Pierre Assouline

Il y a comme ça des livres sulfureux qui se fraient un chemin vers la notoriété sans crier gare. Une fois qu’ils trônent, on a beau jeu de s’en remettre aux voies impénétrables du bouche à oreille. Ne reste plus alors qu’à en déplorer les dégâts ou à en louer les bienfaits, c’est selon. Pour Comment le peuple juif fut inventé de Shlomo Sand, né en 1946, historien des idées politiques à l’université de Tel-Aviv, dont la thèse centrale est ici résumée ici par ses soins, ça s’est passé ainsi.

Paru le 3 septembre 2008 chez Fayard, il se présentait sous une couverture noire, typographique arborant un immense point d’interrogation en surimpression. Il nous était parvenu précédé par la rumeur des débats orageux lors de sa publication en 2008 en Israël : un vrai succès de librairie (9000 exemplaires, 19 semaines de présence sur la liste des meilleures ventes, 11 émissions de télévision). Le titre de la critique de Haaretz était déjà un signe : « Inventing an invention ». On s’y étonnait de ce que Sand ait “découvert” que, tout au long de leur histoire, les Juifs, comme tous les peuples, se soient trouvés des mythes unificateurs. Depuis son livre a suscité une “affaire Sand” là où il a été publié, avec controverses à l’appui. Pour l’avoir suivie attentivement depuis deux ans, on se dit que seul le peuple juif, avec son goût du pilpoul à l’infini dans sa version laïque, pouvait sécréter en son sein un Shlomo Sand susceptible de le mettre en cause dans ses fondements mêmes, jusqu’à réinventer son histoire à sa manière.

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Stephen Lendman

Post-9/11, Dick Cheney warned of wars that won't end in our lifetime. Former CIA Director James Woolsey said America "is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years....This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us." GHW Bush called it a "New World Order" in his September 11, 1990 address to a joint session of Congress as he prepared the public for Operation Desert Storm.

The Pentagon called it the "long war" in its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), what past administrations waged every year without exception since the republic's birth, at home and abroad. Obama is just the latest of America's warrior presidents that included Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush preceding him.

This article covers WW II and its aftermath history of imperial wars for unchallengeable global dominance throughout a period when America had and still has no enemies. Then why fight them? Read on.

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Matt Taibbi

MY health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected by Anthem’s planned rate increase of as much as 39 percent for its customers with individual policies — but the trend worries me, as it should everyone. Rates are soaring all over the country. Insurers have been seeking to raise premiums 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon and a wallet-popping 56 percent in Michigan. How can insurers raise prices as much as they want without fear of losing customers?

Astonishingly, the health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws, which is why a handful of insurers have become so dominant in their markets that their customers simply have nowhere else to go. But that protection could soon end: President Obama on Tuesday announced his support of a House bill that would repeal health insurers’ antitrust exemption, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would put it toward an immediate vote. Op-Ed Contributor – Bust the Health Care Trusts – NYTimes.com.

This is how politics is supposed to work. Well, not really — in reality, you’d like to see your leaders actually lead, i.e. do the right thing first, before being forced into it by circumstance. But we’ll take the latter.

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Stewart Brand

Dharavi, Mumbai. Population density reaches 1m people per square mile.

Sixty million people in the developing world are leaving the countryside every year. The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living

In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organise neighbourhood communities, and moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, a town on the San Francisco Bay. He ended up on South 40 Dock, where I also live, part of a community of 400 houseboats and a place with the densest housing in California. Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.

Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of the new urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Redefining Cities,” an article in the Whole Earth Review, an American counterculture magazine that focused on technology, community building and the environment. Since then, new urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design and regionalism. It drew one of its main ideas from the houseboat community.

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