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Media Bits and Bytes - March 19, 2019

Portside
Jane Mayer on Fox's Friends; Murdoch Oversteps in NZ; Huawei Stoops to Conquer; Google's DC Clout; Netflex Cancels "One Day"; Media vs Bernie

books

Distant Early Warning of Worse to Come

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
Masterpiece or not, William S. Burroughs' "The Revised Boy Scout Manual": An Electronic Revolution fills a puzzling lacuna in the Beat author's bibliography, and offers an foretaste of the viperous Age of Trump.

How Israel’s Secret Services Built the Most Robust Assassination Machine in History

Glenn Frankel Washington Post
Since World War II Israel and its pre-state paramilitary organizations have assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world - some 2,300 "targeted killing operations," most of them against Palestinians, but also aimed at Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians and others. In the name of state security, Israeli officials didn't just walk the line of legality, they trampled it.

Hezbollah Takes Journalists in Lebanon on a Tour to Prove Trump Wrong

Liz Sly and Suzan Haidamous Washington Post
“The current American president is ignorant of the region,” said Hezbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif, speaking to reporters in a cave until recently occupied by Nusra. “We are the force that fights terrorism while the United States continues to support terrorism in many forms.”

books

Terror in the French Revolution and Today

Samuel Farber International Socialist Review
The author argues that the Terror of the French Revolution was a price worth paying, and that the lessons from overthrowing the old regime should temper today's trend of maligning oppressed people's resort to violence as itself a rationale for ongoing class injustices. The reviewer, no critic of revolutionary struggle, argues that the author overemphasizes the pursuit of vengeance then and now involved at the expense of politics and a weighing of class forces.
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