My review of Mike King’s When Riot Cops Are Not Enough has been translated into Dutch. Pretty much the only thing on the site I can read is this quote from William Burroughs:
“The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.”
I have a chapter in the new collection Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self Defense. The book, edited by scott crow, features both first-person reflections and historical accounts concerning the use of firearms in a variety of liberation movements, in the U.S. and around the world. My chapter, “Gun Rights are Civil Rights,” is a collaboration with Peter Little, addressing the racist history of gun control legislation.
Mike King’s book, When Riot Cops Are Not Enough, offers an insightful analysis of the state’s approach to controlling Occupy Oakland. I reviewed the book for Toward Freedom.
Also, there is a short interview with me about policing in Brian Whitney’s new book Subversive: Interviews with Radicals. The book seems, not so much specifically political, as concerned with a whole range of people who fall outside of the mainstream.
Two excerpts from my collection on Orwell, Between the Bullet and the Lie, were posted online this week.
Toward Freedom ran the introduction, “Between the Bullet and the Lie: George Orwell in His Time, and Ours.” In it, I discuss what I see as Orwell’s enduring relevance and explain my approach to understanding his work.
Lithub ran a half-chapter titled “What George Orwell Wrote About the Dangers of Nationalism: On Facts, Fallacies, and Power.” In the excerpt, I sum up the argument from Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism,” in which he describes the bad thinking that arises from “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” In the book, I go on to apply his analysis to our present political movements, left as well as right.
