As Barack Obama winds down the final days of his presidency, we revisit the assessment made by Tariq Ali in The Obama Syndrome, first published in September 2010 and revised in 2011. The excerpt below is drawn from the first portion of the "Surrender at Home" chapter, which examines Obama's domestic policy.
In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the pathetic figure of Hermes, the messenger-servant of the gods, appeals to the dissident Prometheus to make his peace with the supreme beings of the time. The response from the chained figure, punished for betraying the secret of fire to humans, is exemplary: “Be sure of this, I would not change my evil plight for your servility. It is better to be slave to the rock than to serve Father Zeus as his faithful messenger.”
On Friday 23rd December the UN passed a resolution demanding a stop to Israeli settlement in the occupied territories as, in a shock move, the US refused to veto the resolution. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exploded, calling it a 'declaration of war' (having recently been granted a $38 billion military aid package by the US), and Secretary of State John Kerry criticised Israel's approach to the peace process. But with Trump tweeting that Israel should 'stay strong' until his inauguration, progress still seems unlikely.
Verso presents a list of books from Israeli, Palestinian, and anti-imperialist authors, to explain the conflict and provide some perspectives on the future.
Fidel Castro, Cuba's leader of revolution, has died aged 90. We present an extract from Tariq Ali's introduction to The Declarations of Havana, Verso's collection of Castro's speeches.
On 26 July 1953 an angry young lawyer, Fidel Castro, led a small band of armed men in an attempt to seize the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, in Oriente province. Most of the guerrillas were killed. Castro was tried and defended himself with a masterly speech replete with classical references and quotations from Balzac and Rousseau, that ended with the words: 'Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.' It won him both notoriety and popularity.
November 9th is marked in history as the date on which triumphant Berliners breached the Berlin wall. On this day, 27 years ago, crowds began to demolish the Wall and gathered on both sides of the historic crossings to cheer the bulldozers. This was the first critical step towards reunification, which formally concluded nearly a year later, on 3 October 1990.
Tariq Ali’s novel Fear of Mirrors follows East German dissident Vlady Meyer’s life as it mirrors the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The book is available now, and is one of Verso’s Russian Revolution centenary picks. With the fall of Communism, Vlady’s life begins to fall apart; he is a mirror reflecting the intellectual milieu of an incomparable period. Extracted below is the first page of the novel to commemorate this momentous day in history.