Today we dive into old cinema and television, looking at the films of Charlie Chaplin and the television show The Twilight Zone, both of which have recently been the subject of essays in Current Affairs by Ciara Moloney. Ciara has written for Current Affairs on subjects ranging from the 2020 Democratic candidates' range of merch to Hollywood's depictions of George W. Bush. Her essays on Chaplin's films and The Twilight Zone make the case that while both have become enduring cultural tropes and cliches, going back and viewing the original works shows them to have incisive and enduring satirical power. Today Ciara joins us to talk about how Chaplin skewered modern capitalism and how Rod Serling depicted anti-Communist hysteria, and why each showed the capacity of film and television to generate empathy. We also talk about how valuable it is to go back and view things that are old and neglected, since they are often fresher and more relevant than one would expect. The other films Ciara mentions in the episode are:Black Book (2006)Sidewalk Stories (1989)Final Account (2020)All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)The Heartbreak Kid (1972)More of Ciara's writing on film, television, and music can be found at The Sundae. The "feeding machine" sequence from Modern Times can be watched here. 

Branko Marcetic is a staff writer for Jacobin and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He is also a leading heterodox commentator on U.S. foreign policy, and has written critically about the U.S. approach to China and the war in Ukraine. Branko recently wrote an article for Current Affairs arguing that the Eisenhower administration's cautious response to Soviet aggression, prompted by the risk of nuclear escalation, offers an important set of lessons for us today. Today he joins to explain why he thinks U.S. policy toward Russia is much more dangerous than is widely perceived, and how he believes we are ignoring important lessons from history about how to avoid catastrophic wars. Branko's valuable interview with US Naval War College scholar Lyle Goldstein about China policy is here. His critique of Biden's foreign policy is here. His critique of Biden's approach to diplomacy on Ukraine is here. His piece on the International Criminal Court is here. His latest piece on the prospects for a negotiated end to the Ukraine war is here. 

Vijay Prashad is a leading historian on the Global South and U.S. empire. His books include Washington Bullets, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and most recently The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, which features Prashad in dialogue with Noam Chomsky. Today, he joins editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson for a spirited conversation on U.S. foreign policy. The discussion covers, among other things:Why the U.S. left has an obligation to pay attention to the way U.S. power operates abroadThe total lack of any accountability for the criminal wars waged by the U.S. and our lack of interest in applying the legal standards of the Nuremberg tribunals to ourselvesHow every rival power is always characterized as monstrous, bent on world domination, and impossible to reason withWhy the term "American empire" is useful and how American imperialism is similar to and different from other kinds of imperialismHow the U.S. operates internationally like a mafia godfather—and why the comparison might actually be unfair to the Mafia, who are more inclined toward diplomatic solutions"No country in the world has through its wars killed the number of people that the United States has killed in the last 35 odd years. And yet in the U.S. you sound insane to say: Why didn't we have Donald Rumsfeld give testimony at the ICC? Or why not ask George W. Bush to at least stand up and stop painting his ridiculous paintings and reflect a little on having conducted that war? There's just no space in public discourse for that kind of thing. In Nuremberg, there was the death penalty for a war of aggression. But the poison pen of Nuremberg is for others. It's not for the United States. I think that's the responsibility of intellectuals is to not allow amnesia to set in around these really quite consequential issues—consequential not only for the Iraqis, I must say, but also for the U.S. veterans who continue to be haunted by that war." — Vijay Prashad An article on the Clintons and Haiti can be found here. The Robinson/Chomsky article on China is here and the one on Afghanistan is here.  

Today, we see children killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes, but anyone who gets their understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict from news reports lacks the context necessary to make sense of the horrors they are seeing. To understand why there is an Israel-Palestine conflict today, we have to go back a hundred years to see what Palestine was like before the state of Israel was established and how things changed. Joining us to explain the background of the conflict is one of the leading historians on the region, Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University. He is the author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, edits the Journal of Palestine Studies, and in the 90s served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. Prof. Khalidi's book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know where modern-day Israel and Palestine came from in the first place. Among topics discussed:What Palestine was like in the early 1900s, when the Arab population of Palestine was about 95% and political Zionism was a long way from achieving its objective of establishing a stateHow 19th and early 20th century Zionist leaders understood that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine would necessarily involve a project of ethnic cleansing, because of the region's overwhelming Arab majorityHow Prof. Khalidi's own Palestinian great-great-great uncle, who served as mayor of Jerusalem, personally pleaded with Theodor Herzl (father of political Zionism) in the early 1900s to "leave Palestine alone" rather than establishing the Jewish state thereHow Palestinian resistance to the original establishment of Israel is misunderstood to this day: it wasn't a product of irrational anti-Semitism, but a response to being dispossessed and not granted the right of self-determinationThe myth that Palestinians have rejected fair offers of statehood and are the architects of their own misfortuneGolda Meir's infamous statement that there "was no such thing as Palestinians," and the argument that Palestinian national identity is a contemporary construct. In fact, both Palestinian and Israeli national identities are recent, as is the nation-state form itselfThe project of "memoricide": Israel's deliberate efforts to erase the memory of what Palestine was like in the years prior to Zionist colonization and frame the Palestinian resistance to dispossession as aggressive and terroristicWhy the establishment of Israel was similar to (and different from) other kinds of colonialism, and the way colonial projects always treat indigenous populations as irrational, violent, backward, and in need of removalHow changes in U.S. political opinion are essential if Palestinians are ever going to receive the right to self-determinationThe Israel-Palestine conflict is often treated as complicated. In fact, Prof. Khalidi argues, it is not very complicated at all: it is precisely the kind of conflict that can be expected to arise when a colonial project tries to displace a country's native inhabitants and denies them equal rights. Prof. Khalidi mentions Nathan's experience at the Guardian, which is discussed here. Discussion of the shooting of peaceful Palestinian protesters in 2018 can be found here.  Map of Palestine before the project of expelling, dispossessing, and occupying Palestinians had succeeded, taken from Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948

Current Affairs editor at large Yasmin Nair and editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson have both written articles that deal with the country of Afghanistan. Yasmin's Evergreen Review piece, "Sharbat Gula Is Not Lost" is about the woman pictured in the iconic "Afghan Girl" photo that appeared on the cover of National Geographic. Nathan's essay "What Do We Owe Afghanistan?" (co-authored with Noam Chomsky) appears in Current Affairs and is a history of the American war from 2001 to 2021, looking at the hideous consequences of U.S. actions for the Afghan people.In this conversation, we talk about how stories and photos shape Western perceptions of Afghanistan and how Americans came to believe that they were part of a noble endeavor to help Afghan people even as their actions actually severely damaged the country. The "Afghan Girl" of National Geographic is Sharbat Gula, who didn't want her photo taken and tried to cover her face. We discuss the photographer, Steve McCurry, whose work exoticizes (and sometimes even fabricates) the lives of non-Western people. We discuss how the aspirations and wishes of Afghans themselves are left out of Western depictions of the country.Laura Bush's speech using Afghan women's rights as a justification for the war is here. A critique of the way Afghan women were cynically invoked to justify U.S. geopolitical goals is here. A scathing New York Times review of McCurry's "astonishingly boring" pictures is here. The photo of Gula covering her face is here. The photo of the adult Gula holding the magazine is here. Photographer Steve McCurry with the portrait that changed his life (although not the life of the anonymous child depicted, who did not wish to be photographed). 

David Hemenway is a professor of public health at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the author of Private Guns, Public Health which argues that there are many practical ways to significantly reduce the epidemic of American gun deaths. In his book While We Were Sleeping Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention, David provides case studies of previous efforts at reducing injuries and deaths, showing 60 different success stories that have made us all safer.David previously worked for Ralph Nader and compares the situation with guns to the situation before auto safety measures came about. He has produced a great deal of research on what interventions would actually work to stop people from getting shot. Today he joins to discuss what we know (and don't know) about firearm deaths and how to stop them.

Current Affairs is proud to be a publication that takes animal rights seriously. From our lighthearted looks at manatees, ants, and cats, to our more serious pieces on the Orwellian language of the factory farming industry, the reason animal communication shouldn't be the justification for animal rights, and the need for "Veticare For All," we have always believed that left politics and animal welfare go together.Today on the podcast we are joined by Marina Bolotnikova, a freelance journalist who covers factory farming and animal liberation activism. Marina has written for Current Affairs about the importance of direct action to the animal liberation movement and how the factory farming industry has gone from openly admitting that they view animals as profit-maximizing machines to pretending to care about being "humane."  In this episode we discuss why the treatment of animals is such a morally important issue, how the industry uses lies and euphemisms to conceal its barbarism, how phony industry-supported research is used to paper over atrocities, and why leftists and environmentalists shouldn't view animal rights as secondary.Marina's Intercept article on the cruel method used to boil and suffocate chickens to death is here. The episode of the Green Pill podcast featuring Matt Johnson is here. John Sanbonmatsu's Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is here. The thumbnail is the illustration by Nick Sirotich that appears alongside Marina's latest article in the May-June print issue of Current Affairs. 

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as the chair of the COVID-19 commission for leading medical journal The Lancet. Through his investigations as the head of the COVID-19 commission, Prof. Sachs has come to the conclusion that there is extremely dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view, that the United States was supporting much of this research, and that it is very possible that COVID-19 originated through dangerous virus research gone awry. He recently said:"I chaired the commission for the Lancet for two years on COVID. I'm pretty convinced it came out of US lab biotechnology. Not out of nature... [That's] out of two years of intensive work on this. So it's a blunder, in my view, of biotech not an accident of a natural spillover. We don't know for sure, I should be absolutely clear. But there's enough evidence that it should be looked into. And it's not being investigated. Not in the United States. Not anywhere. And I think for real reasons, that they don't want to look underneath the rug."Prof. Sachs also believes that there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation of the origins of COVID-19 and deflecting attention away from the hypothesis that risky U.S.-supported research may have led to millions of deaths. If that hypothesis is true, the implications would be earth-shaking, because it might mean that esteemed members of the scientific community bore responsibility for a global calamity.In this interview, Prof. Sachs explains how he, as the head of the COVID-19 commission for a leading medical journal, came to the conclusion that powerful actors were preventing a real investigation from taking place. He also explains why it is so important to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID: because, he says, there is extremely dangerous research taking place with little accountability, and the public has a right to know since we are the ones whose lives are being put at risk without our consent.  Prof. Sachs' recent article on the subject in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences can be found here. A Current Affairs article from last year about the questions over the origins of COVID-19 can be found here. 

In this episode, we discuss the strange creatures known as children. Scott Hershovitz is a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Michigan and the author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy With My Kids, which chronicles (hilariously) his philosophical conversations with his sons Rex and Hank. The book is a great primer on some basic philosophical questions for adult readers, but it also shows that children are more profound philosophers than they are often assumed to be. Because the world is unfamiliar to them, every child is a little Socrates, asking authority figures to justify their beliefs. The child's relentless query of "Why?" is a demand that knowledge be justified, and Hershovitz encourages us to take children's philosophical questions seriously. He also believes that philosophy ought to be taught much earlier than college, because it helps cultivate useful critical thinking skills. Today, we discuss how the "chaos muppets" that are children can actually be uncommonly profound. Here is Scott's New York Times article "How To Pray To A God You Don't Believe In," which discusses his son's unique perspective on how God is both "pretend" and "real."The image above is from a video of a child solving the "trolley problem." 

Janet Biehl is one of the leading libertarian socialist writers in the country. For several decades, she was the partner and collaborator of the late political theorist Murray Bookchin, who stood, in the words of the Village Voice, "at the pinnacle of the genre of utopian social criticism." In bracing works like "Listen, Marxist!" and The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin laid out the basis for an anti-capitalist, ecologically-oriented, and anti-authoritarian left. Bookchin's analysis was often provocative, and in works like "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism" and "Re-Enchanting Humanity" (which includes a satisfying takedown of Richard Dawkins) he challenged what he felt were the dangerous currents of anti-rationalist and primitivist thinking emerging on the left. Bookchin tried to forge a philosophy that was pro-technology while sensitive to ecological destruction, and which salvaged insights from Marx while avoiding the rigidities of 21st century Marxism. He was one of the first thinkers to warn that capitalism itself was causing catastrophic global warming.Biehl is the author of Ecology or Catastrophe The Life of Murray Bookchin, the editor of The Murray Bookchin Reader, and the author of The Politics of Social Ecology, a primer on Bookchin's ideas.In addition to her work on Bookchin, Janet Biehl is an artist and journalist who has documented the social revolution that has taken place among the Kurds of Rojava. Her latest book is the graphic novel Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS.In Part I of this interview, we discuss the social theories of Murray Bookchin. In the second part, we move to Biehl's recent work on the Kurdish struggle, more information about which can be found at the Rojava Information Center. There is a connection between Biehl's work on both topics, because the "democratic confederalist" philosophy developed by Kurdistan Workers' Party leader Abdullah Öcalan was directly inspired in part by the writings of Bookchin. Bookchin did not in his lifetime get to see a movement that took his ideas seriously, and one of the more poignant parts of Biehl's work is her reflections on how delighted and gratified Bookchin would have been to see his theories expanded upon, developed further, and put into practice by courageous revolutionaries.