4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2018
⏱️ 45 minutes
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The United States today exceeds at perpetually waging wars that are destined to fail to meet their purported objectives. The War on Terror is one such war. The War on Drugs is another. In both cases, failure never leads to much official questioning of the war let alone a repudiation of its underlying wisdom. The conventional wisdom is always that the war just hasn't been waged in the right way, or aggressively enough. My guest today is Leo Beletsky, who directs the Health in Justice Action Lab at Northeastern University. He and Jeremiah Goulka recently published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the abolition of the DEA, noting that after hundreds of billions of dollars spent fatal overdose rates have skyrocketed to a historic high. Let's #AbolishDEA.
Thanks to Verso Books. Check out a huge catalogue of excellent left-wing books at versobooks.com.
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0:00.0 | This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by Verso Books which has loads of great left-wing titles |
0:10.6 | perfect for Dig listeners like you. |
0:13.0 | One that you might like is The Russian Revolution, a view from the third world, |
0:18.0 | by Walter Rodney, edited by Jesse Benjamin and Robin D.G. Kelly, with a foreword by Vigé Parshad. |
0:26.8 | In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost |
0:32.0 | thinkers and activists of the anti-colonial |
0:34.4 | revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. |
0:39.8 | Wherever he was, Rodney was a lightning rod for working-class black power organizing. |
0:46.8 | His deportation sparked Jamaica's Rodney riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation in how to approach politics on an |
0:56.1 | international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People's Alliance |
1:02.0 | in Guyana, the 38-year-old |
1:04.1 | Rodney was assassinated. Walter Rodney's Russian Revolution collects surviving |
1:09.5 | texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent third world. |
1:16.0 | It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D.G. Kelly and Jesse Benjamin. |
1:26.4 | Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney |
1:32.4 | transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. |
1:36.0 | Surveying a broad range of subjects, the Nirodinics, social democracy, the October |
1:41.3 | Revolution, Civil War, and the challenges of Stalinism. |
1:45.3 | Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds |
1:49.9 | revolutionary fury and history with the people in motion. |
1:54.7 | The Russian Revolution, a view from the Third World by Walter Rodney, edited by Jesse Benjamin |
2:00.6 | and Robin D.G. Kelly with a forward from the J. Prishad. |
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