Arts and culture

Film Review: 200 Meters – an exceptional film on the plight of the Palestinians

This review was first published on Red Ant: anti-imperialism, revolutionary struggle and social change 200 Meters (2020)96 MinutesReview by Owen Hsieh Mustafa is a casual construction labourer with a bad back, he lives in the West Bank. In the main he lives apart from his wife Salwa and their children, separated by a wall. Due to […]

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Review: “Removing the Stalin Stain – Marxism and the working class in the 21st Century”

by Davey Heller, 25th September 2021 William Briggs has set himself an ambitious task with his book “Removing the Stalin Stain – Marxism and the working class in the 21st Century”. It is an attempt to explain why socialism has not yet overthrown capitalism, despite it lurching from crisis to crisis including World War, ecocide, […]

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ANZAC DAY – may one day no-one march there at all.

ANZAC Day, April 25th is here again and once again Australians are being asked to stand together and declare “Lest we forget”. Every year though, during the avalanche of militaristic imagery and words that marks this “celebration”, I reflect how it hasn’t always been like this in Australia. During my lifetime I have watched ANZAC […]

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Theatre of Life: the gourmet’s response to conditions of social crisis

By Owen Hsieh – 30/11/2019 ” ..it belongs to everybody, the responsibility to take care of other people that are in dire straits, but I believe that it comes natural, for a lot of cooks to want to take care of people because that’s what we do every day, you feed people.” Visiting chef Rene […]

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Shooting the Messenger by Andrew Fowler: Book Review

by Owen Hsieh, January 23rd 2019 Published by Routledge Press , Shooting the Messenger: Criminalizing Journalism is a valuable contribution to understanding the decline of the media landscape in both the corporate and state press. Featuring a number of case studies, from the media coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions based on the weapons of […]

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VICE: Film Review – Black comedy showing the black heart of U.S. Imperialism

Vice is a Hollywood biography of former Vice President Dick Cheney. This black comedy paints a damning portrait, not only of the Machiavellian Cheney, but of the trail of horror left behind by U.S. Imperialism. For all the movie’s limitations, it contains moments that so viscerally capture the impact of these crimes that as a […]

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The Islamist – by Ed Husain: Book Review

The Islamist is the story of a young man’s journey in and outside of radical fundamentalist Islamic groups in Britain in the 90s and early 2000s. In this memoir he writes of his youth, college and university years, his time as a graduate working at HSBC, and travels abroad to as a TESOL teacher in […]

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Hunter: For the Record : Documentary Review

Hunter for the Record tells the story of the life of rapper Robert Hunter aka MC Hunter (1975-2011). It is a comprehensive look at Hunter’s life and times with reference to his music, live shows and interviews interspersed with comments from friends and family. MC Hunter is an important figure in the history of Australian […]

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Persons of Interest: ASIO’s dirty war on dissent: Documentary Series Review

Persons of Interest is a four part documentary series exploring the lives of a cross section of Australia’s radicals through delving into their previously classified ASIO documents. It portrays their changing political perspectives in a roving discussion of their’ life and times, through interviesws and with reference to the archived material in the reports, photos and […]

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The Commissar Vanishes: the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin’s Russia By David King: Book review

The Commissar Vanishes is another anthology of images from the David King collection in which he displays original artwork and photographs from the early period following the Russian revolution, against later images where people were edited out and removed in the campaign of political genocide initiated by Stalin. Unlike Russian Revolutionary Posters, The Commissar Vanishes does […]

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