Archive of The Revenge of History
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Remembering the Victory at Stalingrad 70 years on
Verso authors Seumas Milne and Clare Solomon joined Geoffrey Roberts author of Stalin's General : The Life of Georgy Zhukhov and Susan Richards of OpenDemocracy Russia to discuss the meaning of Stalingrad 70 years on. Gregg McDonald's film of the event also includes performances by Thee Faction and the Trans-Siberian March Band.
The Philosophy Football 70th Anniversary of the Victory of Stalingrad Night combined political commentary and military history with some great live music. A showcase event for a different way of doing politics, mixing ideas with having a good time, learning from the past, looking forward to a better future, and all on a Saturday night out.
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Explaining the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Today is Nakba Day - the annual day of commemmoration of the Palestinian catastrophe, the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians.
A selection of Verso's books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, from explanations to considered outcomes.
These are Verso's key books to explain the situation – what others should we include?
The Conflict Explained
The Case for Sanctions Against Israel edited by Audrea Lim
Leading international voices consider all sides of the conflict including boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. With contributions from Angela Davis, John Berger, Naomi Klein, Omar Barghouti, Dalit Baum and Rebecca Vilkomerson.
The Punishment of Gaza by Gideon Levy
The powerful narrative of Israel's invasion and control over Gaza - examining the abandonment of diplomacy in favour of raw military power, turning Gaza into an enormous open-air prison.
“Gideon Levy’s passionate and revealing account is an eloquent, even desperate, call to bring this shocking tragedy to an end, as can easily be done.”
– Noam Chomsky
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"It's time to win more than arguments" - The Revenge of History reviewed in the Guardian, Al Jazeera and the HuffPost
The heat of debate within Seumas Milne's The Revenge of History is stirring up further discussion in its reviews. Featured in Al Jazeera, the HuffPost and in the Guardian - reviewed by Verso's Owen Hatherley - Milne's collection of Guardian columns from 1997 to 2012 is a timely work of vengeful revisionism.
David Wearing, writing for Al Jazeera, marks out the trajectory of Milne's argument: that the neo-conservative "empire" in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall realistically only lasted for seven years. While the neo-liberals went head first into a future they believed to be theirs, the voices of the Left continued to speak of the potential for disaster, but when times are good, the voices of dissent are silenced even more than usual due to sheer unpopularity. The same is the case for Milne's prediction of greater resistance in Iraq post-Saddam Hussein. The Revenge of History proves that the "Cassandras have been vindicated, but this is worthless by itself, of benefit only to our own egos".
Wearing sees the necessity of Milne's work being specifically a collection of columns: the advice we didn't take was there all along and now that we're actually paying attention, what are we going to do?
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Seumas Milne: The End of the New World Order as We Know It
[T]he ministers involved in the Blair government were terrified of the demonstration. They were terrified of the strength of public opinion.
The first twelve years of the 21st century have been eventful ones. Beginning with the biggest terrorist attack on American soil, it has since followed with an increasingly drawn out illegal war, uprising in the Arab world, the biggest global financial crisis since the Wall Street Crash in the 1930s and a global backlash to the stranglehold of neoliberal economics. The New World Order that began with the election of George H.W. Bush is under threat.
Slavoj Žižek singled out 2011 as the Year of Dreaming Dangerously but Seumas Milne's new book The Revenge of History points to the first decade of 21st century, and more accurately the summer of 2008 as the "watershed" moment of the decline of the New World Order. Until this time, socialism was a concept resigned to the end of the Cold War, an 80s throwback that was not due to make a return any time soon. Global capitalism had lead the way. Neoliberal economics. Free markets. Western dominance.
Seumas Milne, the Guardian columnist, has compiled his writing from over the last decade into this collection, an amalgam that revisits the decade with a new perspective, one that was widely disagreed with at the time. Interviewed by Joe Kennedy in the Quietus, he recalls how Michael Gove referred to the collective opinion on this renegade group of journalists as the 'Prada-Meinhof' group: "It just drove home to me how everything the establishment – politicians, the mainstream media – had said proved to be utterly wrong, and everything we had said had turned out to be correct."
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The Bolivarian Revolution Continues
Hugo Chávez (waving a replica of 19th century revolutionary Símon Bolívar's sword) has once again triumphed over the bastions of neoliberal capitalism. After 14 years in power, he won 55% of the vote on a record 81% turnout, proving to the World Bank, the IMF, Barclays, and the United Statess (among others) that the people want socialism, not corporate imperialism. As Seamus Milne notes in the Guardian, despite the fact that Chávez's opponent Henrique Capriles was backed by the US (whose antagonism toward his government is well-known and most noteably manifested itself in a failed coup in 2002) and outspent him three to one using virtually all of the private media to his advantage, it was a decisive victory. Only two states, in which most all of the wealthy & bourgeois reside, went to Capriles. The other twenty-one went to Chávez. Milne celebrates the importance of this victory,Venezuela and its Latin American allies have demonstrated that it's no longer necessary to accept a failed economic model, as many social democrats in Europe still do. They have shown it's possible to be both genuinely progressive and popular. Cynicism and media-fuelled ignorance have prevented many who would naturally identify with Latin America's transformation from recognising its significance. But Chávez's re-election has now ensured that the process will continue – and that the space for 21st-century alternatives will grow.