Monday, October 29, 2007

Defending Critical Thinking in Academia

On our 29 October 2007 show, we talked with Reginald Dylan, of the National Project to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia about attempts to suppress critical thinking and alternative viewpoints in higher education. The interview comes in the wake of a so-called "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" organized by David Horrowitz.


In the actual broadcast, we also aired a clip of Bob Avakian, who heads the Revolutionary Communist Party, on the topic of critical thinking in academia.


To listen to the show, click here:

Monday, October 22, 2007

Chinese Political Poster Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Irvine -- For our next show, KUCI's Subversity radio program interviews the compilers of a new collection of Chinese political poster art from the Cultural Revolution. We chat with Lincoln Cushing, a librarian/scholar of political posters and with Ann Tompkins, whose collection of such posters has just come out in a wonderful compilation from Chronicle Books, Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.


We also chat with an Chinese American activist mentioned in the book, Steve Louie, about the impact of the Cultural Revolution, and its art, on social and political movements here.

The show airs from 9-10 a.m. on Monday, 22 October, 2007, on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County, Calif., and is simulcast on the Web via kuci.org.

Cushing maintains a documents for the people site: http://www.docspopuli.org/..

The bulk of the poster collection is housed at the East Asia Library at University of California,

To listen to the entire show, click here:

Monday, October 15, 2007

L.A. Times and Armenian Genocide Censorship


As the U.S. Congress moves to a vote by the full body on calling the Armenian genocide a genocide, Subversity takes a look back at how one mainstream paper has dealt -- rather poorly -- with the issue. In an encore edition, we talk with Mark Arax, a longtime journalist at the Los Angeles Times, whose story on the Armenian genocide was spiked by an editor. He subsequently left the paper after an out-of-court settlement. The editor also left, to work for the Wall Street Journal in Ankara.


The interview aired Monday, October 15, 2007 at 9 am on Subversity, a KUCI public affairs program on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County, California, webcasting via kuci.org.

We discuss why the censorship occurred and what happened. See coverage in the Armenian Weekly.

See also Robert Fisk, "A Reign of Terror which History has Chosen to Neglect," The Independent, 12 October, 2007.
To listen to the entire show, click here:

Monday, October 8, 2007

CIA at 60: Domestic Surveillance Continues

Sixty years ago, the U.S. National Security Act led to the creation of the CIA. The spy agency was not supposed to spy on Americans, but KUCI's Subversity host Dan Tsang found out the CIA was spying on him. He took the CIA to federal court, with the help of the ACLU and the Center for National Security Studies, and prevailed. In an out-of-court settlement, the CIA promised to not spy on him again and promised to expunge anything collected on his First-Amendment-protected activities.
Subversity takes this 60th anniversary of the CIA as the opportunity to look back at the CIA and its history of domestic surveilance, before and after 9/11. We air a 1999 interview we did with attorney Kate Martin, of the Center for National Security Studies, who represented Tsang in his Privacy Act lawsuit against the CIA, as well as portions from an hour-long interivew, taped this past July for KUCI show host Mari Frank's "Privacy Piracy" show (www.kuci.org/privacypiracy/#09_12_07) where Frank interviewed Martin and Tsang about his lawsuit that exposed CIA domestic spying after the Privacy Act was enacted supposedly to prevent such illegal activities. We talk about how the CIA used the National Security Act to illegally spy on Tsang. Although the CIA settled the case with Tsang, a U.S. citizen at birth, it refused to promise to not spy on other Americans (or permanent residents).
To listen to the entire show, click here:
For more information, see press release.

Monday, October 1, 2007

Human Rights & Sex Offenders

On our next show, airing Monday, 1 October 2007, KUCI's Subversity show kicks off its fall 2007 season by focusing on a new report, No Easy Answers: Sex Offender Laws in the US, that recently was issued by Human Rights Watch.


We talk with the report's author, Sarah Tofte, who is a researcher with the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch. In her report, she assails "mistaken premises" that are prevalent about sex offenders and argues that we must rethink sex offender laws because the laws are counterproductive.

To listen to the entire show, click here:

Last month, we aired a related program, an interview with Paul Shannon, who has started a campaign to reform sex offender laws.

Audio of that earlier Subversity show is here.

Shannon's article in CounterPunch is here.

Shannon's web site with an online petition is here.