from opposition to the Iraq War to Brexit. |
| 1:51.3 | Perhaps more than that, he's become, despite himself, an icon, a go-to shorthand to express an idea |
| 1:57.4 | about radicalism in a context that encompasses the histories of Britain, the former |
| 2:02.2 | empire, and the international left. Tarek, we're going to have plenty of time to discuss where |
... |
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