New Media We Recommend

Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these items are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.

Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World, by Maria Armoudian – As someone who firmly believes in the importance of independent media, I found Maria Armoudian’s book Kill the Messenger an excellent articulation of the importance that media plays in social change. The author/Professor looks at numerous case studies pertaining to the role of the news media in international affairs, such as the Rwandan genocide, the Bosnia War and Mexico & Chile’s fight for democracy. Armoudian’s case studies not only support her thesis of how crucial media can be in our understanding of complex global affairs, she makes it clear that the news media can also foster violence & war or it can be a tool for resisting violence and fighting for peace. The book concludes with some suggestions of what a truly independent media would look like and why it is necessary to develop in these turbulent times.

Why Are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification and the Desire to Conform, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has done it again. This book is another amazing collection of essays that challenges the blatant straight homophobia in this culture. These essays also challenge gender norms and even take on the overt efforts within the more mainstream LGBT community’s desire to assimilate. The essays use humor, poetry, sarcasm and sharp analysis that takes us out of our comfort zone and forces us to seriously rethink how we see gender in painfully male dominant world. In addition, these essays speak to the resiliency, courage and compassion of those who will not be silent on the institutional mechanisms that seek to police our behavior at every turn. Delightfully brilliant!

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, by Paul Mason – BBC journalist Paul Mason has given us a gift. Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is a first hand account of the social uprisings happening all across the world. Mason begins with the Arab Spring and provides readers with a beautifully written narrative about some of the people involved in the Egyptian revolution, both the conditions that led to their involvement and reflections on their participation in the overthrow of President Mubarak. Mason then takes the reader to the youth rebellion in Britain, the uprisings in Spain and Greece, then ending with American and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. While the author does not provide any serious critique of each of these movements worldwide, the book does give one a sense of the scope of the global uprising and the possibilities that exist for more profound social transformation. An important contribution to the resistance literature of the 21^st Century.

The FBI’s War on Black America (DVD) – This 1989 documentary (recently released on DVD) provides a stout history overview of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) brutal campaign against Black activists in the 1950s – the 1970s. Using archival footage and interviews from numerous Black activists and revolutionaries, this film chronicles the FBI COINTELPRO campaign to undermine and eliminate the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. This film presents the more radical elements of the larger freedom struggle by Blacks in the US and why they were seen as a threat to the established power structure. A important conclusion that one could draw from such a film is that anytime an oppressed group fights back against power it will be targeted for marginalization or elimination. The FBI’s War on Black America is a film that should be seen by people who want racial justice, since it doesn’t sugar coat the history of how the US power structure responded to the Black liberation movement that has too often been sanitized.