RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Many Vietnams
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends an account of the post WWII global movement that allied socialist countries against US imperialism
Transporting goods on the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam to South Vietnam
[Public Domain]
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
North Korea, Tricontinentalism, and the Latin American Revolution, 1959–1970
Moe Taylor, Cambridge University Press, £85
A GENERATION on from the Cold War, it is easy to forget how every aspect of our lives was shaped for half a century by the existential confrontation between the capitalist and socialist worlds.
Given that, it is imperative we do not allow the latest showdown between the “free” world and its adversaries today to obscure the real driving force of anti-communism after 1945: US imperialism.
That motive becomes emphatically clear when we consider alongside the usual suspects of Russia and China the “rogue” states that Washington and its satellites today continue to isolate, demonise or threaten: Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and so on.
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