The Secret History of the Vietnam War

By Daniel Denvir, Vice

If you thought you knew all there was to know about the Vietnam War, you were wrong. For example: ever heard of the "Mere Gook Rule," a code of conduct the US military came up with in order to make it easier for soldiers to murder Vietnamese civilians without feeling too bad about it? ("It's only a mere gook you're killing!")

Well, few people knew about this bit of history either until author Nick Turse discovered it in secret US military archives, which he used as the primary sources for his new(ish) book, Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. The book is based on Turse's discovery of theretofore secret internal military investigations of US-perpetrated atrocities alongside extensive reporting in Vietnam and among American veterans, and it reminds us that the most significant fact about the Vietnam War is its most overlooked: massive and devastating Vietnamese civilian suffering.

The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution – review

Michael Billington, The Guardian

It's always fascinating to see famous writers' early work. But the real value of this 100-minute, 1972 radio play by Caryl Churchill, which draws heavily on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, lies not so much in what it reveals about Churchill as what it says about its all too topical subject: the devastating impact of torture on practitioners as well as victims.

“Bhele” Tholakele Dlunga & Greg Marinovich on the Marikana Massacre

A template for Marikana was made in Ermelo a year ago

by David Bruce, Business Day

IN JANUARY last year, the operational response services component of the South African Police Service (SAPS) was moved out of the "crime prevention" division and re-established as a full police division in its own right. The units that comprise the division are the Special Task Force, the National Intervention Unit, the Public Order Police and the Tactical Response Team.

Fanon and the Value of the Human

by Paul Gilroy, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism

Why should we care about humanism: rejected as it has been so virulently in the academy and the media, co-opted into the service of western military secularists, while simultaneously being rendered empty and compromised by UNESCO-style liberalism? In order to achieve what Sylvia Wynter calls "humanism's re-enchantment", Paul Gilroy argues for a return to the non-racial, anti-colonial, and ultimately reparative humanism articulated by Franz Fanon - unfashionable though this may be in many contemporary scholastic circles.