Welcome! Newsletter number 8.
For the first time since starting this blog in January there is no monthly review. Well, the publishers take a summer break, so I figured I might as well take one, too. This will probably apply to the following month as well. For the fall, however, I’ve already eyed a few exciting releases that I’d like to read and perhaps say a thing or two about, so the feature will be back.
July was a big month for sports. The Olympics in Tokyo began with a one-year delay and the biggest Workers’ Olympics ever celebrated its 90th anniversary. Georg Spitaler, from the Austrian Labor History Center, and I compiled a few images and wrote accompanying texts for Jacobin, available in English, Portuguese, and German. I also did an interview with Jacobin about workers’ sport, Red Vienna, and Julius Deutsch (see the book Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety). The interview is available in English and Portuguese, but not German. I did write a separate piece to commemorate the Vienna Olympics in German, however, for the daily junge Welt.
I also wrote two pieces on the Tokyo Olympics for junge Welt: one about the shock win of Austrian cyclist Anna Kiesenhofer (one of the Olympics’ greatest miracle victories ever), and one about the shameful de facto ban of South African runner Caster Semenya (a true hero!).
I write mostly about sports for junge Welt, but not only. Earlier this month, I wrote about workers standing up to their bosses at the Nordic distribution center of the e-commerce fashion giant Zalando, and about the fast return of Stefan Löfven as Sweden’s prime minister.
The new issue of the journal of Germany’s Rote Hilfe, a longstanding support network for political prisoners, carries an interview with me about the No-Fly List and being banned from the United States, since, as some of you might know, I have first-hand experience. Nice to contribute to Rote Hilfe. The original organization was already around in the 1920s!
I need to recommend a very special publication: The enigma Phoenix X Eeyore, of whom we used some artwork in X: Straight Edge and Radical Sobriety, released, as an e-zine, a 246-page (no kidding) Outsider History of Hardline. If you have any interest in these matters, you need to check it out. Really!
Our friends at Raddox have a new video out, about the time when “We Were Winning: 20 Years on from the Alter-Globalization Movement’s Summit Protests”. I help with the subtitles for the German version; there are also Spanish and Russian ones.
If you have any extra monies to spare this month, how about considering a slice for the European Zapatista Tour? Folks in Sweden are collecting funds to make a visit to the far north possible – not least so they can meet with Sámi activists!
Next newsletter in a month. Stay safe!