Tonight! Against the Empire: A Night of Radical Folk Legends

Thursday, March 3rd – 7 PM
Against the Empire: A Night of Radical Folk Legends
Featuring Robb Johnson, David Rovics, and Folk This! performing their greatest hits.
$7

ROBB JOHNSON is now widely recognized as one of the finest songwriters working in the UK today. He enjoys a diverse spectrum of critical acclaim – "a modern-day Dostoyevsky" said the US’s Dirty Linen, Mojo made the double CD "Gentle Men" Folk Album Of The Month, while The Daily Telegraph made it their Folk Album Of 1998, & Tony Benn, the UK’s leading radical politician, says Johnson’s "Winter Turns To Spring" is his favorite song.
He has played pubs, clubs, pavements, pickets & benefits, arts centers & festivals, local radio, BBC Radio 3 & 4, Belgian Radio 1, Nicaraguan TV & Channel 4, the Albert Hole in Bristol &, as part of Roy Bailey’s 1998 concert, the Albert Hall in London. Check him out at: http://www.robbjohnson.co.uk/

DAVID ROVICS is a legendary political songwriter who believes "music can be more than an escape. It can be that, yes, fine, but it can also be a hammer, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, it can be a tool for selling products on the one hand, or part of the stockpile of ammunition necessary to build and maintain a social movement." Since the mid-90's Rovics has basically spent his entire life on tour, playing concerts around the US, Canada and various countries in Europe. The vast majority of his gigs are protests, rallies, picket lines, and direct actions. In recent years he has shared the stage with many fine activists including Amy Goodman, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee, Angela Davis, Danny Glover, Desmond Tutu, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Ward Churchill, Jello Biafra, Dead Prez, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, Bruce Cockburn, the Indigo Girls, Steve Earle and many others. Rovics’ greatest hits album, Behind the Barricades, was recently released by AK Press. Check him out at: http://www.davidrovics.com/

Folk This! is a bridge, a connection. Through music they attempt to link the generations who came of age in the 60's and 70's and the new activists making waves in the protest movement of today. The songs they sing come form many sources, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and further back to times of slavery and the Paris commune, the hymns and anthems of the IWW and the songs of labor and anti-fascism. This bridge is not only musical, it is real.

AT THE AK PRESS WAREHOUSE!
AK Press 674-A 23rd. St Oakland, CA
b/t MLK and San Pablo - near 19th St. BART and West Grand Exit of 80/980
For more info contact:
AK Press at 510.208.1700, akpress@akpress.org
All events at AK Press are wheelchair accessible.
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Other exciting AK Press events in March:
Friday, March 18th — The Abolition of White Democracy with Joel Olson
Friday, March 25th — Ward Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens


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Friday, March 18th – 7 PM - FREE
The Abolition of White Democracy
A night with author and activist Joel Olson, offering a new way of understanding the tortured relationship between race and democracy in the United States.

"The Abolition of White Democracy by Joel Olsen should be required reading for anti-racists and anti-imperialists. Olsen presents a tight historical analysis of white supremacy and capitalism as the foundation for a democratic order that requires gross racial inequality. Olsen isn't just offering critical analysis, but tools to help us abolish this system and win liberation. At a time when the Left is faltering under the Right, this book gives us perspective and guidance to flip the script." —Chris Crass, author of Collective Liberation on My Mind, member of the Catalyst Project, will introduce Mr. Olson

"The Abolition of White Democracy is essential reading for all those seeking to realize the promise of democracy in America." —Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White

Racial discrimination embodies inequality, exclusion, and injustice and as such has no place in a democratic society. And yet racial matters pervade nearly every aspect of American life, influencing where we live, what schools we attend, the friends we make, the votes we cast, the opportunities we enjoy, and even the television shows we watch. Joel Olson contends that, given the history of slavery and segregation in the United States, American citizenship is a form of racial privilege in which whites are equal to each other but superior to everyone else. In Olson’s analysis we see how the tension in this equation produces a passive form of democracy that discourages extensive participation in politics because it treats citizenship as an identity to possess rather than as a source of empowerment. Olson traces this tension and its disenfranchising effects from the colonial era to our own, demonstrating how, after the civil rights movement, whiteness has become less a form of standing and more a norm that cements white advantages in the ordinary operations of modern society. To break this pattern, Olson suggests an "abolitionist-democratic" political theory that makes the fight against racial discrimination a prerequisite for expanding democratic participation.

Joel Olson is assistant professor of political science at Northern Arizona University. He has been a member of many political organizations, including Minneapolis Anti-Racist Action, Phoenix Copwatch, The New Abolitionist Society, Love and Rage, and Bring the Ruckus. He has also co-edited radical publications such as Profane Existence, The Blast!, New Abolitionist, and Bring the Ruckus.

The Abolition of White Democracy will be available for purchase.

AT THE AK PRESS WAREHOUSE!
AK Press 674-A 23rd. St Oakland, CA
b/t MLK and San Pablo - near 19th St. BART and West Grand Exit of 80/980
For more info contact:
AK Press at 510.208.1700, akpress@akpress.org
All events at AK Press are wheelchair accessible.
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Friday, March 25th – 7 PM
AK Press, KPFA, Speak Out, and City Lights present:
Ward Churchill – On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
Empire, Resistance, and the New McCarthyism
AN OFFSITE EVENT — AT THE WOMEN’S BUILDING in San Francisco
3543 18th St., San Francisco, CA
$10

Limited Seating Available - BUY YOUR ADVANCE TICKETS HERE!

Over the past month, AK Press author Ward Churchill has found himself at the center of a media firestorm. The controversy is based on an essay Churchill wrote soon after 9-11, which he later expanded into an AK Press book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. Using inflammatory and distorted political attacks conservative protestors used the essay to force Hamilton College in New York to cancel a speaking engagement Ward had scheduled there. Since then Mr. Churchill has stepped down as Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado. Not satisfied with this, Colorado Governor Bill Owens is demanding that Ward resign his position as a tenured professor as well. The mainstream media (including Bill O'Reily and Fox News) has picked up the story, distorting and misrepresenting the facts, as usual.

Ward is appearing at select events around the country to speak on the book that caused the media firestorm and the controversy surrounding it. Friday, March 25th at the Women’s Building in San Francisco, hear it straight from him, as Ward Churchill sets the record straight.

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ABOUT THE BOOK
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (AK Press ): the book that caused a media firestorm. An expanded and meticulously annotated version of Churchill's essay "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," which had the honor of being attacked by both Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

As far as Ward Churchill is concerned, the record speaks for itself. The "Most Peace-Loving of Nations" has been engaged in brutal military campaigns in every corner of the globe, unceasingly, since its inception. In attempting to forever alter Americans false self-concept, Ward Churchill contextualizes US aggression and the most effective response to it yet--the attacks of Sept. 11th—in a readable format. Churchill has meticulously chronicled both U.S. military campaigns—domestic and foreign—from 1776 to the present and U.S. attempts to violate, obstruct and/or subvert International Law from from1945 to the present. Drawing from US military and interventionist history, lessons from Nuremberg and the UN's own voting records, the two Chronologies, exhaustively researched and annotated, illustrate a heart-wrenching history of senseless butchery and democracy deterred. In this context, the only fitting question for a nation still reeling from the wake-up call of Sept. 11th is "How can they not hate us?" In his newest offering, Churchill demands that the American public shake off its collective unconscious and take responsibility for the criminality carried out in its name.

Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Cherokee) is professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado/Boulder. A member of the leadership council of Colorado AIM (American Indian Movement), he is a past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. A prolific writer and lecturer, he has authored, co-authored or edited more than 20 books and 4 AK Press Audio CD’s.