Jon Nelson hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments:
Defending the Resistors: On January 23, 2025, Salem Younes, a first-generation Palestinian-American college student, and K Anton, a Lebanese-American human rights activist, were found not guilty by a unanimous trial jury in Lane County Circuit Court in Eugene, Oregon. The two activists faced charges of disorderly conduct in the second degree following their participation in the April 15, 2024, Global Day of Action (A15). Jan Haaken talks with Lauren Regan, criminal defense attorney and Director of Litigation & Advocacy at the Civil Liberties Defense Center, about the significance of the action, the charges, and the jury decision. They also discuss legal strategies in resisting the intensifying forces of repression faced by social justice activists.
Indigenous Voices in Poetry: Nimiipuu Mole, creative writer, and Director of Native American Programs at Washington State University Vancouver, Julian Ankney reads poems by Natalie Diaz, Mojave, and more.
Learning to Breathe Through the Apocalypse: Laurie Mercier interviews Desiree Hellegers about her web series, a surreal and hallucinogenic monologue set entirely inside their mind during a thirty-day silent Buddhist retreat in the woods of British Columbia during the 2005 winter holiday. While outwardly appearing to meditate, Hellegers time travels back to the 1940s and her father's childhood flight from the Nazis, to the 1960s and growing up watching villages burn in Vietnam on TV, and to a 1979 a fateful trip to Europe in 1979, when she visited Anne Frank's secret annex and accidentally kills her father. The series tackles the intergenerational health effects of war and fascism, divesting from the Military Industrial Complex, clerical sexual abuse, and meditation/mindfulness as a tool of resistance.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat: Frann Michel recommends the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, directed by Belgian media artist Johan Grimonprez, and available streaming through kanopy via the Multnomah County Library. The film opens with, and returns to, the moment in February 1961 when singer Abbey Lincoln, drummer Max Roach, and 58 other protesters disrupted a meeting of the UN Security Council to protest the murder of Patrice Lumumba. The first Prime Minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of Congo, Lumumba was deposed and killed with the involvement of the CIA. During the neocolonial Congo Crisis, a proxy conflict in the Cold War, the US had sent African American musicians on tour as "Jazz Ambassadors." The film interweaves music, archival footage, and readings from texts by Central African Republic politician and women’s rights activist Andrée Blouin, Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, Belgian-Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane, and Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev.