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it was amazing
| Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political change in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Some contemporaries were irritated by this interest in the times as much as the life but not this reader. The book is nearly 680 pages long. Perhaps the more casual reader might have liked some cuts to make it more manageable but the length is justified by the authors interweaving of three closely related stories - that of a personality, that of a scientist and thinker and that of his times. The personality is fascinating in its own right but what comes across as equally interesting is the subversion of his own class - that of the well-heeled but capable gentleman naturalist - by his alliance with the new men of professional science, self made and seeking 'jobs' in institutions. This is where personality ties in with wider social change. What drove this rather timorous man with a life time of seriously unpleasant psychosomatic illnesses to defy convention at some social risk and, quite late in the day, allow the publication of his radical thoughts on evolution and natural selection? Although Desmond and Moore do not quite answer this question directly, a personality that could do nothing but investigate and think on what it investigated - a classical case of scientific curiosity as core to personality - eventually had to break ranks to express its 'truth'. His biography (excepting a rather unprepossessing country gent early life and the last days of being lionised and loving every minute of it) can be roughly broken down into three phases - the days on 'The Beagle', those living his theory discreetly in the country and those once his theory was in play. The first phase is of a very young man with a considerable capacity for hard work who built up sufficient reputation from his specimen collecting to become accepted as part of a family of naturalists and scientists exploring the difficult terrain between nature and revealed religion. The second phase has him highly respected within a respectable world but finding that his 'thinking' was taking existing evolutionary thought and extending it into something that could and would 'in the wrong hands' completely undermine the very social order on which he and his family depended. We have to remember that Darwin was never in want of funds. He was connected to both the Darwin and Wedgewood dynasties and the valuation of his estate at £250,000 (roughly £23m in today's money) at the end of his life did not arise from his writings or scientific work. This was a man from a comfortable Whig family. It may have been in class opposition to aristocratic Tory squires and parsons but it was, like Labour and Tory today, essentially part of a struggle in which both sides competed for advantage within a system they both maintained as 'sound'. During this second phase (as the book makes clear) Darwin's 'thinking' led him into troubled waters because its logic was that of a challenge to the very ideological fundamentals that held the mob at bay in the years following the Chartist threat to property. Working and middle class radicals were very interested in evolution for ideological reasons although they preferred the ideas of Lamarck, a preference of the Left that was to prove highly problematic in the Soviet Union under Stalin. To undermine the ideology of God's grace creating a perfectly structured and benign nature (as proposed by the Anglican Paley) with the 'truth' of an evolutionary natural order with God (if present at all) very distant could imply that radical solutions to social problems were potentially correct. The secret to Darwin's triumph lies not in him being 'right' (which he mostly was) but in what he proposed arriving at just the right time to buttress rising social forces that endorsed a new imperial order that, in turn, buttressed the order of property more effectively than religion. The trigger of course was that Darwin could see that his ideas were in danger of being trumped with the less experimental or consistent thought of others, notably by the younger socialist (in a confused sort of way) Alfred Russell Wallace. He had to publish or lose his edge. It should be made clear here though that Darwin and Wallace were not competing as scientific equals and that Darwin had earned the right to leadership in the field. Darwin never treated Wallace badly and Wallace never regarded Darwin as having done so. Darwin is a complex character. The biography restores emotion to the Victorians but, for all the usual faults that lie in the character of the time (his imperialism, his casual racism, his patronising attitudes to the working class), he was by mid-Victorian lights ethical and broadly compassionate. So, Darwin has to publish to be the one who gets credit for a truth that is brutal in its vision of nature as a war of all against all in the battle of survival and of the survival of those who are fittest. These then, it seems, go on to drive species, racial and all other forms of 'progress'. We can see straight away how useful this was to the rising middle class professionals in the scientific community but also to a new imperial society being born out of the expansion of trade and industrialisation. It 'explained' hegemony. It 'countered' socially radical alternatives. 'Property' (all things being equal) might have been happy to continue with the old Tory paternalist ideology of a settled and benign Nature and of traditionalist values that placed everyone in their assigned role and relied on squires to protect the poor and parsons to comfort them. Science was always going to unsettle this view because science is what it is - the truth of the matter. Unfortunately, Nature is actually mindlessly brutal with God increasingly (if he even exists) pushed further back by reality into being little more than the designer of general laws. The initial challenge had come from two equally opposed sources. We have mentioned the radical challenge which became a socialist one in due course. This emphasised the possibility of social improvement on Lamarckian lines but the more important challenge at this point was the Whig one. Whig intellectuals took up Malthus which led, after the 1832 Reform Act, to the cruelest triumph of Liberal Progressivism - the Poor Laws. Prior to Darwin's publications over a quarter of a century later, 'existential struggle' was already being brutally imposed on the working classes. It is part of the centre-left myth of its own trajectory that Victorian Liberalism was a good thing and the Tories were a bad thing but nothing is so simple. For totally different reasons, yet both thinking in compassionate terms, Tories and radicals challenged the Malthusian ideology of this new elite. Victorian Liberalism was intent on a form of managed revolution in the interests of its own class alliances - wealthy industrialists and dissenters, evangelical Christians, Malthusians, the new professional class, self-made men, the first propertied feminists. This was a culture of trade and empire and of assumptions of worth epitomised by the Self-Help doctrine of Samuel Smiles. The way to handle too many working people was to force them to export themselves to colonies where the imperial authorities subjugated inferior peoples to fit them in. In a weak form, these are attitudes about cultural superiority, social control, ideological conformity and the handling of the working class that are still embedded in American progressives and what was once called 'New Labour'. It is the ideological original sin of the Anglosphere Centre-Left. Darwin straddled this main ideological divide. He was of free-thinking stock where the money had been made in industrial enterprise. He was 'liberal' in the best sense in his dealings with people but, on the other hand, he was also a village country squire and responsible for a parish and good order. The third phase in his life and in the book is what happens when he deals with his internal conflicts and publishes 'The Origin of Species' (1859) and later 'The Descent of Man' (1871) (as well as very many other works) dropping a lighted match into the oil dump of elite ideological tensions. Darwin's work becomes the weaponry to be used by a self-consciously engaged network of 'professional' (or aspirantly professional) elite scientists actively seeking to overturn the old order and transform the existing 'gentlemanly' institutions of the scientific community. Darwin's technique is interesting. He knows what he is doing and he wants to promote the scientific revolution but he also wants to retain his aura of respectability. He does this by standing back and providing the guns and bullets for his shock troops but avoiding the front line himself. His health shifts from being the psychosomatic result of intense stress at the potential revolution that he might create to its being the excuse for not engaging in revolutionary acts by attending events and for not commenting on the ideological, social or political ramifications of his theories. He sits like a spider at the centre of an ideological web as Huxley in particular (but not only Huxley) takes on those who refuse to abandon religion as the core of Victorian ideology (men such as Bishop Wilberforce and the Duke of Argyll) and builds up a shock troop of like-minded scientists. This is why the book is so valuable. It not only gives us an insight into Victorian elite society at a key point in its history between the troubles of the 1840s and the High Imperialism of the 1880s but it helps to explain why change happened and suggests how change might happen today or tomorrow. By the time of Darwin's death in 1882, the 'revolution' is completed. The thesis of Tory Anglicanism and the antithesis of Liberalism are synthesised into the sanctimonious hypocrisy of Darwin's interment in Westminster Abbey (fixed by Huxley and the gang). As Desmond and Moore indicate, Darwin had become a secular saint but his interment in the Abbey as provider of a neat indirect justification of British imperial superiority ('survival of the fittest') was a symbolic negation of the alternative of his interment in a family vault as local patriarch. In essence Gladstonian Imperial Liberalism 'won' and old-style Tory Paternalism lost but the Anglican Church was vouchsafed a place in maintaining social order and the Lamarckian socialists were 'dished' by the weight of evidence that Darwin had provided. Alongside the British story there is, of course, the story of 'Darwinism' (the -ism helps indicate the ideological aspect of this new way of seeing the world) as both Social Darwinism (a more overt ideological system with no serious evidential base) and as its reception overseas. Darwin cannot entirely be absolved of responsibility for Social Darwinism although he did not actively promote it or anything like it. It emerged as, if you like, its own 'bourgeois necessity'. However, he shared the baseline thinking - the struggle for existence with winners and losers in life's race. What becomes interesting is the rapid German intellectual adoption of Darwinism with an enthusiasm and excitability that sometimes comes across as at the edge of comical if we were not reminded of some of the eventual darker consequences of its adoption in the next century. The authors are only interested in how the Germans related to Darwin personally but we can see the lineaments of an interpretation that is similar to that we have seen in relation to the British Empire - an idea, strengthened by its apparent truth, met a newly necessary ideological need. This is the Germany of Bismarck. The defeat of 'effete' France by Prussia saw most of the British elite preferring modernising Germany to France with its perceived tin pot Napoleon III. Germany looked dynamic, the fittest, both to itself in potential and to the wider world. With Haeckel playing the role of Huxley, Darwinism appealed because it weakened the role of the churches in restricting the authority of the State and it suggested ideas of natural selection that were not uninfluential on philosophers like Nietzsche. As my mentor at university, the late Norman Stone, pointed out to me, national socialism was the consequence of a lot of young people being taught half-baked ideological theories by half-educated schoolmasters in small towns. Darwinismus would have been part of their tool kit. One day the path by which two decent men's ideas (those of Darwin and Marx who only interacted briefly in writing once) becomes socially transmuted away from their actual intentions into mass murder and genocide will be traced with more insight than we have seen to date. From this perspective, Desmond (who was an historian of evolution prior to the 'Origin of Species') and Moore (whose previous work was on the controversies in Victorian London triggered by Darwin's work) provide important material on the ideologisation of 'truth' and the role of intellectuals. We should add here that the authors concentrate as much if not more on the man as on his ideas and environment. This makes the book, based on deep research into available letters and papers, extremely readable as a human life that unfolds over more than seventy years. There are two critical death scenes (of Darwin's daughter Annie and of Darwin himself) that should move anyone - in both cases the available evidence gives us scenes of horror that few biographies tend to provide. It is important to understand what death entailed for Victorians. Similarly the account of the Voyage of the Beagle is a deft summary of Darwin's own writings that allows us to picture a young sea sick man prepared to put up with a great deal of hardship and risk to find out how the world might work and do his job of collecting specimens for home. For all the social and ideological aspects and consequences of the case, Darwin comes across as a basically decent human being who loved his family and especially his long-suffering wife Emma, was loyal and supportive to his friends and worked immensely hard because that is who he was. His 'genius' was not based on one just idea or the books for which most people remember him but on a major body of research work involving demanding and committed experimentation and the ability to worry at a problem and follow the logic of his experimental discoveries. How his material was used was not really his fault because he was only telling the truth as he saw it. His truth almost entirely (with the odd speculation overtaken by history) stands up as exceptional science that just happened to be very convenient to powerful people who then weaponised it. Fortunately we have long since moved past the ideological accretions. Scientists eventually returned to the science and built on it. One hopes that, at some stage, the same can be done with those aspects of the work of Marx that still hold 'truths' that it has now become all too convenient to deny. ...more |
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liked it
| This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a governm This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a government department. As a basic primer, it might be useful to someone entirely new to the subject but it cannot be said to be 'inspiring'. One insight (although dealt with rather tentatively by the authors) is that our perceptions have been over-defined by, first, American reactions to the very specific experience of Italian-American organised crime and by, second, the emergent special interests of 'law enforcement'. A sub-text of the final chapter is a frustration that law enforcement's propensity to secrecy makes it difficult for academics to get access to the data that they think they require in order to understand what is going on 'out there'. A suspicion is that law enforcement's political narrative may be flimsy. Although the book is largely descriptive with little or minimal opinion, the final chapter more than hints at an uncomfortable truth - that organised crime is really not that organised except insofar as the market is organised ... it is just another aspect of human aspiration. This leads us to some uncomfortable thoughts because, in the end, criminality is not defined in terms of moral good and evil so much as what the law dictates. Any assumption that the law is the same as justice or morality is as dodgy as the equation made between education and intelligence. In general, there is some consonance of terms. Most people most of the time can reasonably prefer the order of the lawful State over the disorder of a market without restraints especially when the human condition creates desire for things that are harmful to it. The discomfort comes from a number of factors - one is that criminal behaviour can be a reasonable response to aspiration in any system where aspiration for things (including security) is unavailable to some people but normal for others (within the system that law protects). We might add here that the desire for 'bad' things - like addictive drugs or tobacco - may be driven by legitimate anxieties and pressures that the system as a whole will not deal with. Even human and sexual trafficking may be far more a negotiation with crime by the vulnerable than we might think. Protection (revisited later as extortion) may be the least worse outcome where law enforcement itself has failed to provide it. Loan sharking would not need to exist outside a world of low wages and vulnerable small businesses. Criminals mostly exploit the already weak or exploited. The authors flip things on their head a little further by pointing out that many criminals simply want things and do a cost-benefit analysis on the various non-legal means of ceasing to be weak or exploited themselves. They are, in short, just business people working in a parallel system. Another factor is that we should be in no doubt that order (in the form of States) originated in what we would call crime if extortion is a crime. Most of our state structures are derived from older forms where tribute was exacted for 'protection' and eventually became 'taxation'. In other words (and we do not have to be an anarchist to accept this), exactly who benefits from the State structures dependent on taxation and how and what they define as criminal is highly relevant to any attempt to match any concept of good and evil to the law. Finally, in the struggle between order and criminality, order is not averse to extreme and cruel measures sanctified as law if and when it can get away with it. One matter not covered very much in the book is organised political crime or 'resistance' but this really needs considering. If the State under pressure can start banging people up for a Facebook post and turning them into 'criminals', frustrated and excessively exploited or marginalised communities can turn to criminality to finance resistance or create their own authority. The response of the prevailing global neo-liberal community has been to try to force the abandonment of any notion of resistance or national liberation but retain the political dimension by creating a super-criminal category of 'terrorism'. The category may have back-fired as the complexity of Hamas' or Hezbollah's resistance has been understood better under what amounts to a state terrorist operation against their communities by Israel but it has also enabled States to impose extreme measures on their own populations. The abstract problem here is that, whereas lawful states can define criminality by fiat, there is no universally valid international legal structure that has not ultimately been a measure of the American interest (now under severe pressure). The 'rogue state' category has been invented to deal with this. Globalisation, which may prove to have been order's fundamental strategic error in maintaining itself viably, has intensified the ability of aspirational actors to work the global market system and driven 'order' to go trans-national and build a sledgehammer bureaucratism under US influence. Similarly, the New World Order's attempt to define itself as a global police force seems to be in ruins as 'rogue states' and 'terrorists' have proven resilient with increasing sympathies for their predicament from significant domestic minorities who are otherwise law-abiding. This presents a fascinating crisis of definitions where the temptation of the system is to start criminalising aspects of political dissent at home. This threatens to worsen the situation as elements amongst those targeted may start to see unlawfulness as a reasonable response to unjust legality. On balance, one should very much be part of the faction of humanity that seeks order over market chaos but if that order fails to deliver what people aspire to, is inept at controlling the market in general and becomes tyrannous in defence of order, then we have mounting problems. In practice, we should not be romantic about criminals. Sometimes they deliver 'goods' that really should never have been under state sanction. The case study of alcohol during prohibition is probably one of humanity's greatest examples of unintended consequences on these lines. Far more often, they supply 'bads' - addictive drugs, faulty counterfeit products, low priced tobacco, unnecessary protection (extortion), financial redistribution from the most vulnerable in society to themselves, exploitative labour, access to non-consensual sex and so forth. Getting the balance right between meeting the aspirations of all humanity equally, dealing with the trade in oppressive and dangerous 'bads' and maintaining a 'good' (that is, smoothly functioning) market system is not easy. A certain balance was seriously broken with imperial neo-liberalism. It would have been good if the authors had been bolder in addressing this tension which is essentially political but, as a basic overview, even if unsatisfactory in places, this will serve most newcomers to the subject well enough. ...more |
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| Jun 07, 2022
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it was amazing
| Thames & Hudson have produced a superb and readable guide to Catholic culture in all its distinctiveness, emphasising a little perhaps the Catholicism Thames & Hudson have produced a superb and readable guide to Catholic culture in all its distinctiveness, emphasising a little perhaps the Catholicism Triumphant of the Hispanic World over the Catholicism of the Martyred and the Militant. It is encyclopedic. It will be merely an aide memoire with superb illustrations for most people raised in a Catholic environment - nostalgic perhaps for lapsed or 'recovering' or atheistic Catholics - but it should give a rounded and sympathetic account of the culture to anyone outside it. What the author Suzanna Ivanic, a Czech-origin academic scholar of religiosity, gives us is a sense of the totalitarian nature of High Catholicism and how it employed the arts as a full-bodied sensorium embracing every aspect of life both now and in the hereafter. I can well envisage a similar book on the much shorter human experience of High Socialism or on the longer one of Buddhism - belief systems that extended from theory to controlling institutional structures and thence entering into both social and private life using image and the senses to do so. One can see why the Protestant North feared Catholicism much as America feared Communism. Wherever it took hold 'triumphant', it demanded a totality of engagement that extended not only from the cradle to the grave but from the city and guild down to the innermost thought. And it was often a beautiful system both in theory and in practice even if it became gaudy and tacky at the level of the 'volk'. Some of the greatest works of humanity were produced in the service of this totality. The book gives us a context for such art and the art itself . Ivanic does not try to do too much (Catholics themselves may well find things they did not know but not too many such things). The text is far from academic. A lot of the work is, like the subject of the book, about showing rather than telling and this proves refreshing. She themes her tale from the text (the belief system's intellectual core) through its heroes who explicate the text through to the clerical structures that hold everything together as a total working system. She then looks at the role of the cathedral as show place for faith, at devotion in the home, pilgrimage and carnival, the communal aspects of Catholicism, Catholic spirituality in the individual and, finally, that sensorium of experience that so upsets the Protestant mind set. Images range from third century wall paintings to a twenty-first Valentino dress via artists from Bosch and Breugel through Caravaggio and Velasquez and Zurbaran through to those minor artists who still maintain the iconography in the age of scepticism and the modern. 'Great works' and exemplars are effectively used to explain key Catholic concepts and experiences ranging from The Last Judgement, the Saints and Cathedral Facades through to Calvary, the Sacraments and Prayer. The whole becomes a full education into an alien, recalled or felt culture. ...more |
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liked it
| Although now thirty years out of date, Gerald Segal's one volume guide to global issues as they stood in the early 1990s is still useful as a summary Although now thirty years out of date, Gerald Segal's one volume guide to global issues as they stood in the early 1990s is still useful as a summary of international relations at that time. From there, you just have to fill in the subsequent three decades aware that many of the apparently intractable problems and disputes of what will soon be the mid-twenty-first century have very long histories and are unlikely to be resolved quickly. ...more |
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| Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under the term 'terrorism' and to express a barely hidden frustration with the war on an abstract noun (Terry Jones of Monty Python fame). There are two major points being made here. The first is that there is no satisfactory definition of what terrorism actually is except in terms of its political purposes. And the second is that media-driven hysteria around the subject threatens the very fabric of liberal society. The book also debates whether terrorism as tactic (by whatever definition) is efficacious or not. The author suggests not and yet his examples sometimes tend to tell us the opposite especially if we take the long view. We can agree that most socialist or anarchist terror within liberal democracies was a waste of energy but then the later manifestations of it in the Red Army Faction and similar organisations were somewhat narcissistic and even patronising expressions of middle class outrage on behalf of others. However, the cases of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Venezuela and others tend to show that terror as a tool designed to eliminate opposition in the sea in which revolutionaries must swim did work and that national/socialist regimes did emerge and survive for decades - right up until the present day. This, of course, is very different from the attempt at an 'ethical' terrorism by the Narodniki although anarchism descended into very unethical behaviours before too long. Whether ethical or unethical, these types of political excitability without a greater strategy certainly failed. It could be argued, of course, that the failure of the Social Revolutionaries constructed the conditions for Communist ruthlessness as, if we want a symbol of this, Lenin's ideology emerged out of the State murder of his brother. This would certainly be taking the long view. Townshend does himself great credit by not shying away from the existence of state terror and not only of the communist type. The Western empires have not been averse to it, again as part of a wider strategy of warfare, even if they like to cover it up as 'counter insurgency'. Townshend could have gone further and deeper down this route but the danger would have been that the purchasing punter might have got confused if this commissioned attempt to explain what was then a new phenomenon to some had moved into Chomskian territory. He is certainly right that terror within a revolutionary struggle that does not have a national resistance aspect is likely simply to mobilise the resources of the enemy into counter-strategies of great brutality (as in Chile and Argentina) and alienate populations uncommitted to the struggle. Each case is different but Townshend is particularly good and honest on the cat-and-mouse terror tactics of Israel and the Palestinians where he unravels the self-serving Netanyahu narrative that drives American congressional opinion, a legislature of surpassing lack of sophistication. In fact, Israel is an example of terrorism working because it was primarily ethnic and capable of being integrated into the survival strategies of an emerging ethnic State. That Jews never truly repudiated the massacres committed on Arab villagers as ethnic cleansing is a blot on their moral reputation. He also looks at the IRA and ETA as national liberation movements making use of terror as a tactic and he judges, prematurely in the case of the IRA, that they were failures. This is probably true in the case of the Basques with the Basque territory still well locked into the Spanish State mechanism. However, the Whitehall sell-out by stealth of the Unionists in a trajectory that was perfectly happy to abandon aspects of UK sovereignty in collaboration with the Irish in return for Washington's little scheme to get Ireland into NATO was also partly driven by Irish terrorism. As each decade goes by the inveigling of Northern Ireland into an eventual referendum to get the Province off the back of the British budget and secure Ireland so that it was no longer a neutralist strategic risk factor in a European War could rely on Irish terror to make that job easier. If the purpose of Irish terror was to unite Ireland then, although Irish terror did not in itself bring the unification about, the conditions it created have enabled the possibility of their aspirations to be met just as Unionist terror has slowed the process down. In that respect, terror works. Terror, in other words, is a tool within a much wider political or military game. This is something the Israelis never forgot. When the Nazis called the French Resistance 'terrorists' they were strictly correct if we look at the term neutrally as a description of a 'practice'. The FLN in Algeria will have watched French terrorism 'working' in this way - as a process linked to politics and conventional or guerrilla war - just as the OAS blunderingly tried to do the same and the Islamist insurgents of the 1990s even more brutally did the same again. The claim that the 'terrorist' is someone else's 'freedom fighter' is trite because it separates the two as moral categories whereas the actual moral categories are a) the killing of 'innocents' on the one side set against b) the greater aims of, say, national self-determination on the other. We live with this every day. Ukrainian car bombs are called partisan activity and their terrorist nature is glossed over in the Western media and yet these same Editors froth at the mouth when the same tactic is used by Afghans or Hezbollah on their own soil. Townshend was also writing at that point where nearly all commentators found themselves thoroughly confused by the emergence of what appeared to be a nihilistic (from a liberal humane perspective) form of radical religious terrorism that looked to a supernatural end. As always throughout the book he is sensible here, if possibly overly non-committal. Research into Islamic terror was in its early days. Western observers were no more successful in getting into the mind-set of the Islamist than they are today in getting inside the mind-set of a Russian or Chinese. The overwhelming characteristic of the average Western policy wonk is a staggering lack of imagination which leads to simplistic and disproportionate, indeed hysterical, responses to what is generally far less of a threat to a population than exhausted doctors and truck drivers. However, Townshend's wise insights into the tactics of Hezbollah suggest that even Islamist fanatics (if we can only get to understand how they think instrumentally) are instrumental in their approach with attitudes no different in this respect from the Narodniki or the Tupamaros. One of the lessons of the book is that terrorism continues to have its instrumental logic and that we can soon begin to divine when it might be used ineffectively or effectively to achieve very long range ends in association with other strategies - military, political and economic. The liberal moral outrage at the tactic is justifiable in the abstract but the liberal rarely sits where the 'damned of the earth' (Fanon) sits and easily turns a blind eye to state terror when it acts in his interest. Morality is a tool like any other in the brutal game of power. Terror strategies tend to emerge when power is disproportionate so it was always likely that America as hegemon would face it because American power was and is disproportionately greater than anything else on the planet. We should really be surprised that there is so little of it. We might go further and say that, while national liberation strategies (for all the nonsense talked about a Terrorist International in Washington during the Cold War) were located in specific territories, globalisation has created a new West/Rest dichotomy that increases the risks of terror. Russian analyses of the nature of American power are far from incorrect. Russia has not been entirely isolated because non-Western elites connect with that analysis. The blocs that emerge in fact reduce the chances of terrorism because a countervailing non-Western bloc can imply sufficient resistance. However, if the resistance bloc is eliminated as a traditional network of powers striving not to be subsumed within the Western imperium, Western dominion creates the opportunities for asymmetric 'terrorist' resistance amongst the powerless and not only overseas. The same threat exists in the heart of the West from those who feel excluded from the imperium at home. So long as populist ideas and feelings have leg room, terrorism as a tactic is counter-productive but it becomes productive if the national populist or the deprived feel their back is to the wall. Similarly, the potential unravelling of the cosy consensus between the corporate sector, states and eco-politicians over green issues because of crude energy security and more urgent socio-economic requirements might also threaten the system with what might be called a Green Army Faction, The point here is that terrorism as a tactic is always a potential threat and increases to the degree that Western society behaves more like the old Russian Empire than the liberal democracy it purports to be - surveillance, social control, hunting down whistleblowers and so forth. Townshend notes something important - the grim dialectic between terrorism and the media and the way that the media's excitability and hysteria drives public panic far beyond what reason would dictate and so creates inappropriate political decision-making and manipulation. It could be argued (I would) that the most socially destructive force in Western society is not the potential terrorist but the Editor with his propensity for 'stories', fast news cycles, high emotion, moral posturing and attempts to manipulate power by the back door. There is nothing we can do about this because liberal democracy defines itself in part by the freedom given to the Press. The benefits of good journalism (where it exists) should theoretically always outweigh the disbenefits although increasingly they do not as serious journalism decays. Although now out of date by about two decades (especially in regard to Islamic terror), this very short book (139 pages) packs in a lot of information. If it does not do a great deal to help us define what the phenomenon is then that is because the phenomenon is not easily definable at all. ...more |
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really liked it
| Derleth's work is a homage to, commentary on and even pastiche of his friend H P Lovecraft's works, moulding them very deliberately into a 'mythos' la Derleth's work is a homage to, commentary on and even pastiche of his friend H P Lovecraft's works, moulding them very deliberately into a 'mythos' later to be taken up by others and, in the process, completely subverting Lovecraft's own cold and dark philosophical stance. The book is made up of five interconnected short stories which all appeared initially in Weird Tales from 1944 to 1951, allowing Derleth to introduce the atomic weapon by the end, useless though it may be against the crawling chaos that our heroes are dealing with. Psychologically he understands his audience. He is a mature late thirties when he writes the bulk of this material but he still remembers what it was like to be in his late twenties (the age of his young protagonists) even to the point of ultimately being confused about one's own allegiances. Although irritating to Lovecraftian purists perhaps, 'The Trail of Cthulhu' may have been underestimated - at least as literature. Derleth is clear that this is an entertainment. He reiterates a probable truth that Lovecraft was also primarily concerned with little more. All Derleth does is displace Lovecraft's cosmic pessimism and awe with a more Manichean struggle between alien beings with a strong nod to the Christian mythos' struggle between Satan and God - almost certainly necessary to extend the appeal of the genre to the American popular market. What we are seeing is the first stage in what I call the 'Count Duckula Cycle', that process whereby a concept eliciting awe or genuine horror (Nosferatu or Stoker's Dracula) transforms into thrilling entertainment (Universal's Dracula) to comedy and ultimately to children's entertainment. Derleth is at the Universal Monsters stage before that declined into 'Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein'. The Mythos is still disturbing and scary but more boy's own adventure and far from the cuddly Cthulhu toys and Cthulhu for President memes of today. Given this aspect of the case, Derleth's skill lies in weaving a story that can include the key components of Lovecraft's story lines (Cthulhu dreaming in R'lyeh, Innsmouth, the Nameless City, night gaunts and so forth) in order to re-model them as a continuous narrative. Some may baulk at the repetitions in each story (necessary as months or even a couple of years might pass between publication of each) but I suggest we look at the repetitions as incantatory so that the stories themselves are a form of ritual protection against evil. All the stories have one leading figure in the mysterious and ambiguous Dr. Shrewsbury (the Van Helsing of the tale) and one young hero (who the Weird Tales reader can identify with) for each so that, by the end, we have a band of brothers with an unexpected twist in the person of the last. Each story is a written testimony, a Gothic horror meme that goes back to at least Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and so to the eighteenth century epistolary novel - manuscript, deposition, testament, statement and narrative. This literary traditionalism also pays homage to HPL. The writing is clear and popular, less obviously mannered than Lovecraft but with enough references back to retain a linkage - where Lovecraft repeats 'eldritch', Derleth barely uses it but repeats 'batrachian' instead. He retains the 'tainted blood' theme that worries bien-pensants today. The skill lies in in the popularisation and re-ordering of something that was fragmented and still speaking to a cultured elite under HPL. There is a hybridisation with the adventure novel - South American jungles, sea-going and what would be regarded now as 'racist' anthropologies. Enough of Lovecraft's cosmic awe and horror remains even if the idea that we can actually resist such evil with its minions on earth (if it had a mind to our destruction) seems to miss HPL's point. Such a shift can never truly be in the spirit of Lovecraft's vision. Nevertheless, Derleth writes much better than his critics have allowed. The journey to the Nameless City in the Arabian desert, though it has its unexplained absurdities, is a brilliant piece of subterranean horror which Tim Powers will have drawn upon in his 'Declare'. A knowledge of Lovecraft aids our enjoyment because (other than the grand philosophical betrayal) Derleth is immensely skilled at co-ordinating the 'facts' of HPL's stories into some sort of cohesion - not excluding travel between 'non-Euclidean' dimensions. The stories and their tight relationship with each other and with their Lovecraftian sources deserves more consideration not as great literature but as a genuine innovation in popular fantasy that has helped fuelled enormous creativity since. Are we horrified by what we read? Rarely - too much time has passed since its writing. Are we excited by what we read? Much more frequently because adventure is equally what these stories are about. Are we nostalgic for its world? Certainly. ...more |
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| Apr 23, 2019
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it was ok
| The idea behind this book is a good one - to get professional historians in a number of countries to tell their national stories in such a way that it The idea behind this book is a good one - to get professional historians in a number of countries to tell their national stories in such a way that it would help readers in other nations to understand them better. Unfortunately the result is rather disappointing, not bad, just disappointing. In part this is down to the difficulty of telling a national story in ten or twelve pages without the story being a dry narrative of sequential events that you could get from Wikipedia. In part it is a matter of maintaining quality whilst herding 28 academic cats into a common project. As a result, the contributions are highly variable and only intermittently insightful although it is true that there are insights to be had - some contributions are very good, many others less so and one or two an utter waste of reading time. What makes the book problematic lies in the editing. This required a directive rigour that asked for as objective as possible an account of how the mass of nationals of a country (accounting for divisions amongst those nationals) interpreted their story. Jeremy Black on Great Britain (aka the United Kingdom) is rather good even if the justification for placing our history at 1707, functionally true, does not really hold water if you take seriously how most people in England think of their past sans Celts, 'intellectuals' and migrants. MIhir Bose is honest about India, a nation invented in part by the British and the British-educated nationalists . Colin Schindler plays it straight about Israel: you can sense an authentic expression of the Israeli mind-set in a clear, simple and uncontentious narrative. However, too many of the narratives seem to offer us the interpretative or identity hobby horses of not so much historians as 'intellectuals' expressing their own opinions of the past. We end up getting what we always get from pop books - the ruminations of tormented liberal intellectuals. This tends to be a particular fault of the central and east Europeans where a degree of intellectual discomfort about their own national reality tells us more about the cosmopolitan liberal mind-set (the book was published long before the events of 2016) than about local realities. The problem is probably that any serious historiography quickly strips away the reality of any national myth but misses the point that such 'dirty' and flexible myths do not need to be true to be useful: they just need to be emotionally coherent. This offends the intellectual deeply and often the solution lies in trying to construct a new 'clean' ab initio myth such as liberal internationalism or the European Project that can be made to be true because its history is being written now by members of that class. Strong and cohesive new national identities and versions of history have been emerging in the decade since the book was published in a dialectic with the 'clean' myths. We can guess that the intellectual classes are not going to be enormously happy with the outcome. The book is a hodge-podge (we get in one non-European case a romantic nationalist rant) of insightful description, thematic suggestions that can only give us a personal and sometimes fashionable view of a culture, intellectual torment and a working out of local political concerns. Some of the 'thematic' (single issue) contributions will provide useful insights - Willhem Frijhoff on the Dutch and water for example or the account of the Ottomanisation of Turkey in recent years - but others do not. This is not to be too negative. The account of Finland by Pirjo Markkola represents what every contribution should have been - an exploration of a continuing national historiographical debate set against historical reality with an insight into why things are seen as they are. The coverage of the 28 nations is also represented by a choice of nations that excludes Africa almost completely (only Ghana and Egypt get a slot) while Asia is only represented by India, China and Japan. The choices are euro-centric and anglo-centric with Israel thrown in for good measure. The Muslim world is covered by Egypt, Iran and Turkey but not Indonesia or Saudi Arabia. Latin America is covered by Brazil, Mexico and Argentina which is reasonable but South Africa, Nigeria and Ethiopia are excluded while Ireland, the Czech Republic and Finland are included. The general impression is of a pot boiler concocted for the mass popular history market which, at that level, might have a function as educational for people looking for sufficient knowledge to help get them through a reading of the Economist or when watching broadcast news. It will certainly educate to a degree, which is good, but I suspect that it will also confirm many in-built prejudices amongst the liberal graduate urban middle class centred on 'the West' and Europe, offering history as the stories people culturally like themselves tell themselves in foreign parts. The point here is that Erdogan, Putin, Bolsonaro and Johnson as well as national populism itself need explaining as forces that are popular and that have particular visions of history very different from the bleatings of urban intellectuals. In 2012, few of the contributors seem to have dug far beyond the resources of their own class to analyse the minds of their compatriots. The nation is not confined to the scribbling classes. It extends into the masses and deeply so and that is the history we need to understand. ...more |
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| 3.62
| 1,313
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| Jan 19, 1999
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liked it
| Well regarded at the time (1980), Chatwin's fictional and short account of a slave-owning family's fortunes in nineteenth century Dahomey now appears Well regarded at the time (1980), Chatwin's fictional and short account of a slave-owning family's fortunes in nineteenth century Dahomey now appears as a dated and even a rather patronising account of the history of slavery and Africa. It means well but Chatwin's style is cold and detached, luxuriating in words that require a dictionary to hand (although his prose is unforced and clear). There is a disconnect here between the facts and his desire to give us a history that might appeal to our sentiments. It is both very English and very 'liberal', evading perhaps any sophistication in analysing the conditions that make people sociopathic and disregarding of others beyond the obvious implication that poverty hardens us. There is also something unpleasant in the way he presents Africans at times, to the extent that, as the story precedes, one feels that he has been a bit of magpie in collecting colonialist, popular and sentimental liberal tropes in order to mash them up into a pleasing narrative. The book was a quick and easy read but I was disappointed to find that I thought it clever but uninspiring and untrustworthy. I could not put my finger on what what was wrong until I realised that it lacked a 'soul', some sense of engagement with the subject matter. ...more |
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really liked it
| The 'Seed from the Sepulchre' appeared in Weird Tales in 1933 and is a tale of alien vegetable body horror that reminds one of Ballard, albeit Ballard The 'Seed from the Sepulchre' appeared in Weird Tales in 1933 and is a tale of alien vegetable body horror that reminds one of Ballard, albeit Ballard is writing two or three decades later. Others might compare the 'monster' to Wyndham's Triffid, also much later in publication. The story plays on popular stories of man-eating plants in the then still unexplored darker reaches of the south American jungle but Ashton Smith's peculiarly fertile imagination takes it a stage further with a grim pathology where you feel something of the desperation of the protagonists. Once again, Ashton Smith offers something just a cut above most pulp fiction. ...more |
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| Oct 16, 1986
| Jan 01, 1986
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it was ok
| Thirty years old, this 'atlas' probably only has antiquarian interest now as a snapshot of the state, not of the planet but of the global environmenta Thirty years old, this 'atlas' probably only has antiquarian interest now as a snapshot of the state, not of the planet but of the global environmentalist movement as it was about to launch into its moment of greatest power and influence within Western politics. It is a bit of hodge podge, genuinely informative but essentially a work of propaganda for the cause with a tail end of case studies in environmental activity some of which looks as if it was cut-and-pasted from a brochure, whether corporate or NGO. And, of course, the genuine science is book-cased with standard issue exhortation and the usual spiritual guff that gets dangerously close to New Age. But, hey, that is the nature of the movement - part sincere scientifically-based concern, part the latest in a long line of potty religions. One is in two minds about this revolution. On the one hand, its ends are decent and its call to action probably timely. On the other, it descends to half-truths and obfuscation to manipulate the great unwashed in order to subsidise a veritable industry of beneficiaries who do like their air miles. The point at which this revolution in consciousness or cultural coup (depending on your stance) took place was fixed in my mind by the editorial change around this time or soon after in the Royal Geographical Society's 'Geographical Magazine'. Issues under the pre-environmentalist regime were primarily concerned with human geography. I remember a remarkable detailed and well illustrated article in the latter days about the failures and problems with the old Soviet passport scheme. It was essentially humanist. Overnight, the magazine switched to a concern with the planet and eco-systems. The human was lost or, rather, the human seemed to be restricted to indigenous tribes with that rather naive implication that they were saints and we were sinners. Fact mixed with ideological assumption. It was nonsense, of course, but still a genuine corrective to a disregard for the total eco-system and a refusal to recognise the bad effects of technological interference. This was to be overwhelmed by a commitment to a faith-based set of values, an ideology at least, if not a religion. The science is still in there, of course, and some important and good work has been done but the 'Atlas' shows us the rest of the baggage - the diminution of the human in favour of the total system, a barely suppressed hysteria about threats and an almost obscene sentimentalism. The best aspect of the movement has been the creation of a nobility in us through our improved respect for the natural and its invocations against cruelty, albeit that nature itself is essentially brutal, cruel and wasteful if magnificently self-creating. Kill a species and a new one arises. The worst aspect of the movement is the sanctification of the natural and a gross negativity about human works that has created a generation that is negative about humanity itself. Instead of the material serving us as consciousness, this ideology forces our superior awareness to bend to matter. Thirty years on, it is probably time to start calling the movement out on its hysteria, personal hypocrisies and half-truths while trying to preserve the general ethic of balance between human and nature. We really did not need another religion, not this and not now trans-humanism. A re-calibration does not mean returning to the dogged science of the pre-1980s whose detached attitude to the world failed to see that sentiment in favour of nature is part and parcel of being truly human. What is required is that some balance is imposed on the Gaian loons. First, that the object of policy must be the improvement of the human condition in the medium term and that nature has to be respected in that context not as a traditionalism or conservatism that holds us back from experimentation and technological solutions to human problems. Second, to recognise that the planet has no meaning without us to give it meaning and that the meaning we must give it is as the base line for own personal, cultural, socio-political and economic development. Giving up on these for the planet misses the point of being human entirely. Third, to recognise problems but still resist the sustained hysteria used tiresomely to maintain ideological momentum and accept that nature changes as much as we change and that overall flexibility and adaptability are more important than preservation of an obscure beetle. This is not an argument against ecological awareness (quite the contrary, it should be embedded in all strategic progressive thought) but it is an argument against allowing eco-ideology to govern nations at the expense of other considerations. It is a part and not the whole. Above all, the ecological movement has to be seen as having perverted itself from a rational enterprise into a daft populist religion somewhere along the line. This is not healthy. Its irrational, anti-human and sentimental aspects must be called out now for the sake of the species. ...more |
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| Feb 11, 1995
| Mar 15, 1996
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liked it
| Although two decades old so that its position on the asteroid trigger for the death of the dinosaurs is less firm than today and there is no mention o Although two decades old so that its position on the asteroid trigger for the death of the dinosaurs is less firm than today and there is no mention of the iceball earth theory, this remains a good basic snapshot of the state of our then-knowledge of the history of the earth and the fossil record. It also has good sections on relatively recent issues such as the state of the San Andreas fault and the background to the Mount St. Helen's volcanic eruption. Probably now far too dated for serious use, it is still a good primer for those of us uninterested in creationism. The maps are, of course, speculative, there is some obscurity when there should not be and there are a few too many literals in the text suggesting moments of sloppy proof-reading but, overall, it stays in the library until something better turns up. ...more |
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| 4.20
| 2,669
| Oct 30, 2012
| Oct 30, 2012
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really liked it
| A health warning is due on this book. It is a polemic linked to a documentary. Usually that should be cause enough for caution but it is generally wel A health warning is due on this book. It is a polemic linked to a documentary. Usually that should be cause enough for caution but it is generally well written and researched, valuable as a corrective to the standard internal narrative about US foreign policy which is somewhat Pollyanna-ish. Stone's propensity for conspiracy theory and a curious hagiography surrounding the John F. Kennedy who might have been (reflected briefly in this book) is corrected by a solid research team clearly under the able direction of Peter Kuznick and, no doubt, guided by Stone himself. The result has flaws - too kind to the Russians while the balance shifts into contemporary polemic in the final chapters on Bush and Obama. We have mentioned the over favourable approach to JFK. But these flaws, denying it five stars, do not detract from the achievement. This is a book that I would like to see in every American high school library, not as the main set text but simply as an intelligent corrective to the conformist almost totalitarian educational training of Americans in the myth of their own cultural and political beneficence. The best recent history of the US that I have found was critical but measured and by a fellow Brit - David Reynolds' America: Empire of Liberty - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... - but Reynolds' vision is definitely not that of Americans themselves. This is why Stone and Kuznick have done their fellow citizens a service in the age of Sanders, Clinton and Trump. They have held up a mirror to American foreign and international economic policy and shown us an imperial system out of educated democratic control run by psychopaths. It is rare that I feel much emotion in reading a book nowadays but I found myself seething with anger at times - on the decision-making around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the murderous assault on Gautemalan freedom and, of course, the lunacy of Vietnam and MAD. I used the term psychopath. It is a term I usually avoid using because it over-simplifies the brutal things some people have to do in existential situations and is too easily applied to people stuck in a system like bankers or brokers but here the term often applies. Some of the activities of the American State, often deliberately obfuscating its actions before the democratic process, often manipulating and subverting it and often backed by legislators whose ignorance can only be put down to the force of ideology, are, frankly and simply, evil. Yes, evil. This is not to say that most American public servants are evil but then I suspect most ordinary Communist apparatchiki or Nazi civil servants were not intrinsically evil but all served systems that accepted evil acts against civilians and lies to their own people as normal and right. You will have to make up your own mind after reading this catalogue of horrors and lies but, before getting over excited, you should balance the book with some reading of other texts with a more sanguine view of American exceptionalism and belief in its being a 'beacon on the hill'. The honest truth is that this book falls precisely into the American trap of seeing everything as black and white rather than many shades of grey. It is the dark to the sunny light of the standard American narrative but that does not make it right. One yearns for a balanced view. Yet facts are still facts. It is hard to reason away many American State actions which were the more criminal in being based on bad intelligence, poor judgement and the taking of risks that might have led to the immolation of our species let alone tens of thousands of passing peasants. OK, so the US won and the spectre of communism has now degenerated into a few elderly socialists who can't muster majorities anywhere but the price, as I read it, was too high. It degraded America itself decade on decade until degeneracy became the national norm. Victory was Pyrrhic. Forgetting the overblown tirade against Obama here (although it is true that he is now mere creature of a system created by his predecessors), each President, perhaps excluding FDR and Clinton I, is held up to scrutiny and found wanting. Bush II was far from uniquely dodgy. Indeed, one of the benefits of this book is that it cuts through the partisan nonsense and shows us that Democrats and Republicans are really not much better than each other when push comes to shove - though the silence here suggests Clinton I was perhaps a bright point through inaction. If this is an argument for Clinton II, however, I can't find it in her pronouncements or the text. For some reason, she is a 'hawk' far to the Right of Obama and not quite so different from the world of Bush II as naive Democrats would like to think. She terrifies me ... As for Trump, words should fail but at least he has the merit of possibly, just possibly, not being answerable to an establishment machinery backing sustained state violence, one that is clearly horrified by his candidacy. If the system is horrified by him, he may have merit! The American propensity to concentrate on the individual (the President) misses the point that he is always embedded in a system and that this system is imperial, concerned with economic loot and highly militarised. The noble gestures and rhetoric are just icing on a mouldy cake. The Generals answer to the Commander-in-Chief but he is trapped into compliance with the cultural expectations of competitive but closely knit networks made up of surprisingly few ideologically motivated people with an axe to grind. Stone and Kuznick bring out the continuities where a few hundred ambitious careerists, lost in abstract models of foreign policy, float like trash on a registered electorate of 153 million souls and coldly and blithely dispose of the lives of others without any existential self-questioning. One suspects that the system both attracts and promotes a personality type perfectly fitted to serve it as all such systems do - just as the Roman, British and Soviet Empires created their unself-reflective 'types'. There is no reason why the US should be different in this. What seems to be lacking in the contemporary historiography is an analysis of careers, patronage, ideology formation, interests and connections, such as Lewis Namier once did for the eighteenth century British Parliament - ideology is not top down but centred in group-think. As with Namier, such a historian might find that this closed elite shared a 'weltanschauung' but pursued self interest within it - questioning nothing but seeking to combine through allegiance to networks (parties) that scarcely differed from each other except in their competition for benefits. Namier's analysis of a grasping and self interested elite left little room for ideas but eighteenth century Britain did not 'progress' to the American situation where ideas, linked existentially to identity, might become weapons of advantage. Ideas have here paradoxically displaced humanity. The question is whether Americans who read the standard narrative, the non-American neutral narrative and the dissident native narrative (this book) would still want to change a decayed system that thinks its eighteenth century constitution is sufficient protection against evil. It was in 1973 that Arthur M. Schlesinger coined the term for the Imperial Presidency as something uncontrollable and prone to exceed constitutional limits. Yet it is that constitution that permits those excesses - taken even further by Bush II and even (as the authors argue) by Obama. What either Clinton II or Trump could do with these excessive powers (of which a first taste lay in that most sinister of Democratic 'progressive' Presidents Woodrow Wilson) is perhaps what is keeping many centrist liberals awake at night with reason. Neither fills one with hope. The truth is that liberal Americans are still stuck in their eighteenth century and 'rights' paradigm as Roman intellectuals were once stuck in their republican and 'virtu' ideology as they lurched stage by stage towards Tiberius and Caligula. In the end, all a Roman could hope for was that the Emperor be a good one. American liberals have found themselves in the same situation, hoping against hope that the next President will be a 'good one'. As Stone and Kuznick show, that is not a likely outcome. Even Carter gets a coruscating treatment here that does not allow his later saintly persona to get in the way of the facts. Perhaps Clinton I's scarce mention only arises because he was uninterested in foreign policy and Bush I (the best since FDR) had done all the work in apparently taming Russia. So, all in all, with the caveats, an eye-opening book that might further radicalise the young but not, I hope, into a futile faith in some man in a white hat appearing in the Oval Office but into beginning to think like a European and move from individuals to a critique of the total system. There is something eighteenth century even today about a monarchical/imperial executive capable of great and monstrous crimes that yet seem not to stir the consciences of the vast number of Americans. Obviously many radicals who voted for Sanders were stirred but he lost! Americans might be engineered to be horrified by Aleppo perhaps because it is the Russians 'doing it' but not enormously by Falluja or Gaza. One suspects the complaints about Vietnam owed far more to the fears of narcissistic hippies than concern for the slaughter of the Vietnamese. Sometimes the US was existentially threatened: we must respect its desire for survival and cohesion. Sometimes it acted out of for greed which at least is comprehensible. Sometimes it killed for a theory or a dream or an idea. Frankly, that last makes it not much better than the Soviets. ...more |
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| 1980
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it was amazing
| Originally published in 1980, this impressive example of deep investigative journalism has been regularly updated and revised with new information. Th Originally published in 1980, this impressive example of deep investigative journalism has been regularly updated and revised with new information. The Edition that I am reviewing is the 1998 edition. The book contains several pleas for the US Government to be more forthcoming with documentation and I am not qualified to assess whether any 'smoking gun' document has been found since my reprint (2001). I think we would have heard of it by now. Nevertheless, what is in this dense and fully foot-noted book, which tries to summarise research by other respectable investigators (a story where politically engaged populists like Oliver Stone have probably done more harm than good) is remarkably full and interesting. Summers lays out his evidence and refuses to speculate too far beyond the data, certainly not directly on the grand questions of whether Oswald pulled the trigger or not and whether he was a patsy or a participant in some conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Part of the value of the book is that it forces you to think and evaluate the evidence for yourself and so to come up with the most likely (all things being equal) narrative for what actually happened in the years and months leading up to the assassination and even on the day itself. Perhaps once or twice in nearly 400 pages and another just under 1oo of footnotes I may have questioned Summers' interpretation of specific evidence but his work stands up very well to scrutiny with speculation reduced to the minimum necessary to make some sense of it all. The best I can do is interpret the facts as I can, knowing that another reader may read them differently. There is no shock headline here just the accumulation of circumstantial evidence to the point when you would be wilfully blind to believe the Warren Commission Report was not fiction. 1. It is possible that Lee Harvey Oswald did not actually pull the trigger from the Book Warehouse but we can probably never know that. The 'grassy knoll' and forensic evidence is indistinct. 2. It is almost certain that the Soviets or Castro Cubans had nothing to do with any conspiracy although immense efforts (well documented) appeared to have gone into trying to 'frame' the Soviet Union or Cuba in the weeks before the assassination. 3. There is significant evidence that Oswald was involved in special intelligence 'dirty tricks' operations against Castro's Cuba and that he was a well known participant in 'deep state' or radical right circles since late teen age. 4. There is evidence that Oswald was on the US intelligence services' radar screens for some time before the assassination and the FBI and CIA appear to have gone to an awful lot of trouble to try and cover up that aspect of the matter immediately afterwards. 5. Oswald was possibly a high security clearance agent for naval intelligence and his visit to the Soviet Union engineered for intelligence purposes. His 'flakiness' is as likely as not to have been cover. Of course, the line between flakiness and off balance sheet security work is a fine one. 6. Oswald had family connections to the mob and Jack Ruby was much more embedded in mob networks (notably the powerful Marcello network) than most accounts seem to imply. He was not quite such a minor player, with a track record that goes back to Capone and the Outfit in Chicago. 7. Oswald appears to have had longstanding personal connections to right-wing extremists with links to the anti-Castro community who in turn had close links to the Mob (in view of a shared interest in overthrowing Castro) 8. There is reason to believe that, for different reasons, the Mob (Giancana-Marcello-Trafficante) and extreme elements in the anti-Castro insurgent forces (and their minders in the intelligence services) had 'good reason' to want Kennedy dead. 9. Oswald's engagement with anti-Castro activity looks increasingly (as the evidence piles up) like the sort of agent provocateur action typical of domestic intelligence operations and adds to the 'evidence' that if he was being set up as a patsy in the context of what was to happen in Dallas. 10. There is evidence that in the period leading up to the assassination there were contacts between Oswald and others which might imply police corruption and Oswald being set up for arrest. The ease of access to Oswald of Jack Ruby also looks suspicious in this context. The attempted assassination of right-wing extremist General Walker has always looked suspiciously 'set up' to me especially as Oswald (or whoever) missed but there is no evidence that Walker was involved in any conspiracy. Similarly the murdered Officer Tippit looks a lot less of an innocent party in Summers account of him and even the circumstances of Oswald's movements and arrest at the cinema look puzzling. Overall, the most plausible scenario (as far as Oswald is concerned) is that he was being set up to be a patsy or was directly involved in the assassination but was unaware of a second level of activity designed to incriminate the Soviet Union in the assassination. This latter really does look evidenced by the weight of suspicious activity involving possible impersonations of Oswald in Mexico City and the stories placed in the media in the immediate aftermath of the assassination - though this part looks pretty amateur to my seasoned eye. As for the 'conspiracy', the most plausible scenario is that anti-Castro militants (supported by a right-wing fringe element in the security services), with Mob connections and access to Mob assets and resources, killed the President. I now find the Robin Ramsay 'cui bono' related to the circle around LBJ as less plausible unless someone is postulating that all Summers evidence is incredibly coincidental and that something else was going on all this time! Summers is certainly as plausible as any official investigation. If so, the anti-Castro militants feared (wrongly) that Kennedy was turning away from toppling the regime (and that LBJ would take a tougher line) and the Mob wanted to pay the Kennedys for welching on the deal they thought they had in 1960 and also warn off investigators. The identity of interest between Mob and anti-Castro activists was the overthrow of the Castro regime (an interest shared with the Government and the CIA) but this would be only the framework for a more specifically directed plot. And where do the US intelligence services fit into this? Probably just as totally embarrassed people who find that one of their own (albeit a minor player) has killed their own boss. Then they desperately run around trying to get the facts off the agenda of investigators, colleagues and media. There is a strong suggestion which would be plausible, of an element in the intelligence services, perhaps semi-detached and 'political', engaged directly in anti-Castro subversion, emotionally engaged in the Cuban situation and able to talk to the Mob when required. It would be naive not to believe that these types of sociopathic groups emerge inside all unaccountable intelligence services at moments of tension or under weak leadership - we can think of the Italian cases in the 1970s and rogue activity in Northen Ireland. The question is whether such a rogue element knew of, connived in and even facilitated an essentially Cuban dissident operation with Mob aspects in order to meet some other political objective. This one is tougher to claim - doubtful for any but criminalised security elements. But this moves us well into 'deep state' territory which is, by its very nature, almost impossible to evidence very far. The balance of admittedly circumstantial evidence strongly indicates that this was more than possible with motive and means both available. I will leave you to read the book in regard to motives but, in the foot notes, there is one very dark suggestion which we should note, disturbed perhaps, and pass on - this is that the assassination might be linked to a military claim of a particular window of opportunity. There was serious military interest in a successful 'first strike' against the Soviet Union before the notorious 'missile gap' disappeared. This too has to be seen in a Cuban context since all Americans were painfully aware of how close they had come to be being incinerated. Kennedy was horrified and forbad any further discussion of it but we have to take account of the possibility (no more) that radical right intelligence awareness of this 'opportunity' might offer the chance to incriminate the Soviet bloc and defeat world communism. Some were nutty enough. Should we take this seriously? We are a long way now from a lone loony gunman. Oswald can only be regarded as that if we forget his family connections to organised crime, the mass of coincidences, the historic link to right-wing extremists, the Cuban aspect and so on and so forth. Maybe he had all these attributes and connections but still was loopy and did the deed without orders. Under this scenario, Jack Ruby took him out before he could open up a can of worms that might implicate 'innocent' parties. That too is possible. In the end, we do not know but we do know that the 'conspiracy theories' are not to be dismissed as the work of nutters (though some are) but as ways of seeing events in a way that is no less plausible (probably more so) than the grossly poorly evidenced official versions. The real story is, as always, hidden. It is not who killed the President - do we honestly care any more? It is what conditions make the alternative versions credible and what did and do we do about it if they persist. Let us review them. A: There is the lack of accountability of the military towards the welfare of the people they serve - the people we elect are merely a thin and weak barrier between us and destruction. In the standard model, welfare-warfare state, the two elements are regarded as separate. Is this wise? B: There can be a lack of accountability and gross internal mismanagement within the intelligence services but especially of sections of the intelligence services that operate either outside the law or become politicised in undemocratic ways because of their secret work. C: There is the state sponsorship of subversive operations against other 'regimes' that permits the emergence of special interest groups trained to kill, with intelligence connections and with political motives in using violence or disinformation to affect democratic decision-making. D: There is the use of low level operatives to investigate but also to disrupt and discredit lawful dissident political operations in a democracy (as Oswald was clearly doing if Summers' pile of evidence stands up) E: There is the impunity of organised crime and the tendency of political intelligence services to solve problems outside the law by cutting deals with mobsters. These disturbing but well known aspects of the 'deep state' are all found evidentially laid out (regardless of the assassination) in Summers' book at different points. Together, they almost define the infamous Deep State: institutionalised military power, an unaccountable security apparatus, state-backed regime change, state infiltration of internal politics and the latitude permitted to any organised crime interest that stays within 'its box'. I would like to think that matters have improved somewhat since 1963 but I have my doubts. Everything is just run more effectively (lessons learned!) and more subtly. If some state actor was complicit in the Kennedy assassination, the first lesson would have been that victory was Pyrrhic. Perhaps from now on, the Deep State just tries to make sure a wrong 'un isn't put into power at the start. Yet much of what we saw in 1963 has simply been transmuted into another form despite some honest reforming efforts by some honest politicians. Just glance at NATO's political interventions in Europe in the last few years, at the emergence of mass surveillance, at the manipulation of soft power to build momentum for regime change, at the use of the media for political purposes and at the lack of progress in dealing with organised crime. But matters are at least less violent and obvious. We have become sophisticated. But, going back to the Kennedy assassination, we should not look at the US through the lense of the half century since 1963. If we look at the country through a different lens - the previous half century - we see a nation with a high level of overt and covert violence inherent in its politics, not just cultural manipulation and control of information. Assassinating a President may seem horrific to 'ordinary' Americans but, just as the US is only now coming to terms with its criminal gulag and police brutality, it would take another two decades for the US to exorcise state violence as an instrument of policy and then not for long. The Church Committee Hearings were an eye-opener but the old ways were back with a vengeance with the arrival of George Bush II and on terms that ensured direct advocacy for sociopathy by half the political class. The next assassin will no doubt be a Muslim threat or Muslim patsy. So it is very reasonable to look at the hyper-tense culture of the American South, in the context of civil rights and fear of communism, as always marginally on the edge of political violence but also possibly of military intervention in politics. Be all that as it may, the book is highly recommended for anyone seriously interested not just in the Kennedy assassination but also in modern American politics and the curious phenomenon of the Deep State. ...more |
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| Dec 02, 2011
| Jan 03, 2012
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really liked it
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This is a useful corrective to the rather hysterical media image of the Mexican cult of Santa Muerte as little more than a religion of death for narco
This is a useful corrective to the rather hysterical media image of the Mexican cult of Santa Muerte as little more than a religion of death for narco-criminals. Instead, Professor Chesnut re-positions it as an understandable, almost pragmatic, response to poverty, uncertainty and the complexities of gender relations under near-lawless conditions. The interest of narco-gangsters in the cult is real enough but it does not belong exclusively to them nor do narco-gangsters worship only the 'Bony Lady'. Attempts at linkage are misdirection by forces of order. Chesnut has studied the emergence of pentecostalism and other forms of charismatic religions in the emerging world and sees many similarities of condition. Modernisation is more than disruptive. It is terrifying in its uncertainty as young populations scrabble to make a living within 'bourgeois' legal cultures built on little more than force. The Catholic Church is not speaking to these people because it is not delivering the goods in terms of life improvement or security in this world. The new religions are nothing if not pragmatic. We, in the West, should be very nervous of these developments because their appeal is, in fact, unanswerable. We have nothing for them. They want welfare and a secure job and not an ideology of 'rights'. Western liberals are evasive on this question. They have developed a malign theory that somehow welfare and justice will come out of democratic chaos. The reason for this is not hard to find - a 'socialist' solution is now unacceptable in Western society and the alternative of order to permit the growth to provide rights unacceptable. Instead, a gulag of injustice is slowly being built up on both sides of the Mexican border while young men have to be part of the delivery of psychic salves to the wealthier north simply to survive. This is a world of dangerous slums, vulnerable women, prisons and the dangerous business of crossing borders where deportation, incarceration and death are regular challenges. NGOs just get in the way. 'Santa Muerte' is the religious response. It strikes this reader that, though we educated northerners may affect to despise its magical thinking, it serves a purpose because we have abandoned these people. Their revenge will come as the pragmatics of all these new religions get a foot-hold in the West (as they are clearly doing) and enforce an equally ruthless and pragmatic politics within our democracies. Chesnut thus provides an invaluable interim guide to what is a moving cultural feast. In theory, the cult could disappear as quickly as it came but this now looks unlikely. 'Respectable people' might be inclined to give it more of a wide berth as bad publicity increases under Catholic pressure but this may merely strengthen its appeal amongst the masses. It appears to be a deviant form of Catholicism with folk and santeria characteristics. There is no hierarchy or organisation. Whether it will shift from cult to organised religion is another matter. Chesnut's approach, which justifiably makes use of personal and family testimonies to help fill out the lack of research by others, is to use the coloured candles of the cult to throw light on its functions. To cut a long story short, he dismisses the Mexican nationalist narrative about its origins and sees it as something that the folk have constructed out of European ideas of death and love. However, the death has been 'detourned' by the local believers into something the very opposite of Europe's 'Grim Reaper' and what was an innocent love cult as recently as the 1970s is very different now. In essence, the Bony Lady gives you what you want if you believe enough in her, undertake the right rituals (which are Catholic derivatives) and keep the promises you made when you needed her. Given the placebo effect, the role of coincidence and the power of the unconscious to make things happen if indirectly willed (the A O Spare view of things), practical successes are going to be evidenced. She is displacing God in a way quite easy to do within the Catholic tradition which has often permitted intermediation to flourish in a way not acceptable to Protestants. Magical protection and (in effect) cursing, relationship management, economic security and healthcare all come within Her territory - to which Chesnut adds the peculiar demands of the drugs war on justice. The rise of Santa Muerte has emerged not coincidentally with the civil war conditions created by the war on drugs and with the effects, always worst on the poor, of the global economic downturn. The cult is not a bad thing in the world despite what Catholic Bishops think but a solution to the problems of people affected by the current crisis in late capitalism and an insane progressivist drugs war. If you take away hope of economic progress and create conditions for random gang and state terror, people will turn to something they can cling to - this obscurantist cult does no bad service in this respect. Similar Reviews - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
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| Mar 01, 2013
| May 27, 2014
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really liked it
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This is a very solid and informative account of the global food system, marred only by an occasional tendency to speculation and the odd bit of indulg
This is a very solid and informative account of the global food system, marred only by an occasional tendency to speculation and the odd bit of indulgence in what might be called 'apocalypse porn'. One suspects that the book was partly guided in this respect by the needs of the marketing department of the publisher and by the somewhat excitable atmosphere to be found amongst NGO activists. But the claim of an 'unleashing' of 'dangerous forces' by 'turmoil' on the blurb, the occasionally excessive use of 'may' (viz. speculation) and a degree of normative assertion when it suits should not deter you. The vast bulk of the book is, in fact, a solid fact-based account of how a total system works in clear English and is highly recommended. The bits of standard excitability may irritate but you can grit your teeth and go on and it makes up only a small percentage of the whole. McMahon appears to know his stuff and even to act as a responsible corrective on worse activist hysteria. He is measured and thoughtful and I will be keeping this on my bookshelf as a ready reference. NB: I have a conflict of interest as professional adviser to a major investor in the sector so you should only accept the review in that light ...more |
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| Oct 04, 2012
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This is a collection of papers from many perspectives and from all ideological stances on the initial stages of a major wave of investment, some pirat
This is a collection of papers from many perspectives and from all ideological stances on the initial stages of a major wave of investment, some piratical but much not, in agricultural production in the emerging world. It has to be regarded as an interim (2013) review and may be outdated within a few years. It is based on uncertain data (no fault of the contributors) so that (we hope) we may now expect a great deal of corrective research. I have a conflict of interest as professional adviser to one major investor in the sector (hence you should accept the comments below this as in a private capacity and be as critical as I would be of me in similar circumstances). However, I can recommend the book as a useful single source that sets out the parameters for the debate over agricultural investment with good web resources for further research in its Appendix III. Michael Kugelman's final summary of Recommendations and Conclusions is a measured attempt to bring all the contributors' commentaries into a policy advisory programme of sorts. The population of the world may be as much as 9bn or even 10bn by 2060 and we do not have, and probably would be made intensely miserable by, some socialist world government allocating resources through planning. There is good reason to believe that a combination of governments with the interests of their peoples at heart (an issue in itself), the market (yes, the market) and innovative technologies will be able to feed that population and transform the emerging world positively. This modernising view of the future where the 9bn can be fed and technology ensures sufficient renewable resource to sustain a population that ceases to grow because of its level of prosperity contrasts with conservative green views of population control and radical conservation. This view, I suggest, represents a progressive ideological stance whereas, if you dig deep, much of the criticism of current investment derives from an intensely conservative position which is often associated with traditionalist ideologies. The irony of a merger of Leftist and religious views is not to be dwelled upon here but it probably arises out of the 'detournement' of the Enlightenment that took place after the 1960s and the associated later collapse of Marxist discourse. In that context, simplistic hysteria for campaigning purposes about 'land grabs', while some radical arguments can certainly not be dismissed, may be excessively disruptive, naive and irresponsible. At a recent review of the situation at the LSE, two points were made amidst the tub-thumping and demand from one notable figure that 'all foreign agribusiness' be halted. The first was that we still have too few facts to go on. A major effort is required to invest in independent (not activist or business) research into what is actually happening and assess probable impacts from which workable (not idealistic) policies can be constructed. This book, therefore, acts as a solid intellectual base-line not for what is true but about what questions need to be asked in order to get to the truth. The second was that the sloppy use of the term 'land grabs' in order to serve activist purposes in relation to what amounts to an anti-capitalist agenda obscures other phenomena that must be taken in the round. For example, we are also seeing massive urban 'land grabs' in places like China and India where the newly wealthy middle classes are doing what they have done throughout history and capturing prime land for their own 'class' purposes. This leads to failures to comprehend the sheer scale of change, for good and bad (depending one one's situation), arising out of globalisation. This can be the result of simplification of the issues for the media or the manipulation of the agenda by special interests instead of cool analysis of a total global phenomenon of great complexity. Three facts on the ground strike me as salient. The need to feed people. The availability of resources that are under-utilised. And the realities of human struggle for advantage and resources. I belong to an old and possibly naive school where nation state administrations managed complexity as best they could in order to benefit the maximum number of people without causing exploitative damage to the most vulnerable (who would come to benefit along with everyone else in due course). In that scenario, the 'Left' did not oppose modernisation but sought to ensure no back-sliding on the two separate but related principles of change being for the benefit of all and that change did not exploit the vulnerable unless their vulnerability was part of the bloc to modernity (in which case they were to be assisted into modernity). Since we do not have world government and since socialist planning has proved brutal and inefficient on small and large scales and no less corrupted in the detail where it is as efficient as the market (as in China), then Kugelman's Recommendations (excepting perhaps the implicit tolerance for the disruptive rights of activism at the global level) are a good and balanced starting point. The programme of feeding the world starts both with national administrative capacity to manage the market and put in infrastructure and the rule of law and with responsible investors who are prepared to read this book or texts like it and tick off what must be done and add that to their cost base. The point, however, is that excessive demands on developing capacity and excessive regulation at the initial stages of investment will not merely deter future agricultural investment (which some activists clearly want to do) but may cause withdrawal by all but major states cynically seeking food for their own cities. This would be a major own goal for humanity since a huge number of our putative 9bn could well starve and economic growth (which depends on a cost-effective agricultural sector) be stunted for rising nations. It would also place emerging countries not in a competitive but in a truly colonial relationship to a few providers of capital prepared for the higher levels of risk. The negative stance of labelling all overseas agricultural investments as 'land grabs' and the conservative position of denying individual members of traditionalist cultures the right to modernisation and (so) the economic basis for improved services in the longer term is either exceptionally naive or cruel. This is not to say that the balance may not be too much in favour of piratical interests who have cut often spurious deals in vulnerable countries today. I think that can be corrected but only through the reasoned debate promoted by this book - in effect through classic evidence-based political education. Somehow, while ideology cannot be entirely eliminated because it is simply 'how we think', ideological formulations and grandstanding on all sides must be reduced in favour of fact-finding, fact-checking and reasoned dialogue. Above all, for Western liberals in particular, who have never and probably will never starve and always have a safe haven back home, I suggest some reading elsewhere on the depressingly brutal history of economic development and the costs of non-development. There is no simple and easy way to get from A to B because of who we are as a species. Imposed idealism from above is not always helpful and can be deeply patronising. What is required is evidence-based assessment of where we want to get to at B and how to get there, with maximum effectiveness and humanity, and encouragement of the administrative and institutional structures required to consider the total public interest over time. Such an approach does not need passion and sentiment but a cool head and a level of socio-historical education that is sadly lacking in the mass graduate populations of the liberal West. This book, in part, helps to redress this failing. ...more |
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| 3.89
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really liked it
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Published just after the Millennium as a sort of popular pot boiler, no doubt making excellent use of material derived from editing various Times' his
Published just after the Millennium as a sort of popular pot boiler, no doubt making excellent use of material derived from editing various Times' historical atlases and his research on his own 'Millennium', the idea behind Fernandez-Armesto's book has some experimental merit. What the Argentian-born academic tries to do is to limit the chronological bias of history by exploring what civilisation means in terms of human mastery of the environment. There is a dull introduction for fellow-professionals which the author implies we can freely skip and a speculative final chapter that seems already overtaken by events but the remaining 450 pages of this blockbuster contain a great deal of material that will probably be as new to you as it was to me. The book has to become much more conventional as he moves towards the story of Greece and Rome and then on to the creation and dominance of what he calls Atlantic civilisation but, even here, there are important insights. His critique of slavery abolitionism is devastating and depressingly true and he reports back on the 1997 500th anniversary academic investigation into Vasco da Gama in a way that suggests that its findings have partially helped to underpin his book. What we can learn from history is not so much how to predict the future - this is impossible - but how our modern decisions are often wrong because we have not understood what happened in the past (or, equally likely, are in denial of that past). Even now, in the slavery case, we have eager beaver idealists in the NGOs and amongst the Christian evangelicals causing similar harms on the 'victims' because of their idealistic commitment to issues of 'principle'. Overall, I like his conservative but humane approach to history as a complex system where good and bad things arise from each other, mostly beyond the control of anyone, rather than a story of inevitable or automatic progress and individual heroism. What progress there is is incremental and derived from blind luck and necessity as much as any other factors. The mythologies of inevitability and superiority arising from a 'win' in 'life's race' are suggested throughout to be false. The judgments of the early modern and modern era are mostly sound if necessarily selective in scope. But a book on civilisations that appears to entirely neglect the globalising inter-ocean power of the British Empire in the nineteenth century and over-emphasises the power of the United States since then has to be considered slightly flawed. As a result, the British Raj is scarcely alluded to (nor the parallel trek across the world of the French) and Australia arises very late and in passing as part of the putative Pacific World where (I think) the author's predictions are too much of the time of his writing. But the meat of the book - easily two thirds of the whole - is filled with insights on cultures and civilisation that are usually neglected in Western school rooms, covering almost every conceivable human environment excluding space and deep sea exploration (which have not constructed true civilisations as yet). Here are just some of the peoples that Fernandez-Arnesto introduced to me and which had me searching for more information on Wikipedia - the biarmians, the orang laut, the kutchi, the garamantes, the dawada and the mapuche as well as, more anciently, the hagarites. Alternatively, you might try looking up some very obscure but interesting kingdoms - Funan, Shatrunjaya, Srivijaya, Rozwi, Mwene Mutapa or the Maroon Kingdoms such as Palmares. Overall, not a bad entertainment and an excellent guide to how sensible history should be written - conversationally, contingently and evidence-based with a critical attitude to the stories we tell ourselves in the dark. ...more |
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| 4.34
| 238
| Oct 17, 2011
| Oct 17, 2011
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really liked it
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A blockbuster of a book that, on and off, took me about eighteen months to get through. It comprises nearly 1,000 pages of art works, with useful refe
A blockbuster of a book that, on and off, took me about eighteen months to get through. It comprises nearly 1,000 pages of art works, with useful references at the back, on a large pictorial scale. This means that you get a better sense of the scale of a work than you would from most art books. My edition lost a star because of a gripe. Perhaps the publishers were keen to get the book out for Christmas 2011 but there are persistent problems with inaccurate cross references in some sections. However, it is an achievement of great educational value, covering all periods and regions from the stone age to contemporary work. I tend to have a jaundiced view of much recent art which strikes me as simply reflecting the same bubble that burst with the crash of the financial engineers in 2008 - cynics servicing fools. Despite that, there are signs of recovery. Relational art takes conceptual art out of the hands of the alleged creative genius and makes the artist a potential educator and facilitator of liberation. In addition, there are individual geniuses for our age - the late Cy Twombly speaks to the great tradition and Eliasson tries to make us think again while installations are there to create wonder. Even the neo-pop of Murakami and Koons is, at the least, fun and sculptural techniques continue to subvert materials. Perhaps we can now move on from the constant hommages to Duchamp. This book is a great table top item - albeit very heavy to carry around. It is highly recommended although I hope a second edition corrects the referencing. Such sloppy editing, for whatever reason, is not good enough from the House of Phaidon - and certainly not at the relatively high price. ...more |
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| Nov 19, 2007
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really liked it
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This is a fairly substantial and worthy account of the history of anarchism, largely built around review chapters of prominent figures and historical
This is a fairly substantial and worthy account of the history of anarchism, largely built around review chapters of prominent figures and historical reviews of anarchism in action. It takes a broad view by including writers and thinkers who might better or equally be considered liberal or libertarian, although Marshall is always at pains to show their differences from classical anarchist thought. It has to be said that it can be a little dull at times and there is a lack of a sustained overview, something that would give us a better idea of what it all may mean. It was also written in or around 1991/2 so the 'action' (such as it is) takes place at one of the low points in anarchist history - a quarter of a century after the collapse of the student hopes of the 1960s. Similarly, Marshall is writing at least a decade and probably more before the internet permits the creation of a new politically-directed hacker activism and the emergence of the post-2008 insurrectionism that, one suspects, would have thoroughly confused the somewhat earnest intellectuals who dominate his book. Indeed, that is the problem with the tale told here. This is mostly a story of intellectuals pontificating from on high about ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ and about the nature of humanity and the world in a way that bears little relationship to the actual lived-in world of the people they claim that they want to liberate. And it gets worse over time. The culmination of the book is a deathly dull (I skimmed in the end) account of the thoughts of that dodgy old Hegelian Murray Bookchin, a throw-back to the nineteenth century if ever there was one. Marshall is old-school. The succession of (mostly) dead and nearly-dead white males leaves one, ultimately, less minded to anarchism at the end than one was at the beginning, partly because of the brutal realization that, if most of these gentlemen could have achieved their utopian dreams, the rest of us would have been oppressed and miserable before very long, certainly from utter boredom in their craftsman/peasant, neighbourly, crushingly dull, little communities. At the end of the day, most of these thinkers (as opposed to the far more interesting practical seizures of power by anarchists in the Latin street) have no real language for accepting humanity as it is and so they rapidly go scuttling into a world of claimed reason where you can read petit-bourgeois tyranny on every page, at least when the people do not match up to the dreams of their saviours. The Green Anarchism of Murray Bookchin is typical. His is a turgid and unrealistic Hegelianism that has very little to do with real freedom, calling us back to what amounts to the faith-based politics of dreamers like Kropotkin and Tolstoy via that German theoretician. Anything that is ultimately faith-based or essentialist is definitely a bit creepy to anyone with their two feet placed firmly on the earth and many anarchists can be lumped with the Marxists and New Age loons in that respect. In the end, one is thrown back to a place somewhere between the minimal state libertarianism and a humane left-libertarianism that permits some state action to enable all to be autonomous on equal terms. Grand theory has little to say to us here, praxis everything. But even the praxis leaves us with a romantic bad taste in the mouth because every decent anarchist experiment – the Paris Commune, the Kronstadt rebellion, Makhno in the Ukraine, the POUM in Catalonia, the Evenements of ‘68 and many others – is quite simply crushed by superior reality. Not just by superior force but by the fact that the force represents something – the reality of the situation. As a romantic, I am definitely with all these rebellions but, let's face it, participation is heroic but futile, an act of suicide. It would be like Mishima's hari-kiri only for the goodies. It is not enough to say that these experiments ‘should have won’ because they were ‘right’. The truth is they did not win for very good reasons related to what we are as human beings. The only successful anarchist rebellion would be one that could change humanity – and that is very dangerous territory indeed, a repetition by force of what the Bolsheviks tried and failed to do. All in all, this book, which is highly sympathetic to the movement, tells us that anarchic thinking is like a chair that is very appealing to the eye but falls apart when someone tries to sit on it. If it did not exist, it would have to be invented but only as a constraint or restraint on power, by promising rebellion if lines were crossed but not as an option for any social organization that is actually viable. This has implications for the four main current strands of quasi-anarchic thinking in the world today – hacker activism, greenery (which has already compromised with reality to gain a power that it probably does not deserve), the Occupy Movement and anarcho-capitalist libertarianism. All of these are troublesome for the prevailing order but none of them represent a terminal threat – indeed, the Occupy Movement’s achievement may have been little more than mobilizing the vote for Tweedledum Obama over Tweedledee Romney and giving the State some populist welly when it is minded to bring the capitalists to heel for its own tax-raising purposes. It is interesting that the State did not even bother to do that. Occupy is particularly daft from a classical anarchist perspective. It is led by naïve middle class students and activists whose sole purpose seems to be to get more cash into the hands of the State from the private sector or give the NGOs a bit more oomph in the street so that money can then be diverted to their latest pet project. The general public, of course, has seen through this. The most threatening to the State may be hacker activism and then only because its more louche side is quite prepared to act as intellectual muscle for organized crime. But it can just as easily be co-opted into the State Department’s manipulative cyberwars against states it does not approve of and it is most effective as trail-blazer for anarcho-capitalism’s darker side. Kim Dotcom is an anarchist of sorts but not quite what Prince Pyotr Kropotkin had in mind. Even in Greece today, where one would most expect insurrection, the struggle for mastery over a corrupt and failed bourgeois elite, backed by the European Union, is in the hands either of sensible Leftists who have no intention of unraveling the State and a bunch of gangster fascists. In Catalonia, the drive for independence is also no longer associated with anarchist ideology but with a revived Leftism. Worse, this Euro-Leftism is not only not anarchist in the traditional sense but is imbued with an ideology of identity politics that wholly relies on the State to impose its cultural agenda on an increasingly resentful mass (at least that proportion of the mass not on the State pay roll, admittedly a decreasing proportion). Having said all that, if we winnow out perhaps seven out of ten of the anarcho-intellectuals as either faith-based essentialists (and we include the Hegelians) or narcissistic imposers of their values and personality on the world, we are left with some good people and good thinking. The American Paul Goodman stood out in this respect. And it was good to see Foucault briefly included as gad fly. There is real value in anarchism but not as praxis or ideology. Its value lies in it being a reminder of the core value to humanity of personal autonomy and of individuation. People of anarchist bent would do much better to hold their noses and engage with the political process and the State through improved organization, if only to halt the growing power of authoritarian Leftists, fascists and religious believers. Camus' concept of rebellion as preferable to revolution holds water here - we can all constantly rebel against the unwarranted demands and claims of others. The final pages of the book raise issues with anarchism as practical politics but by this time we have all made our mind up – either we are anarchists or we are not. I am not – more so after reading the book than before. My initial sympathies dissipated chapter by chapter as I realized that I would be filled with a terminal boredom by these men and their utopias. Anarchists are too often people who have lost their sense of reality, equally as much as the religious types they claim to despise. In some cases (horror of horrors!), they will even claim to have found a better God or reality as did Tolstoy. Any politics that has a place for invented beings and universal consciousnesses must be considered dangerous and yet a small minority of anarchists persist in this sort of flummery. Like Marxism, anarchism can be religion by other means and so deeply dangerous to non-believers in the long run. Nevertheless, this book is strongly recommended as a sound guide to what anarchists have thought in the past and what they did in history. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 11, 2012
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Paperback
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| 1400044111
| 9781400044115
| 1400044111
| 3.91
| 4,696
| Apr 08, 2008
| Apr 08, 2008
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really liked it
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I was initially wary of this account of contemporary organised crime. Misha Glenny's 'Fall of Yugoslavia' had frustrated me as good narrative but weak
I was initially wary of this account of contemporary organised crime. Misha Glenny's 'Fall of Yugoslavia' had frustrated me as good narrative but weak analysis. I need not have been so concerned. Yes, Glenny still does not quite 'get' that he is being fed a line sometimes by people who have an interest in extending their own power. And, yes, he still trots out liberal-imperial cliches in the short epilogue. However, the vast bulk of the book rises above the ‘given’ ideology. It provides an excellent account, travelling from the Balkans through every theatre of criminal enterprise and ending up in China, not merely as a narrative of crime, the supplier of illegitimate needs and desires in a globalised world, but as an account of how the state system is beginning to crumble under the pressures of these trades. There are sub-texts here that are immensely valuable for students of international affairs – above all, that imperial exploitation has left a culture of resentment in which non-Western criminality can not only thrive but develop an alternative moral compass that cannot easily be dismissed. This will pass but the thieving of the British Empire in Africa, India and from China in the Opium Wars may be forgotten at home but it is not forgotten where the thievery actually took place. Victorian Britain was once a drugs dealer using violence in ways little different from the cartels of Medellin. The bottom line is that once trading barriers were eliminated by globalization and massive demands unleashed – including demands for drugs, risk-taking and sexual pleasure as well as jobs and cheaper versions of expensive consumer goods – no police or security force was resourced or skilled enough to counter the operation of the laws of supply and demand on a global scale. The perfect idiocy of the West was not merely to drop all trade barriers without adequate planning for the consequences – including mass migration – but to think that destroying rival state structures such as the Soviet Union would not bring the organizational muscle of a degraded security apparatus into alignment with criminal gangs whose main motivation would be purely economic. The starting point for all criminality, across the world, is for state structures to try to ban rather than manage some human requirement (mind-altering substances, pleasures, status-driven wants or simply the need to cross a border to earn a living). These are the fools who think that an ‘ought’ is an ‘is’ and that the law, being self-evidently representative of the ‘good’, works without immense costs when it works against human instincts and needs. There is a difference between law as protector of persons and property from other persons and law as code of conduct to meet pre-set cultural or religious standards. While those standards subsist, everything is secretive but it is still happening. Once those standards cease to hold for great tracts of the population, a market opens up where state terror is no longer sufficient to counter the demands of desire or need. Economic interests then emerge to exploit these needs and desires and these interests are not always the bad guys. Sometimes, they resort to violence simply because they cannot rely on the state to regulate their markets, while those markets are often the only way economic forward for depressed populations. Even if a Western State ‘takes out’ a gang boss or gang, the system simply re-assembles and re-connects, much like the nuclear-proof internet, albeit with short term violence and the lacuna actually results in improved production methods and increased supply. Warlord gangsters with a monopoly have an interest in keeping prices high and restricting supply. Break the monopoly and everyone is driving down price and increasing supply. But what makes the situation so much worse is that the ideological basis for state attempts to deny the population what they want ‘in their own interest’, which might under normal circumstances motivate public servants and public to contain criminality, collapses under post-modernity. It is the wider public that wants what the gangs provide and, in a way, why shouldn’t they? By what right do states dictate our pleasures, certainly not by divine right? Glenny seems to think that we are naughty for wanting these things (the message clearly purveyed to him by the 'authorities'), but we might as easily say that the bureaucrats are very naughty indeed for not allowing us these things on fair and safe terms. On the one hand, in the US in particular, we see the emergence since the 1920s of special interests who rely on public cash (as taxes) being voted them year in year out, in increasing amounts, to deal with threats that they themselves define and popularise. They extend their remit internationally because, like all imperial markets, they must otherwise expand or die. Glenny tells the story of the ultimate in bureaucratic stupidity where US Homeland Security's container monitoring took place in China at source to check nuclear smuggling but under conditions where none of the Americans spoke Chinese and the cops were, shall we say, not always exactly not corrupt – what was being signed off was a steady flow of cheap production from North Korea stamped ‘made in china’. On the other hand, when a State is finally degraded by its own economic failures, the pauperized security apparat finds that it has the sudden need and means to engage in the market itself, either directly or in alliance with criminal gangs. By the time we reach China we have a working Political Criminal Nexus. What is the common denominator here? Why, the State, of course, and its self interest and failures. The gangsters, though barbarous and cruel, are merely taking things from one place where people are very poor and giving them to people who are much richer in return for cash. Clearly the States do not seem to be doing much about helping the very poor people and Glenny's account of how FARC in Colombia got into coca productions ends up making one see FARC in a new and positive light and the Colombian state thugs (backed by the US) in a rather less positive one. The poor coca or opium producer, the Fukien peasant or the educated but dirt-poor Nigerian, the beautiful East Asian village girl or the Balkans youngster get the cash they desperately need to survive, albeit smaller than the worth to the gangsters further down the line. At the other end, the Westerners get what they want. The Westerners get doubly taxed – high prices for their illicit pleasures and high ‘legitimate’ taxes to keep thousands of security men and bureaucrats slaving away to keep those prices high by disrupting the supply lines. Meanwhile, the lack of legitimacy means that the poor do not get full value (‘fair trade’) and there is no regulation of the health and safety aspects of what is supplied. Liberal and faith-based moralists are almost certainly central to the rotten core of the politics involved here. Similarly, without legal protection, there is no recourse but to the gun and corruption so that the whole security apparat gets suborned by people whose capital accumulation is substantial and who are always one step ahead of any attempt by over-paid bureaucrats to deny then access to their loot. Losses are budgeted into the game, driving down benefits for the poor and prices up for the rich. It is a mess but no one wants to face the fact that you cannot buck the market except within a tough authoritarian state (which means a sclerotic economy) and that world government is just not going to happen (and that it would simply be a sclerotic authoritarian state writ large if it did). And so it goes on – thuggish stupid state security systems claiming the moral high ground but building huge prison systems like gulags and destroying the freedoms and wealth of their own peoples in their drive to control the market and thuggish entrepreneurs who claim the same market ideology as their opponents and never have to give true value to the two ends of the supply chain. Glenny follows the Western liberal party line at the end about more global governance but it is not convincing. It is just a job creation scheme for increasingly inept administrators and some very brave but misused grunts on the ground. Imagine the tax take for Governments if those grunts were administering the trade themselves! Glenny gets to the nub of the issue at one point: the stupidity of the war on drugs. One solution would be the legalization of human pleasures regardless of the priests and ideologues in order to give fair value to the peasants and young women who provide the services. From this point on, regulation could improve health and safety and punish not the small user but exploitative bosses in between. But, regardless of all this, the reality is that globalization has, in around 30 years, broken the back of one Empire (the Soviet) and is placing two others (the Atlantic and the Chinese) under severe strain. The ‘alternative economic system’, now operating as both gangsterdom and increasingly anarcho-capitalist trading across the internet, is simply no longer something that can be beaten like Hitler or Mussolini. It has to be adapted to. It has to be out-thought. Why? Because it is not a perversion of humanity but the very essence of humanity – the seeking of trading advantage and arbitrage opportunities between sets of desire and want. It is the sclerotic state systems that originally unleashed this chaos by going for economic growth over social cohesion that are the perversion of humanity, still trying to contain and control what is essentially human for the sake of bureaucratic order. It may not be an exaggeration to say that what we are seeing compressed (alongside the insurgencies that grow year on year, the collapse of small nation states such as Afghanistan and Syria under Western pressure, and the internal resentments and institutional cynicism within the West) into a relatively few years is a systemic breakdown like that of the late Roman Empire. Once empires stop expanding, they freeze up and then they crumble. Mexican gangsters are now at the very gates of the American South West, insurgencies with criminal aspects spread from Mali to Central Asia, from Somalia to Southern Italy, and the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress is faced with direct challenges to its authority from PCN elements. We are only a few steps from warlordism. So, despite the failures of analysis (or perhaps the lack of courage or interest in critiquing the analyses of his establishment sources), this book is an invaluable primer in how the world really works. And if the world does work like this (and we think it does), it merely confirms that we have been ruled by idiots for far longer than we all deserve. The gangsters are only half the problem – the other half is our less than competent political class. ...more |
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Aug 24, 2024
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it was amazing
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Feb 23, 2024
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Feb 19, 2023
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Nov 11, 2022
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really liked it
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Sep 03, 2022
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it was ok
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Apr 25, 2021
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Sep 16, 2019
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Mar 24, 2018
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it was ok
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Nov 17, 2017
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Sep 08, 2017
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really liked it
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Sep 23, 2016
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it was amazing
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Apr 16, 2016
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| 3.85
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really liked it
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Jun 21, 2014
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really liked it
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Aug 25, 2013
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Jul 28, 2013
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really liked it
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Jul 13, 2013
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really liked it
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Jun 28, 2013
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really liked it
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Nov 11, 2012
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| 3.91
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really liked it
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Oct 29, 2012
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