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Unpacking the Jewish Claim of Indigeneity and Flights: Radicals on the Run

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In the first half of the show, Quechua and Jewish writer and student Rabbi Daniel Delgado joins us to confront the elephant in the room: are Jews Indigenous? As someone who is both Indigenous and Jewish, Daniel discusses the history and context of the term Indigenous and how the claim of Jewish Indigeneity is almost always brought up to absolve Zionists from accusations of colonialism, occupation and genocide, and why this claim is such a remarkably effective and insidious propaganda tool. In the second half of the program, award-winning journalist and author Joel Whitney joins us to discuss his latest book, Flights: Radicals on the Run, a look at censorship through surveillance, violence, oppression and the quite literal hunting of artists, poets, journalists, organizers, and more. Through these varied biographies, Joel highlights the US government’s intolerance for anyone who is effective in working towards positive change in this country. All this and more, coming up now on Project Censored.

Video of the Interview with Daniel Delgado

Video of the Interview with Joel Whitney

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Daniel Delgado

Support our work at Project-Censored.org/Support

Eleanor Goldfield: Thanks everyone for joining us at The Project Censored Radio Show. We’re very glad right now to be joined by Daniel Delgado, who is a Quechua and Jewish writer and student rabbi. He is a former editor of Earth First! Journal and the author of a chapter in the Sacred Earth, Jewish Perspectives on Our Planet.

He also writes fiction and works on tabletop role playing games.

Daniel, thanks so much for joining us.

Daniel Delgado: Thanks for having me.

Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely. So, Daniel, I’ve invited you on today to talk about this massive elephant sized question in the room that Jews and non Jews alike seem to either emphatically assert or delicately avoid, that is: are Jews indigenous to the land now occupied by the ethno state of Israel?

And just to preface this conversation, I want to quote a bit from an essay that you wrote on this topic as to why you have a particularly powerful perspective here. “I have worked with other Indigenous peoples from North, Central, and South America on campaigns to protect our lands, our ways of life, and our planet. I have taught extensively on the topic of colonization as it exists today, including within explicitly Jewish frameworks.”

so with that, I want to start with the word indigenous. And having read your work, I know better than to ask you what that means because I too agree that strict definitions belie lived realities.

But I want to highlight the modernity of the term, which you do, that it’s something that doesn’t make sense prior to a certain time period or the action of building nation states. For instance, I’m Swedish and the creation of the nation state of Sweden around 1000 AD. necessitated the violent othering of a people, in this case, the Sami, a practice that continues to this day.

So I wanna ask you, so like the Sami are indigenous, for instance, but the Zoroastrians who were victims of Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century are not indigenous. Can you talk a little bit about this timeline aspect and how that then relates to the claims of Jewish indigeneity?

Daniel Delgado: Yeah, for sure.

The key point here is the european colonization of the Americas beginning in 1492 is sort of recognized by historians as a major shift. And the systems that Europeans developed to colonize the Americas, right, or Abya Yala are, were new, and they were systems that played into the development of all of these systems that then sort of came to characterize modernity, you know, white supremacy, capitalism, these things that are now part of the air we breathe, were under development at that time, and they were new things.

And so just like it’s anachronistic to back project capitalism into the Middle Ages, even though there are things that might resemble capitalist structures, it’s not capitalism as we have it. It’s the same with colonization. So even though we’ve had things like conquest and we’ve had population resettlement, these particular systems of colonization developed by Europeans are unique and are now pervasive, right?

And that’s the context that the term Indigenous or the concept Indigenous comes out of, and as I sort of say in the essay, right, from the perspective of those of us from this hemisphere, right, we got called Indians. And that was turned into a real social and legal category that only came to exist because we were colonized.

Because before we were colonized, we belonged to our Pueblos or our tribes or our nations or some combination. And then we had our neighbors and we were all people. Indian as a category, Indigenous as a category had no meaning. So that’s why, uh, when we use this term, we need to be aware that we’re referring to something that exists in some sort of relationship with colonization, which is a modern phenomenon.

Eleanor Goldfield: Right. And I also want to, with that highlight, as you do, the importance of power over geography. Using my family as another example, my mother’s family has been in the same part of Sweden for probably like a thousand years, but I’m not Indigenous. I have roots there. There’s a massive difference.

And to me, the claim of Jewish indigeneity feels a bit like in the movie Get Out where they say it’s so in to be black right now. It just feels like very in for people to claim to be indigenous , but only for people who aren’t because it’s just like fun for them to put this costume on.

But as you put in your essay, Indigenous and settler are not identities or awards or punishments. They’re labels describing relationships with positionalities of power. Could you talk about that distinction between the power aspect and just geography? Like, Oh, we’ve been here forever.

Daniel Delgado: Sure. So

relationships are really central, right? I mean, relationships are really central in a lot of Indigenous views of the world and of how we move through the world. And so what creates the concept of settler and indigenous is the onset of colonization, right?

You can have many peoples inhabiting a place. You can have peoples moving in and out of that place and you can have conquest. But once you have the creation of this category of the settler or the colonizer who comes in and who establishes their control over the land and over the people and create some kind of system in which this class has power, and this other class of people does not then you’re getting at these colonial dynamics. And so that’s what creates this idea. And what maintains the existence of settlers and natives is the persistence of those structures.

So in a true post colonial context, we wouldn’t need terms like indigenous anymore, either. We might retain them in language, right? Because of course, language, we keep the things that the terms we’ve used in the past and we give them new meanings. But as we use those terms now, there’s only settlers if there’s settler power structures. There’s a settler, if they are someone who has this privilege and the systemic power in a place that their ancestors migrated to and they gained that power historically and in the present day by marginalizing, by displacing, by othering the people who are there first and then the relationships, the pre existing relationships are part of what goes into indigineity as well right, the sort of consistent relationship with the land and with the history in the land.

And again, you can pick out individual pieces of that, and you know, if we get into talking more about the Jewish case specifically, part of what makes it a tough one is that there are many elements of Jewish relationship with this particular land that share things in common with indigenous relationships with their native lands.

But we sort of need to look at the overall picture of the relationships involved and not get really, really reductive in the same way that a lot of people will come in and say, well, indigenous just means the first people originally from a place. And so the Sami are not indigenous because they came in like, right? It’s like, that’s, it’s an attempt to obscure these very real power relationships.

And the history of the term Indigenous Peoples in this context, it is a movement term. It is a term that was adopted by Indigenous Peoples from different continents in order to organize around commonalities of experience of resistance to colonization.

So it isn’t just an abstraction or academic, like this is what the term was developed to mean. It was developed to mean something we have in common, even those over here we get called Indians over there you’re getting called aborigines over there you’re getting called natives, whatever it is we’re getting called, we have this shared experience of persistence, right of persistence

even though there’s this colonization.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And as you mentioned, I want to get into the Eretz Israel, the land of Israel and how that’s necessarily different from the nation state, the Medinat Israel. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and how this, how it kind of gets a lot of Jews or non Jews as well can get confused by that relationship.

I mean, just speaking for myself, you grow up hearing about Israel and our connection to it, even though I’m not really connected to it. Could you talk a little bit about how this gums up the works a bit?

Daniel Delgado: It’s right, like with the terminologies it’s incredibly complicated, right?

So in the Torah, Yisrael is a person and is then the term used for the descendants of that person who then constitute what we might call the nation, like the people, right? And not nation in the nation state sense, but in the sense of this is the people of Yisrael. You know, and for most of Jewish history, when you say Yisrael or anglicized Israel, what you mean is that people, who have been a diasporic people for 2000 years and I am in the camp of I would say we are still a diasporic people, like, regardless of the existence of a state that claims to be a Jewish state.

A nd then there’s Eretz Yisrael, which is the land of Yisrael, and in the classical Jewish understanding, Eretz Yisrael is a, it’s an imagined space. There is a specific land, but the way that the term is used, it’s like a reference to a past land and a future land, and also wrapped up with these ideas of redemption and the world perfected, and the relationships with the land are tied up with this idea of a future perfection.

What’s then happened is that with the development of Zionism, Zionism re-read many Jewish texts and reinterpreted many Jewish texts as being about the in the present day establishment of a nation state on the Eurocolonial model. And I know that a lot of people want to push back on the Eurocolonial part, but it’s very clear in the early Zionist writings that they are very explicitly mimicking Eurocolonial nation building. That’s the project.

And so for many Jews and many non Jews, it’s very confusing because you’ll open up these texts, you’ll open up the Passover Seder, and it’ll say next year in Jerusalem. You’ll open up the, you’ll go into a synagogue on Shabbat, and it’ll say something about Zion, or it’ll say something about Jerusalem, and it’s very easy to read that as a Zionist declaration, a Zionist aspiration, and for many Jews it is, but for most of Jewish history, it was not.

So, we have these competing narratives about even how the land is defined and what our relationship with it is. I don’t know if that answers the question or if it just complicates it further.

Eleanor Goldfield: Well, and I think that’s part of it, right? Is that these texts, you know, like in Judaism, there’s a saying there are 70 faces of the Torah.

You can interpret it, and I know that Christian and Muslim scholars know this well, you can interpret it in a multitude of ways, it’s just that this has become a major, or like a mainstream interpretation, just because Zionism has become a mainstream interpretation because it’s, as you pointed out, Euro colonial, and also very Christian. There are more Christian Zionists in the US than there are Jews worldwide, they’re about 30 million Christian Zionists in the U.S. and there are about 16 million Jews worldwide. And I’m not saying that to excuse Zionist Jews. I’m just saying this is a very Christian, as you pointed out, Euro colonial paradigm and ideology.

And I think that, moving kind of more into this morass, I want to talk about the topic of roots as well, because, as you mentioned, we are people of the diaspora. And I read years ago, the book by Shlomo Sand called The Invention of the Jewish People, which I recommend that a lot of folks read, and he details with buckets of research, how most of today’s Jews are in fact, descendants of converts from the diaspora. And I would consider myself as Sephardic and Ashkenazi as a part of that.

So most of us, most of us can’t even make the claim that we have this ancestral, like that we once lived in the land that is now Israel. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this idea that you know, the people who are Ashkenazi or Sephardic or whatever, that have, that might be those same descendants of people who never were directly linked to that land have this like deep seated assertion that they are the people of that nation state or that modern place.

Daniel Delgado: I think that, you know, the idea of like blood as connection, you know, you can find this concept in a lot of languages, right? But again, when we use it in the modern sense, it really often ties back into these European ideas of race. And most societies, including Jews throughout most of history, haven’t constructed belonging in that way.

And so when someone converts into Judaism, you know, their Hebrew name, they take on as their parents, Abraham and Sarah, who are the archetypal first Jews, the idea being, right, that there’s this peopleness and there’s this belonging.

And, much of what we see in a lot of modern Israeli discourse is this pivoting toward this idea of blood and belonging that’s very distressing, and has very fascist resonance for clear reasons, and in the same way, right, as I was sort of saying that the connection of the people with the land, it’s like a spiritual connection.

I wrote about this in my essay in the Sacred Earth, the Jewish relationship with land traditionally is very allergic to the idea of ownership and control, and what distinguishes Zionism in its idea of what a Jewish relationship with land means is there’s this idea of controlling the land, determining who settles, where they settled, what activities taking place on the land in a very authoritarian hierarchical way, that of course has castrophic consequences for non Jews and for the land, right? And I would argue for the Jewish people as well.

So again, I think I lost the thread of your original question, but the idea of belonging to the land, right? There is a very deep Jewish idea here. And there is a very long history of Jews dwelling in the land. And, you know, there are many Palestinian and Jewish writers who have written about different ways that Palestine can be free, that’s not some sort of imagined nightmare Zionist fantasy of all Jews being driven away, right?

Daniel Delgado: There are many ways that different peoples can inhabit the same space. But again, when we talk about colonization, we’re talking about relationships, like who controls land, who controls belonging, who controls access to structures of power. And these structues that Israeli society are set up upon are really coming out of these European ideas of how land should be controlled.

And so it hurts me to see that reference as the actualization of an ancient Jewish connection with this land, because that connection is very real to me. And that is never the way that the texts, I would argue, two Jews, three opinions, but I would argue the way that the texts have directed us to be in relationship with land or with others who dwell there.

And certainly the blood argument is, I try to stay away from the blood argument, because I think that it’s a diversion. Because I think, you know, someone else can bring in another study, and say, well, X, Y, and Z claim about Palestinians, and, oh, no, this is the claim about Jews, and I just, I want to keep DNA away from all of us, because I think once any people in a vulnerable position vis a vis white supremacy, which includes Jews and Arabs, start to get into them analyzing our DNA, I don’t think it’s going to end well for any of us.

I just, I try to steer the direction, the conversation away from that.

Eleanor Goldfield: That’s a very good point. Yes. As you were talking, I was thinking of like how often in U.S. history alone, which this country hasn’t been around that long, just in the history of this country, like how blood quantum and all of this has been used as a fascistic tool against non whites. So you make a very good point there.

And with that, I appreciated that in your essay, you mentioned this as well, is that the question is to whether Jews are white, and I remember talking to my father about this, who’s a professor and historian, and he said it depends on who you ask, because in the South, and you write about this, the Jews were given rights as whites, and many Jews owned slaves and had plantations.

In the north, it was different. And even when my dad was growing up, him and his father were not allowed to stay at certain inns because they were “Hebrew.”

So there’s also this aspect of lallowing the oppressor to define you versus defining ourselves. And to me, I’ve always recognized myself as white, but not just because I’m Swedish, but also because I have not experienced my Judaism as something other than as connected to the whiteness in terms of the system that I live in.

And so I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about this allowing of the oppressor to define who you are versus defining ourselves and not least of all how that relates to Zionism.

Daniel Delgado: Oh, wow. Okay. So, there are so many people who want to tell Jews who’s Jewish and who’s not Jewish. And there’s this very intense push in sort of post enlightenment European cultures, including the United States, to define different peoples through one of the rubrics that’s been set up by colonization.

So are you a race? Are you a religion? Are you a state? Are you a club? Like, what are you? Right? And it’s, it’s the classic question, like, what are you? And I would recommend Daniel Boyarin’s book, The No State Solution, because he goes through all of these different ones where he’s like, okay, so what are the Jews?

Are the Jews a race? No. You know, and he goes through them and says, well, because these are all European categories, and even the ones that seem to manifest at certain times, will often be turned against us. And in this book, he talks about how the categorization of Judaism as a religion often is used for antisemitic legislation in Europe because they say, well, if you behave in these practices, you’re stealing your children’s right to later choose the religion of Christianity, which doesn’t understand the framework of belonging.

And for native people in North America, right, the federal government is really interested in okay, are you a federally recognized tribe or are you a race or are you, what are you, and all of us sort of traditional peoples have our ways of defining ourselves. That said, as you point out, I think it is important to recognize the way that those belongings intersect with the structures imposed on us by the colonial systems we live in.

So, we do have white Jews and Jews of color, because race is a social reality in, throughout the world now, right? And we do have Jews who practice religions that aren’t Judaism, right? And that, those are things, in as much as religion is like a weird Christian category, it’s a category that makes sense to us when we speak in English.

So, we do need to be aware of that. And it sort of, it brings me back to something you mentioned earlier that I wanted to circle back to about how it’s like kind of trendy to claim to be Indigenous especially for people who haven’t actually been experiencing persecution to keep their Indigenous cultures alive and create, keep the connection with the ancestors and the land and the customs.

And that in itself is a structure of settler colonialism. There’s a very long history of settlers claiming the label of indigenous when it suits them, and in doing that as a move, in fact, to take away power from Indigenous people. There’s a lot been written about this, the term is settler move to innocence.

Daniel Delgado: It’s one of many settler moves to innocence in which settlers find a way to say, no, no, I’m not really a settler. Actually, I’m this other thing. And what really gets me about so much of the Zionist claim of Jewish indigeneity is it’s utterly disconnected from the actual community of indigenous peoples.

And you can really see it. You can really see who is claiming it as a way to be like, you can’t accuse me of something. But are they really involved in doing decolonial work? Like, in most cases, they’re not. And again, caveat, there are other Native Jews, there are Native Jewish Zionists, there are Native Jews who disagree with me about these things.

I’m not necessarily talking about those people specifically, but I’m talking about the larger trend that I see when this claim gets brought up. It’s almost always a claim that gets brought up, the claim that Jews are indigenous is almost always brought up to absolve Zionists from, and especially Israel, from accusations of colonialism and occupation and genocide, or to invalidate somehow Palestinian claims to land to indigenousness.

And it doesn’t wash. It’s pretty transparent if you have the framework, but most people don’t. Most non native people don’t, which is why it’s such an effective propagandizing tool because it’s really easy to confuse people. And it’s really easy to make, especially non Jewish question like, Oh, am I being anti Semitic if I attempt to refute this claim of Jewish indigeneity? I don’t know enough about Jews or natives to really assess this, right? There’s a reason it’s such a popular rhetorical trick, because it’s a really cheap shot that can be hard to tease apart.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for bringing that up because as somebody who has experienced like legitimate anti semitism, I, that makes me so angry when somebody claims that talking about Palestine or from the river to the sea or whatever is anti semitic.

It is just so mind bogglingly infuriating. And as you say, it’s a very effective tool. And it is important to be aware of these tools that the colonialists have both past and present.

And I wanted to, wrapping up here, I wanted to get a bit more like explicitly personal. Of course, all of this is personal. But, as somebody who is indigenous and Jewish, I’m curious what kind of hope, if any, that you have for the kind of extreme splintering that’s happening in our community right now of those who fight for liberation and those who fight for colonialism. And, what does this vision of land back mean to you as somebody who is Indigenous and Jewish?

Daniel Delgado: I really firmly believe that land back is kind of the only way out of this mess that centuries of colonialism have put the entire planet in. Native peoples have fought for centuries to maintain ourselves as peoples and to maintain our relationships with our land and we still know how to take care of it.

And again, I’m speaking of the collective, right? Like the collective wisdom and knowledge that we have, and we’re all diverse people and, you know, some native support fracking and okay, fine. And that’s the difference, right? This is when we say land back, we’re talking about most cases, collective land stewardship under our traditional models in which you don’t have one person who says, well, this is my plot. I can do whatever I want. Like, that’s not our system, right? Even in the communities for the most part that have had something that might resemble family ownership, it’s not ownership in the European model. And that, I think, is fundamentally a Jewish model. I think that that’s a Torah model of land.

I’ve written about this. And I think that being diasporic people for 2,000 years, many Jews experience that as a disconnection from land and from relationship with land. And there’s a lot of trauma there. And Zionism was one reaction to that, to say, well, we were forcibly disconnected from being able to have relationships with land for all of this time, so we’re going to be in control now.

Also being a diasporic people, I think has given the Jewish collective a lot of wisdom and humility around how to dwell in different places without trying to be the people in charge. And there have been times when diasporic existences had horrible oppression, and there have been periods of hundreds of years when it’s gone really, really well and we’ve had a really great relationship with our neighbors and beautiful cultural flourishing. And so I do think that as Jews, we have that tradition. And if we can bring that orientation, I think that there’s a lot that Jews can contribute to anti colonization, decolonization movements land back.

And I, I think that the way to survival is through radical solidarity. Like, the way to a better future is through understanding that when the white supremacist fascists want to put us all in the category of, like, untermenschen, then there’s a real way out of that is to bridge those gaps that they’ve spent hundreds of years trying to build between us and those rivalries.

But, you know, it’s almost the high holy days, and for Jews in relation to Zionism and for white Jews in relation to white supremacy, that brings a lot of need for self reflection and the ways that Jews, as individuals, as peoples, have often benefited from those structures, often looking for ways to survive, but you know what, like, Jews coming to North America, looking for a place to survive, have by and large integrated themselves into white supremacist systems at the expense of Black and Indigenous people.

And so to really create that radical solidarity, there’s some repentance needed there, and there’s some owning of the things that we have done as individuals and as a collective, and not expecting to come to the table and say, Jews are oppressed and black and brown people are oppressed, so let’s just all work together. It’s like, no, no, there’s still some real power imbalances here that are in the room and there’s harms that have been done that need to be addressed. And we can work together if we’re addressing those.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a very, a very powerful and important offering, particularly as we look at the High Holy Days and the concept of Teshuvah.

Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down. Where is the best place or places for people to follow your work?

Daniel Delgado: I have a Twitter account that is very dormant, but it’s a good place to see some, on my pinned tweet, you can find some of my more recent published work, including the essay we’re talking about, and I’m more active on Blue Sky now, so if you want actual interaction, that would be the place to find me. And then there are links in both of those profiles to some of my other sort of online presence.

Eleanor Goldfield: Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Daniel, really, really appreciate you taking the time.

Daniel Delgado: Thank you so much.

Below is a Rough Transcript of the interview with Joel Whitney

Support our work at Project-Censored.org/Support

Eleanor Goldfield: Thanks so much for joining us at the Project Censored radio show. We’re very glad right now to be joined by Joel Whitney, who’s an award winning journalist and author of Finks, How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, and Flights, Radicals on the Run.

He is a former features editor at Al Jazeera America and a founder and former editor in chief of Guernica. Joel, thanks so much for joining us.

Joel Whitney: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely. So, today we’re going to be talking about Joel’s most recent book, which is Flights: Radicals on the Run. And Joel, I want to start off with the layers of the book, because on its face it could really just be about the stories from the U.S. Empire’s past, but as James Baldwin put it, history is not past, we are stuck in history, and history is stuck in us.

And the book spans quite a bit of history, from more recent to further back in the earlier part of the 20th century. But of course, there’s that commonality, the commonality of continued suppression of voices against U.S. government interests.

So could you talk a little bit about how that red thread follows us from a hundred plus years ago up to today, and even how those stories uncover what one might call omens for the future?

Joel Whitney: That is the whole work. I mean, I was writing these essays separately after a prior book called Finks, How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, and, some of these stories were actually the result of FOIA requests that didn’t come through in time for the first book, but I was thinking very much about this idea of censorship, what holds these stories together, and how to reverse engineer the idea of an institutional history of something like the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom from the first book into a series of microbiographies that encapsulate this idea of surveillance and violence and repression and censorship.

So, you know, I wrote these over several years. The oldest one is from 2014, but most of them were written just before and during the pandemic, which puts its own sort of frame around them. But I think the title sort of says it all. What is the response of these great minds, you know, from Lorraine Hansberry and Seymour Hirsch in the beginning to Francis Stoner Saunders and, people pretty well known people like Malcolm X and Angela Davis in the middle and at the end, some of the gorillas and writers from Central America, a lot of stories from Guatemala and Honduras.

What do they have in common, when this power, this sort of lone superpower bears down on them? And so I was thinking about flights in a couple of different ways, but the main way is flights across borders and sovereignty and questions of citizenship. And so the through line plays with this idea of flights.

There’s all kinds of flights in the book, you know, planes dropping bombs as Graham Greene goes on a fly along with a French pilot during the French attempt to maintain its colony in Vietnam. And Greene’s subsequent glimpse of the power of the Americans as they’re taking over the mantle from the French, to, and Scott Momaday having his troubled character, Abel, and his novel, Housemaid of Dawn, watch the eagles flying and cavorting with each other just before he goes on an eagle hunt as he returns from World War II, quite damaged from the European theater of the war, to just all of the characters, George Oppen and Mary Oppen fleeing across the border from McCarthyites in the early part of the 50s, sort of chasing or following, actually, maybe leading some of the Hollywood 10 who they were friends with in LA when they left.

So, yeah, it’s kind of a meditation on that through line of really great minds having to deal with these couple ways of maintaining their integrity, maintaining their work, maintaining their politics while huge forces were brought to bear on them.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to talk a little bit about the concept of flights because, I found it fascinating that you highlight a very psychological aspect to being on the run as well.

You know, it’s not just the physicalities of it. It’s not like just the Hollywood chase idea, but the emotional and mental impacts of being hounded by the U.S. empire. Could you talk a little bit about those manifold iterations of being on the run?

Joel Whitney: Yeah. I mean, my background is twofold.

I came up sort of writing poetry, but then also as an editor. And so a lot of my sensibility is built around this idea of what’s out there, what’s already been written, what’s in the archive. And, I think that the window into that, that you get from people like Angela Davis, for instance, or, the Oppens again, they, George Oppen’s letters were published and you can hear over the years, the effect that this had on both him and his wife and their daughter.

But at one point Angela Davis likens it to kind of what, and Scott Momaday elsewhere in the book, calls blood memory, the sense of what our ancestors had to go through for their freedom and the degree to which we’re standing on their shoulders. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to quote from Davis who talked about her own nightly safe house transfers in 1970, when she was being chased by the American state.

She said, “living as a fugitive means resisting hysteria, distinguishing between the creations of a frightened imagination and the real signs that the enemy is near.” And then I say in her quest to quote, elude him, outsmart him, she recalled thousands of my ancestors had waited as I had for nightfall to cover their steps. In something like that, I got the chills because, you know, that’s, that’s kind of it. We’re not doing this alone. It’s always been made hard.

Gerald Horne, the historian, talks about American history as a series of counter revolutions. And so if you’re doing good work in this country, you will be chased, as they say, possibly out of print, across a border, or in the worst cases, into an early grave, as some of the characters do and are.

And, it’s worth stating, too, in the middle and final sections of the book, you move from this kind of palpable McCarthy way that the FBI would show up at the Oppen’s house and interview them, and that moves into this much more silent, nefarious penetration, both of those were already there, but in some of the essays around American Indian Movement, AIM that come in the middle and late in the book, you get the confessions of retired agents who are telling us that they wanted us to be as paranoid as Angela Davis reports being, and they wanted that paranoia to be part of what splits us, makes us suspect each other of being infiltration agents, or of being on the wrong side, or being two faced Janus figures.

And so the book’s layers kind of appeared to me as I, as always, as I delved into the, to the archives and into the stories and into the biographies.

A lot of these are review essays of films that give me an excuse to pitch these stories to editors who always need something new on these historical subjects. And I think my editors were very generous. I don’t think they knew that I had this sort of, this trigger of a chase scene, so to speak. I’m not too much of a purist to resist the Hollywood chase scene. And some of the essays, the Garcia Marquez, when he’s running to Paris, or he’s driving to his first vacation in a long time, and he gets the idea for the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and as he’s sort of working out how that sentence will inform the novel, he’s aware that he’s not allowed into the United States, and so there’s this very cinematic scene of him having that insight, and then realizing when his book is excerpted, when 100 years of solitude is masterpiece novels excerpted in a CIA magazine having this sort of counter epiphany of holy shit. You fuckers. You said I couldn’t say that and there I go. But having this counter epiphany of disgust at this contradiction that he’s being smuggled into a magazine created by a country where he’s banned from entering its borders, alongside, you know, again, the Oppens having this moment in the Sonoran Desert, where they’re realizing that though they’ve done everything right, you know, George earned a purple heart in World War II, here they are becoming political refugees crossing the desert to end up in the haven of Mexico. And so throughout these flights and these stories and these epiphanies, I’m in all the different ways that I could find to fit flights in and luckily have my editors not cut too many of them. Because I don’t think any of my editors were aware of what this project was, and I was only, to be fair, vaguely aware. Throughout, especially in the first half of the book, Mexico is kind of the haven that the U. S. pretends itself to be for immigrants, and that struck me almost by accident as I looked at these stories.

I thought of all of the activists and writers who had to flee and saw Mexico City as the place where they were safe.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah. And, I want to dig into a little bit of that too, because when you first start reading the book, you’re like, Oh, this is, you know, the US oing after Americans for, you know, the counter revolution, but there’s a very global feel to the book.

And you don’t just focus on people in the U S or even American citizens running from the U S empire. And it really shows how the U.S. Empire’s tentacles reach far outside our own borders, not least of all, as you mentioned briefly, places like Honduras and Guatemala, and, of course, what that means in terms of any nations or even a personal sovereignty that you’re allowed from the U.S. Empire.

So I’m curious, why did you choose to focus on people like Berta Cáceres and Gabriel García Márquez and Diego Rivera, who weren’t actually Americans, and yet were hounded by the U.S. Empire?

Joel Whitney: I mean the prosaic kind of boring version of that is that I lived in Central America for two years and that I internalized a lot of the rebel histories of central and South Americans and the visions of people from early founders up to Che Guevara up to Lula de Silva of one large America.

And I think you see that most explicitly in the Diego Rivera. It’s basically my review of his largest mural, which was on display in San Francisco. And in that great San Francisco mural, whose name is escaping me right now , he’s painting that vision. He’s got figures like John Brown, Simon Bolivar. He’s got depictions of Anti fascist Hollywood, you know, the Hollywood 10 before they were chased to Mexico City. And it’s a compelling vision for me, like of a sovereignty and a citizenship that if you’re not indigenous, must be humble. And throughout the little mini book tour that I’ve been on for this book, I’ve alluded constantly to that great t shirt, which is, you know, powerful in the work that it does. It has a picture of Geronimo and a few other resistance indigenous fighters. And it says, if you don’t look like this, then you also are, quote,an illegal alien. So that vision of sovereignty that was stolen by Europe, that vision of all the borders we cross in defense of the, let’s say Monroe doctrine,

as well as the Truman Doctrine, the amount of invasions that the U.S. has done is seemingly infinite. And so I just decided to locate this particular version of this meditation in the Americas. So the action, those chases in this book mostly take place in the Americas. Canada mostly gets off the hook.

And it’s sort of reflected, a reflection of what I’ve read, what I’ve experienced, what I’ve meditated on. But yeah, you’re right. You see, you see a couple Brits in there. You see a lot of black American figures whose sense of their citizenship is always in flux throughout civil rights and the anticommunist Cold War period.

You’ve got, you know, Paul Robeson meditating on to what degree he’s an American. He’s simultaneously being held up as the sort of the ultimate sort of black citizen in some sense, as a sort of an advertisement for the American way, but then when he speaks out against fascism and against the drives towards war against Russia after World War 2 in a place where I grew up, by the way, Peekskill, he’s chased out.

And so the figures, you know, when I lived in Central America, Rigoberta Menchú was sort of still a legendary figure, and I had missed her being controversialized for supposedly conflating scenes in her memoir, I Rigoberta Menchú. But, the whole thing was me sort of doing this piecemeal meditation on figures that I think, in many cases we know, or in some cases I have a relationship to, and wanted to know better, and how, you know, if you looked at their stories together, you would see that this myth of American freedom, of America as sort of, even America in quotes, you know, U.S. American freedom as real, falls apart pretty quickly. And if you see these stories together, I think you start to sense that any time someone’s doing effective work towards change, it may return 10, 20, 30, 50 years later if the ideas prevail, which a lot of them do.

But a lot of them in real time, like the civil rights movement is delayed. Paul Robeson was basically articulating in the late forties what needed to be done after World War II. And his vision was delayed by about 20 years. And even then it was hard fought, and certain people were assassinated like Malcolm X.

With, by the way, nine informants in the room. So, you know, to answer your question, I think these characters sit together in a way that may be foreign to those of us who are raised on American, U.S. American propaganda unquestioningly, but very, very familiar to those of us who turn against that propaganda.

And that’s my journey, that’s my own flight, which is, you know, someone who came up in a liberal democratic traditional family who saw the Democratic Party as the bulwark against the right, but, which is still the vision of so many of my friends and family members, especially right now as we speak, there’s a debate tonight where that will be enshrined in their raised fists and everything else, but I’m in a place where I’m turning against that and I’m starting to see that the short term idea of slowing down and don’t go too far too fast, which is what these characters were told every decade throughout my parents and my own life, they hang together and they’re instructive to us all.

Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely. And I’m reminded of the, which I think everyone should read, which we astonishingly did not read in history class, Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from Birmingham jail, where he talks about how the well meaning white liberal who just says, Oh, wait, wait a bit, you know, go slower, is far more dangerous than just your average KKK member. Cause you know exactly where they stand.

So that, that kind of liberal mentality is, I feel also far more dangerous because it suggests that it wants to help you. It wants to help the poor and the needy and the oppressed. And yet the policies remain the same.

And I wanted to also ask about the choices that you made, because I think a lot of people, you know, you’ve got a picture of Che behind you. People have this feeling about radicals and revolutionaries, like they got the guns strapped, you know, the Huey P. Newton picture is not a picture of him sitting there reading. It’s a picture of him with a gun strapped across his chest. There’s this picture of the militant,which, I would say is also true, but there’s a huge facet that’s missing, and that’s the poets and the artists, which are oftentimes a side of the militant, and I think what’s really powerful and important that you cover is that these were authors and artists and poets, and this again highlights to me the importance of culture in combating oppression, but also how you know, a nod to your first book, how the government tries to use culture for its own propaganda and means, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this, the role of art on both sides of this coin.

Joel Whitney: I mean, the boring first answer is that I did my MFA in poetry. Trying to say that with a straight face. No, I wanted to learn how to write, and I thought poetry has the smallest unit to take in at a time, and it’s really intense, and I wanted to learn how to write sentences, and some of my teachers are still in my head. I shifted, in addition to poetry to being a magazine editor, but my first one was a cultural magazine and I always wanted to bring, where possible a poet’s sensibility to language, and to even the language of politics and history.

And so that’s still in me, whether I like it or not. But it’s also a gesture that I think I inadvertently learned from the Cold War. I think the Cold War warriors wanted the American arts to be kind of a calling card, first to Europeans and then to the people of what were then called the Third World.

And that mission was announced very kind of importantly and crucially in a year or so, the year after Eisenhower was sworn in, this idea of proselytizing the American way to the the lost peoples of the world beyond Europe. And I think they, they saw that with a lot of condescension and a lot of concern that these poor people would be swept up under communist influence and anti imperialist ideas.

And so, there was this idea that a cultural mission, a mission of culture was needed. It wouldn’t happen in McCarthyite America with right wing figures stopping things like that. And so without my knowing it, this program that had been partly as a CIA program, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was the subject of my first book, which is a CIA front, which created magazines and brought symphony orchestras to Europe and brought the first abstract expressionist exhibition to Europe.

And as I’ve always said, when it’s music or painting, even if there’s kind of an undercurrent of secrecy around the who’s actually paying for it, the soft power part of that doesn’t quite bother me as much as the magazine program that the CIA started. As a digression I’ll just repeat that. I mean, when you’re dealing with historiography and

political op eds embedded into a magazine where you have a great artist or a great writer on the cover like Garcia Marquez that’s much more problematic. So, having known nothing about that, I think, after grad school, I wanted to create a magazine with some comrades. And I think I understood that we needed to put together politics and culture in a way where you might come for the García Márquez essay, or in our case, a Richard Howard poem, and you would stay for a political op ed. So that was intuitive, and it was probably ingested through various kind of cultural filters that I was partly aware of and partly unaware of.

But, I still believe in that. It’s just that you don’t want the right, or the center right, or the neocons monopolizing that scheme. In other words, getting people to read true histories by, I don’t want to say using culture, but by partnering with cultural figures and cultural magic, the bling of culture using that to bring someone to an ideas based vision of history and politics.

I think that that’s solid. I think that’s a great idea and I just wanted to retrieve it from the people who misused it and who weaponized culture as Francis Stoner Saunders, who’s one of my first mentors and teachers on this question of the Congress for cultural freedom and what a vast, you know, what a vast program this was.

She referred to it as the theft of culture by the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom at MI6 and everyone else. And so, yeah, I think intuitively, even before I knew explicitly about this, I think storytelling and poetry, those, you know, music, painting, exhibitions, art, that really is the stuff of life.

And that’s what people who are not immediately on the run, people who are not running through safe houses, that’s what they want to get back to when they have a moment of peace. That’s what peace is for. Peace, which is something I’ve never known in my entire lifetime as a U.S. American. We’ve been at war, secret or explicit, my whole life, my parents whole lives.

It started immediately after World War II and that’s the universal vision that artists remind us of, like, how to make magic in our free time, how to dance with nature, corny as that sounds, and how to think about our mortality and, the end of my Paz essay, I think, speaks to that, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just read that because it speaks to why we need the arts and we need to take the arts back from people who weaponize them.

This poem, Brotherhood, just always stuck with me.

I am a man, little do I last, and the night is enormous, but I look up. The stars write, unknowing I understand, I too am written, and at this very moment someone spells me out.

And so I do try to use my artist influences, my writer influences, as tests of this work, this idea of taking back beauty and truth from people who have severely damaged it by way of severely damaging American institutions. And as we’ll see tonight with the next great debate, what we’re going to be forced to do is kind of narrow our vision and look at this sort of lesser evil dualism that is being foisted upon us as propaganda.

And, you know, we don’t have to completely ignore that to realize that all the great writers and artists and activists and historians are telling us that when we’re really paying attention, when we’re really wise and we’re really awake and we’re really listening to all of those who’s I’ll say the cliche again, whose shoulders we stand on, that we’re not narrowing our vision, we’re broadening our vision, we’re doing what M Scott Momaday did when he thought about the horse coming into Kiowa culture, which is the horse puts you up on this

higher plane where you can see further into the horizon and into the distance and he likens that to the imagination where you can see beyond your present reality.

And so I think we desperately need that. I think all of the terrible things that the Democratic Party is making us complicit in right now is forcing us to either accept it by narrowing our vision

In a way that’s going to damage our institutions and the distrust of the media, which was already damaged by the Iraq war and the war on terror. they’re going to keep forcing us to either do that or to finally say, no, we refuse to narrow our vision. we don’t have a lot of great options, but that’s where our imagination is most needed.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, that’s very beautifully put. And I think it also highlights the importance of artists not being useful idiots. You know, knowing that this is what happens and I could speak myself for hours having been in a political rock band, how hard they try to make you write love songs. How hard they try to make you write vapid, bubble gum type stuff that no one really needs because we’ve got oodles.

It is a concerted effort and it would behoove all artists to understand that that is the goal. And so I think artists or no, people should absolutely check out both of your books. First one is Finks, How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, and Flights, Radicals on the Run.

Joel, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about your book and to beautifully contextualize this topic.

Joel Whitney: It’s a pleasure. Thanks.