FRDH Podcast with Michael Goldfarb

When it comes to Iran, ignorance is not bliss. For the last 40 years, American policy makers have displayed astonishing ignorance about the day to day reality of life in Iran. This has led to one blunder after another in how the US deals with the country, most recently President Trump's withdrawing the US from the JCPOA or Iran nuclear deal. What makes this ignorance astonishing is just how much contact there is between ordinary Iranians and Iranian Americans. In this FRDH podcast Michael Goldfarb speaks with Iranian-American journalist and author Azadeh Moaveni who has reported from Iran and written two highly regarded books about the country about Trump's withdrawing the US from the nuclear deal, what it means to the many Iranians who do not support the regime and whether it brings the prospect of war closer. Ignorance may be a problem of American policy makers, but it is not a problem in this fascinating 15 minute long conversation.

The reality of torture is usually smothered in euphemism when it is discussed in Washington as it has been during the Senate hearings on Gina Haspel, Trump's nominee to run the CIA. It shouldn't be. In this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb, who has interviewed torture victims and torturers, and made the DuPont award winning documentary, "Surviving Torture: Inside Out" cuts through the euphemisms surrounding this barbaric practice. He explains why the official version of what happens in CIA blacksites is wrong. Torture is for punishment not to extract information.

On the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, FRDH host Michael Goldfarb has a meditation on the uprising's meaning today. He tells the story of how the Jews of Warsaw, one-third of the population of the city were herded into a Ghetto and how slowly and then rapidly the Nazis tried to kill them all until, eventually, a group of fighters decided to die with a gun in their hands on teh street of the Warsaw Ghetto rather than to walk meekly into a gas chamber. He explains what effect this story continues to have on himself and his fellow Jews, wherever they live and he asks profound questions about finding the courage to respond to the worst violence.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in the spring of 1968 was a national trauma. Like most traumas people have repressed their memories of the event. Yet, half a century later, the twin decapitation of America's progressive leadership still has an effect on the country. In this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb traces the decline of broadcast journalism and political discourse to the murders. No politician today speaks as honestly to the American people as King and Kennedy. He also recalls what it was like to be young and hear the news that another American leader had been murdered.

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 Amazon

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 crudely as Trump expresses his views. But they will be expressed with the absolute certainty of people who have money. IN this FRDH Trump Year 1 anniversary podcast the focus is on understanding the President as a product of his class ... not a madman.

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 and then the economy disintegrated on Bush’s watch this group congratulated itself for sticking with reality. But this same group was now ignoring facts and indulging in magical thinking. Trump wasn’t going anywhere, no matter what was proclaimed on twitter and in the opinion columns of the mainstream media. Wishful thinking or magical thinking is not reality-based thinking … that is how Trump had changed his opponents. And it’s one of the most important aspects of 2017 in America.

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 justice in full measure.

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 out in Biblical terms. When you think of Moore, and all the other public or political Christians who have been caught out in scandals think of blasphemy. Isn’t it blasphemy to present yourself to the world as a Godly person while behaving in ways that depart from all moral teaching? And isn’t blasphemy a terrible sin. St. Thomas Aquinas thought it a worse sin than murder.

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 carnage, Henri Dunant, organized local people to bring some kind of relief to the stricken soldiers. Dunant, a man of private wealth, self-published a book about his experiences, it was the first step in the lobbying that would create the Red Cross in 1863 and the First Geneva Convention or the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, the following year. War today is different. Emperors no longer command armies into battle in great open spaces. Conflict is everywhere and involves everyone unlucky enough to be nearby. In WW1 for every 10 soldiers killed 1 civilian died. Today that is reversed. For every soldier killed 10 civilians die.

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. Virtually all revolutions fail. Either they fail literally and are reversed by forces of reaction or they fail metaphorically by compromising their lofty goals. The fairest way to assess the impact of a revolution is by the fact that it happened at all. Revolutions represent tectonic shifts in society, terrible rupturings that create decisive breaks with the past. Michael Goldfarb asks Does the Bolshevik Revolution mean there will never be another revolution in a major country like the US?

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." Goldfarb asks, Why American society today feels like it is coming apart at the seams because when watching Burns documentary you realize there is no comparison between the objective reality of the Vietnam era and now. The reality then: half a million troops in combat deployment, riots in American cities every summer with hundreds killed, major political assassinations as a regular feature of national life. Reality today: a sense of panic that is comparable to the Vietnam era but not based in anything like the same scale of trauma.