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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Granny Made Me an Anarchist: General Franco, the Angry Brigade and Me
by
Stuart Christie
jgeneric
, February 07, 2008
Some people are just born as natural rebels. Stuart Christie is such a person. He was born in 1946 in working-class Glasgow, Scotland, into a world split in two by the ever-present sectarian rift between the Catholics and Protestants. Christie was a member of the Orange Order growing up, an anti-Catholic Protestant fraternal organization. When he came of age, however, he went through a metamorphosis of left-wing thinking. After meeting with members of the Coal Miners' Union, Christie became an anarchist. He was 16. From that point on, his life would revolve around the ideals of anarchism, which stands for social justice, community autonomy, and individual liberty. Soon after, Christie became involved with the anti-nuke movement in Scotland, where he saw all the different varieties of the radical movement, from pacifist liberals to labor party hacks to Trotskyites to the anarchists. He quickly became impatient with the nonviolent protest marches, which were seemingly ignored, and longs to do more. When talking to older Anarchists, he learns of the fight in Spain a mere twenty-five years before, where the ideas of Anarchism nearly achieved success in the farms and factories of Catalonia in Eastern Spain. If it hadn't been for the betrayal by the Stalinist forces, the anarchists would of beat Franco's fascists and prevented the dictator from taking power. This recent history had a huge affect on the young Christie and he decided to attempt to kill Franco, under the assumption that the end of Franco would mean the end of his regime. At only 18 years in 1964, he links up with a Spanish Anarchist group and makes his way to Spain through France. Upon entering Franco's Madrid, he is almost immediately arrested by Brigada Politico Social (BPS), the Spanish secret police, who were supplied information on his arrival by the British Scotland Yard. That the British secret service would collaborate with the fascists amazed Christie. During the interrogation and beatings, his explosives are quickly discovered by the police, and the only thing that saves him and the Spanish anarchists arrested with him from a quick execution is his foreign citizenship, since Spain at the time was trying to soften it’s image to attract tourism and foreign money and didn’t want to scare either away by executing foreigners or those involved with them. Christie enters Spanish prison on a thirty year prison term, and quickly meets the "politicos" or political prisoners, which are a variety of trade unionists, anarchists, socialists, communists, and any other dissenter in Franco's Spain. Later in his life in British prisons, Christie realized that the liberal democracy of Britain's jails were much worse than the jails of Franco's fascist Spain, in brutality, isolation, food, and exercise, amongst other things. Quickly, he becomes the center of an international campaign to free him by radicals to free him, though he is ignored by Amnesty International for accepting violence and because he admits guilt. Eventually after three years in a Spanish prison in 1967, Christie is freed when his grandmother writes to Franco and Franco decides to score points in order to attract more British and other European tourists to Spain by showing mercy. When he returns to Scotland, dogged by the press, he noticed that Britain has changed a lot during his years in jail, as rebellion and disobedience and rock music became the new norm for the Youths of England and the rest of the West, specifically protesting the US war in Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and a host of other actions attacking the established order of thing. Christie did his best to fit back into the world, moving to London and becoming an electrian for a trade. He joined Albert Meltzer's Wooden Shoe Bookshop on Compton Street, and restarted the Anarchist Black Cross which fights for political prisoners, and co-founded the long-running "Black Flag" magazine with Meltzer, an anarchist investigative and analytical magazine, and helped raise money for the "First of May Group", a Spanish-anarchist resistance group to Franco's regime. However, these activities also brought him near constant police harassment, surveillance, and media attention calling for his imprisonment. In 1970, as the war in Vietnam roared on and the limits of pacifism and peaceful demonstrations became apparent, the author goes on to tell us that many left-wing youths involved started to turn to more militant and violent actions, like the Weathermen in the US, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and in the UK the Angry Brigade. These groups, with varying levels of success, took the guerilla warfare aspects of Mao Zedong and Che Guevera to "bring the war home", in actions such as bombing campaigns, kidnappings, propaganda deeds, and acts of sabotage. The Angry Brigade, a group influenced by anarcho-syndicalists and situationist politics but never outward about their politics, claimed responsibility for 25 bombings in the UK from 1970 to 1972, targeting at government offices, banks, and the homes of conservative politicians, though only targeting property and not killing anyone (unlike later bombings done by IRA, PLO, and Basque groups), as well as releasing political statements explaining their actions. Christie, though sympathetic to the Angry Brigade, has nothing to do with their activities and stays away from any extra-legal activities. This does not stop Scotland Yard from trying to scape-goat him as a well-known Anarchist as a member of the Angry Brigade. In 1972, Christie was arrested on “conspiracy to cause explosions” from planted evidence by the British "bomb squad" which had been organized to catch the Angry Brigade. He was arrested along with a dozen other British radicals After a very long trial, he is found not guilty of all charges and the others only guilty of conspiracy. Christie notes that one of the keys to their victory is that in the trial, they made sure that the jury was as working class as possible. Why? Because during the course of the trial, the defense proved that the defendants were simply normal working class people, with regular worries and jobs, with different political beliefs who were being persecuted, to the point of even planting evidence, by the Crown as scapegoats. After the trial, Christie also notes that the British prosecution of political trials from then on would be held outside of the cities and in middle-class dominated areas, similar to how in the US, many trials against Blacks are stacked with White jurists. Stuart Christie helped run Cienfuegos Press, a radical publisher which he founded, from 1974 until 1982, and continues to be active in anarchist publishing projects in the UK. "Granny Made Me An Anarchist" is a really humorous book, and a thing I really enjoyed was that he never assumed that you knew the terms he was talking about, and therefore inserts many excerpts throughout the book explaining terms, periods, groups, and historical events, like Anarchism, The First of May Group, Francisco Franco, the Angry Brigades, etc. He examines his past with a critical eye but never apologizes for anything he's done, since he has nothing to be ashamed of and remains true to the values and actions of his youth (though he hasn't tried to blow up anymore dictators since then.) He's also very funny and doesn't take himself so seriously at any point, a thing you can tell that he came from humble beginnings and never really got away his raising by his Granny and Mum, a truly good person he is. This book is a great find for anyone who has trouble keeping idealistic in troubling times.
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Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy
by
Joan Burbick
jgeneric
, December 27, 2007
I believe in the right to self-defense, and the right to carry weapons, and on the left, I find myself very alone a lot of the time in the US. In much the same way that the government wages a war of prohibition against drugs that continues to swell our prison system but doesn't do a thing to fix violence in our society, I also believe the rush to ban guns is also a power ploy that doesn't stop violence but merely disarms people and makes them even more vulnerable to attack. Any individual or group under attack deserves the right to defend themselves from unjust harm, especially against military or police or thugs. More right wing groups like the National Rifle Association, however, defend the right to keep guns from an entirely different prospective. They define it as a way for "law-abiding citizens" (usually white) to defend themselves against criminals (usually black), and a way for patriots to defend their country from the UN or immigrants or whomever, and I don't really see it that way. I see guns as a way for groups or individuals to keep themselves safe as they act as a deterrent from attacks if others know that the gun-carrier can fight back. In fact, it carries to other weapons and martial arts forms that people ought to know to defend themselves against attack, but I digress. I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania (Susquehanna County) until I was 14, a place where we got the first day of hunting season off from school because of how many people hunted. It might not make much sense to urban and suburban dwellers, but I knew a lot of people who supplemented their income by shooting animals and selling them to butchers, or just eating the stuff they shot. Now, in Philadelphia as violence and murder escalates, there is a call to give Philadelphia its own gun laws instead of trying to tackle poverty and joblessness. All this aside, the gun debate in the US is one where both sides are damned in my opinion. I picked up the book "Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy", by Joan Burbick, hoping that it might be a breath of fresh air. Burbick, a shooter herself, explores the culture of the gun show and the "gun nut", and the underlying politics of the NRA, as well as explaining their view of the world. It takes a few chapters to realize her points of view, but she also sees the right-wing "2 nd Amendment" movement as a cover for white-supremacist and male domination and an attempt at trying to maintain the status-quo, convincingly so. She argues that the gun was used by the right-wing to roll back some of the gains of the Civil Rights era in the US. In effect, the gun issue was used by conservatives as a Trojan horse issue to fight back against what they saw as an attack on their traditional family-oriented values and way of life. She also argues that all-white rifle clubs in the 1800s were used by Southern white supremacists to keep blacks "in their place" during and after Reconstruction. Groups like the John Birch Society get along very well with the NRA in that they see the federal government as taking away people's right to defend themselves (which sort of makes sense), yet they are in favor of a strong and large military at the same time (which doesn't make sense). In the pages of the "American Rifleman", the magazine of the NRA , throughout its 80 years of existence, they glorify the model citizen as a "rugged frontiersman" dressed in buckskins, independent, and strong, with a strong work ethic. Always implied, of course, was that this citizen was also white . This played into the Cold War image against groups working together such as unions or civil rights groups or Communist collectivism. The NRA's literature was peppered with mentions of fighting against Communist infiltration, though it tried to stick to hunting and sport fishing. Only in the late 1970s, when Charleton Heston and Bill Loeb took over the NRA and ousted the moderates, and indeed started targeting the Republican Party as did a host of other groups like the Christian Coalition (much the way labor unions and civil rights groups targeted the Democratic Party). The 1980s and the rise of the Reaganites to the government also brought movies like Terminator and Rambo with muscle-bound men shooting up entire armies by themselves. This is the atmosphere in which Charleton Heston said his famous "From my cold, dead, hands" while holding up an old flintlock. Thus guns became the issue for white guys who wanted to fight back from the gains of women and people of color. In doing research for her book, Joan Burbick went to hundreds of gun shows and spoke to lots of different people. She encounters all sorts of people obsessed with guns, and learns quickly that gun shows are a multimillion dollar business. During the Cold War, military surplus made guns both cheap and available, and the international arms trade boomed. The UN draws special ire from gun show enthusiasts for trying to clamp down on this trade. Burbick also notices that most of the crowd at gun shows are white guys, and that confirms my suspicion when I had a subscription to "The American Rifleman", in which I can rarely ever remember seeing a person of color in its pages. It should be noted that the NRA has it's base in rural places, in which the vast majority of which are white, but it doesn't even seem like they're trying to outreach to people other than whites (though they do reach out to white women.) One aspect of the book I seriously disagreed with is when Joan Burbick recounts an incident in the 1873 at Colfax, Louisiana, when a black militia was massacred trying to defend themselves from a white mob. She states that "Easter Sunday, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana would prove once and for all that African Americans could not defend with arms either their lives or their right to vote even if they were members of a local militia" (referring to the fact that whites often formed militias) In stating this, she isolates this one incident in a time period where blacks were particularly vulnerable to attack. In the 1950s, wide-spread chapters of the "Deacons for Defense" not only defended blacks from attack during the civil rights organizing, but forced government officials to deal with groups like Student Non-violence Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King's Southern Leadership Conference (the pacifist activists). In the late 1960searly 1970s, the Black Panthers for Self-Defense Party took inspiration from them and carried weapons around regularly, though they were encouraged not to use them unless attacked, as well as organizing free breakfast meals, education, and health services. The American Indian Movement did similar things and also believed in the right to self-defense. Granted, the last two groups were targeted by the government COINTELPRO repression for being "violent" even though they were simply advocating for self-defense, but that's not really surprising given the history of the US government (and most other governments.) But to leave these examples out of her critique of gun culture really amazes me. While I suppose she was trying to focus on the "gun-nut" people like the NRA and gun shows, the history of weapons and guns in this country is not as black and white as it is painted by either side of the argument.
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A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman
by
Sharon Rudahl
jgeneric
, November 23, 2007
Emma Goldman is one of the big name names of American anarchists, as well as one of the earlier to contribute to free speech, birth control, and the labor movements. She was an amazing public speaker, something that is lost in this day of television and radio, and her writing still ranks amongst the classics of Anarchist thought for a free and just society. From her involvement in the shooting of Frick (though Alexander Berkman was a lousy shot) to free speech fights to labor struggles in Massachusetts to getting deported by Edgar Hoover, all the way to being amongst the first radicals to denounce the government of the Bolsheviks (which ostracized her amongst the left), and finally working to raise funds for the Spanish Revolutionary cause. She was jailed for fighting against the draft, advocating for birth control, and for "inciting a riot." In a lot of ways, the stuff she said then was visionary for the time period. She remains one of the most amazing people in history, and someone who gave her all so others could be free and live in a just world. "Dangerous Woman: A Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman" can be best described as a graphic novel version of "Living My Life", and it's a real treat. The artist, Sharon Rudahl, does a great job capturing Goldman's turbulent and unique life, growing from a fiery Jewish peasant girl fleeing Russia to an active Anarchist speaker and organizer hated by the government, to the patron-saint of the American Anarchist movement, though small by the time of her death. She spares no detail, especially the parts about Emma's sex life and her many partners over the years. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when she has been sent by her mentor, Johann Most, on a speaking tour "Against the 8 Hour Day" (it was too little and was too reformist and not revolutionary enough.) She encounters an older man in the Chicago stop of the tour who tells her that while he understands why young people would be impatient with small demands, but "I won't live to see the revolution. Will I never have a little time for reading or to walk openly in the park?" After this encounter, Emma vowed never to let doctrine or ideology get in the way of a good fight that brought real change to real people's lives. That's a lesson that a lot of radicals then and now could learn and take to heart. Today, the closest we in the United States have to an Emma Goldman is academics in ivory towers, as loud mouth voices in the sea of state and corporate rule. The speaking tours of yesterday is the youtube, internet, music albums and television of today, which is much more controlled than speaking in public used to be, though less prone to violent disruption by people who disagree with the author. It's hard to imagine a story like hers again where someone from such a humble beginning devotes her entire life, to the point where she refused to correct health problems like infertility, to the cause of fighting the existing order, and becoming such an international figure as she did. Maybe a new Emma Goldman of the internet or TV or music like hiphop will arise to become an inspiration to people's movements everywhere, like Subcommader Marcos in Chiapas has, or elsewhere. It's hard to say. Either way, check out Emma's life in graphic novel comic form, because she's a real life superhero in a way that Superman never could be.
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Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina
by
Marina Sitrin
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
People have been asking about this one for a long time. This book came out in Spanish a few years ago and was already heavily asked requested. Now, an English translation let me read this for the first time, and it's no disappointment! Horizontalism is about the social movements in Argentina since the economy collapsed in December of 2001, seemingly a part of the bigger movements for social justice sweeping across Latin America. What I really liked about this book is that it's from the point of view of people participating in the movement. It's really seemingly different from a lot of stuff, from the ground-up and not imposed by elites or cadres. It really seems like it's out of the grassroots struggles of Argentina, and the December 19 th and 20th 2001 economic collapse were just events that turned people out in mass in an uprising. The book is divided into sections based on interviews, getting different perspectives on different subjects. The first section deals with how people thought the country changed in December 2001, and hundreds of neighborhood assemblies suddenly appeared throughout the country. In a country where 30,000 people disappeared in the 1980s during the military dictatorship, all of the sudden when no one, even the middle class, could get their money, thousands of people in Buenos Aires took to the streets and banged pots into the night. From there, people began gathering in their neighborhoods to try to run their own places, took over factories and other workplaces where the management had either fled or owed the workers large amounts of money, and occupied buildings that were not being used, which flew in the face of clientilism of Argentina. The famous roadblocks, where people blocked off roads across the country to shut down commerce as protests of the poor of the country, also appeared across Argetina. The popular call was "Oh, que se vayan todos!" ("They all must go!", referring to the nation's "democratically" elected politicians.) A sudden burst of anger from most people sick of the ruling class pretending to represent the will of the people brought down five Presidents in a matter of two weeks. The elites and political parties and financial organizations like foreign companies and the World Bank literally had no part in any of this upheaval other than being the target of anger, cast away like sand against the waves. From there, in the assemblies, a process of "horizontalidad" became the big philosophy. Before there would be a boss of any organization, and any real decisions would originate from above. But in the assemblies and collectives, people worked together for their common well being, equal in power at least in structure, often with consensus instead of voting. Several people interviewed commented that while having a boss or simple voting for decision making might be easier, you lose the power to the people when you go the easy route. There are several great lines about how the walk is just as important as the talk, and how bullshit speeches and posturing doesn't take a group of people very far. It's really interesting how an idea is put together and made stronger by a group of people interacting and listening where the most powerful, well-done stuff happens. "Martin S., La Toma and Argetina Arde (an occupied building and alternative media and art collective) What does horizontalidad mean? First, that there isn't one right way; there isn't anyone that has the truth and tells us what we have to do. It means seeing each other as equals, or trying to see each other as equals. It also means - and this is something that's a challenge for the assemblies - learning to listen to one another. The assembly is like a game, it's really interesting. Someone comes up with an idea and the idea is elaborated upon by someone else, then someone else expands or changes it, and then as you listen, another person improves the idea, or says something totally different. The initial person might say "no" or agree, and this is how we move forward. It's like the game where a group makes up a story together. One person says "the house" and the next says "the house is" and the next "the house is in" and then "the house is in the mountains." If someone is in the assembly not listening, but talking, and trying to move forward with something else… Or if that person just makes statements or speeches, which sometimes happens, things really don't go anywhere." Another section is on autogestion, or workers' self-management, focusing on how the explosions of December 19th and 20th gave worker activists, who had been fighting management for years beforehand on issues like safety, being owed back-wages, and simple dignity on the job, a chance to show a different way of doing things. Owed tons of money, workers kept factories, clinics, bakeries and distribution centers opened, but kept the profits for themselves instead of giving it over to a boss. Nearly 200 companies were taken over in this fashion. Though they still operate under "the market," the fact that they have no bosses is a very important step since we still live in a capitalist world. The workers face evictions and fight tooth and nail to keep what they have gained. Many actually stayed in the factories because "they didn't have enough money to get home" and were sick and tired of being walked all over their entire lives. They decided to make the workplaces into services for their neighborhoods and communities instead of for the rich. Many have been shut down since then by the government and repression, but there are also many still operating today. Another chapter deals with women. Beforehand, machismo seemed very widespread in Argentina. Several people, especially women, note that amongst the very first people rushing to the forefront to get the neighborhood assemblies together and setting up road blockades were women, who had traditionally taken care of the children, and also the most hardcore activists in the fight for a better future were mostly women. It is also noted that as men started to take the lead of women, some started to go back to their old roles of men talking more than anyone else. But many women's collectives and groups start during this time, as people begin to realize it's okay to speak out against the old forms of oppression. It should be noted that there is a good chapter on repression as well by the state and it's allies, so not to give the impression that everything is lala-happy in Argentina or that revolutionary work has been completed. For instance, there was several instances of police killing people at the roadblocks, and then lying about it later on, saying they had been killed in accidents. People have been assassinated, and violent evictions of occupied spaces where owners had fled during the collapse are widespread. Only due to much pressure have local governments only accepted the ownership of the spaces by the occupiers. Sometimes, groups even reject government aid so they do not get tied to the state too much as well. I'm leaving out a lot of parts because I don't want to give away too much, but this is really a beautiful book and very nice to see it from the point of view of people actually doing the walk instead of just doing the talk. I really got to give Sitrin a lot of credit for letting people speak for themselves. It's very hard to say what will happen in Argentina in the next few years, or Latin America, or the world for that matter, but I'm really glad I got a chance to read the experiences of these people in Argentina striving to create a world without oppression or hierarchy. They're trying to build a place everyone has the power to decide what is best for their community and work and themselves, and actually trying to build such a world right now, in this world, like the old phrase "building a new world in the shell of the old." I do have some questions of how to defend this world from it's enemies, like the state or defenders of the old ways, and how they're doing this down in Argentina. For the most part, this book is incredibly inspirational to anyone who simply dreams of a better place right here on Earth.
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Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States
by
Pete Jordan
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
I really like stories of people's jobs, and no one I've ever read about has had more jobs then Disherwasher Pete. The author of the long-run cult favorite zine "Dishwasher" has put out this great book by the same name. Pete decided at a very long age when he had a hard time figuring out what he wanted to do for his life, that he liked to travel and see the country, and that dishwashing was the way to do it. He put up a goal of going to all 50 states to wash dishes. This is his autobiography of those journeys. And as a former dishwasher, I love this even more. It's one of those books you can't put down because it's so wild. He talks about his time aboard oil rigs, loads of evil, sick, and twisted bosses, grungy work conditions, the ability to quit a job that screws with him in any possible way (and believe me, he takes advantage of that, fulfilling the impulse of every worker in America.) Along the way, as he puts out his zine, he develops a reputation as a "Master Dishwasher" and treats the reader to the underground world of dishwashing, of sorts, like eating off of the bus tray buffet (sometimes I never got enough of when I was working as a pearl diver). He ends up on David Letterman (actually, just a friend of his impersonating him), has tons of near dates, and tells about the great history of dishwasher unions and the loyalty they have (to the exclusion of the servers and the cooks.) He doesn't spare the reader of descriptions of nasty kitchens full of roaches and rodents, and drinking on the job to pass it by. Pete really lives a lot of people's dreams, and refuses to let it end until he's at the age of 35, having been to every state in the union and seen a lot more than most people do in their whole lives. He's got such a sense of humor that's so self-depricating but at the same time proud that he doesn't let anyone tell him how to be. Everywhere from racist Louisiana resteraunt owners to hippy communes who try to sucker him into doing more than he wants, Pete always seems to end up on top. He lives dollar to dollar and makes every buck count in his travels, but always confident he can find another job, because once you washed one dish, you can wash any dish.
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Peoples History of the Civil War Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom
by
Williams, David
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
For a long time, the American Civil War became a war of valiant white Southerners fighting for "their way of life". History was re-written to be not about slavery or profits, but about "state's rights" against the government. Such figures like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis became heroes in the post-war South, while the people who fought the war were largely white-washed. Movies like "Gone With the Wind" or "Birth of a Nation" romanticize slavery and the ruling planter class. More importantly, dissenters against the war, especially in the South, were nearly written out of history. Only in the last 50 years has the swing back to the war being about slavery and a rich man's war, where nearly a million people lost their lives. "A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom" does a superb job of explaining why the Civil War happened, as well as the struggles of all people, not just the politicians or generals during the war, and the major reasons for the defeat of the South beyond just plain military reasons. To every war, there is multiple reasons. The Southern Plantation owning class feared race war if their African slaves ever became free, then poor whites and poor blacks might unite against them. Throughout the 1850s and especially in the months prior to the start of the war, numerous bouts of paranoia of abolitionist plots to spark slave revolts appear in Southern Press (which the militant John Brown used to fan the fears of the planters.) The planters believed that their control of the South would be safer in a Slaveholder's republic than compromise with Northern industrialists. In the North, wealthy industrials and emerging capitalists feared losing access to cheap Southern cotton and agriculture, and therefore pressed their government not to let the Southern states leave. In that, they had a stake in continuing the slave system. Copperheads and pacifists throughout the North opposed the war, but were routinely shut down by Lincoln's government, who suspended habeas corpus. Williams explores the hidden history behind the war which has seemingly been erased from history, such as the incredible amount of dissent against the war on both sides, but especially in the South where whole regions were strongly pro-union (especially poor white farmers who hated the ruling plantation owner class), in parts of the South like East Tennessee, West Virginia, North Alabama, West North Carolina, North Louisiana.) Nearly 500,000 Southerners ended up fighting for the union side, both in the US Armies and as guerrillas struggling against the Confederates. It is noted that the Confederates were both fighting the union armies and anti-planter guerillas, destroying the notion that the American Civil War was a regional war and not a true civil war. The role of women deviates as well, exploring how Southern women actually helped end the war. In the South, most men were away in armies, leaving women behind to tend the crops and other such work by themselves. They felt the starvation of the war first hand, as the Plantations of the South, a supposed breadbasket, continued to produce cash crops such as cotton and tobacco instead of food like corn and wheat. The first to demand bread from the government were women, and Williams documents several big bread riots in the South by women. He also documents several cases of female spies and nurses, women who dressed as men to serve in the armies, and women openingly telling men to desert the war effort. There are also chapters of the struggles of the soldiers themselves, who deserted on mass near the end of the war in the South, Blacks who refused to work and fled for the union lines whenever they could get a chance (despite the very cool reception Union soldiers, generals, and politicians gave them), and Indians who continued to fight the centuries old war against white people theft of their land. I fully recommend it for anyone looking to get a sense of how the war actually effected people, and why the ruling classes still came out on top after the war's end, even if chattel slavery was abolished as a result of the war.
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Price of Fire Resource Wars & Social Movements in Bolivia
by
Benjamin Dangl
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
Things across Latin America look like they've heating up in the last five years to the breaking point. After decades of military rule, right-wing forces, banana republics, and domination by foreign companies, governments in Latin America crushing left-wing movements and people fighting the old orders of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, it really looks like those days are through. Social movements are no longer an isolated thing. From the autonomous movements in Argentina, to the Landless People's Movement in Brazil, to even (to some extent) charismatic left-wing rulers like Hugo Chavez, to the Zapatistas and their supporters in southern Mexico, it looks like from this vantage point in the mid-atlantic region of the United States, that Latin America has some really big things going on right now. Bolivia is no different. "The Price of Fire" explores struggles and movements in Bolivia, focusing on the last five years. The book's title refers to what many of the struggles there are tied around: the simple price of fire, or gas for heating. Dangl talks about many different issues going on there, and especially issues like the coca trade, access to water after the government privatizes the water and begins billing people for it, and the community mobilization across the country in response. These uprisings are called "wars", like the Water War and the Gas War, for very good reasons. One interesting aspect is that the coca leaf is used as a symbol of resistance. Coca can be processed into cocaine, but it's also a main ingredient in coca-cola and is used locally as medicine. Because of the US insistence as a part of the "War on Drugs", the government and sometimes US Forces, regularly bomb, destroy, and prosecute coca farmers. Indeed, sometimes the soldiers themselves sent to destroy the crops are chewing coca leaves as they burn coca plants. The military also murders farmers who refuse to plead guilty to drug trafficking. In response, at the city of Chipiriri, the cocaleros formed a coca farmers union, and set up a tightly controlled market to sell their goods, while forbidding any drug dealing or usage at the market. Two major uprisings, the Water War in Cochabamba of 1999 and the Gas War of 2003, are vividly described in the book. After three years of pressure by the World Bank to either privatize its water or face losses of billions of dollars in loans, the Bolivian government relented and pushed for the water of the nation to be places into corporate hands in 1999. This totally enraged the population of Cochabamba, which has around half a million people and is growing rapidly, after costs skyrocketed, distribution failed, and the poorest were completely cut off from water at all. Road blockades, huge street demonstrations, and occupation of the water company offices forced the government to act, and they made the company public. On September 19th 2003, the Gas War starts in Cochabamba, and quickly escalates as cocaleros join in huge road blockades, made even more popular by events in Argentina as a form of protest. The issue is on whether to export natural gas to foreign countries when there is a shortage for the very poor in Bolivia. Large popular assemblies gather, and unions, community groups, and other organizations unite around this issue, which eventually brought down the President. An anarcha-feminist group, Mujeres Creando, agitates for the end of patriarchy and women's submission in their center "The Virgin". Neighbors in the neighborhood El Alto also emerge at the head of the mobilization. At the end, a left-wing President, former coca-grower and indigenous Evo Morales is elected, with the understanding that if he does not stand up against International Companies and the World Bank, that he can be forced out of office as well. This book takes a wide view of the situation in Bolivia, as the author worked as an independent journalist throughout Latin America, writing for a variety of left-wing magazines like Z Magazine, The Nation, and the Progressive. I recommend that if you have read Marina Sitrin's Horizontalism, you read this one right afterwards. The two fit together like a hand in a glove, one focusing on Argentina and one focusing on Bolivia, but seemingly talking about the very same thing: poor people, indigenous people, and women rising up againstcorporations and the rulers of their lands. A lot of theory andanalysis makes you want to jump off a cliff with how depressing it is; books like this and Sitrin's fills you with hope and examples of how people are organizing and fighting back.
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Criminal of Poverty Growing Up Homeless in America
by
Tiny aka, Lisa Gray Garcia
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
Struggle and hope. That's what I thought of this May the 1st of 2006, when seemingly millions of people across the US, mainly Latinos, rallied to support so-called illegal immigrants. These immigrants have literally spent a long time struggling both in the nations they came from and here in the US as business people get rich from their labor. But that day there was hope. In this day of globalization where corporations have the ultimate freedom to cross borders at will in the search for higher and higher profits, while workers cannot without becoming "illegals", it was a day that seemed to signify that "Si, se peude!" They stood up to a government punishing its own people trying to escape a poverty created by the economic policies created by that very government. What exactly is going on at the US-Mexican border? It seems so far away to me, but in a town I grew up near, you can see the backlash and blame on immigrants for US citizens losing jobs to what is really that fault of neo-liberal attacks like NAFTA. In Hazleton, PA (about 45 minutes from my native Carbondale), some of the most draconian laws against immigrants ever passed sailed through recently. But it all comes back to the border. It turns out that Mexican immigrants are not so docile after all,and that they, just like any people who have been wronged over and over, will stand up for themselves. David Bacon, a labor journalist who works for the Nation, illustrates this well in "The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U. S./Mexico Border". Bacon looks at what exactly is happening on the border. He starts by exploring the grape pickers of Southern California. Most had come to the US to seek higher wages than they could have possibly gotten in Mexico. But after NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association), the companies at which they had won better wages after decades of fights with the Caesar Chavez's United Farm Workers (UFW), many suddenly found that they lost these jobs as they moved to Mexico's Mexicali Valley where they could pay those workers as much as a third less than the mainly Mexican immigrants in the US. In the Mexicali Valley, farmworkers (who often bring their children to the fields since there is no affordable school or daycare) could barely afford to pay their bills or get groceries, leading to many families sharing homes in order to pool their resources. Along this same border has risen the infamous Maquiladora (duty-free and union-free factories) industry, which is now a global term but originated as a term for clothing manufacturers along the US-Mexico border. These have swelled since NAFTA, and one of the allures is that it is very hard to form an independent union in Mexico. However, Bacon illustrates that over the past decade of NAFTA Mexico, several independent unions have arisen in the face of a hostile ruling PRI, and then PAN, governments. At the same time, US unions have begun to pull away from their former cold-war, anti-communist sentiment and have slowly recognized that American workers and Mexican workers both lose because of NAFTA and that they must work together in order to survive, The UE, (United Electrical), an independent union, sent the first support to the new independent unions and conducted co-campaigns on the border to organize Maquiladoras into unions to demand better conditions and wages. Interestingly enough, it also began the question of shifting their tactics, since while US unions usually pressure companies until they can win or get some of their goals, Mexican unions usually see the government as their main enemy since the Mexican government maintains industry control over wages and will often not let companies raise wages if it will effect an entire industry (another reason US companies like moving to Mexico). Some of the stuff in this book honestly was shocking how far 1st world companies would go to crush 3rd world workers. There are countless stories in "Children of NAFTA" of brutal beatings of union organizers. They (factory managers) shipped in temps in many stories to vote for the company government-sanctioned union in factory-wide elections, which too seemed many times to galvanize Maquiladora workers against the management. Black-lists, revenge wage-reductions, and brutal attacks on factory workers' pro-union demonstrations almost made reading it unbearable. However, as the labor organizers learned to deal with NAFTA, the one thing I came away from is that the only hope that we human beings fighting for a better future for our children have is that we can never turn our backs on anyone in a struggle. If global corporations can be everywhere, labor unions must be too. While we engage in these struggles locally, our minds must think globally, as the phrase goes.
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Children Of Nafta Labor Wars On The Us
by
David Bacon
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
Struggle and hope. That's what I thought of this May the 1st of 2006, when seemingly millions of people across the US, mainly Latinos, rallied to support so-called illegal immigrants. These immigrants have literally spent a long time struggling both in the nations they came from and here in the US as business people get rich from their labor. But that day there was hope. In this day of globalization where corporations have the ultimate freedom to cross borders at will in the search for higher and higher profits, while workers cannot without becoming "illegals", it was a day that seemed to signify that "Si, se peude!" They stood up to a government punishing its own people trying to escape a poverty created by the economic policies created by that very government. What exactly is going on at the US-Mexican border? It seems so far away to me, but in a town I grew up near, you can see the backlash and blame on immigrants for US citizens losing jobs to what is really that fault of neo-liberal attacks like NAFTA. In Hazleton, PA (about 45 minutes from my native Carbondale), some of the most draconian laws against immigrants ever passed sailed through recently. But it all comes back to the border. It turns out that Mexican immigrants are not so docile after all,and that they, just like any people who have been wronged over and over, will stand up for themselves. David Bacon, a labor journalist who works for the Nation, illustrates this well in "The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U. S./Mexico Border". Bacon looks at what exactly is happening on the border. He starts by exploring the grape pickers of Southern California. Most had come to the US to seek higher wages than they could have possibly gotten in Mexico. But after NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association), the companies at which they had won better wages after decades of fights with the Caesar Chavez's United Farm Workers (UFW), many suddenly found that they lost these jobs as they moved to Mexico's Mexicali Valley where they could pay those workers as much as a third less than the mainly Mexican immigrants in the US. In the Mexicali Valley, farmworkers (who often bring their children to the fields since there is no affordable school or daycare) could barely afford to pay their bills or get groceries, leading to many families sharing homes in order to pool their resources. Along this same border has risen the infamous Maquiladora (duty-free and union-free factories) industry, which is now a global term but originated as a term for clothing manufacturers along the US-Mexico border. These have swelled since NAFTA, and one of the allures is that it is very hard to form an independent union in Mexico. However, Bacon illustrates that over the past decade of NAFTA Mexico, several independent unions have arisen in the face of a hostile ruling PRI, and then PAN, governments. At the same time, US unions have begun to pull away from their former cold-war, anti-communist sentiment and have slowly recognized that American workers and Mexican workers both lose because of NAFTA and that they must work together in order to survive, The UE, (United Electrical), an independent union, sent the first support to the new independent unions and conducted co-campaigns on the border to organize Maquiladoras into unions to demand better conditions and wages. Interestingly enough, it also began the question of shifting their tactics, since while US unions usually pressure companies until they can win or get some of their goals, Mexican unions usually see the government as their main enemy since the Mexican government maintains industry control over wages and will often not let companies raise wages if it will effect an entire industry (another reason US companies like moving to Mexico). Some of the stuff in this book honestly was shocking how far 1st world companies would go to crush 3rd world workers. There are countless stories in "Children of NAFTA" of brutal beatings of union organizers. They (factory managers) shipped in temps in many stories to vote for the company government-sanctioned union in factory-wide elections, which too seemed many times to galvanize Maquiladora workers against the management. Black-lists, revenge wage-reductions, and brutal attacks on factory workers' pro-union demonstrations almost made reading it unbearable. However, as the labor organizers learned to deal with NAFTA, the one thing I came away from is that the only hope that we human beings fighting for a better future for our children have is that we can never turn our backs on anyone in a struggle. If global corporations can be everywhere, labor unions must be too. While we engage in these struggles locally, our minds must think globally, as the phrase goes.
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I Cried You Didnt Listen A Survivors Expose of the California Youth Authority
by
Dwight Edgar Abbott
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
The author of this book states that he wrote it while in solitary confinement. It's a trip into his childhood, where he came of age in California's Juvenile system. It takes place throughout his childhood years, beginning with an early stay at age 6 (along with a rape by a counselor). The rest is his teenage years spent trying to survive the brutal system of rape, violence, and sadistic counselors (also known as prison guards). It's very chilling. I couldn't peel myself away from this book, even though it has graphic descriptions of rapes and brutal fights between gangs of boys not even old enough to shave. The fact that the author even survived that system, which incidentally took place in the 1960s, impresses me. When I was a teenager, a few friends of mine ended up in a juvenile drug rehab center at Horsham, PA, and afterwards they were extremely shaken up. It turned out later they had been raped. Not much has changed in the last 40 years. Abbott and his companion quickly rise to the top of the ruling prison gang, which he uses to attempt several escapes. Each time, he nearly makes it. It's amazing that he goes for his parents, who are totally excluded from being able to help their boy. He forms a love relationship with his companion which he must hide in order to survive. The counselors maintain the order by daily beatdowns and shake-ups, and when it comes down to it, the boys are treated exactly like adults. The prison system makes people have to fight for their survival almost daily, or be pushed to a fate of worse than death. It makes the reader wonder why anyone thinks that prisons can reform any person. Trapping someone in a room and punishing them for years with the most sadistic people doesn't seem like a good way to reform anyone. In the end, prison, for adults or kids, really just sweeps the problem of emotional disturbance underneath the carpet. Nowadays, a few million reside in United States prisons, the largest such population in the world (even more than China, which has 5 times the population). We're at a time when the ruling classes think it's better to completely separate millions into boxes than to even give a carrot to oppressed communities. Dwight Abbott remains in jail today, and he says he wouldn't be there unless the Juvenile Youth Authority had twisted him as a human being to the point where the only place he could exist was in a prison. They destroyed him as a teenager at a critical point in any human being's development. Why? If you want a window into how a person can be destroyed, read this book. At the same time, if you want to see how a person can keep some amount of love and hope for a better day (away from the prison), read this book as well.
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Redefining Our Relationships Guidelines for Responsible Open Relationships
by
Wendy O Matik
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
Whether to put more emphasis on one's politics or one's personal life has been a running debate between activists, organizers, and rebels of all sorts for a long time now. Where does your personal life stop and your efforts to change the world begin? Is there something in between? How do you go about living your life that goes along with your principles? These questions sometimes haunt me, because you can never really separate yourself from mainstream consumer society no matter how much you dislike capitalism. However, in this life, while you make compromises so you can exist, at what point do you go too far? I'll usually veer away from these sorts of thoughts since I've seen it cripple many politically-minded people and make their heads spin. The worst part is the questions continually come back. Relationships are a huge part of who we are simply as human beings. Whether it's sex, friendship, love, simple companionship, or something in-between all of these, humans exist as social creatures. In fact, any healthy social movement for change develops strong relationships on individual and mass levels. So what's so radical about that? Well, it may look more radical when you start to think about how many things in our society have been the result of domination, control, and exploitation. Ultimately, much of what we think of as romantic relationships in the West is based on about male control, patriarchy, and jealousy, (which again, we all grew up with in this society). Alternative relationships, or open relationships where no one person has control over another's feelings, is an alternative model. In "Redefining Our Relationships: Guidelines for Responsible Open Relationships," Wendy O Matik, explores how an open relationship, based on trust, honesty, and maturity, would actual work. When it comes down to it, I highly recommend this book. I've gone back and forth on the monogamy vs. polyamory issue. (I don't like the term non-monogamy because I don't like defining myself as what I'm against.) Sometimes I won't do it because my partner is against it, and other times we compromise to adopting it. Wendy writes here that the key towards a successful open relationship is to be honest with one another that humans will be attracted to other people, and they can't shut that part of them down just because they're with someone else. Jealousy, much like rage, can shut a part of you down and hate someone you're supposed to love, or when someone cheats on monagomy. Wendy also makes the good point that relationships aren't just a black/white thing where you have lovers and friends, and nothing else. Another excellent point she makes is that open relationships do not mean irresponsible relationships where you don't have to take your partner's feelings into account or can just go marathon bed-hopping without letting your partner know what's going on. If you're even just curious about open relationships or wish to explore exactly what love is, Wendy-O Matik is a great start, since it's a fast, short enjoyable read.
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Race How Blacks & Whites Think & Feel Ab
by
Studs Terkel
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
Studs Terkel's "Race" is another in a series of books that provides an excellent oral history about subjects that few feel free to talk about. If you like oral history, then you'll love Studs Terkel. Famous for his classic book "Working", he seeks out common "unfamous" Americans and simply asks them to talk about what they think about Race and race relations, in this book. Written in 1990, the book is a little dated, but still holds largely true. There are around 100 interviews in this book. He interviews about an equal amount of Blacks and Whites with some other ethnicities mixed in, and like in all of his books, he interviews about the same number of old and young, men and women, and middle-class and poor. (No mention of anyone's sexuality though.) Some highlighted stories are from a white former Ku Klux Klan member and a black former civil rights leader are interviewed some two decades later. The Ku Klux Klan member has become a hard-core anti-racist radical who is President of his union which is more than 80% Black. The former civil rights leader has become a conservative republican (though he still believes in limited Affirmative Action). Many of the other stories are interesting because when you put the white point of view and the black point of view right next to each other, there are clearly some huge gaps in understanding each other, and usually the faults and ignorance seem to lie on the white point of view (though some of the interviewed are trying to change their understandings or admit they've changed). There is a lot of frustration on both sides, but at no point do you get an opinion exactly the same as another individual. I have a belief that you should have 10% theory and 90% action, and lately I've been reading a lot of theory. Books like these are a good antidote to too much theory in your life. I love oral history, because it's straight to the point and doesn't require any detective work by the reader to find out what the author is talking about. Something like the subject of Race, being so linked to how people in the United States relate to each other, you need some straight-forward answers. People too often dance around the issue of race and in order to build a social change movement that brings real improvement in all people's lives; we can't squirt around race anymore than class or gender or sexuality or anything else. Most often, the real battle is the battle for the hearts and minds of people, and to understand what that is exactly. Oral history is important. In conclusion, Studs Terkel is my favorite non-fiction writer of all time, because his work involves the words of thousands of ordinary people.
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Feminism is for Everybody Passionate Politics
by
bell hooks
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
This book is a nice short read covering the basics of feminist theories and detailing bell hooks's experience in becoming a feminist. She touches on a variety of subjects and how they relate to feminism in practice. Class, work, race, bodies, relationships, sexuality, and others are all touched upon. It's pretty good, especially for a beginning text. I picked it up because I thought I could use a little brushing up on some feminist theory, and I always prefer the basic theory stuff as opposed to the thick theory stuff. While I don't find some of hooks' stuff about the battles in Academia all interesting, I do like the points she makes about how many reformist feminists have stopped fighting for the rights of women after they got some money as high level managers, or how many white feminists used white supremacy in achieving gains. Instead, feminist organizers should make alliances with other intertwining causes like race, class, sexuality, since ultimately they all are related. She also points out that patriarchy, which feeds into capitalism and other forms of oppression, is a system, and not an individual action, and men acting as allies are needed for any real change to happen (though men shouldn't lead it.) If you want a good primer on why feminism is truly a philosophy of liberation, and isn't anti-male or anti-sex or just limited to educated white academics, I would recommend you check this out.
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A People's History of the Vietnam War
by
Jonathan Neale
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
The war in Iraq and September 11th probably will be the defining event of the youth of the United States today when we look back in a few decades, in much the same way the war in Vietnam defined a generation of youth in the 1960s and 1970s. In a war that ended place a decade before most of those youth were born, what lessons can we take back? How exactly did the Vietnamese win? What were the social movements in the US that arose out of this conflict? Why are the myths of the American-Vietnamese War? The trick to understanding a lot of history is that a lot of what was taught us growing up was simply wrong and just a particular point of view. "A People's History of the Vietnam War", by Jonathan Neale, does a fantastic job of presenting an excellent history that skips over the usual hoop-la about certain elite leaders of the war, and instead concentrates on a more systematic analysis of the war that took so many millions of lives. He sees the world in terms of class and therefore argues that the American ruling class got into Vietnam as a continuation of their policies aiming at domination of the globe. They needed to save South Vietnam, which was about a brutal a dictatorship as there gets, in order to shore up their support of other dictators throughout the world. At the same time, he doesn't commit the same blunder that many other left-wing historians make in supporting elite cadre of the Communist Party either. He correctly identifies that the majority of the party leadership were the sons and daughters of the ruling landlord class, and though they wanted a better world and sought to destroy the class of their ancestors, they also made sure that they, the CP, stayed on as rulers. They did lead a mass mobilization of peasants which liberated their land and carried out a revolution, and life was much better under the CP than it was under the French, but at the same time as Vietnam liberalizes its economy, it is the Party which mainly benefits from it. Neale makes a pretty convincing argument that three main factors led to the defeat of the United States military in Vietnam by the Vietnamese forces. 1) The main one was the peasants revolt, led by the Communists and guerillas, in which hundreds of thousands of fighters gave their lives to bring a new future to their country. Millions of peasants died in bombings, slaughters, and executions, but they never gave up. When the Viet Cong (the South Vietnamese guerrilla group) was nearly annihilated following the Tet offensive and Operation Phoenix by US special forces, North Vietnamese units filled the void and gave everything until the truce of 1973 five years later. By the time of that truce, the guerrillas of the south and soldiers of the north were completely exhausted. The second factor for why the US could not win the war (which it could have done given a few more hundred thousand dead soldiers, a few more million dead civilians, and a few more years of death and war) was because of the US Peace movement. This is where Neale does a masterful job of shattering myths. He points out that the Peace movement is remembered mainly as being fought on campuses by middle-class students and that white workers usually were pro-war. This is simply not true. In fact, a greater percentage of middle-class Americans supported the war, and the great majority of working-class Americans were against the war, mainly because it was they who were dying in the war and returning home maimed and psychologically damaged because of the atrocities they were forced to commit. In this atmosphere of civil rights struggles, black and white workers were at the forefront of joint struggles against the war. In fact, Neale argues that a big limit of the student anti-war organizers was that they did not reach out to working class people as much because they had built-in assumptions about racist white working class people being pro-war. In fact, because of the large scale of the anti-war movement, it became hard to mobilize the country's military resources without facing political defeats at home. There's a great passage here about President Johnson listening to a Pentagon whiz kid in 1966, two years before the war became hugely unpopular, saying the carpet-bombing Hanoi and several key North Vietnamese ports would end the war early, and argues that after feeding numbers into a computer,the Pentagon knows that the atoms bombs of Nagasaki and Hiroshima saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Johnson responds: "I have one more problem for your computer- will you feed into it how long it would take five hundred thousand angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President if he does something like that?" The third factor argued by Neale which lead to the victory of the Vietnamese resistance was the GI revolt. By the end of the war, soldiers refusing to fight, fragging their officers who led them into dangerous missions or other stuff like racism towards black soldiers, and everyday acts of resistance by a huge chunk of the GIs in Vietnam led to an impossible task of the generals pushing forward when they were not even sure they could trust their own soldiers. On nearly every military base in the world, there was a radical underground soldiers newspaper which wrote articles about their dangerous superiors and anti-war material in general. Towards the end of the war, President Nixon switched to almost exclusively air war by carpet bombing North Vietnam and the countryside's of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, supporters of the Communists. Neale does a great job explaining the huge effect on post-war Vietnam and United States. The United States proceeded to isolate Vietnam with its alliance with China and the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia. China even invaded Vietnam because of it's occupation of Cambodia after after the Khymer Rouge proceeded to destroy what was left of Cambodia after the massive firebombing of 1973 by the US air force. Gradually, the state rolled back the communal lands that the peasants had won in the war from the landlord class, until the point where today Vietnam is becoming a massive sweatshop in conjunction with large multinational corporations. In the United States, the ruling class learned not to commit to a long ground war, and instead embarks on a big counter-offensive against the gains of marginalized people (People of color, women, gay movements, working people) beginning in the 1980s. They learned the lessons of not letting a large amount of soldiers commit to ground operations, else that breeds massive dissent. The book was written right before the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, and aptly predicted a long ground war in Iraq. Anyway, this was a great read and very well done. I can't recommend it enough.
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Stonewall
by
Martin Duberman
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
If there's any one thing that has the potential to evoke instant violence from individuals, it's the idea of homosexuality. Today, nothing seems to polarize so many people. Anyone growing up has heard "fag" as a basic insult in the grammer of teenagers and beyond, and I really suspect there's a lot of people who are in the closet in some way that know that if they came out at all of even being remotely attracted to members of the same sex (however you want to define that), then they would become an instant target for former friends and family. It's even worse in the countryside than in the cities, too. So I picked up Stonewall to brush up on some Queer history, especially since the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York are often cited as being a turning point in the acceptance of anything but straight as an arrow by mainstream society at all. Stonewall details the lives of seven different individuals from their childhoods, to the day they came out of the closet, to their lives afterward and up until the stonewall riots, and the aftermath. The six people are Yvonne (Maua) Flowers, Jim Fouratt, Foster Gunnison Jr, Karla Jay, Silvia Rae Rivera, and Craig Rodwell. Some like Jim Fouratt were previously involved in radical left-wing groups like the Yippies before Stonewall brought gay issues as an issue to be seriously considered. Yvonne Flowers felt out of place wherever she went, being a black lesbian and therefore subject to homophobia and sexism in much of the black community and racism in much of the white lesbian community. Foster Gunnison Jr was the son of an industrialist, and became extremely involved in the moderate Mattachine Society, which sought to seek an understanding with straight society. Karla Jay was a student who became involved with left-wing activism but quickly was uncomfortable about male domination of the movement. Silva Rae Rivera defiantly strikes the reader as one of the most interesting, as she lives on the streets as a queen, and transvestite. Finally, Craig Rodwell was a young member of the Mattachine Society and tried to turn it more radical and relevant by recruiting young members into it to infuse it with energy, and later opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore. Without going to far, the Stonewall Riots started when the police raided the notoriously seedy, and Mafia-run, Stonewall Bar. Raids were common place and often were proceeded with warnings, bribes, and such, but this time after the police roughed up a few people, the crowd fought back. It escalated into a full scale attack on the police and lots of pent up rage was unleashed. The next day, as news of gays fighting back spread quickly, people took to the street and made a statement that they would no longer be silent second-class citizens. After this, the Gay Liberation Front was founded to push for confrontation and demand, not request, full equality with straight society. The effects on the characters reminded me of the effect that the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization had on me when I was a teenager. It all the sudden became alright to be out in the open. The book itself can be a little confusing at points as Dr. Duberman switches between the individuals stories quickly and suddenly, but each story is indeed pretty interesting. Even today as there seems to be an enormous backlack by the Christian Right to attack the rights of people to be attracted to anyone, or to BE anyone, that they feel like, and to have access to all of the same health, jobs, and life that any straight person would, it really was the beginning of hope back in an age of closets and not being able to even talk. This was a beginning of change, before even the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic. Stonewall should be read by anyone who believes in the right of anyone to struggle for a better life for themselves and those they care about.
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Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile
by
Ramor Ryan
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
I never thought I would enjoy a travel journal, but Ramor Ryan changed my mind. At first I thought it was going to be an over-romantic story of this guy traveling around the world in order to avoid himself, in the way that a lot of Crimethinc type of stuff reads. I'm really not into that kind of stuff. However, he really surprised me, and I'm ashamed I thought that of him in the first place in association with Crimethinc, because this guy is a real character, a great writer, and no one can call him fake for leaving out the messy details. In fact, read about his review of the two different "Days of War and Nights of Love" (one by Crimethinc, and one by Eduardo Galeano) online. In the great tradition of Irish story-tellers, Ryan recalls experiences from the squats of West Berlin, the war zone of Kurdistan, the revolution and post-revolution repression in Nicauragua, his youth in Ireland watching the British army attack a Republican demonstration, and much more. He is an exile from his native land, moving from situations of struggle across the planet with a keen analysis of each. Ryan left Ireland in the 1980s for Nicaragua to help defend the Revolution there, and ended up seeing the Sandinistas crumble under the might of the US-funded Contras, alienating Indigenous peoples struggling for autonomy in the process. He remarks that a generation of international solidarity activists in the 1980s got their start in Nicaragua; much like many saw the same in Chiapas in the 1990s. If you've never heard of Ramor Ryan, look him up. I would love to meet him, because this guy has such a wealth of information and has seen so much without thinking he is better than anyone else for having done so. He brings a personal touch to bloody places stormed by revolution, repression, and fights for a better world. By the end of it, I thought to myself that he had really lived his life thus far to the fullest, and brought a whole new meaning to what I thought of as an "international solidarity" activist. Much of what he writes is exciting in that revolutionary situations are very much within reach, but at the same time depressing when he discusses the aftermath in the case of defeat (like in Kurdistan or in Nicaragua). If you want to find an inspirational person, you have to meet Ramor Ryan by reading his Clandestines.
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Working Class White The Making & Unmaking of Race Relations
by
Monica Mcdermott
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
The book explores race relations and is a sort of an undercover look at working class people's basic thoughts on stereotypes and how those views differ based on region. The researcher gets jobs at convenience stores in two working-class white neighborhoods bordering on working-class black neighborhoods, one in Atlanta and one in Boston. It's a fast read because it is an interesting concept. I'm not so cool with the whole treating people like guinea pigs in the whole Nickeled and Dimed style of research, though the researcher is honest with people if they ask her background (she grew up as a working class white southerner). The focus is on white-black race relations and interactions. One of the main differences she notices is the difference in how race is perceived in Boston and Atlanta. In Boston, working class whites are proud of their ethnicity and are more likely to identify with an Old-world group, like Irish or Italian. They're also very defensive of their neighborhoods, leading to block-by-block segregation and being open about saying racist stuff aloud. In Atlanta, being working class white is something to be ashamed of because the perception is that having white skin should guarantee you middle-class status. As a result, whites often actually have a hard time landing a job that is low-skill and low paying. Further, whites are seen as weak and passive. However, in both cases, working-class whites realize that race is not a polite thing to talk about, and usually save their views for whites-only company. McDermott also explores topics like racial profiling within convenience stores and views on immigrants. I liked this book, though it seems sort of location-centered. Maybe these views wouldn't be prevalent in places like California or Illinois. I found it especially interesting since I live in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia which has traditionally been a white working class neighborhood of Irish-Catholic background, though this is changing due to gentrification affecting all of Northern Philadelphia. It reminds me a lot of the Boston neighborhood described in this book. If you're looking for a quick and interesting read on race in American cities, though sociologically-focused, pick this one up.
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Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Unabridged)
by
Avrich, Paul
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America is a real treasure. It's more than 450 pages long, but I couldn't put it down. The book allowed me to escape into the lives of the real participants of the Anarchist movement of North America in its previous heyday of the 1890s-1930s. Originally published in 1995, Paul Avrich interviewed hundreds of Anarchists and former Anarchists who were mainly in their eighties and nineties in the 1970s, the majority dying within a few years of the interviews. I was especially impressed by this, since it gave hundreds of people who had led amazing lives a sort of last memoir before they passed, much in the same style as Working by Studs Terkel. It is divided into six sections covering much of the American Anarchist movement. It is mainly centered around the east coast, especially New York. They are 1) Pioneers, which focuses on relatives and close friends of the famous Anarchists like Alexander Berkman and Ben Reitman, 2) Emma Goldman, who was hugely influential and left a strong impression on everyone interviewed 3) Sacco and Venzetti, which details mostly Italian Anarchist experiences around the famous trials and frame-up of the Italian immigrants, 4) Schools and Colonies, which focus on the Modern School movement like the Ferrer school or the Stelton colony in which Anarchists tried to build communities and separate themselves into a lifestyle, 5) the Ethnic Anarchists, focusing on different groups which really brought ideological Anarchism to the United States, like the Russians, Jews, Spanish, and Italian immigrants, 6) the 1920s and beyond, which links the activities after the big decline on the US Anarchist movement after the 1920s until the 1960s and the rise of the "new anarchist movement" starting in the 1980s. What really struck me about this book was how similar some of the arguments of the Anarchist movement were in the past to those of the present. Past divisions between sub-groups were detailed in the text as well. As Avrich explains, the main split was between the Anarcho- syndicalists / communists and the Anarcho-individualists. Today, the main split is between the Anarcho- syndicalists / communists and the eco-anarchists. The discussion also includes people who got burnt out on anarchists because they thought the anarchists were ineffective. Many do not regret their involvement in the movement and look back on the years they spent in the movement as the best years of their lives. In the end, the book is very inspiring because so many of the interviewees still call themselves Anarchists and see that the fight for a better world will continue no matter what. Many of them remain idealists and are hopeful that the world they have worked towards will come about someday. They have hope despite having seen the world nearly destroy itself, supposed comrades (like the Communists) betray them, and enough bickering to make anyone cynical. Many of them had not been involved in the Anarchist Movement for many years, or had simply been involved in book clubs or discussion groups that passed on the ideas. And yet they are still committed to the idea that all humans should be free of oppression and that no government can make you free no matter where you are on this earth.
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Still Philadelphia
by
Fredric Miller
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
Around the Turn of the Century, Philadelphia was in a turning point in its history. Put together by Temple University's Urban Archives collection, the authors do an excellent job crossing architecture with people. The South Street area was becoming increasingly Jewish as refugees from Russia fled, rubbing elbows with the Black community of the 5th ward. Italians and Irish flooded South Philly. Irish, Polish, and German immigrants flocked to the new industries in Kensington. The middle class areas of West Philadelphia and North Philadelphia became the first "street-car" suburbs, commuting daily to their office jobs in the downtown Center City, as Broad Street was widened at the same time to provide room to the new "automobile". At the same time, vast amounts of row housing put the working class (of all different origins and colors) very near their factory work places. There is a classic picture of the Stetson factory (in Kensington) Christmas party, where hundreds of factory workers are in suits lined into neat rows. You can find a Jewish man and an Irish girl courting. Wow. "Still Philadelphia" is a treasure that any Philadelphian should take a look at. They may recognize some of their streets, and they might not. For instance, Broad and Girard Streets, today is an El Stop, in a working class Black neighborhood near Temple University, in the 1890s was the site of several mansions of the Well-to-do class of Philadelphia (who's descendants now live on the Mainline of the suburbs.) South Street, today a smorgousboard of dinky strange shops and tourist attractions, a century ago was a Jewish marketplace (though the traffic doesn't seem to have changed.) 58th and Baltimore, now a working-class Black neighborhood just blocks away from gentrification, was in 1906 farmland. As our city rapidly changes, a city with thousands of Latino and Asian immigrants arriving, struggling neighborhoods, and areas balancing gentrification with building neighborhoods that meet the needs of the already established community, it's fascinating to look back to an earlier time when the city struggled with similar, yet different issues.
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Come Hell or High Water Hurricane Katrina & the Color of Disaster
by
Michael Eric Dyson
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson Review by: James Generic Who else wasn't glued to their television set, or the newspapers, or their internet, or whatever, last late August into early September? It's not everyday that we see a city destroyed by a combination of a hurricane and government ineptitude. It's the second major disaster in just four years in the United States, after the attacks on the World Trade Center that killed 2000 people. Hurricane Katrina and the lackluster FEMA response killed 1,836, plus 705 people unaccounted for, as of May 19th, 2006. There was a rapid response to 9-11 attacks, when the victims were mostly white affluent people. There was a slow, too-little, too late response to Hurricane Katrina, when the victims were mostly poor and black. Today, fewer than half of New Orlean's population has returned, since many of them have nothing to return to. Michael Eric Dyson, the author of "Is Bill Cosby Right?", writes in "Come Hell or High Water" of the meaning of the disaster. While it is true that Bush, Mike Brown, and local Louisiana politicians did not cause Hurricane Katrina, (though the magnitude of the hurricane was most likely highly worsened by global climate change), they certainly were responsible for the hundreds of thousands of people being stranded in New Orleans when help started arriving nearly five days afterwards. Dyson spends much time exploring the cultural response of the mainstream to the hurricane, with the glaring implications of race in America. In a desperate situation with little hope for help, people in New Orleans began to take food from stores which had been abandoned in the wake of the hurricane. The media shortly separated the Black people trying to feed themselves into "looters" and the whites as "finding food". An absurd amount of attention became focused on people using the opportunity to take televisions and radios, though the media ignores the fact that people may have sold these appliances later on for food. The disaster of the Superdome, where 30,000 people waited for days while the Red Cross was turned away by the national guard because New Orleans was "too dangerous" (which later turned out to be mostly based on rumor.) Hurricane Katrina seemed like the world turned upside down, but it really just brought already messed up situations, like white supremacy and capitalism, to be magnified ten-fold. I keep wondering why they didn't just evacuate everyone, and it turns out that Amtrak offered to provide free trains, but the city turned it down. The Levees weren't funded properly, leading to detoriation and busting up. FEMA didn't know what was going on, and followed every little procedure by the book, leading to necessary help not happening for days (for instance, FEMA officials were instructed not to help any locals unless they asked for help.) Later, a Lousina representative declared (off-the record) "We finally cleared up that public housing problem..." For a step-by-step detailed look into what happened in the Deep South in August of 2005, pick this up, and prepare to shake your head in bewilderment at the people who run the United States. Reggie Bush or no, New Orleans has been forever changed.
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Case Against Israel
by
Michael Neumann
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
A huge issue in our times and our world has been the injustice of an the Palestinians and Israelis. It is not an easy issue, either, in America, where there is a large Jewish population. Many Jewish radicals come from families who whole-heartily support Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and are used to being named as self-hating Jews. They are often torn between their own experience of growing up in a predominantly Christian nation as well as being apart of a people who have been persecuted mightily throughout the world, and that experience being used by Israel to justify their imperialist activities in the Middle East. Indeed, American Jews have been known to unquestionably support the actions of the Israeli government even more than Israelis themselves, who are more torn into different viewpoints. This is the experience this book, "The Case Against Israel", was written from, as the author, Michael Neumann, is a Jewish professor, who in the introduction states he has never been incredibly pro-Palestinian, teaching Philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada (close enough to America.) It is also a touchy subject, because one certainly does not want to be accused of anti-Semitism as a non-Jew. I am not Jewish, making it difficult for me to get involved in this discussion without being shut-down as simply "not understanding the plight of the Jews" as has been said to me. The book, however, is a step-by step logical and moral counter to the arguments of Zionism and the government of Israel. It proceeds in a very calm but very encompassing style. The charge of anti-semitism is covered early in the book, noting that Israel does not represent all Jews and therefore it is not anti-semitic to criticize Israel, especially since the largest population of Jews lives in the United States and not in Israel. The book is divided into two sections. The first is the argument against the ideology of Zionism, which is grounded in the pre-1947 founding of Israel. Neumann makes the point of stating the incredibly colonialist and imperialist nature of settling European Jews in any land, and arguing that the Zionist leadership saw the people of Palestine as non-existant or undeserving of the land, since Jews had lived there millennium before them (which is countered by stating that no one is really native of anywhere, since people existed in Palestine before even the ancient Israelites did.) He also makes the point that the Zionist movement leadership manipulated many poor Jews to move in the stead of more wealthy Jews. Following the horrific holocaust by Nazi Germany, the Zionist leadership actually placed fleeing Jews in even more danger by having them go to Palestine, where war was brewing between Palestinian people losing their land and the incoming settlers and refugees. The second part of the book recognizes that after the 1967 war, Israel was in no more danger of being "driven into the sea", and therefore the shift of the Zionist ideology came to be supporting Israeli drives to take more land in Palestine. Many will argue that Israel must maintain its occupation to protect itself against Arab attack, and that is easily countered by stating the fact that Israel has not faced a united Arab world, which is itself sort of a fantasy, in a very long time. Indeed, the utter destitution that the Palestinians face as being permanent refugees in their own land leaves them with little choice but to resist, since it is the natural human need to resist attempts at bodily destruction of one's self and close ones. Logically, one cannot morally support the Jewish settlements which are funded by Israel and US tax aid. There are many more arguments used by Israel's defenders which are refuted in a systematic rational manner within this book. A quick and enjoyable read, it is mainly based in Philosophy and sound arguments, and the author refuses to become emotionally overdrawn in any argument. For anyone with an interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict, this book is an absolute must read, since it carries some essential basic concepts and arguments that are so simple they are powerful, impossible for anyone with any sense of moral justice to ignore.
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Other Sheep I Have the Autobiography of Father Paul M. Washington
by
Paul Washington
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
"Other Sheep I Have.... The Autobiography of Father Paul M. Washington" is the story of Philadelphia's legendary Father Paul Washington, the reverend of the Church of the Advocate. Writing in the early 1990s after his retirement, he recounts three decades of being a force of social change in North Philadelphia. Being a Black clergyman in a predominantly WASP Episcopalian Church, he flings open the doors of the huge Cathedral doors to the events of the 1960s thru 1980s. Father Paul Washington stood side by side with Cecil B. Moore during the pickets of Girard College. He refused to back down during the many times the police brutalized young black high school students trying to better a rotten public school system. He let the Church of the Advocate be used for a Black Power conference in the 1970s, as well as a Black Panther Party conference. He butted heads with members of his own church about the direction that the Advocate was allowed to take in the struggles for Black self-determination. Paul Washington refused any other post in the Episcopalian church structure, even turning down the chance to be a Bishop or to go to New York City, instead staying in the impoverished neighborhood of North Central Philadelphia near Strawberry Mansion, at 18th and Diamond streets. Later, he recalls the bombing of the MOVE house in 1985, and while not entirely sympathetic to MOVE, he believed that the city overstepped their bounds extraordinarily. He expressed disappointment with how Wilson Goode, who many Black clergy had hoped would be a new wave of Black Power politicians who would finally bring the city to help the impoverished Black neighborhoods, turned out to be just as bad as other mayors. Today, there has been a proposal from community activists in North Philly to rename Diamond streets "Paul Washington Street" in the same as Columbia Ave was renamed Cecil B. Moore avenue. It makes sense. When you talk with people in that neighborhood, or you visit the Church of the Advocate, you can see the effect Washington had on the people who's lives he touched. Across the Advocate are paintings of biblical scenes transferred into Black Power messages. They are quite stunning, and I'd never seen something like that in a Church, but there they are. I first saw the Church on a class field trip across the neighborhoods of Philadelphia, and later went to it again at a Jazz and Art event. For anyone living in Philadelphia, visiting the Church of the Advocate should be a priority at some point. A huge gothic cathedral built in the 19th century by Scottish stonemasons, there are what appears to be angel faces carved all over the building. However, in reality, they are the faces of the Stonemason's children, since they were homesick for Scotland. Fast forward to the early 1960s, when Paul Washington become the Rector at the Advocate. The neighborhood, traditionally a upper middle class neighborhood, is quickly changing as many white families flee to the suburbs and many poor black families from the south arrive, philly's "white flight." As such, Paul Washington encounters a congregation of racially mixed members, with the white members slowly dwindling and the black members being finally welcomed into a church that had turned them away. From here, he transformed the church into a haven for Black Empowerment activists. Washington strikes several times on the theme of balancing Martin Luther King's rhetoric of "turn the other cheek" non-violent protest with Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" Black empowerment for the improvement of African-Americans in the white supremacist United States. This debate continues today for people trying to change the world, and probably will continue for quite some time.
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Five Years in the Warsaw Ghetto
by
Bernard Goldstein
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
It took me a few days to write this review after I finished "Five Years In The Warsaw Ghetto" by Bernard Goldstein. In a day where there's much wrong with our world, you can't help but be depressed when reading of people in the past that's ideals were utterly crushed by the might of state power. Goldstein was a Jewish socialist organizer in the trade unions of Warsaw, and lost his entire community to the Nazi plan of aus rotten of the Polish Jews. Its story, a re-release of a memoir put out in the 1950s when the Holocaust was fresh in the world's mind, leaves you with three things. First, it is a tragedy, one of where Bernard Goldstein spent his entire life fighting for justice, as a socialist activist and organizer amongst Polish workers and Jews; he actively fought fascism from rising in Poland, but was nearly powerless to stop as the tanks rolled into Warsaw. Throughout the five years, he watched as half a million Jews were reduced to a little more than 70,000, and as his beloved Warsaw was utterly destroyed by the Nazis, and than the Socialist resister survivors were rounded up and either imprisoned or executed by the Soviets. Second, it is a story of hope. Throughout the entire occupation, Goldstein never rested nor never gave up; reminding the reader of the old phrase "Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." When the Nazis set up the Ghetto, he urged, from the underground press, to resist it and not to trust the Jewish collaborators whom the Gestapo put into power to rule over the ghetto. When deportations started, his organization tried to manufacture fake documents to as many people as possible marked for liquidation as good workers. When it became clear the Nazis were planning to kill everyone, Goldstein helped organize the uprising which nearly succeeded in defeating the Nazis except for a dearth of supplies. Escaping the Ghetto, Goldstein joins the Polish resistance which stages a second city-wide uprising two years later, which only failed because the approaching Soviet army refused to help it, since Stalin wanted no rivals in his puppet government. Third, it is a story of courage to fight for what is right. Throughout the story, Goldstein remains resolute that the Nazis would be defeated eventually, and used all of his cunning, strength, and organizing skill to achieve it. People who compromised themselves in order to survive in this story usually did not, such as Jewish Gestapo agents, who became such to protect themselves from death camps, but instead were assassinated by vengeful Jews when the uprisings erupted. Goldstein, the biggest rebel of them all, survives the holocaust of his people and his city, though he has to flee when the Soviets begin arresting the radicals of the nation. Goldstein's message should be for us today, in these difficult times, to never give up, and never stand down, no matter how mighty your foes are nor how much the odds are stacked against you and what you hold dear. Nothing, not the state, nor the worst of tyrants and human hatred, can crush the thoughts and hope for a better world. If Goldstein can survive it, so can we.
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Since Predator Came Notes from the Struggle for American Indian Liberation
by
Ward Churchill
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
When I read "Since Predator Came" by Ward Churchill, I was not surprised by the subject matter of the series of articles by Ward Churchill which appeared in academic journals from the 1980s to the mid 1990s. What I was surprised by was how much I enjoyed the book. Churchill pushes for an "Indigenist" worldview, in which all people have a right to self determination and land stolen illegally by conquerors, no matter where they are. In such a world, no state could arise and the world would be "balkanized" into thousands of homelands, ruled by local councils, similar to many anarchist viewpoints. His call for tactics of "US Off the Planet" instead of "US out of Iraq", by making the United States abide by its treaty obligations that it made to American Indians centuries ago seem a little far-fetched, but Churchill admits it could be just one of many tactics. Churchill, for any who doesn't know, is a long time Indian activist, writer, and professor at Colorado State University, and recently made national headlines by comparing the people who died in the 9-11 attacks to "little Eichmans" who were not entirely innocent. Churchill's argument is pretty convincing. He talks about Natives using legal tactics of forcing the government to abide by its broken treaties to recover land, specifically citing the Iroquois and the Ogalwa Sioux. He also has a fascinating chapter where he makes the argument that the human species came from the Americas, not Africa, and people migrated from the Bering Strait into Asia and across Greenland into Europe hundreds of thousands of years ago. He also cites non-North American struggles who fought both Communists and Capitalists, like the h'Mong of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua (who at first supported the Sandinista revolution but then turned against it when the Sandinistas betrayed their word about giving Indigenous peoples self determination, and also fought the Contra counter-revolutionaries.) What is lacking from the book is how non-Indigenous peoples can support the struggles of Indigenous, especially in America. However, that isn't really what the book is about, so I don't blame him for leaving that out. He does touch briefly by stating that, in North America at least, Indians do not see race quite the same way, not so much as blood. In other words, whites and blacks, like they did in the case of the Seminoles in the 1830s, could "become Indians" if Indian nations got their land back. I'm not sure how this would really work, and I also am a little suspect of tearing down industry, but otherwise Ward Churchill's collection of essays in "Since Predator Came" is a worthwhile read indeed.
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Whats My Name Fool Sports & Resistance in the United States
by
Dave Zirin
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
"What's My Name, Fool?" shatters the image that many on the left think of athletes. Citing both historical and present day acts of resistance by athletes in national spot-light sports, DC area socialist Dave Zirin challenges this sometimes elitist with clear and crisp writing. The title comes from Muhammad Ali challenging white reporters, who made it a point to call him Cassius Clay, his former name, after a dominating victory. From football to baseball to soccer to tennis to boxing to the Olympics, Zirin digs into the history and shines a light into the dark corners that the major leagues would prefer remain unexplored. Zirin discusses racism, classism, sexism and homophobia, and also profiles uplifting examples of athletes fighting the power and speaking the truth. Such glaring examples include the domination of a nazi boxer by Joe Lewis, the smashing of the color barrier in baseball with years of organizing by members of the Negro leagues and communist sports writers, the Black Power salute given after winning the gold and bronze medals by the American Olympic Track Team to protest apartheid and segregation, and current day examples of antiwar women's college hoopster Toni Smith or all-star slugger Barry Bonds criticizing racism and the war in Iraq and then being targeted by the Bush adminstration as anti-american or pro-bowl Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams refusing to be used anymore to sell tickets. As an rabid sports fan, I loved this book and saw it as the connect between my two major interests, political action and sports. Zirin criticizes the sports industry by taking solid aim at the ownership who make it their goal to exploit athletes who are mainly working class people of color, sacrificing their bodies in order to bring their families out of poverty. He does a good job at pointing out that athletes are not the dumb idiots that society encourages them to be, but instead many use their fame for good causes. For every Michael Jordan being silent on the issues like sweatshops, there is a Kareem Abu Jabar who the right wishes would just shut up and go away. I also believe it is a huge mistkae to dismiss all sports fans, possibly because of classism, and some of the best organizing can be done amongst sporting events. Read the transcripts or Listen to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewing the author David Zirin about this book.
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Welcome to the Terrordome The Pain Politics & Promise of Sports
by
Zirin, Dave
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
Sports are the world's great distraction, especially in the United States. To really understand American culture, and other cultures too, you have to understand sports to get why people get so very fanatical about them. In a sense, they are a form of reality TV, except they envelope so much more. It is very easy for radicals to dismiss sports as a distraction from more important things, like changing the world, but in a sense, by dismissing sports, they also dismiss sports fans, which is a great deal of people. It's also important to understand how sports is used to distract people, and why athletes are told to shut up and be good soldiers. So having said all that, when Dave Zirin put out a sequel to his first book, "What's My Name Fool?", I read it as fast as I could. Much like his first book, "Welcome to the Terrordome", (Chuck D does the introduction, since the title is taken from a Public Enemy song), the book is broken down into chapters exploring different parts, exploring politics in the sports world. Roberto Clemente was a Hall of Fame right-fielder for the Pittsburg Pirates from 1955 to 1972. He is often described as baseball's Latino Jackie Robinson, in that he never shut up and never backed down from disrespect. He was outspoken on issues of the day, like racism, segregation, colonialism in Latin America, civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and media mockery of minority players. Clemente was instrumental in winning a World Series for the Pirates in 1960, yet finished 8th in MVP voting because of his Puerto Rican heritage. When non-white baseball players had to eat in the bus while in the South, he led a protest against segregation and demanded that all players be treated the same. He died in a plane crash on his way to deliver relief supplies to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua a year after his retirement and remains one of the best players to ever play the game.. Another topic is how Major League Baseball sets up minimum wage baseball sweatshops in the Caribbean and Central America, where the only options are the army, the factory, or baseball. In the so-called "America's Game", baseball, nearly a fourth of the league are foreign born Latinos. During the World Baseball Classic, sponsored by MLB in an effort to show-case homegrown talent, the Team USA was trounced by Latin American teams. Interesting statistics like how 6 of the last 10 American League MVPs have been Latino, and here's why. In the Dominican Republic, US teams run "baseball academies", where young boys who have dropped out of school attend to get trained how to play baseball, some coming with soapboxes for shoes and tattered clothing. 99 out of 100 don't make it to the MLB who attend these academies. Around the world, soccer, or football as it's known outside of the States, is by far the most popular sport. It's famous by soccer hooligans in Europe, full-scale riots in Latin America, and national pride all over. Players like Diego Maradona are heroes in the third world, for standing against corporate globalization, war, and famously "avenging" the Falkland War in 1986 World Cup against England. In 2002, he attends the protests against the Summit of the Americas, where he says that Argentina will never enjoy the fruits of corporate control. Another famous player, Ronaldo of the powerful Brazil team, goes to Palestine to meet with a Palestinian boy who wrote him a letter asking him to meet with him, and brings international attention to Israel's travel bans when he is stopped from meeting with him. Most famously, Zirin goes into the famous head-butt incident at the France-Italy World Cup when France's Zidane headbutted Italy's Materazzi. Materazzi comes from an Italian fascist club, and Zidane instantly becomes a hero in much of the Third World for responding to Materazzi's racist taunting. It follows a culture of right-wing and left-wing organizing in soccer fans, where political parties and other organizations try to recruit fans at matchs and brawls often break out over politics. (I've often wondered why there wasn't much organizing at sporting events in the US when it seems so obvious.) The Prime Minister of Italy even comments that "The French team is made up of Negroes, Islamists, and Communists." In effect, people of the Third World root to beat First World teams because of the history, and cling to the ideals of hope and pride and dignity through them. The world of sports is not a separate world, nor is it just for men, and nor is a perfect world of saints. Just like all aspects of the world we live in, the best thing to do is to understand it and understand the people who follow it. I think I've just about always fit into my work situations pretty fast by being a die-hard Philadelphia sports fan, particularly the Eagles, as well as just about everyone in this city is as well. When Donovan McNabb says that black quarterbacks are criticized different than white quarterbacks and that there's racism in the league, I applaud him for stating the obvious when others are afraid to do even that. Left-wing sports fans might be few and far between because of many on the left's complete rejection of sports fans in general, but sports writers like Dave Zirin remind us that the there's social justice in everything in life, if you look behind the scenes a little bit.
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How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
by
Daniel Cassidy
jgeneric
, October 31, 2007
The Irish make up one of the biggest ethnic groups in the English speaking world of Britain, the USA, and Australia. As the first colony of England, where much of later British imperialist policies were perfected and tested, the Irish were the laborers, the soldiers, and the maids of the Anglo rulers in the United States and Britain. Irish women were especially popular in the States as servants because they spoke English. However, it is very easy to forget that the Irish's native language is not English, but Irish-Gaelic. Yet, for a group whom was so emerged in English speaking culture after they were conquered by the English, and crushed over and over again in rebellions, very little of the Irish language appears to have influenced the English, at least according to most mainstream English dictionaries, like Oxford. In "How the Irish Invented Slang", Daniel Cassidy lays out an argument that most English linguistic study have all overlooked the Irish influence, most because much of the words come from working class language of the Irish slums, and therefore much of our "colorful" language actually is descended from the Irish Gaelic language, though the spelling has changed and origin was often listed as "unknown" by the scholars. Therefore, Irish-Americans can take heart that their language is still spoken in the bars and streets across the US, especially amongst working people. He explores popular songs, like railroad songs, cowboy songs, and baseball songs, to how the Irish influenced popular card game lingo, to cowboy lingo, to how the book and movie "Gangs of New York" got the name of the gang Dead Rabbits completely wrong. In the back is a nice dictionary of words that Cassidy attributes to being descended from Irish-Gaelic, a language not crushed out of existence by Anglo culture after all. For examples, listed below are 45 slang/descended-from-slang words which Cassidy attributes to the working-class Irish. 1. Babe (sexually attractive young woman) 2. Baloney (as in foolishness) 3. Bee's Wax (as in "none of your...") 4. Booze 5. Brat 6. Chuck (as in "to throw") 7. Cop (as in policeman) 8. Dork 9. Dude 10. Fluke 11. Freak 12. Gams (as in legs) 13. Geek 14. Guzzle 15. Hick (as in peasant or country fool) 16. Honky 17. Jerk 18. Lunch 19. Lick (as in to beat someone) 20. Ma/Pa 21. Mug (as in someone's face) 22. Malarkey (foolish talk) 23. Mutt 24. Phoney 25. Pussy (as in vagina, or whiner) 26. Puss (as in mouth or lips) 27. Slugger (as in baseball hitter) 28. Queer (as in odd) 29. Razzamatazz (showing off, high spirits) 30. Root (as in to cheer for) 31. Slew (as in large number, a whole... of `em) 32. Shanty 33. Shindig (party) 34. Shoo 35. Whiskey 36. Skinny (inside information) 37. Slacker 38. Slogan 39. Smack (as in to hit) 40. Sock (as in to punch) 41. Spunk (spirit, energy, semen) 42. Sucker (as in fool) 43. Taunt 44. Yacking 45. Yellow (as in cowardly) This is a great book for anyone curious about language and why certain words arose. In a country where working people are often slammed for their language as being outrageous or overly emotional or dramatic or offensive, and while working people are told how stupid they are for they way in which they talk or continuingly corrected their entire lives, it's very nice to read a history of where those "dirty words of the rabble" come from. It's nice to not feel stupid when people are talking about language for once.
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