Frdh Podcast With Michael Goldfarb

The Iraq War began 15 years ago. Seems like ancient history given where America is now. This FRDH podcast, made at the start of the war, shines a light on what might have been and foreshadows the disaster the Occupation became, a disaster Iraqis are still trying to crawl out from under. Was the failure of the Iraq War the American unipolar moment begin to unravel? Was the day Saddam Hussein’s regime disintegrated in Mosul, the day when the seeds were sown for the city to be overrun by ISIS? Did the Bush administration’s catastrophic lack of planning for the day after, the moment when Syria’s fate was sealed? This deeply mixed sound documentary will take you to the battlefront of the Iraq War, experience it with FRDH host Michael Goldfarb and the extraordinary Iraqis he met. Was there a possibility it all might have worked? You can also read my book about it. Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace. It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2005. Out of print now, but still available for download into your e-reader at Am

What do the words liberal and conservative mean any more? What about left and right? No one is sure. Certainly not the news media who throw the terms around without a thought to definitions that make sense. Conservatives in America are neo-liberals when it comes to the economy. Neo-conservatives call for liberal intervention. In this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb gives a potted history of the word liberal and calls for clarity and uniformity of usage by the mainstream news media. It's a confusing world, imprecise language doesn't make it easier to understand. Let's have a classification clarification conference so we can all know what we're talking about when we say, You are a Liberal. (or a Conservative.)

What is the historical process by which something becomes sacred? Is Auschwitz a sacred place? In this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb asks what is the historical process that leads to the creation of a religion, or changes in the practice of one that already exists. Is it possible that events of modern history will someday take on religious significance, or are people today intellectually and emotionally incapable of understanding their experience as “awesome” in the sense that the great religions mean the term? Using sound from his personal archive Goldfarb builds a case that the catastrophe of the Holocaust, like the catastrophe of the destructions of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, should and will be incorporated into Jewish religious observance.

The big question at the end of Donald Trump's first year in office is: Is he crazy or just typical of his social class? Anti-Trump forces constantly question his mental state in the hopes of provoking his cabinet into forcing him out via the 25th Amendment. In this FRDH podcast, host Michael Goldfarb looks at whether Trump is crazy or is he just a typical country club kind of person. Are his words about shithole countries and immigrants any different than you would hear most Sundays at the country club? Among people of a similar social caste and with the unwritten rules of any club - you can say what you like and it will not be repeated outside the four walls of the clubhouse - when the talk turns to politics men and women, can vent their opinions on matters of politics and foreign affairs and race and immigration. The language used, will frequently be exactly the same as Trump uses. The solutions for political, economic and international problems will be as simplistic, although perhaps not expressed as cr

In 2018 There will be many stories marking the 50th anniversary of events from 1968. 1968 year of defeat, assassination, riots and treason in America. There were near revolutions in France and Czechoslovakia. An early demonstration of the violence which would consume much of Latin America over the next quarter century in Mexico City. We still live with the cosmic echo of those events. It is good to remember 1968 via news media but what lessons people who didn’t live through these cataclysms will learn. In this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb looks back at one of the most dramatic years since the end of World War 2. He describes living through a paradigm shift and asks if it's time to find a new one. The paradigm has shifted on the economy, and, God knows, on standards of mainstream political leadership in the Anglo-American world. But has the paradigm shifted on modes of political activism? Are people to tied up with the past?

America in 2017: was the story of Magical Thinking vs Reality. For Trump voters it was a confirmation of everything their "unbiased" news told them. For the anti-Trump brigade it was believing too many of the rumors they saw on twitter. Reality was the victim in this car crash. 2017 challenged the very notion of a fact-based, mutually acknowledged reality that is essential for creating a stable society. Finding facts on social media like twitter became impossible. Twitter is about Outrage Outrage Outrage. It was like outrage had become a form eroticism. Makes me feel so good to feel so outraged. Back in pre-history, when the second President Bush was prematurely swaggering about victory in Iraq, his dark angel, Karl Rove told the New York Times, “we create our own reality.” Liberals - here defined as all those who didn’t vote for Bush and a lot of people who did - shook their heads at Rove’s arrogance. This group proclaimed it was part of the reality based community. And as nemesis followed hubris and Iraq

The fact that we are in a new historical epoch was underscored recently in the response to the news that Robert Mugabe and Ratko Mladic, two men who ruined their countries and caused the deaths of thousands, got their comeuppance. 20 years ago this would have been enormous, front page a-segment news. it would have been the topic of gleeful conversation among the well-informed and politically aware. But In this era of Trump and harassment and Brexit, hardly a ripple. It's ancient history. The Bosnian War, was a fascist temper tantrum that destroyed one of the most beautiful countries in Europe. FRDH podcast host Michael Goldfarb, covered that conflict and returned to Sarajevo on the fifth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement to make a radio documentary on how the country was recovering. In this FRDH podcast he uses archive tape from that documentary to illustrate the difficulty of bringing justice to the families of the dead. Mladic's conviction 22 years after ordering the genocide at Srebrenica is not quite j

Share this Bible Study for Atheists, in which FRDH podcast host Michael Goldfarb looks at the controversy over Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. A self-proclaimed man of God whose behavior seems like blasphemy. How is it that the most religious part of America is also home to the most blasphemers? And Alabama really is the most religious state in the country, According to a 2016 survey by Pew research Alabama ranked first in the nation for religiosity. 82% of its people say they believe with “absolute certainty” in God, nearly tHree quarters of Alabamans say they pray to him every day. Yet, many in that state are still lining up to support a man who acknowledges preying on underage girls, and just generally falling short of all moral precepts contained in the Bible. The Southern mindset is very religious. It imposes itself on visitors, even an atheist needs a modicum of biblical knowledge and language to have conversation with Southerners. So this Bible Study for Atheists tries to figure this

There is no place of greater safety for civilians and soldiers wounded in today's wars. In 2016 alone there was nearly one attack every day on a hospital in a conflict zone. The most infamous attack came in 2015, when the United States bombed an MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Why? Are we seeing the end of the rules that governed warfare and provision of safe spaces for those caught in the crossfire? The origins of the Red Cross and humanitarian law go back to the middle of the 19th Century, to the battle of Solferino in 1859. The French Army under Napoleon III faced off against the Austrian Army led by Emperor Franz Joseph 1st. The politics behind the battle related to Italian independence but the battle is famous for much more. 300,000 men met on the field of battle near Solferino a small town between Milan and Verona. After nine hours of combat nearly five thousand were dead and more than 22,000 were wounded, many lying where they fell receiving no medical treatment. A Swiss observer of the carn

The Bolshevik Revolution is to political change, what nuclear weapons are to warfare: the ultimate deterrent. The question on this 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is what happens to a society when you take violent overthrow of the government by the governed as a last resort out of the equation. How does it affect a society’s ability to respond to the inevitable changes wrought by the passage of time? Economic, political, social pressure’s build up as decades pass. These pressures weaken and deform the political system, certainly it deforms the politicians who work in that system. What happens then? To paraphrase Langston Hughes, do Generations of dreams deferred, dry up like raisins in the Sun, or fester like sores … or do they explode? Is it even possible to hold off the explosion? The overwhelming violence in which the Soviet Union was born and its ultimate failure, has obscured our ability to think about revolution clearly. It is wrong to judge revolutions by whether they succeed or fail. V

Media obscures history. Not intentionally, but the effect of looking at images without a deeper understanding of the context in which the images were created will keep the viewer from knowledge of an historical event. In this FRDH podcast, host Michael Goldfarb looks at how this lack of full understanding is hampering efforts to create a coherent political strategy to oppose President Trump. He explores the seminal research into how media obscures not just history but also other aspects of life by thinkers like: George Gerbner: http://web.asc.upenn.edu/gerbner/Asset.aspx?assetID=2597 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/the-man-who-counts-the-killings/376850/ & Neil Postman: https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/postman-amusing.pdf He also writes about the television programs that shaped the Vietnam generation, like Beulah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ2l_KTDcHU This essay on how media obscures our undertanding of history is inspired by Ken Burns series "The Vietnam War." Goldfar

Referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia raise the quesiton "What Is a Nation?" What is a nation? What is a nation-state? Is it the same as a country? Are a people, or a tribe, the same thing as a nation? What does national sovereignty really mean? These are the key questions for our globalized 21st century. What is a nation? Is it something you die for? Get murdered for? Is it something that can make you clinically insane, incapable of seeing reality? Is a nation something that can be created by treaty or politics? What does the birth of a nation look like? What does it smell like when it dies? Michael Goldfarb draws on his decades covering conclficts rooted in frustrated attempts to express national feelings to look for an answer and comes up with more questions: Can the dozens of nations that make up western Europe hope to preserve their wealth and high living standards in a globalized economy without pooling their nation-hood into something greater? What is the importance of a nation-state i

If an event happens and there is no one to witness and remember it, does it become part of history? If memory is eliminated is it possible to write or understand history? When FRDH host Michael Goldfarb researched his book Emancipation, about Europe’s Jews in the century and a half between being liberated from the ghetto and the Holocaust he came across stories of many interesting people in obscure places, completely forgotten because the community that might have remembered them had been eradicated. They were no longer part of history. Restoring them to the record became his obligation. In this archive recording, originally made for the BBC, he tells the story of Gabriel Riesser. It is particularly relevant to what’s happening in America today. This is about the ephemeral nature of civil rights laws, the tarnished promise of integration, how racial hatred is never dead and buried, and finally the foundation of all history writing: memory.

This episode of FRDH is about Berkeley and the high point of the revolution of the 1960's as host Michael Goldfarb remembers it. Revolution is a romantic word and a bloody practice. This autumn "revolution" will be discussed a lot, as we mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution. The word will also come into use as we move towards the 50th anniversary remembrances of 1968, the year of student revolution. The University of California Berkeley, is where student revolution was effectively born in the US, during the Free Speech Movement. That was a movement of the left. Free Speech Week which may well spark a riot, is a movement of the right and it providing pundits the opportunity to note the irony that Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement, has become anti-Free Speech. In this FRDH podcast Goldfarb recounts the story of the Free Speech Movement, the fight over People's Park and recalls a memorable rally on Berkeley campus addressed by Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis. He then describes a moment of

Three things I learned or was reminded of on my first American vacation in more than 15 years. First thing I learned: America is clearly in crisis but not yet at crisis point. I watched television news just once - for a very few minutes. It is hysterical, condescending to its viewers and in the way it contextualizes reporting - frequently wrong. Some other podcast I will back that assertion … the history of how TV news got that way requires several essays … but trust me on this, the presentational style so overwhelms the factual content, that Americans - even the most intelligent - are operating in a news vacuum. Much of the crisis in which American society is immersed, and which has been building for decades, has been framed by a news media that doesn’t inform but survives commercially by creating this hysteria as well as outrage … It was inevitable that an hysterical and outrageous person would legitimately gain political power democratically in my native land. Second thing I learned: In a tweet the Cri

When Jews met African-Americans in the early part of the 20th century the collision created American popular music. Both groups were immigrants to the great cities of America's north - Jews came from Eastern Europe and Blacks from the American South. But their desire to get away from oppression to economic opportunity wasn't the only thing they had in common. Their cultures were deeply rooted in music and music of a particular kind: crying out and soulful and syncopated. In this cultural history from the FRDH archive, Michael Goldfarb traces out how talented people in both communities met, borrowed, occasionally stole musical ideas and along the way created the American songbook, as well as rock and roll and and rhythm and blues. He also tells the story of the coming together and then fracturing of the great alliance for political progress in 20th century America ... the alliance between African-Americans and Jews. It is an alliance that can be traced at least as far back as Harlem in the 1920's and disint

If you want to know America, you have to understand the Mind of the South. If you want to understand the dynamics that drove events towards the Charlottesville Outrage, you have to understand the mind of the south, or specifically the "white" Southern mind. That mindset did not just pop up, the day Donald Trump took office. It has been the driving force in American politics … all the way back to the foundation of the Republic. White Southerners are a powerful force in American politics. Not a majority - but the largest single political bloc - in the country. In the century after the Civil War this bloc was attached to the Democrats - Lincoln was a Republican - and it acted as a drag anchor on the progressive forces that shaped the modern Democratic party. In response to the civil rights movement white Southerners shifted to the Republican party. Superiority is a key part of the white southern mindset, not just racial, but religious, as well. In the 18th and early 19th centuries the region saw a heavy influ

On the tenth anniversary of the start of the Financial Crash, MIchael Goldfarb looks at work and employment. Are they the same thing? We are told we will have to work longer - in Britain last week it was announced that the age at which Britons in their 40’s could collect their state pensions - social security - would be going up to 68. Work longer, but will we be employed longer? It is all well and good if people are living longer that they stay in the work force longer but it would be jolly nice if the government told that to employers, almost all of whom seem keen on getting rid of their employees once they get past 55. When you add in all the stories about robots doing most forms of work by the time those in their 40s are eligible for their pensions, there seems to be some contradictions that need to be resolved. The unemployment rate today - midsummer 2017 - is 4.3% in the US (4.5% in the uk) In the 1960’s the golden era of the American economy, 4.3% was full employment and economic contentment. Numbers

This Bible study for atheists looks at what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote about God in the Declaration of Independence. Many evangelical or political Christians argue that the US is a "Christian" country because Jefferson used the word. Michael Goldfarb challenges that idea which explores the Enlightenment use of God as Nature. Far from the scriptural understanding of the Judeo-Christian divinity. He traces Jefferson's ideas back to those of Enlightenment philosopher Benedict Spinoza. He uses Spinoza's own bible study as a way of explaining what the founding father's intentions were. Spinoza, who wrote in Latin, coined the phrase Deus sive natura, God or Nature. Nature for Spinoza is is all there is. YOu can call it God if you like but it does not cause itself, or create itself. It is not the creator God of the Bible, anthropomorphized, and directing the fate of human beings and particularly the Israelites, his chosen people. This was pretty revolutionary theory, for the late 17th century. By the la

The Republican Party has become the people James Madison warned us against: a Faction. In any country, the most dangerous thing that can happen is for a group and its political representatives to act as if their view alone represents the nation. That thinking leads to the view that they alone “are” the nation and that those who disagree with them are not of the nation - even if they are fellow citizens, born on the country’s soil. When this happens in a democratic republic, like the US, and the view takes over a political party, then the threat to the national fabric is mortal. And that is the heart of the crisis in America today: The Republicans are no longer a political party but a faction. The danger of factions was noted at the foundation of the United States. In Federalist paper #10 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Federalist_(Dawson)/10 James Madison defined faction as, "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse