Should we ever go back in time to live the past dreams for social equality when we can make giant leaps into a concrete future of individual liberties? The challenge is not merely philosophical.

Guthrie’s ‘machine’ indeed ‘killed Fascists’, for reactionary seeds, just as revolutionary ones, are sowed first in the minds.

Merely the celebrity status of a pacifist leader cannot transform a country that has been kept deliberately bereft of the knowledge of its peoples’ history.

Rama Devi continued a lifetime of serving the humanity through picketing liquor stores and gambling joints, treating lepers and people with disabilities, physically rendering care in drought and flood affected regions all over India.

No one else emulated American electoral system like Havel did. He not only successfully divided up the country by racially disintegrating the Slovakians (almost 90% of whom were ethnically Slovak), Havel adopted a political system modeled on the U.S. Senate.

They killed the world leader who had relentlessly strived to unify Africa and to bring people of the colonized world together to raise their consciousness about the history of Eurocentrism and the living legacies of Colonialism.

Cold War history has been so colored by western media propaganda that it has ceased to be Cold. As an unintended ramification and possible consequence of the old habits of generating fear psychoses and war justifications, the numbers continue to get inflated even today. In the case of Libya, before the issue is relegated to dustbins of history and before Gaddafi is eternally depicted as the dictator he was not, it is crucial to seek for answers regarding the number of actual deaths.

The war on Libya certainly did not begin in 2011. However, it probably is going to end this year if the rogue nations of G8 and NATO forces end up assassinating Colonel Gaddafi. But there should not be any illusions harbored as regards the outcome of this war.

As much as his poem reminding us that the revolution will not be televised is indeed truer than before, beloved late brother Gil Scott-Heron’s message that the revolution is going on at the same time is equally relevant a reminder. And the poet might have departed us, but the revolutionary is still alive in spirits…

An uncritical acceptance of street tactics in Egypt will be a historical fallacy. The romantic notions of revolutionaries as hopeful future is one thing; a false ascription to a group of religious mischiefs as social justice fighters is yet another. The most recent instances of popular uprisings may well have been a continuation of protests on part of the people to end brutal regimes world over.

Saswat Pattanayak interviews Noam Chomsky

In the most grotesque of historical misrepresentations, Gandhi and King have today been reduced by their false worshippers at highest of world powers, to becoming exactly the opposite of what they stood for: as poster boys for global capitalism, of the military-industrial complex, the new permanent features of the status quo, dazed and dumbed down on the revised Mt. Rushmore.

America has witnessed more revolutionary upheavals than any other modern nation. Abolitionism, women suffrage movement, Wobblies, anarchism, anti-McCarthyism, black upsurge against racial segregation, New Left, anti-Vietnam War resistance movement, Stonewall and LGBT movements, Black Panther Party, and anti-WTO protests in Seattle are among hundreds of other small and significant revolutionary sparks which provide important lessons for the global working class solidarity against capitalism, racism and patriarchy.

A new dialogue about India and Pakistan requires new imaginations. A federal reunification manifesto with autonomous rights to both nation-states is not as dangerous a proposal as the original partition sketch. A mutual agreement for complete disarmament between India and Pakistan is not likely to be as unfriendly a conversation as the surreptitious nature of warmongering going on for decades.

Inspired by Savarkar, the Hindu Nation has found its modern day distinct ideology through writings of Keshava Hedgewar and Madhav Golwalkar. Full of hatred and parochial intents, Hindu supremacism has mesmerized the country today. Once, a communal outburst, Hindu nationalism today has gained not only a cultural admissibility in the form of RSS, but also a wide-scale political platform in the form of BJP. The killers of Gandhi are celebrated in the land of the Buddha.

The blood narrates Orissa’s history as the history of tribal uprisings against socio-economic injustice. And that, her future, too, shall be shaped by the mandates of the dispossessed, not by the whims of the oligarchs.

Just as the indigenous organizers were correct in their assessment of human values in the past, it is more likely that keeping in view the status quo of power dynamics in independent India, their dissent towards the power this time around, too, is indicative of appropriate impatience towards prevailing rampant social injustice.

Our freedom is not about piecemeal compensations as agreed upon by corporate giants of South Korea, Japan and the United States. Our freedom is not open to half-hearted round table negotiations. We are yet to attain the freedom we have been dying for since generations. And we are yet to give up the hope that one day, we shall collectively inhabit the planet, without submitting any portion thereof to any greedy private capitalistic interests, irrespective of geographical territories.

Parsons’ commitment to the cause of international communism often embarrassed the United States administration. FBI confiscated her library comprising over 1,500 books and progressive works soon after her accidental death – thus preventing the country of having access to her radicalism.

Employing radical perspectives, Howard Zinn has not only left behind issues that have legacies of progressivism, but also equally powerful tools for future reinventions of the current world. “We the people” are stricken by the grief of his passage, but enriched by his enduring imaginings.