@bostonreview.bsky.social
A magazine of ideas, politics, and culture, committed to the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world. Independent & nonprofit since 1975. Newsletter: bostonreview.net/newsletter Subscribe: bostonreview.net/memberships
For @bostonreview.bsky.social I wrote about the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy's reporting from Vietnam: controversial at the time, not much read anymore, and pretty clear-sighted in my estimation.
Millenarian Fantasies
In Lebanon, Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Joelle M. Abi-Rached
www.bostonreview.net/articles/mil...
“As plumes of smoke tower over Tehran, many recall the nights when Baghdad was irreversibly defamiliarized by violence. I remembered the voice of Saadi Youssef. It was the United States, he writes in one poem, ‘that demolished a homeland over your head.’”
@nabilsalih.bsky.social in Baghdad:
“There was much about Vietnam she did not see. Clearer to her were the ‘fantasies and illusions of American men,’ as Kempton put it, and her own hope against hope that a novelist could help stop the war by piercing them.”
@arh12.bsky.social on Mary McCarthy in a new era of wartime illusions:
“Nearly 23 years after I watched on TV from a village outside Baghdad as Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled, I was greeted by a giant billboard showing the image of Ali Khamenei, whose assassination has crowned him in the halo of martyrdom.”
@nabilsalih.bsky.social on Iraq after another U.S. war:
The Trump doctrine seeks control in a world that resists domination. By substituting coercion for consent, it multiplies the very crises it ostensibly aims to end.
Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana on how we got here: www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
In Lebanon, Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing.
@joelleabirached.bsky.social writes from Beirut as bombs rain down once again:
Terrific piece from someone on the ground.
“I thought of the specters of all those who could have walked the city streets but died too soon. The latest victim was Yanar Mohammed. Her portrait was plastered on the city’s walls by her comrades at the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq.”
@nabilsalih.bsky.social writes from Baghdad:
Excellent analysis in @bostonreview.bsky.social on the crisis in Iran.
www.bostonreview.net/articles/ira...
Israel’s incursions into southern Lebanon look less like a new doctrine than the revival of strategic vision associated with Ben-Gurion: preemption, cross-border force, and the reshaping of neighboring realities through military power @joelleabirached.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/mil...
“I thought of the specters of all those who could have walked the city streets but died too soon. The latest victim was Yanar Mohammed. Her portrait was plastered on the city’s walls by her comrades at the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq.”
@nabilsalih.bsky.social writes from Baghdad:
“Few literary figures living in the West are willing to confront war as directly as McCarthy did, and they, like her, are typically rewarded with the condescension of a loud and powerful segment of their peers.”
Andrew Holter rereads McCarthy’s Vietnam writing in a new era of wartime illusions:
As debate over (de)funding DHS continues, reread Professor Margulies piece on the lasting impacts of 9/11. In particular, on the modern surveillance state: "ubiquitous state and private surveillance has fundamentally altered our conception of privacy."
In Lebanon, Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing.
@joelleabirached.bsky.social writes from Beirut as bombs rain down once again:
“A local teacher said there was nowhere we could walk that had not been at the bottom of the sea on March 11. He showed me the impossible sights a tsunami leaves behind—not merely disorder, but a new and weirder order of its own making.”
Stephan Phelan on the worst tsunami in Japanese history:
An great interview with sociologist Asef Bayat on the U.S.-Israeli war, democratic opposition to the Islamic Republic, and the country’s uncertain future
My latest in @bostonreview.bsky.social from Baghdad:
www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
“The roads taken by each protester are riddled with traumatic memories from years of occupation. Iraq remains a country with deep wounds of neocolonialism and camouflaged ruination. Its revolutionary parties have long lost their capacity to mobilize.”
@nabilsalih.bsky.social writes from Baghdad:
“McCarthy didn’t need to go to Vietnam to draw these conclusions, but the fact that she did—that she could—underscores the disadvantage of war writers and resisters today. The jeopardy Sally Rooney bravely assumed lay in an expression of solidarity, not in what she could testify to firsthand.”
“Her reporting depicted the war as a psychodrama of vanity and hubris that indicted the values of the ‘Greatest Generation’ to which she belonged.”
Andrew Holter reads Mary McCarthy on Vietnam in a new era of wartime illusions—and new efforts by writers to puncture them:
“McCarthy didn’t need to go to Vietnam to draw these conclusions, but the fact that she did—that she could—underscores the disadvantage of war writers and resisters today. The jeopardy Sally Rooney bravely assumed lay in an expression of solidarity, not in what she could testify to firsthand.”
Jared is correct. Read Theory
"Whatever states are today, they are not what they once were—in part because, as Dasgupta chronicles, the state now faces serious competition for center stage in the organization of human society."
www.bostonreview.net/forum/climat...
“Her reporting depicted the war as a psychodrama of vanity and hubris that indicted the values of the ‘Greatest Generation’ to which she belonged.”
Andrew Holter reads Mary McCarthy on Vietnam in a new era of wartime illusions—and new efforts by writers to puncture them:
“The monarchists have capitalized on this sentiment without being burdened by what political scientist Daniel Ritter calls the ‘iron cage of liberalism.’ The global rise of anti-democracy movements has made it easier for them to embrace their authoritarian ethos.”
An interview with Asef Bayat:
The high fantasy—that the strongest would defend the weakest—will strike many in our current political climate as too ridiculous, too impossible, but the fact it continues to have purchase on our collective imagination is a sign that not all is lost. —Junot Díaz www.bostonreview.net/articles/ris...
“Far from ‘uniting’ the diverse opposition, Reza Pahlavi has deepened divisions. Lacking a political structure inside Iran and refusing to build coalitions with other opposition groups, he has relied almost entirely on foreign support—particularly from the United States and Israel.”
“Gaza exposed the falsity of the belief that the United States would constrain Israel and that conventional force would be sufficient to deter Israel. So much of Israel’s military success reflects the lifting of all U.S. constraints on how Israel could use force, breaking all codes of conduct.”
