Reviews

Little Milton and Clarence Brown

— George Fish

IN MEMORY OF
LITTLE MILTON
9/7/34-8/4/05 and

CLARENCE “GATEMOUTH” BROWN
DIED 9/10/05

ONE OF THE classic of the electric blues says it all about the time of late summer, 2005, when two of the most distinguished practitioners of contemporary blues, both with five-decade-long musical careers, passed away.

“Little Milton” Campbell, 71, died on August 4, following a stroke he suffered on July 27.Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown died at age 81 on September 10 in his hometown of Orange, Texas, following the August 28 evacuation from his home in the New Orleans suburb of Slidell, Louisiana made necessary by Hurricane Katrina. (August 27 was also the fifteenth anniversary of the death of yet another remarkable contemporary blues master, Stevie Ray Vaughan.)

But instead of “The Sky Is Crying,” this author chooses as the theme for this occasion the affirmative, celebratory blues anthem Little Milton recorded in 1984, “The Blues Is Alright.” The blues is still very much alright despite these losses, losses we commemorate because we honor and cherish the legacies we inherit from their lives.
We affirm with the words of yet another artist of the blues who has left us physically, but lives with us always because of the music he left behind, Hound Dog Taylor, who insisted, “When I die, don’t have a funeral, have a party!”

Little Milton, also referred to as Mr. C, was born Milton Campbell on September 7, 1934, near the Mississippi Delta town of Inverness, within that 100-mile radius around Clarksdale noted for its material poverty but cultural richness, a region distinguished for its contributions in face of adversity to African-American cultural life.

It was within this region of the famed Mississippi Delta that not only Little Milton was born, but also B.B. King, Albert King, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and that Promethean progenitor and legendary player of the blues himself, Robert Johnson. But more African-American cultural excellence came out of there than just that from the blues: Country artist Charlie Pride was born and reared there as well, as was actor Morgan Freeman.

Little Milton grew up hearing not only the African-American blues and gospel music that surrounded him, but also the white country music of the South, which surrounded him culturally as well. It’s not often realized how significantly white country music and Black blues mutually influenced each other, but Black blues artists regarded country music as an expression of soulfullness and deep artistry as well, and referred to it as “White Blues.”

Country music pioneers such as Jimmy Rodgers often incorporated the blues into their own music, Black and white artists jammed together, and Black musicians and bands often played at white dances and parties — one of those rare forms of limited integration that was tolerated in the segregated South, and one not always favorable to the Black musicians as the barriers to racial intermingling were every bit as much physical as they were cultural, social and legal.

In this world created by segregation, the truly Kafkaesque codes and taboos engendered could cause some very grisly things to happen, and happen all too unexpectedly. A story from the life of the legendary “Blues Mandolin Man” Yank Rachell, when as a young man he was part of a Black band hired to play at a white farmer’s dance in his native Tennessee, relates what could and did happen all too easily.

Some drunken white farmer suddenly burst out with an accusation that the band’s Black guitarist was “looking lasciviously at a white woman,” and the band was set upon. The guitarist was lynched, and the young Yank Rachell, even though he’d managed to escape, still had to lay low for several days lest he be found and lynched also.

But this is just one of those stories from the life of a blues artist who lived in the South, Yank Rachell, who was almost denied that chance to even live long enough to become the legendary player, singer and songwriter who was renowned some 60 years later!
Fortunately, there are other, far more positive elements that are relevant here — for example, how the incorporation of white country music into Black blues resulted in two modern blues hits, commercial successes noteworthy also for their accomplished blues artistry. The first is Johnny Adams’ 1969 “Reconsider Me,” which was produced by a famed country record producer as well, Shelby Singleton.

The other is the 1970 classic, “Let’s Straighten It Out,” the signature song of blues artist Benny Latimore, that incorporates into its blues not only country but also the surrealistic rock of the Doors, to create a singular, poignant statement that’s become a blues masterpiece. And of course, there’s the legacy of the Genius himself, Ray Charles, whose love of the “stories” he found so evident in country music impelled him to perform these songs in new, previously-unheard-of arrangements reflective of his trademark funky blues/R&B urbanity.

Prolific Recordings

Little Milton learned guitar by ear and from his father, “Big” Milton Campbell, and as early as 13 was playing on Mississippi recordings by blues artists such as Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller). He was discovered by blues player/ talent scout Ike Turner, recorded for Sun Records at 18, and went on to record with, and become A&R man for, Bobbin Records in East St. Louis, Illinois.

From 1965 on until his death, Little Milton recorded for the major blues/R&B labels Chess, Stax, and since 1984, Malaco. His numerous hit records include such songs now regarded as contemporary classics of the blues as “We’re Gonna Make It,” “Grits Ain’t Groceries,” “Who's Cheating Who?” “Walkin’ The Back Streets And Cryin’,” “Little Bluebird,” “Annie Mae’s Café” and “My Dog And Me.” Little Milton recorded 34 albums from 1965 on, 14 for Malaco alone, where he had his longest label stint.

He was nominated for a Grammy in 2000 for “Welcome to Little Milton,” a CD recorded at the famed blues/R&B Muscle Shoals recording studio and considered one of the finest recordings ever to come out of there, which teams Little Milton with such noted guest artists as Government Mule, Susan Tedeschi, Keb’ Mo’, and Delbert McClinton.

The music of Little Milton, expressed in both in his own original songs and in the songs he covered from other artists, is deeply affirmative of African-American life and culture, as affirmative in its way as the more direct affirmations of W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, and even Malcolm X. His music celebrates Black ethnicity through positive reference to such culinary staples as collard greens, Buffalo fish (carp), and Hennessy cognac.

Another aspect of this affirmation can be seen in the covers of blues classics he recorded in his own way, songs such as Elmore James’ “It Hurts Me Too,” Jimmy Rogers’ “That’s All Right,” and that soul-blues masterpiece of the early 1960s, “A Nickel And A Nail.”

But more than that, as a delightful audio perusal of Little Milton CDs easily confirms, is the way in which he made himself at home in all kinds of musical arrangements, from soul to horn-driven soul blues and more traditional blues approaches with horn backing, and even to funky down-home approaches incorporating harmonica. He makes a guest appearance on the 2004 Handy-nominated soul blues CD of his nephew Charles Wilson, “If Heartaches Were Nickels” (the Handy is the Grammy or Oscar of the blues), and has another notable soul-blues relative in cousin Artie “Blues Boy” White.

Little Milton toured extensively with his guitar “Bessie,” but even though considered by many as significant a blues guitarist as B.B. King, never achieved the fame. In fact, it was only within the last couple of years that Little Milton began to emerge from the confines of the Chitlin’ Circuit to broader recognition (which means, of course, acknowledged as a “real” blues artist by white blues devotees as well as Black).

When Little Milton was first coming into prominence, B.B. King and Bobby Bland held sway, and commercial success meant following in the familiar paths they had made, but even then, as already demonstrated on those Chess recordings of the middle and late ‘60s, Little Milton was always his own bluesman.

A Crossover Giant

Uniquely his own artist as well, of course, was Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. Although considered by many, including this author, to be rightly a significant and integral part of contemporary blues, Gatemouth Brown didn't like being called a bluesman, and considered the blues to be too confining as a musical form.

Although his early hits such as “Okie Dokie Stomp” were in the blues idiom, Brown deliberately moved away early in his career from performing the strict blues to develop a music uniquely his that he called “American music, Texas-style”: a music that featured big-band horn sections and incorporated not only blues, but jazz, R&B, country, zyedco and Cajun as well.

This was as close as he felt comfortable with in applying labels to his music. As Brown put it in a 2001 interview, “I’m so unorthodox, a lot of people can’t handle it.” Ironically, the musical approach Brown developed specifically to get away from the blues, that Gatemouth sound of driving horn sections riffing underneath his fiery guitar solos, has become a mainstay of contemporary Texas blues!

Interestingly enough, while he expressed disdain for most blues guitarists, and especially for modern Texas blues guitarists such as the late Albert Collins and Johnny Copeland, one of the few musicians Brown openly admired was none other than the granddaddy of Texas electric guitar blues himself, T-Bone Walker.

T-Bone himself, or rather his absence, was responsible for propelling Gatemouth into musical prominence. Although Brown had been working as a swing band drummer in the 1940s, when he acquired the “Gatemouth” moniker because of his deep voice, it was only in 1947 when Brown established himself as an artist, during an evening at Houston’s Bronze Peacock nightclub when he was asked to fill in for an ailing T-Bone Walker, who had to leave the stage.

Gatemouth Brown went onstage, picked up T-Bone’s guitar, and prompltly rocked the house with “Gatemouth Boogie,” a song he claims he made up on the spot. The enthusiasm Brown sparked that night garnered him two things: $600 in tips within 15 minutes, and more significant for continuing his career, the immediate signing to Peacock records by club owner and record-label entrepreneur Don Robey, whose Peacock and Duke labels went on to record other seminal post-World War II Black artists such as Johnny Ace, Junior Parker and Bobby Bland.

Gatemouth Brown’s early music, blues-based and described in the New York Times September 12 obituary as “a hair’s breadth away from rock ‘n’ roll,” established his prominence as a guitar player; but Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was noted as an excellent fiddle player as well, and also played mandolin and harmonica.

Both Brown’s overall musical mastery, as well as his place of honor in the blues he scorned in Guitar Player magazine as “these old cryin’ and moanin’ guitar players always talking about bad women,” are given in detail by Colin Walters, who is working on a biography of Gatemouth.

Walters says, “He is one of the most underrated guitarists, musicians and arrangers I’ve ever met, an absolute prodigy. He is truly one of the most gifted musicians out there.”

As to Gatemouth’s place in the blues, Walters says this: “He never wanted to be called a bluesman, but I used to tell him that though he may not like the blues, he does the blues better than anyone. He inherited the legacy of great bluesmen like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, but he took what they did and made it better.”

Bluesman/eclectic Gatemouth Brown, who dressed for performances in cowboy boots, cowboy hats and Western-style shirts, expressed that musical eclecticism not only in what he played and recorded, but also where he played.

Born in Vinton, Louisiana but moving with his family to Orange, Texas a few weeks after his birth, and growing up amidst a potpourri of musical influences, Brown played for periods of time in the 1960s in Colorado and New Mexico; hosted the house band in 1966 for a teenage-oriented R&B TV show out of Nashville Tennessee, “The !!!! Beat;” appeared on the country music TV show, “Hee Haw,” also out of Nashville, in the ‘70s; and recorded an album of blues, country and even jazz in 1979, Makin’ Music, with country banjo wizard Roy Clark.

Gatemouth Brown recorded over 30 albums in his career, and received a Grammy in 1982 for “Alright Again!” Even while dismissive of most musicians, Brown recorded with contemporary music masters Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Frank Zappa and Bonnie Raitt.

Besides T-Bone Walker, the only other musician for whom Gatemouth Brown ever expressed admiration was his railroad worker father, who sang and played fiddle in a Cajun band. Brown summed up what he felt both of his father’s playing and his own musical ambition this way, “If I can make my guitar sound like his fiddle, then I know I've got it right.”

Though sick from lung cancer and heart disease, Brown did make his scheduled appearance on April 28 this year at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and a few other small performances in the following months. He successfully evacuated to Orange from his home in the New Orleans bedroom community of Slidell on August 28, but his house was totally destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Although advised to stay in the hospital in Port Arthur, Texas where he’d undergone an angioplasty, Brown insisted on returning to Orange. He died in his brother’s house, with his family present.

His booking agent, Rick Cady, said Gatemouth “was completely devastated” by the destruction of his home by Katrina, and added, “I’m sure he was heartbroken, both literally and figuratively. He evacuated successfully before the hurricane hit, but I’m sure it weighed heavily on his soul.”

Affirmations

The music of Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown is as affirmatively African American as that of Little Milton — in that same indirect but honest celebratory way — gathering and combining influences from a wide variety of Black musical genres to create a music uniquely his own, and solidly African American as well. But Brown’s music is tellingly indicative of a broader affirmation, through its deliberate inclusion of white country and Cajun music, genres which are positive working-class cultural affirmations every bit as much as are Black blues, zydeco and jazz.

For both artists, from these specific affirmations comes also an affirmation of the realizations and capabilities of working-class people generally that, albeit indirect, is just as substantive as that of more specifically political, explicitly polemical artists such as Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs.

Authentic culture is not manufactured and handed down to the masses as politically correct nostrums; nor is it the massive commercial dissemination of a mood or fad by very much self-interested capitalists, even though this very commercial dissemination may be disguised as a real expression of a pure folk culture.

Affirmations of the working class generally, yes, but also of the African-American working class specifically, are most tellingly seen in the blues of Little Milton. This writer (having found out the hard way that being a member of the lower strata of the working class made him an irritating, undigested morsel inside the maw of the “helping professional” mental health and welfare bureaucracies far more often than his “whiteness” prevented it), particularly appreciates those songs that some on the left would classify as “backward” in Little Milton’s repertoire, such as the welfare-scorning, Protestant Work Ethic-affirming “Strugglin’ Lady.”

That middle-class left simply does not know what’s really involved in getting those necessary goods and services from these officious, frequently arbitrary, rule-imprisoned and rule-imprisoning bureaucracies.

For me, as one who’s actually “been there,” the “backwardness” expressed in “Strugglin’ Lady” demonstrates, instead, a deeper, very real, working-class understanding of The Man’s iron fist that’s very much within the velvet glove that appears on the surface — to which anyone who’s ever had to apply for Medicaid or Social Security benefits can attest.

In this respect working-class culture contrasts with hostile, aggressive lumpen cultural styles, which are sometimes confused with actual representations of the political content of working-class consciousness. This preoccupation manifests itself especially in a queasy yet affirmative attitude toward gangster rap, and the notion that somewhere lurking within gangster rap is a militant, liberating, but presently incoherent, political consciousness.

For uncritical devotees of hip-hop, gangster rap, as a no more ominous and threatening statement than any other form of rap, stands as an automatic, positive measure of rebellion against the capitalist order simply because its stylistic trappings make it seem rebellious.

This writer will gladly pass on this cultural counterfeit so eagerly proffered by very obviously capitalist “cultural revolutionaries” and listen, instead, to the far more genuine working-class cultural expressions to be found in the recordings of Little Milton and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown.

ATC 119, November-December 2005

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John Brown, Abolitionist

— Jennifer Jopp

The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
by David S. Reynolds
Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 2005
578 pages, $35 cloth.

Why do some people take literally the admonitions of our faiths, both religious and secular? We are all advised to “do unto others.” We all hear, from early childhood, that “all men are created equal.” Yet, not all of us abide by these “faiths of our fathers.”

Why, indeed, do some people draw from “the air” ideas and ideals that inspire them to live in a way that others find incomprehensible and disconcerting?

The life of John Brown presents us with just such a person, one who continues to discomfit and unsettle. In the immediate aftermath of his death, writers began to both sanctify and vilify him. Every generation has recreated this dichotomous treatment of Brown. These opposing views reflect the difficulties we face — still today — in placing Brown in any kind of framework that aids our comprehension of him.

John Brown continues to fascinate. Biographers are drawn to his incandescent spirit as moths to a flame and, yet, almost all are burned in the bright light of his life’s work. Few are able to see Brown the man. Few want to see Brown the man.

Transcendalism as the “Historical Air”

David S. Reynolds is a notable exception. He crafts a work of “cultural biography” to tell the story of the life of the man John Brown. Drawing on the Emersonian notion that “the ideas of the time are in the air,” Reynolds sets out to study the “air” in which Brown lived. Reynolds mines extensively poems, songs, stories, letters, lectures — virtually all kinds of written material produced in the period — to recreate the culture of nineteenth-century America.

In Reynolds’ telling, the Transcendentalists created John Brown, and it is to the Transcendentalists that Reynolds turns to fashion the framework within which he studies Brown. Emerson’s notion of “Self-Reliance” informs Reynolds’ excavation of the culture and “historical air” breathed by Brown.

“Through the pores of his skin” Brown absorbed life’s lessons. Frederick Douglass remarked of Brown that it was “as if his own soul” had been pierced by slavery. And it was. From childhood, Brown was shaped by a life of Bible reading, arduous and unremitting labor, and an abhorrence of slavery.

Perhaps it is this very life that struck fear in the hearts of men, for none of the prizes that others so desire had any allure for John Brown, and none of the ways in which other men tell themselves they have made necessary compromises held any sway with him: material gain meant little, and he remained steadfast in dedication to his cause.

Reynolds opens his telling of the rough and tumble life of John Brown, oddly enough, with the story of a party in a mansion, an event he describes as “[o]ne of the most symbolic events of the Civil War.” (3)

The event was a “John Brown Party,” held to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation. The unveiling of an idealized bust of Brown, the recitation of Emerson’s “Boston Hymn,” and a rendition of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” brought neatly together in one place many of the mythmakers, many of those creators of Brown’s “sainthood.” Reynolds then travels the long road back, through Brown’s childhood, his peripatetic existence, and his eventual execution in the aftermath of the raid on Harpers Ferry.

John Brown’s life is indivisible from his religious beliefs. Puritan religious devotion was intense on both sides of his family. The religion of the Brown clan was not that modified by time, but rather the “Orthodox Calvinism of Puritan times.” (25)

Indeed, Brown modeled himself on the Puritan warrior, Oliver Cromwell. Owen Brown had bequeathed to his son an intense hatred of slavery. Brown took as his text those words of the Bible that admonished “You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped…Rather he shall dwell with you.” (Deuteronomy 23: 15-16)

Throughout his life, Brown turned to the Bible for solace and guidance. His father’s “errand into the Wilderness” (in this case, on the Ohio frontier) during his childhood and the grueling labor of pioneer life “both toughened and humanized” Brown. (28)

Brown patterned himself on Biblical patriarchs, fathering a large brood of children and schooling them as soldiers in his holy war. Like earlier Puritan fathers, Brown extended his reach to all who might come into his “little Commonwealth.” He was tireless in his efforts to construct community and no issue — libraries, labor, moral behavior — was beyond his interest. Stern, unrelenting, and exacting, Brown meted out penalties for transgressions.

His family life also reveals Brown’s deep and abiding attachments. Grief gnawed at him for much of his life, especially one horrific year in which he lost four children. Yet death was not the only shadow cast over Brown’s life. His children shared his battle against slavery and suffered along the way.

Reynolds’ life of Brown presents a portrait of a man whose guiding faith shaped his ideas about all aspects of life. Brown’s economic views are no exception, and Reynolds’ elucidation of Brown’s business ventures aid in understanding the complexity of Brown’s relationship to the society in which he lived. Measured against the standards of the day, Brown was a failure in all his various business enterprises: He declared bankruptcy, moved his family frequently, and constantly sought loans. Brown’s business “failures,” as Reynolds explains, were, rather, favorable portents.

Indeed, Brown selected his own standards, letting the Biblical patriarchs be his guide. In his wool business, Brown embarked on a cooperative approach, outlining his ideas in “To Wool Growers.” Such a tack was unlikely to bring commercial success in the burgeoning market economy of antebellum America. But “failure” did not worry John Brown; rather prosperity ate at his soul. Indeed, all his life he remained “devoted to the subsistence economy” that had predated the capitalist one. (43)

After excavating Brown’s early life, Reynolds turns to the unfolding of Brown’s plans to invade the South to free the slaves. Having felt that we’ve come to know Brown, we see why he believed as he did. We see the truth of Douglass’ observation.

Yet Reynolds admirably balances his empathy for Brown with a clear-eyed look at his weaknesses. A constant interplay between Brown and the culture in which he lived informs Reynolds’ study. Most importantly, we see at all times that on any given topic, Brown was not alone.

The Use of Violence

Take, as but one example, the issue of violence. Reynolds asserts that “Brown was the only white man in America both willing to live with Blacks, and to die for them.” What drove Brown, he asks, to embrace the insurrectionary violence that drove other abolitionists to pacifism? (56)

Brown, in Reynolds’ sensitive portrayal, is a man open to all aspects of the Black experience. He drew lessons in the fight for freedom from maroon communities, as well as fugitives fleeing to the North; from the Haitian Revolution, as well as the Underground Railroad; from Black men and women, as well as their white supporters.

“Only scattered voices” endorsed the use of violence in the struggle to end slavery. Reynolds plumbs a deep sea searching for echoes of Brown’s ideas. His soundings reveal that the idea, indeed, crossed the minds of others. Thomas Jefferson prophesied a cataclysmic end as early as 1787 remarking, “'Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” (95) Most abolitionists preferred not to think about such an end, clinging instead to the hope of a peaceful end to the problem of slavery.

Under Reynolds’ careful consideration we see that there were, indeed, others who espoused the use of violence; Brown, too, had heroes. The author again uses literature as a way to gain insight into the “cultural air” of the times.

In Life and Opinions of Julius Melbourne, author Jabez D. Hammond declares that the relation between master and slave is “necessarily a state of war.” (98) Others, among them martyr Charles T. Torrey, also echoed the ideals of Brown. Reynolds remarks that Torrey embodied the paradox Brown later more famously represented: in a time of immoral laws, patriotism looks like treason. Lowell thus eulogized Torrey with words that could later be applied to Brown, “Woe worth the hour when it is crime, To plead the poor dumb bondsman’s cause.”

Reynolds next turns to Pottawatomie, site of John Brown’s execution of unarmed men in Kansas. Pottawatomie was a crime, but a war crime, insists Reynolds. He reminds us that in Brown’s view, slavery was a state of war; and whoever would understand Pottawatomie must give careful consideration to the context of Brown’s behavior.

Reynolds peels back the layers of revenge and retribution to reveal the meaning that both abolitionist and proslavery forces attributed to Kansas. Both sides saw the future staked out in Kansas and both sides resorted to violence to wrest their beloved away from their enemy.

Endemic violence plagued the region. For Brown, the time had come. Citing Deuteronomy’s warning “Their foot shall slide in due time,” he began to relish confrontation with proslavery settlers.

In anticipation of such conflict, Brown traveled armed to Kansas in the Fall of 1855. He was following five of his sons: they had arrived earlier to stake claims to both land and an identity as antislavery warriors. (144) The Browns, father and sons, came to believe that war was “decreed and certain… if the ‘Slave power’ …[did not] desist from its aggressive acts upon the settlers of Kansas.” (151) Escalating violence, continued assaults on Free State people, and the caning of Senator Charles Sumner drove Brown to violent action.

In launching the raid that was to claim the lives of five men, Brown declared that it was time “to strike terror in the hearts” of the supporters of slavery. Brown and his sons and followers took the men at night from their homes and savagely stabbed and hacked them to death.

Pottawatomie, in Reynolds’ telling, is the crucible of later events. Indeed, the pace of the story quickens thereafter. Southern newspapers erroneously linked Brown’s violent actions to organized abolitionism; indeed, many in the South saw Pottawatomie as proof that the abolitionists had secret military organizations. (176)

For Brown, himself, the event proved formative. One of the most fascinating aspects of Reynolds’ treatment of Pottawatomie is his discussion of the weapons selected by Brown. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of slave uprisings, and also of Native American battles, Brown chose knives as the weapon of choice.

In a chapter entitled “Pariah and Legend,” Reynolds traces the two strains of thinking about Brown — vilification and deification — to the period after Pottawatomie. Brown’s notion that individual conscience surpassed laws found a sympathetic ear among the Concord Transcendentalists. They, disgusted with the turn of events on a national level, eagerly sought heroes. Emerson’s lecture “Courage” featured Brown.

Harpers Ferry and Beyond

Brown, in his turn — and no stranger to self promotion — used this connection to Concord for his own purposes. His plans to invade the South, decades in the making, required above all cash. The Transcendentalists generally, and the inner circle of the Secret Six more specifically, sought to oblige.

By the 1850s the Transcendentalists, disgusted by the Mexican War and the Fugitive Slave Law, faced their failure: the age was as corrupt and commercial as ever. Brown appeared in the guise of a Cromwellian warrior ready to battle corrupt political institutions in the name of a higher law.

They rallied to his cause — albeit from afar. Veneration of Cromwell in the popular imagination and the historical moment conditioned the Concord group’s response to Brown and his activities.

Just what did Brown envision in a post-invasion south? Inspired by the histories of durable maroon communities in Jamaica, Brown imagined that his revolution would spread from an initial invasion; thousands would flee to him, establishing an independent community that could — if so required — survive for years.

The U.S. Constitution, Brown believed, condoned “none other than the most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon the other portion.” His proposed new constitution, by contrast and in defiance of the then-recently decided Dred Scott decision, declared Blacks to be citizens. (251)

In the years of preparation that preceded Harpers Ferry, Brown continued his tireless efforts to promote his plan and to engage in any number of efforts to strike at the slave system. Just one example from his efforts in the late 1850s reveals his embrace of full equality (there are many such examples). In these years, Brown founded Black Strings, an organization dedicated to liberation, whose members were required to pledge belief that “all mankind are created free and equal, without distinction of color.”

Brown traveled continually in search of funds and friends for his cause. Brown believed in the transformative power of possessing a weapon. “Give a slave a pike,” he declared, “and you make him a man.” (306) Yet Brown valued life very highly, admonishing his men to resort to violence only when necessary and reminding them how dear life was to them and to their loved ones. Nor did Brown ever engage in acts of private revenge.

The raid, when it came at last, was rife with irony and coincidence. It did not ignite slave insurrection as Brown had wildly hoped, but rather prefigured the Civil War in completely unexpected ways. Harpers Ferry, Reynolds theorizes, was the Civil War in microcosm. Ultimately, Brown ended up engaged in exactly the kind of battle he sought to avoid; it was the aftermath of the raid that proved so decisive.

Brown prophetically declared upon his capture, “I wish to say…that you had better — all you people of the South — prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled — this negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.”

Asked at this moment near the end of his life what had inspired him to act as he did, Brown replied that the Golden Rule applied to all who would help others gain their liberty. Here, certainly, was a man imbued with the “faiths of our fathers.” His religiosity deeply unsettled his listeners, who then hastened to denounce him.

As Brown himself noted with irony, had he intervened on the behalf of “the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great” it would have been deemed worthy of reward rather than punishment. But, as he took up the cause of “His despised poor” the outcome would be otherwise.

In “Pilloried, Prosecuted, and Praised” Reynolds broadens his lens again to view Brown’s capture, incarceration and hanging as a cultural event. Witnessed by the entire nation through the press, the last days of John Brown left a lasting imprint on the nation. Among the strange ironies of the days after the raid were the responses to Brown’s raid: proslavery southerners praised Brown’s courage and resolution, while many northerners — abolitionists among them — scrambled to distance themselves from him.

At the outset. the Transcendentalists alone — led by Thoreau — publicly defended Brown and, by so doing, planted the seeds of his later veneration. Brown’s words, Thoreau insisted, “were more powerful than any gun he carried.” Brown devoted his time in prison to the work at hand: martyrdom. Newspapers printed his prison correspondence. The porous prison system of the 1850s allowed for a steady stream of visitors, and their impressions, too, found their way into the media of the day.

By the time of his execution, Brown was an extremely polarizing figure. Eulogized by Thoreau as embodying “transcendent moral greatness,” Brown was, for Andrew Johnson, nothing more than “a murderer…and traitor.” (402) The sorrow and anger provoked by his execution helped to unify warring antislavery factions in the North. Elsewhere, as well, there was reaction to his execution; a secessionist fury swept the South.

In his concluding chapters, Reynolds brings his discussion to the contingency of Brown’s existence and the ways in which it overlapped with specific social and cultural conditions. For Reynolds, literature appears to be a kind of cultural mirror wherein we can see our history. Thus, he devotes considerable attention to literature inspired by Brown. No one in American history, he asserts, was so recognized in drama, literature, song, and verse.

Writing this review convinced me of the veracity of this assertion; the outpouring continues today. At every turn, I found another song, poem, commentary, biographical sketch or literary depiction of Brown.

Understanding Brown

Reynolds also follows the twists and turns of the historiography on Brown. In a fascinating discussion, Reynolds shows that Black writers remained committed to the memory of Brown. The attitude of white writers, by contrast, had grown more negative by the 1880s.

How, then, are we to understand Brown? Do all these stories, poems, and songs explain him? As we are poised on the brink of another explosion of new works on Brown, what truly helps us to understand him?

In a great essay entitled “Puritans and Prigs,” Marilyn Robinson reminds us, “the assumption of present responsibility for the present state of things was a ritual feature of life in this culture for two and a half centuries, and is entirely forgotten by us now.” (in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, Mariner Books, 1998, 155)

The theological basis for Jonathan Edwards’ definition of “justice,” continues Robinson, was the thought that no one is so contemptible or worthless “but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image.” (172) Such a sense of personal responsibility and of justice motivated Brown and inspired his actions.

The use of the word “terrorist” to describe Brown has its parallel in the nineteenth-century view of Brown as insane and serves to distance ourselves from such a man and such action — for to acknowledge that he was sane is to accept some responsibility for our inaction.

A terrorist uses terror as a method to demoralize a government, to sow fear. Indeed, his actions struck terror in the hearts of men throughout the South. For his actions raised the specter of Toussaint L’ouverture, of Denmark Vesey, of Nat Turner. But terror was not Brown’s goal, emancipation was.

In other words, the story was not about the whites but rather about Blacks. The questions pondered by, turned over by whites — Was he insane? Had his enterprise a chance of success? Was it doomed at the outset? — are not the questions that Black writers and thinkers pore over.

Driven though he was, obsessed though he was, Brown’s goal was not about himself, but about the lives of others.

The transcendentalist sanctification of Brown is the other side of this coin: saints are difficult to approximate and we needn’t feel that we’ve strayed so far from the mark if he was, after all, unlike other men.

In the cacophony of voices calling for Brown’s sanctification, one is hard pressed to remember the quiet courage of his daily life as a man of a century that defined material accumulation and visible wealth as prosperity, Brown lived by the creed that “‘tis prosperous to be just” (from James Russell Lowell’s “Once to Every Man and Nation”).

Venerating him as a saint also removes him from the context of Black militancy (where he himself was most comfortable), and makes it difficult to see the true courage of a man who lived with, worked with, fought alongside of Blacks in an age in which even the most vocal abolitionist feared radical action by Blacks.

His uncompromising belief in the necessity for equal education, his commitment to Black agency, and his absolute conviction about the necessity of eradicating slavery shaped his everyday existence.

Taking seriously his intent to write a cultural biography, Reynolds at all times also keeps his eye on the larger picture. We see the ways in which Brown moved among his contemporaries, responding to and corresponding with them. Such a broad canvas deepens our understanding.

This dual focus on man and culture perhaps allows Reynolds, more so than any previous biographer, to present a sensitive and nuanced portrait. Thus, it might seem churlish to criticize so full and complex a work. And yet, readers might well ask if Reynolds doesn’t remain just a little too transfixed by the Transcendentalists? Without such veneration, implies Reynolds, Brown might have lived and died in obscurity. Yet what of the Black writers who wrote of Brown? Or of writers for whom the questions were different?

An earlier biographer, W.E.B. DuBois, might have answered these questions. Also a work of cultural biography, DuBois’ John Brown opens with a discussion of Africa’s “mystic spell” over America. He implicitly ties Brown’s birth in 1800 to the history of slave revolts generally when he writes that “John Brown was born just as the shudder of Haiti was running through all the Americas…” (DuBois, 40) Thus, for DuBois, the focus is on Blacks and the Black experience.

Brown saw himself, as Reynolds reminds us, as a “God-inspired person who acted upon sympathy for oppressed Blacks, not as an antislavery reformer.” (68) Such a person is far more dangerous than an abolitionist and, after reading about Brown’s life, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that we yell so loudly about his abolitionist activities so that we needn’t think too deeply about all of the ways in which he challenged the society in which he grew to adulthood, and — indeed — even ours.

One cannot help but admire a man who had the strength of character to live by the Golden Rule’s admonition to “Do Unto Others…” as a daily creed. Therein is the root of his radicalism, and the radical challenge he offered both in his own time and in ours.

ATC 119, November-December 2005

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John Brown, Abolitionist

— Jennifer Jopp

The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
by David S. Reynolds
Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 2005
578 pages, $35 cloth.

Why, indeed, do some people draw from “the air” ideas and ideals that inspire them to live in a way that others find incomprehensible and disconcerting?

Transcendalism as the “Historical Air”

The Use of Violence

Endemic violence plagued the region. For Brown, the time had come. Citing Deuteronomy’s warning “Their foot shall slide in due time,” he began to relish confrontation with proslavery settlers.

Harpers Ferry and Beyond

They rallied to his cause — albeit from afar. Veneration of Cromwell in the popular imagination and the historical moment conditioned the Concord group’s response to Brown and his activities.

Understanding Brown

Driven though he was, obsessed though he was, Brown’s goal was not about himself, but about the lives of others.

His uncompromising belief in the necessity for equal education, his commitment to Black agency, and his absolute conviction about the necessity of eradicating slavery shaped his everyday existence.

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Background to Bush's Debacle: Iraq and the Empire

— Christopher Phelps

Bush in Babylon:
The Recolonisation of Iraq
by Tariq Ali
Verso, 2003. 214 pages, $12 paper.

THE STATED OBJECTIVE of the neoconservatives in control of United States foreign policy today is to carry out a war on terror by spreading freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, if necessary by American power alone, and if necessary by guided missiles, Humvees, and fighter jets.

This philosophy of imposed democracy is riven with contradictions. It is, for one thing, opposed by an overwhelming majority of the world's people, who poured onto the streets in unprecedented anti-war mobilizations in 2003. Had they been able to vote for what the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano calls “president of the planet,” they would have turned George W. Bush out on his ear.

Even at home, this newly aggressive version of democratic imperialism could be baptized only by short-circuiting democratic processes with a barrage of lies. In the buildup to war with Iraq, one administration official after another misled the public and Congress by claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction or was in league with Al Qaeda.

Conservatives call for governments based upon rule of law, while practicing torture and indefinite detention without charge in the prisons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They have consolidated and strengthened the national security bureaucracy, that part of the state least susceptible to democratic control, given it sweeping authority to override civil liberties, and disciplined it to serve their political ends.

In the global war on terror, U.S. military and intelligence operations are carried out in alliance with military or strong-man dictatorships like Egypt and Pakistan and dynastic autocracies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, states where too fervent an advocacy of freedom or democracy will issue in a prison term, if not a shallow grave.

Although Bush’s paeans to democracy imply something more robust, the conservative criterion of democracy is not the rule of the people but at best formal elections, and the free market is its only essential condition of freedom. This is why the American state is certain to prevent any Middle Eastern polity from actually giving expression to democratic longings in the Arab world for the nationalization of oil or, at the very least, higher rates of taxation and redistribution of oil profits.

The neoconservative doctrine, justifying muscular unilateralism with claims of national interest and democratic principle, runs against the diplomatic tradition of seeing idealism and realism as antithetical approaches to international relations, and neoconservative policy formulations such as “preventive” war break with long-established norms. Despite these departures, however, there is nothing new in the distance between promised ideals and reality in imperial claims or the vastness of self-deception and arrogance on the part of conquerors in the Middle East.

A Long View of Empire

We are reminded of this truth time and again by Tariq Ali in his perceptive polemic Bush in Babylon. Ali is an Oxford-educated Pakistani writer whose prominence on the British left dates back to his opposition to the Vietnam War, and who is today an editor of New Left Review and Verso Books. In Ali’s long view of history, present-day neoconservative conceits and ambitions contiinue the basic pattern of empires that have long shaped the destiny of the region.

He unearths the history beneath the surface of current events in a style that might be called erudite popularization. Ali draws not merely upon research and logic but cleverness, poetry, anecdotes, playful wit, creativeness, and controlled anger. (His devastating appendix on Christopher Hitchens is not to be missed, and his mention of Kanaan Makiya, the author of Republic of Fear, as having evolved “from Marxist to liberal-imperialist” bristles with the contempt reserved for turncoats one has known.)

Ali dips into ancient history with his title’s allusion to the notoriously decadent city in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates. Babylon is a deliberate point of departure, evoking the King James Bible more likely to be found in U.S. conservatives’ desk drawers these days than the Constitution.

Although Ali takes note of the subsequent invasions of the Mongols and Persians, he concentrates in earnest on the modern period, beginning in the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire laid hold of these lands. During Ottoman rule, a majority of the world’s Muslims looked for the first time to what Ali terms “a single center of temporal and spiritual authority” in the person of the Turkish caliph.

By the nineteenth century, however, the caliphate’s grip was weakening. The British, the Turks’ primary competitor for imperial reach, encouraged Arab opposition to the Ottomans in a strategy of fomentation that, combined with victory in the First World War, enabled the British to seize Jerusalem and Baghdad in 1917.

France and Britain divided the Arab East between themselves, carving new states and borders out of the former Ottoman provinces. The conquering British hit ingeniously upon creating Arab dynasties out of whole cloth to reward clans who had served them well. The peninsular plum went to the family of Ibn Saud, creating today’s Saudi Arabia. The thrones of Jordan and Iraq went to two of the sons of Sharif Hussein.

As custodians for British control, these monarchies acted as a smokescreen to meet the challenge posed by the Russian Revolution of 1917, namely the revolutionary socialist call for national self-determination. Arab dynasties, the British hoped, would defuse both the threat of Arab nationalism and “the syndicalist and socialistic ideas seeping out of Europe,” as the shrewd administrator Gertrude Bell put it. (Her boss Sir Percy Cox, in words later echoed by the brass of another empire, informed the citizens of Basrah in 1914 that the British came as “liberators, not conquerors.”)

The Invention of Iraq

The new state of Iraq was stitched together out of the former Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basrah, and Mosul. King Feisal I was crowned its first monarch, but the Iraqi throne proved a simulacrum of sovereignty. In Ali's words, the “Colonial Office in London made all the key military, economic, and foreign policy decisions.”

Feisal and his ministers had to consult the British High Commissioner on all matters, down to what Ali terms trivial “local disputes related to patronage, ethnicity, or religion.” Even Feisal declared, “I am an instrument of British policy.”

Feisal’s son and successor, King Ghazi, who assumed the throne in 1933, proved less pliant. Influenced by Arab nationalism, Ghazi financed a palace radio station that urged Kuwaitis to overthrow their Sheik and rejoin Iraq, while denouncing British and Zionist maneuvering in Palestine. British consular officers, moreover, were scandalized by Ghazi's passion for men.

When Ghazi died in a dubious car crash, it was most likely a murder, and most Iraqis suspected a British hand behind it. The organizer was probably Nuri al-Said, a sinister Iraqi government minister whom Ali likens, fittingly, to Macchiavelli and Iago. Suspicions over Ghazi’s death, Ali writes, “accelerated pan-Arab nationalism,” leading to a 1941 coup by military colonels whose “popular nationalist government attempted to establish relations with both Berlin and Moscow.”

Soon after, British troops reoccupied Iraq, restoring both the monarchy and Nuri, and the subsequent Portsmouth Agreement reduced Iraq to the status of a protectorate in 1948. A mass uprising erupted against the Portsmouth Agreement, sparked by the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), but it was defeated — partly by the government's ingenious device of sending hundreds of eager young militants to a war to “liberate Palestine,” whereupon they were left stranded in Jordan while the revolt at home was suppressed.

With the rebellion defeated, the ICP’s secretary general Yusuf Salman Yusuf was executed along with two other leaders. That same year, the feckless Arab war with Israel revealed the extent of corruption and incompetence in the Arab states.

The humiliating defeat fanned radicalism throughout the Arab world, especially among nationalist officers resentful of generals craven to the British. Military revolutions were the result. By 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt stood down the British, French and Israelis over the Suez Canal, making him, writes Ali, “an Arab leader who, despite all his weaknesses, was genuinely popular with his people, unlike the freaks and monsters that came later.”

From Revolution to Saddam’s Rule

At this, the high point of Arab nationalism, Iraq’s government was so out of step with the immense regional sentiment in favor of Arab autonomy and unity, a feeling shared widely among Iraqis, that the Nuri government facilitated the creation of the Baghdad Pact, a security arrangement patently meant to foil pan-Arab nationalism.

The Baghdad Pact comprised Britain, Turkey, Iran (then controlled by its own royalty, the Shah, installed by a 1953 coup instigated by the Central Intelligence Agency), and Pakistan. In the background, notes Ali, was “a powerful new guarantor: the United States.”

The gulf between the regional mood of defiance and the Iraqi government’s complicity with dominant foreign powers explains why 1958 became a signal year in Iraqi history. A military coup toppled the monarchy and won Iraq’s freedom from foreign rule for the first time. The military, explains Ali, was “the only institution in the country where virtually every segment of society was represented” because the Nuri-led elite had sought to create “an army whose composition transcended regional, ethnic, and tribal divisions.”

This nation-building project was altogether too successful, overflowing in the heady atmosphere of the Arab world of the 1950s. Young Iraqis drawn to the army began to see the appeal of “a wider entity that was the Arab nation,” as Ali puts it. These sentiments were found among “Free Officers” supportive of Nasser, among radicals in the Iraqi Communist Party, and among the very small nationalist Ba’ath Party.

All three currents shared a loathing for the palace, Nuri and the British Empire. On July 14, 1958, the Free Officers, led by the social reformist Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qasim, seized power with tacit support of the Communists and Ba’athists. A republic was declared. The king and Nuri were executed. No substantial resistance showed itself in any part of the army or population. Exuberant crowds filled the streets.

Tension, however, pervaded the new ruling coalition. Arab nationalists distrusted Arab Communists, not for their Marxism but because “they operated as Moscow’s instruments in the region,” writes Ali. The German 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and subsequent Grand Alliance of the Second World War had brought the cessation of opposition to imperialism by Communists in the British, French and Dutch colonies, including Iraq, for which nationalists never forgave them. Then came a second blow.

In 1948, writes Ali, the Arab Communist parties “had gone against all their own political instincts and the advice of their own Jewish members and backed the formation of Israel because this was official Soviet policy at the time.”

The resultant fissure between Communists and nationalists grew to tragic dimensions, dividing the two main strands of anti-imperialist Arab opinion. “None of this can be laid at the door of any Western imperialism or, for that matter, Israel,” writes Ali. “It was a self-inflicted wound. The sectarian failure of communists and nationalists to reach a compromise became a tragedy for Iraq and the region as a whole.”

Another weakness traced to the mutual failure of nationalists and Communists to recognize the need for “a genuine assembly and the right of other political parties to exist,” writes Ali. The hierarchical organization of the army, from which the Iraqi coup’s leadership emerged, fostered a governing political style that Ali characterizes as “Bonapartism,” authoritarian rule elevating the solitary leader above social classes and discussion.

In this respect, the Nasser example was profoundly negative, for it encouraged his emulators to establish top-down military-populist regimes. Still, the new regime was authentically popular in its first years because Qasim’s social and economic agenda included land reform, increased taxes on the wealthy, rent control, price control, regulation of working hours, and compulsory social insurance provisions.

These popular measures were undoubtedly a response to the Iraqi Communist Party, by then the most substantial in the Arab world, capable of leading more than half a million out for a May Day march in 1959. The party’s base of peasants and workers put pressure on its leaders, claiming that landlords and industrialists were resisting implementation of the land reforms and working hour regulations.

Conditions may have been ripe for revolution, but under instructions from the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (who feared estranging Nasser) the pro-Moscow Iraqi party decided to offer its unconditional support to Qasim. As a result, with the pressure off, his regime in its final two years retreated from social reform and grew more authoritarian.

Into the vaccuum stepped the Ba’ath, orchestrating a coup d’etat in 1963. Qasim was executed and the Communist left subjected to a severe repression that prefigured the massive bloodbath against the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965.

The tiny Ba’ath, including a young man from Tikrit, had lists of names and addresses of known Communists to enable this operation. The probably source of the rosters was U.S. intelligence, if King Hussein of Jordan, a cooperator with American interests in the region, is believed, for in a 1963 interview with an Egyptian editor he stated, “Permit me to tell you that I know for a certainty that what happened in Iraq on 8 February had the support of American Intelligence.”

Ali explains the origins of the Ba’ath in the estrangement of educated young Arabs in the interwar years from liberal and social-democratic parties in Europe that did not demand freedom for the colonies and protectorates. The remaining models were fascism and communism. Fascism appealed to some as a counterweight to British and French empire, but Michel Aflaq, as a student at the Sorbonne, was at first attracted to the French Communist Party.

The Communists' refusal in the Popular Front government to insist on colonial freedom alienated Aflaq, and in 1943 he and Salah Bitar formed the Ba'ath (meaning “Renaissance”) party to espouse uncompromising nationalism. In Syria and Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Ba'ath party obtained and consolidated its power, the two states became military dictatorships revolving around rival state interests and reliant upon revived clan patronage.

Somehow the Iraqi Communist Party survived its 1963 decimation, its Kurdish cadre being the least affected, and when its leadership regrouped in 1967 in Prague it released a self-assessment regretful of not having seized the opportunity presented by 1959.

The late 1960s were changing times, of “polycentrism” among the Communist states — of Cuba, China and Vietnam — in which atmosphere a “central command” faction of the ICP argued for initiating armed struggle in Iraq. Expelled for this deviation, a handful of the faction’s most fervent members proceeded to launch a resistance movement in the southeAnd it is Brown in his daily life that we are privy to in Reynolds’ work. rn marshes, hoping to create a “liberated zone” from which to advance on Baghdad.

Ali paints a fond and moving portrait of Khalid Ahmed Zaki, the quixotic leader of this failed guerrilla adventure, whom he knew on the London left of the 1960s. (In general, Ali’s attentiveness to the history of the Iraqi Marxist left, as should by now be clear, is one of the great contributions of Bush in Babylon.)

The 1967 pre-emptive strike of Israel against Nasser’s Egypt dealt Arab nationalism “a body blow” from which it “never recovered,” notes Ali. Therefore, the residual memory of the Iraqi left made it the main potential threat remaining to the Ba’athist regime. Saddam Hussein, leader of the Ba'ath security apparatus, devised a strategy that drew the remaining pro-Moscow Communists into the open by persuading them to enter into a national front.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi regime, Ali records, “developed close relations with the Soviet Union, trade agreements with Poland, and recognized the German Democratic Republic [East Germany], which in those days was regarded as the acid test for determining the orientation of third-world regimes.” The result was a “pincer movement” that trapped Iraqi Communists between their loyalty to Moscow and their knowledge of the murderous nature of the Ba’athists.

The Iraqi Communists suspended their better judgment and joined the government in 1973. No sooner was this phony unity announced than the wily Saddam began to tack westward. (Although Ali never compares Saddam to Nuri, the comparison can hardly escape any reader of his study. Both figures loom large as unscrupulous machinators in the politics of twentieth-century Iraq.)

In 1978, the ICP was expelled from the government and 31 Communists were executed. The following year marked the ascendancy of Saddam to President of the Republic.

America’s Gulf Friend

Saddam's attainment of dictatorial power in 1979 coincided, Ali observes, with a new interest in Iraq among U.S. policymakers:

"That same year, the Shah of Iran had been toppled by a popular revolution dominated by Shia clerics, and the United States was desperately in search of a regional replacement. Might Saddam suffice? He might. He was certainly brutal enough. He had shown this by his robust treatment of Kurds, communists, and clerics. Could he be trusted? Perhaps not, but then who could be trusted in that world any more, apart from the Saudi monarchy, whose loyalty was beyond reproach?"

For his part, Saddam had contradictory desires, both to run in the league of Big Powers and to become a hero in the Arab world, for although the unoriginal “personality cult he instituted was modelled on that of Stalin, Mao, and Kim il-Sung,” writes Ali, “the person he really yearned to be was Gamal Abdel Nasser.”

War with mullah-revolutionary Iran would serve both purposes well, and the result in 1980 was the Iraqi invasion of Iran, supported behind the scenes by the United States and concluded in stalemate in 1988 after 262,000 Iranian and 105,000 Iraqi deaths.

Next Saddam set his eyes on Kuwait, which for reasons of geography had always been seen by Iraqi rulers as an artificial entity, a product of British colonialism that ought, by all lights, to be reunified with the Basrah province from which it was split. Iraq’s claims on Kuwait had long been based on the observation that the British had, in parceling out the Ottoman provinces, left Iraq without access to the sea.

By 1990, though, a resource more aluable than salt water was at stake. In Saddam’s calculation, the annexation of Kuwait and its oil reserves would be his Suez, rendering him the Nasser of 1990. Ambiguous signals from the U.S. ambassador, April Glaspie, led Saddam to think — or at least to claim later — that he had a green light.

The source of the Western consensus against Iraq in 1990 was not law, according to Ali, but oil and power. It would be difficult to match the dry delivery of Ali in the following masterful passage: “The regime change carried out by Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly in violation of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, and the United States organized a coalition under the UN flag to take back Kuwait. At the time the phrase ‘national sovereignty’ was much in vogue.”

The liberation of Kuwait meant the restoration of its unpopular ruling family to their fiefdom. Iraq's conscript armies were destroyed as they fled from Kuwait, in violation of the conventions of war, while the Republican Guards were left intact to drown a Shi'ite uprising in blood.

In passing, Ali mentions one consequence that the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia had during the Gulf War on one devout believer just back from helping defeat the Soviet Union as a “freedom fighter” for Islam in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden’s “total alienation from the Saudi ruling family and the attacks of 9/11 were an unexpected minor outcome of the 1990 conflict,” Ali notes. “Blowbacks are never immediate.”

Sanctions, War, Occupation

For the Iraqi people, the upshot was a punishing sanctions regime imposed by the United Nations, along with routine bombings by British and American planes. This according to Ali made Iraq one of the poorest societies on earth, with "the effect of making the people totally dependent on the regime for all basic necessities, strengthening the hold of the regime.”

All of the foregoing brings us to the military conflict that has lasted, in various phases, from March 2003 to the present. One potent aspect of Ali's book is his careful attempt to discern the reason we find Bush in Babylon. Ali holds that this is “a war only partially about oil” and “essentially a war to assert imperial hegemony.”

Ali is quite right that oil did not constitute an exclusive cause for the intervention, but he is mistaken to discount oil in the following manner: “If the war had just been about oil there was nothing to prevent a rapprochement with Saddam Hussein, who would have dealt just as happily with U.S. companies as he did with the French and the Russians.”

This mistakenly conflates the ability to purchase oil (access) with the far more profitable practice of oil extraction (direct control). As Ali mentions elsewhere, the Ba’athists nationalized Iraqi oil in the 1960s, and the signal result of the 2003 invasion, presuming the country can be “stabilized,” would be the industry’s privatization. The primary beneficiaries without question would be multinational energy companies headquartered in the U.S. and Britain.

It is, in other words, hard to be too crass about the emphasis this administration places on unfettered corporate freedom to invest in petroleum production. Nevertheless, Ali’s case for a multicausal analysis, rooted in but not limited to oil, is powerful. Especially useful is the following passage, worth quoting at length lest anyone still harbor thoughts that democracy motivates the current campaign in Iraq:

"If no single reason explains the targeting of Iraq, there is little mystery about the range of calculations behind it. Economically, Iraq possesses the second largest reserves of cheap oil in the world; Baghdad's decision in 2000 to invoice its exports in euros rather than dollars risked imitation by Chavez in Venezuela and the Iranian mullahs; the privatization of the Iraqi wells under U.S. control would help to weaken OPEC; strategically, the existence of an independent Arab regime in Baghdad had always been an irritation to the Israeli military —even when Saddam was an ally of the West, the IDF [Israeli army]supplied spare parts to Teheran during the Iran-Iraq war; with the installation of Republican zealots close to Likud in key positions in Washington, the elimination of a traditional adversary became an attractive immediate goal for Jerusalem. Lastly, just as the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had once been a pointed demonstration of American might to the Soviet Union, so today a blitzkrieg rolling swiftly across Iraq would serve to show the world at large, and perhaps states in the Far East — China, North Korea, even Japan — in particular, that if the chips are down, the United States has, in the last resort, the means to enforce its will."

Unsurprisingly, Arabs never saw Operation Iraqi Freedom as a war for democracy. To them, writes Ali, the invasion was “a grisly charade, a cover for an old-fashioned European-style colonial occupation, constructed like its predecessors on the most rickety of foundations — innumerable falsehoods, cupidity, and imperial fantasies.”

The memory of Arabs is longer than that of their would-be saviors, so they are inclined to see barbarism rather than civilization in the present-day conquest. When American officials failed to safeguard Baghdad’s cultural treasures in 2003, it immediately brought to Iraqi minds the Mongol warriors’ burning of the Baghdad Library in 1258.

Against the imperial juggernaut, Ali cautions, the European Union and United Nations will not stand. He instead poses a strategy of a movement resistance from three-quarters: the Arab world, the United States, and the worldwide global justice movement as manifested in the World Social Forum, which he suggests should begin to campaign for the closing of all U.S. military bases and facilities abroad.

Brief Critique

Here it is that I must close with two points of dissent. The first regards Ali’s unconditional support for the Iraqi resistance. Ali hopes that “the invaders of Iraq will eventually be harried out of the country by a growing national reaction to the occupation regime they will install.”

What would follow, in such a scenario? Ali asserts that while “Ba’athists dominate this resistance in the Baghdad region, they are not the only people involved” and it is possible to speak of “the emergence of a much broader national resistance.”

In a recent interview with Suzi Weissman in these pages, Ali went further, stating “I think the resistance will develop its own ideology and politics as it goes along” and that he knows some of its partisans, who want “an Iraq that is democratic and social democratic.”

Reliable knowledge of the precise political character of the resistance is difficult to obtain, even two years into the conflict, and the resistance is undoubtedly heterogeneous. But it seems more than probable, given Ali’s retelling of the multiple waves of brutality visited upon the Iraqi left over the past 60 years, that organized Ba’athist and Islamist elements far outnumber political leftists or pure-and-simple patriots in the Iraqi resistance. Even the once-formidable Iraqi Communist Party has been reduced to collaboration with the occupiers. (Ali relates graffiti on a Baghdad wall: “ICP = Iraqi Collaborators Party.”)

The presence of some rational, secular, democratic leftists within the resistance does not mean that the resistance as a whole reflects such values. The logical political conclusion of Ali’s history is not unconditional support for the resistance but a judicious, discerning politics that stands on principle against Ba’athism in any incarnation, against mystical Islamist reaction, and against the imperial occupation, while seeking to support whatever forces are committed to the interests of the Iraqi working class and poor.

My second objection pertains to the book’s cover, a contrived image of an Iraqi child pissing on an American soldier. Impish scatology is amusing in some circumstances, and this certainly conveys the ribald, bawdy elements in Ali's prose. At the present conjuncture, however, to put such an image on the front of a book is a case study in the self-defeating phenomenon that Lenin called “infantile leftism” (for this cover, “toddler leftism” is perhaps a more scientific term).

Ali is entirely correct when he writes that the United States is the “crucial” site for worldwide anti-imperialist resistance, because the history of empires teaches us that “it is when their own citizens finally lose faith in the virtue of infinite war and permanent occupations that the system enters into retreat.”

Given an America increasingly awash in propaganda, ignorance, moralism and fear, a boy with penis exposed and urine streaming is not the best possible outreach strategy. Why inhibit any American bookstore from carrying this valuable book, instructor from assigning it, magazine from reviewing it, library from ordering it, or friend from passing it on to someone in the military?

Before us lies a long, difficult, uphill campaign of education and mobilization if inequality and imperialism are to be supplanted by justice and solidarity. Tariq Ali’s books are precisely the kind of texts that we need. Let us hope that his future books are wrapped more intelligently. If we are serious about challenging empire, if neoconservative imperial ideology is ever to be replaced by a world of authentic freedom and democracy, all our messages should be designed to break through the psychological resistances of an American public that must learn to think in radically new ways.

ATC 119, November-December 2005

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Eliizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe

— John McGough

Field Notes from a Catastrophe
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Bloomsbury, New York: 2006,
210 pages, $22.95.

“I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed.” — David Rind, of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, quoted in Field Notes from a Catastrophe

FLOODS IN NORMALLY drought-stricken eastern India have killed hundreds and left 1.5 million homeless this summer. Closer to home, a record-setting heat wave this June killed 225 in the United States, breaking thousands of local temperature records and sending the mercury above 104 degrees as far north as North Dakota.

This year has been the hottest year on record for the U.S. since modern temperature recording began in the 1890s. Globally, the ten hottest years on record have all occurred in the past 15 years.

The hottest year globally ever recorded, 2005 was also the year of the so-called “natural” disaster. The majority of those affected were victim to the devastating earthquake that hit Kashmir and Pakistan on October 8. The event of course was not in itself a function of climate change, but the huge numbers of rural poor living in environmentally degraded and unstable regions certainly contributed to the death toll of over 73,000.

Hurricane Stan affected two million people, mostly victim to flooding and mudslides, when it hit Central America a few days earlier. The number of extreme weather events and the people affected (killed, injured or displaced) are both on the increase. A year ago, Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 2,000 people, displaced over 200,000 from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, caused an estimated $200 billion in damage, and exposed the brutal racial and class inequalities that underwrite uneven capitalist development.

This new climate regime of more numerous and intense hurricanes, droughts and floods has everything to do with our continued industrial age and the socio-economic priorities of ceaseless profit accumulation at the expense of labor and nature.

A growing body of literature on DAI, or “dangerous anthropogenic interference” on the world’s climate, is exposing modern industrial civilization’s potentially irreversible and catastrophic effects on the course of nature. (A cottage industry in literature — scientific, journalistic, memoirist — on Katrina itself has also hit the shelves on its one-year anniversary.)

It’s Getting Hot in Here

Field Notes from a Catastrophe, by New Yorker science writer Elizabeth Kolbert, provides a captivating and readable account of the development of the science of global warming, alongside shocking vignettes that demonstrate the rapidly altering effects climate change is having on our world.(1)

In 1859, Irish physicist John Tyndall built the first ratio spectrophotometer to compare how different gases absorb and transmit radiation. He discovered that some gases are “transparent” to visible and infrared radiation, while others — like carbon dioxide and methane — were not. The presence of these later in the earth’s atmosphere, Tyndall argued, largely determines the earth’s climate.

A bit later, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius produced theoretical models for the effect of CO2 levels on the earth’s temperature. Completing his studies in 1895, Arrhenius “recognized that industrialization and climate change were intimately related, and that the consumption of fossil fuels must, over time, lead to warming.”(41)

The more modern story of global warming science picks up with work of Charles Keeling in the 1950’s. Keeling and the U.S. Weather Bureau set up an observatory at Mauna Loa on the Island of Hawaii to measure CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The result of measurements made there since 1959 reveal an unflagging increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, as shown in the now famous Keeling Curve. Whereas CO2 levels stood at 319 parts per million when the observatory began operation, today they measure 380 parts per million. (44)

Arctic ice cores enable us to gauge both the temperature and atmospheric makeup of the earth over hundreds of thousands of years. The Vostok core from Antarctica goes back 420,000 years and shows that the earth’s current temperature is as warm as its ever been in this long history. CO2 levels are now rising off the chart. During the previously hottest epoch, 325,000 years ago, the atmosphere contained only 299 CO2 parts per million. (128)

It may take a while for the atmosphere to warm in response to this unprecedented rise in CO2 levels, as a built in delay effect always operates at certain levels of climate change. (105) The corporate boardrooms and their political agents are working to prevent people from putting the pieces together too soon, at least before a profitable way is found to save the current economic system.

There’s a lot at stake — certainly current investments and profits, maybe the whole setup too — and those at the helm have poured millions into the creation of phony science, the promotion of business-friendly bureaucrats into positions dealing with resources, parks and the environment, and the manufacture of doubt and confusion about the reality of global warming.

Thus the current administration would have us consider “greenhouse gas intensity” — or the levels of greenhouse gases in relation to economic output — and forget about the actual changes in the atmosphere. (158)

Falling Through the Ice

Pre-historic air trapped in arctic ice-cores is not the only evidence of our new climate regime. Many fundamental and sweeping changes in nature and society are already evident “at the surface,” so to speak, as Kolbert’s expeditions and interviews described in Field Notes show.

She describes projects of scientists aboard the ice-breaker Der Groseilliers to research ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. After years of preparation for the studies, the ship sailed north, only to discover the floes were nearly half as thick as they’d anticipated! (25) They settled on one anyways.

In 12 months it drifted 300 miles north and itself decreased in thickness by a third. A new regulation on the project requires scientists to wear life jackets, as many had begun to fall through ice.

Warming is rapidly altering migratory and habitation behavior too, as animals chase the northward retreating climate they need to survive. English scientists tell Kolbert that butterflies are moving northward, with typically southern species now being recorded in the formerly middle climates. (70) A few years ago, Inuit tribes in Alaska began noticing the presence of robins, a bird they have never seen there before and have no word for. (64)

Kolbert describes projects underway in the Netherlands to clear land for the inevitably rising ocean and river waters. A Dutch construction firm is even building “amphibious homes” and roads designed to survive a regularly flooded environment. (130)

Unprecedented changes in the earth’s climate and landscape that are happening before our eyes sound an even louder alarm as scientists recognize now that shifts in climate regimes can happen “catastrophically” — with long periods of relative stability punctuated by radical reversals into a new, fundamentally different climatic period. We are either past or in the midst of such a transition, when numerous influences — for the first time, of our making — accumulate to propel conditions towards a “tipping point” beyond which there is no return. (34, 50)(2)

Business As Usual?

Kolbert’s book has been compared to Rachel Carson’s galvanizing Silent Spring (1962), which publicized the destruction caused by pesticide use and led to the ban of DDT. Field Notes is an alarming account of global warming and a solid introduction to the science. It also gives a hard look at various existing schemes proposed to meet the crisis.

As might be expected, the book takes the global warming debunkers, including representatives of the current administration, harshly to task. She isn’t soft on the Democrats either, pointing out that CO2 emissions from the United States were 15% higher at the end of the Clinton-Gore years than they were in 1990. (157)

Existing international efforts are also open for criticism. Kolbert writes that “if every country — including the United States — were to fulfill obligations under Kyoto, concentrations in the atmosphere would still be headed to five hundred parts per million, and beyond.” (166)

There is a scary, skeptical tone in Kolbert’s descriptions of all the efforts she notes. Even the 15 “stabilization wedges” as proposed by two Princeton scientists — which include measures like carbon emission “taxes” and the installation of a million wind turbines (!) — would require a huge level of commitment and coordination that Kolbert doubts is possible. They probably are, given current socio-economic priorities.

But beyond calling for a “global response” on the book’s last page, Kolbert doesn’t hazard any proposals to meet this crisis. (187) A crisis of this magnitude, in my opinion, would require us to fundamentally alter our relations with one another and with the ecologies that sustain us. The American way of life — which demands personal cars, air conditioning, everyday wastefulness, and where our wonderful model of economic development translates into planned obsolescence, poverty, and a society where the average person consumes five times the energy of the global average person — will certainly have to go.

A global economy that requires constant expansion of production and inceasing exploitation of finite resources — fossil fuels, labor — would have to be transformed at its roots. We’ll have to produce less — and fundamentally differently and more equitably — than we do now.

Challenging the regime of capital — based as it is on the cheapest and fastest exploitation of labor and nature and the endless expansion of exchange value — and the creation of an ecological social-economic democracy, is at the core of this necessary transformation. It’s either this, or learn fast from that Dutch firm to build those “floating houses.”

Notes

Incidentally, these qualities are the undeniable virtues also of Al Gore’s new movie An Inconvenient Truth. For someone new to this stuff, there’s a lot to learn there. But you have to stomach a lot of pathetic reminiscence and self-promotion from Gore along the way Perhaps the accompanying book (or CD-ROM, or musical, or whatever else…) is better on that score.
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In a recent survey of the new global warming books in The New York Review of Books (Volume 31, Number 12, July 13 2006), James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies argues that we are in a 10-year window beyond which time the dangerous changes now observable will become self-reinforcing and magnified through “feedback loops” in the climate system.
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ATC 125, November-December 2006

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James Green's Death in the Haymarket

— Patrick M. Quinn

Death in the Haymarket:
A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing
That Divided Gilded Age America
by James Green
New York, Pantheon Books,
2006. 383 pages, $26.95.

JAMES GREEN’S DEATH in the Haymarket tells the story of the anarcosyndicalist militants accused of perpetrating the throwing of a bomb that killed police at a workers’ rally at the Haymarket in Chicago on May 4, 1886. They were subsequently framed, convicted, and four martyrs hanged by the judicial system of Cook County on “Black Friday,” November 11, 1887.

Death in the Haymarket is clearly one of the very best histories of the working class that has appeared in recent decades. Green does much more than recount the story of what happened between May 4, 1886 and November 11, 1887. He situates the events of Haymarket in a much broader context — the social, economic, political, and cultural history of the working class and their capitalist exploiters and oppressors in Chicago from the end of the Civil War through the events of 1886-87 and beyond.

By so doing, Green enables the reader to grasp the enormity of the social forces in conflict in Chicago and elsewhere in the United States during the two decades that followed the Civil War. Green clearly demonstrates that what happened in Chicago in 1886 and 1887 was a significant expression of the titanic struggle between labor and capital during the last half of the 19th century. The two inherently adversarial key components of modern capitalism — the emerging modern industrial capitalist class and the modern industrial working class in formation — engaged in a monumental battle to establish a relationship of forces.

With the grace and descriptive power of a novelist, Green devotes the first 10 of his 16 chapters to the struggles between labor and capital in Chicago (and elsewhere) in the post-Civil War decades, as the new capitalist class built enormous fortunes by extracting an extraordinarily large amount of surplus value from an increasingly impoverished working class. At the same time, he shows how the working class organized to defend itself by joining and building an unprecedented new labor union movement, hallmarked by the Knights of Labor.

Drawing upon the pioneering methods of the previous generation of brilliant labor historians, such as Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, Eric Hobsbawm and especially Edward (E.P.) Thompson, Green describes how, beginning with the great national railroad strike of 1877, the industrial capitalists set in motion a combination of tactics designed to defeat and repress the militant workers’ movement.

These methods included the extensive use of scabs drawn from the large unemployed reserve pool of labor; the use of brute force by state militias, federal troops, private armies of hired thugs and the police; the use of the law and the courts; and the middle classes’ inflamed fear of the working class promulgated by pro-capitalist newspapers and other molders of public opinion.

Green describes the formation of the new industrial working class, comprised in the rapidly growing new industrial cities, such as Chicago, of hundreds of thousands of recently arrived immigrants from Europe — most from Germany, Bohemia and Scandinavia. As the 1880s unfolded, many of these workers were organized by the first significant national labor union in the United States, the Knights of Labor.

Within the newly organized working class, a wide variety of political views emerged, including those of socialists influenced by the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and a smaller, but more vocal, current of radical militants who became known as anarchists.

These militants were not content with piecemeal, incremental improvements in the conditions of the working class, but instead advanced the need for a revolutionary transformation of society that would result in a “cooperative commonwealth” where workers would democratically determine their working conditions.

Chief among the leaders of this vocal revolutionary left current were August Spies, a recent immigrant from Germany, and Albert Parsons, a former Confederate Army soldier from Texas, who had been a partisan of the freed Black slaves fighting racist oppression during Reconstruction. The “anarchism” that Spies, Parsons, and their comrades espoused had little in common with the “anarchism” of Karl Marx’s political opponent, Michael Bakunin, but was more akin to a revolutionary socialist vision of a new society that would replace capitalism.

With their comrades, Spies, Albert Parsons and his wife Lucy, a dynamic militant agitator of African-American origin who was also from Texas, campaigned relentlessly against the abuses of the industrial barons using inflammatory rhetoric that might today be characterized as “ultraleft.” They concentrated their organizing efforts in the struggle for the eight-hour day, which had been a central goal of the working class since the end of the Civil War, and insisted that workers should continue to be paid for a 10-hour day even after their workday hours were reduced.

The Haymarket Bomb

On May 1, 1886, the first May Day, a massive strike in support of the eight-hour work day occurred in Chicago. Two days later police fired on workers on strike at the huge McCormick Reaper Works, killing six. Spies, Parsons, and others organized a protest rally to be held the next night, May 4th, at the Haymarket on Randolph Street on the western edge of Chicago’s central business district.

The evening protest rally was almost over, when a large force of police marched toward the dispersing crowd. Somebody threw a bomb into the ranks of the police, killing one of them. The police opened fire indiscriminately on the rally (and in the process on their own ranks), killing rally participants, bystanders and policemen.

The next day August Spies and six other anarchists, Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fisher, Louis Lingg, George Engel, Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebe, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder. Albert Parsons had fled to Wisconsin, but returned and turned himself in as the trial of the accused began.

The trial, held in a frenzied climate of fear and hatred whipped up by the press, was presided over by an openly biased judge before a hand-picked jury of 12 men, all of whom stated in advance that the accused anarchists deserved to be hanged. In a gross miscarriage of justice, the eight accused men were convicted and sentenced to death.

Just prior to the date of their execution, the Governor of Illinois, Richard Oglesby, commuted the sentences of three of the eight men to life in prison. On the eve of the execution, one of the condemned men, Louis Lingg, confined to his jail cell, died after a dynamite cap exploded in his mouth. His death was called a suicide, although many thought that Lingg had been murdered by the police.

At noon on November 11, 1887, in a structure behind the Ccurthouse and jail, Spies, Parsons, Engel, and Fisher, clad in white hoods and robes with their hands bound behind their backs and their legs tied together, were dropped through the scaffold trapdoors, where they dangled from their ropes until each strangled to death.

Honoring the Martyrs

Two days later, the largest funeral procession in Chicago history accompanied carriages carrying the five corpses to the railroad station and thence by train to Waldheim Cemetery west of Chicago, where they were buried.

On June 25, 1893, a beautiful monument honoring the five Haymarket martyrs was dedicated in the Waldheim Cemetery. One day later the courageous progressive Illinois Governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three imprisoned men who had not been executed, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden and Oscar Neebe. But as Green notes, the militant labor movement in Chicago never recovered from the impact of Haymarket.

Seven years after Spies, Parsons, Engel, and Fisher were hanged, the great strike of the Pullman Palace Car workers in Pullman, Illinois, George Pullman’s model company town 12 miles south of Chicago, a strike led by Eugene V. Debs, was smashed. The relationship between the capitalist class and the industrial working class in Chicago set by the events of Haymarket was further decisively established.

Like his colleague David Roediger (who co-edited with Franklin Rosemont The Haymarket Scrapbook, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), James Green is one of the very best contemporary historians of the working class. His Death in the Haymarket is a must-read for everyone interested in the history of the working class in the United States.

ATC 125, November-December 2006

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A Record of Resistance

— Dianne Feeley

Our Culture Is Our Resistance
Repression, Refuge, and Healing in Guatemala
Preface by Rigoberta Menchú Tum
Essays by Ricardo Falla, Francisco, Goldman and Susanne Jonas
Photographs by Jonathan Moller
powerHouse Books ( Lee Scott, “Letter from Lee Scott,” WalMartFacts.com <http://http://www.turnerlibros.com
Spanish edition http://www.turnerlibros.com). Large format,
208 pages, 147 tritone photographs, $45 hardcover.

HERE IS A stunning book, filled with photographs that record the suffering and strength of the indigenous population in the Guatemalan countryside over the past 15 years. In short essays and photos Our Culture Is Our Resistance records the harsh life of those who survived the army’s “scorched earth” of the early 1980s and fled to isolated areas of the country.

The majority of the 624 recorded massacres were in the department of Ixcan, a “frontier” area only settled in the 1960s. Some of the survivors fled to the areas where they were born. Others went over the border to Mexico, but approximately 20,000 lived in isolated areas in Ixcan or Peten.

This book focuses on the survivors in the mountains and rain forests, who organized themselves into the Committees of Population in Resistance (CPRs). During the same period the military organized model villages that were under army command, and some of those captured over the years ended up in these villages.

Witnesses

Many of the photos detail what it is like to live for years with the army in pursuit. Life continues even on the run, as a young girl walks home with a piece of firewood and wild greens to eat.

We see women cooking the corn that will later be ground into tortilla; a barber cutting a man’s hair in the middle of a field; structures going up, fields planted, women bathing in the river; children in a make-shift school, a community health promoter examining an infant in a clinic, a community operating a hand-powered mill to squeeze juice out of the sugarcane.

Another is the book’s stunning cover: a wedding party, walking along the road appropriately outfitted in boots, the young bride and groom carrying flowers in celebration. But if we see everyday life in a lush setting with very meager resources, the words of the participants tell the other side of the story: how they had to flee their new home because they were spotted by the army, how the military found their corn field and burned it, how their relatives weren’t able to escape so they hid until the army left and then come back and hastily buried them.

At the end of 1990, three years before Moller came to Guatemala, the CPRs in the Sierra came together and decided they had to break out of their isolation. They issued a statement announcing their existence as a civilian population and demanded that the government protect their rights. The army issued a counterstatement stating that such a population didn’t exist and they were all guerrillas.

The CPR announcement opened up a new phase, with human rights workers from the Catholic Church and non-governmental agencies reaching out to these communities. Moller joined them as an “accompanier” — a human rights observer who acts as a witness. And as the CPRs were demanding their rights and receiving more publicity, army attacks decreased.

By the later half of the ‘90s different units of the CPRs were able to negotiate with the government to find land on which they could resettle. Moller documents several of the communities that were set up, including Primavera del Iaxcan in Quiche, the Salvador Fajardo community that settled on an old finca in Peten, and the Union Victoria and Nueva Esperanza communities that settled on old coffee plantations near the Pacific Coast. Others were able to return to their homes. Some communities have maintained collective work while others have settled in areas with poorer land and many have been forced to find work on nearby plantations.

Following the signing of the peace treaty (1996) that ended Guatemala’s civil war, both the Catholic Church and the UN-sponsored Truth Commission issued reports (1998 and 1999 respectively) that documented the death of over 200,000 people.

The Truth Commission found that 93% of the violence was committed by agents of the state, mostly by the army (3% by the guerrillas), and condemned Washington’s complicity. These reports have aided the survivors in their demand to reclaim the remains of those massacred or “disappeared.”

Moller worked with the forensic team of the Office of Peace and Reconciliation in 2000-01. He records both the work of the forensic team as it carefully recovers the remains as well as of the community, observing as it gathers to watch the process. Several bring photographs of their relatives. In one a Mayan priest performs a ceremony as he prays over the bodies.

A series of photographs records the recovery of 120 people from 22 villages in the municipality of Nebaj. We see the watchful community gathered and waiting as the various clandestine cemeteries are unearthed. We see a procession of villagers at the end of a long day returning home with the dead in cardboard boxes. We see the former orphanage that served as the forensic team’s home and laboratory, lined with the labeled boxes.

During the months when the team cleaned, reconstructed and analyzed the dead we see the candles, crosses and flowers that indicate family members visiting. There are several forensic photographs: showing how bullets shattered a jawbone, the trajectory of a bullet as it went through a skull, hand bones that had been crushed by a heavy object at the time of death, a beautifully composed exhibit of an unidentified young male guerrilla fighter who was killed as he and six others attempted to disarm a grenade wired as a trap near the village of Tzalbal in 1983.

The section ends with eight photos showing how the families prepare the coffins, laying the bones out with new clothes and other objects. The main church is then filled with coffins and the town turns out to accompany the coffins through the streets of Nebaj and on to the cemetery.

Human Rights Meltdown

The very last section of the book, “Five Days in Nebaj,” is from 2002, with a final note from Moller dated September 2003 and an update from Susanne Jonas in March 2004. By 2002 Amnesty International stated the country is in a “human rights meltdown.” Three photos of an arson at a parish house in February 2002 demonstrate the level of intimidation the right exhorts against those they consider leaders in the struggle for human rights.

Since Moller’s book came out, the violence in Guatemala has only grown.

Violence against women has risen astronomically. According to the National Statistics Institute, between 2000-04, almost 1600 women were murdered. During the first five months of 2005, the Guatemalan Women’s Group reported another 381 additional deaths. It is difficult to understand the factors involved since at least 40% of the cases have never been investigated or the investigation was shelved.

The government is arresting grassroots leaders of indigenous, union and social justice organizations. At least 43 are under incitement with another 47 threatened with criminal investigations. Police harass demonstrators and authorities attempt to brand organizers as terrorists. This is then picked up and regurgitated by U.S. government officials.

I would strongly recommend Our Culture Is Our Resistance. I think it is particularly valuable for those who have some familiarity with the political situation in Guatemala during the war, but the photographs are so revealing that even someone unfamiliar would learn a great deal.

For the person just learning about Guatemala, I’d also recommend reading I…Rigoberta Menchí (Verso Books, 1987) and Ricardo Falla’s Massacres in the Jungle (Westview Press, 1994). Both of those authors are represented in Our Culture Is Our Resistance. The book also has a four-page chronology of Guatemalan events and a one-page list of resources.

ATC 121, March-April 2006

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For the Love of Country?

— Jennifer Jopp

to the flag
The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance
By Richard J. Ellis
University Press of Kansas, 2005,
297 pages, $29.95 Cloth.

VISITED ONCE AGAIN by the vultures of patriotism and gnawing anxieties about the nature of our republic, we are falling into a renewed debate about our peculiar brand of patriotism. Investing symbols and rituals with meaning others find puzzling, we adorn our automobiles with yellow decals, sport flag lapel pins, and require school children to daily swear allegiance to the state.

In other countries, more schooled in the dangers of demagogic nationalism, such open displays of fervent patriotism are greeted with suspicion.

For those who would understand the contours of the contemporary landscape, to the flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance is engrossing and edifying. Richard Ellis tells the fascinating story of the creation of the Pledge of Allegiance from its origins in the schoolhouse flag movement of the late 1880s until the recent Supreme Court decision in the Newdow case. [See Elk Grove Unified School District v. Michael Newdow.]

Ellis opens his discussion with the 2002 Federal Court of Appeals decision in Newdow, in which the Court first declared the phrase “under God” of the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of church and state. [See Newdow v. U.S. Congress 292 F.3d 597 (2002)].

Most telling were the reactions to the Court’s decision. Senator Byrd, more lately known to us as a voice of reason, thundered that he wasn’t going to “…stand for this country’s being ruled by a bunch of atheists. If they don’t like it, let them leave.”

A Gallup poll, meanwhile, found that nine in ten Americans favored keeping the Pledge unchanged (always shocking to discover, once again, what a minority one is in!) (to the flag, ix, x. All page references in this review are to the book.)

Congressional and other leaders spoke of “two centuries of American tradition,” in which we have “always been ‘one Nation, under God.’” Historical memory in America is short and few Americans remembered — or knew — that the phrase had been added only in 1954. Such amnesia allowed Americans to view the phrase as part of our immutable past.

Indeed few Americans know much about these most-frequently cited words in our culture. The real history of the Pledge of Allegiance, Ellis remarks, is darker and more unsettling than current discussion allows. In essence the Pledge is bound up with the underside of American democracy, with the pervasive uncertainties that shape our political culture.

Fearing Immigrants, Radicals, Communists

Anxieties, reveals Ellis, “loom large in the creation, propagation, and amending” of the Pledge. A list of these anxieties is by no means unfamiliar to students of American political culture, the first being anxiety about immigrants. American ambivalence about immigrants is intimately tied, Ellis asserts, to the notion of requiring children to swear allegiance to the state in a public school classroom.

Qualms, too, about the growing commercialism of American culture in the late nineteenth century tapped earlier republican anxiety about the difficulties of maintaining public virtue in an age devoted to materialism’s excesses. Anxiety about the ability of a free society to summon the self-sacrifice necessary to defend the republic in times of danger also shaped the spread of the movement to require the Pledge of Allegiance.

While closely connected to an anxiety about immigrants, anxieties about radicals and about Communists, especially of the home-grown variety, were central to the effort to add the phrase “under God” during the Cold War-induced hysteria of the 1950s.

Ellis first turns to the early history of the creation of the Pledge, the origins of which he finds in a late nineteenth-century movement to put a flag in every schoolhouse in the nation. The link is martial and closely connected to the Civil War: the American flag was omnipresent throughout the North after the fall of Fort Sumter.

Displays of the flag continued sporadically in the years after the war. These infrequent presentations of the flag began to alarm in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The rapid industrialization of the country, the accompanying shifts in social mores, and the influx of immigrants gave rise to fears about the future of the republic. People decried the loss of patriotism, self-sacrifice and national unity present during the war. For some critics of the new materialism and individualism, the veteran came to embody all of the virtues of an earlier era.

New York City, port of call for millions of new immigrants, was — not surprisingly — the site of initial efforts to inculcate new immigrants, and especially their school-age children, with the tenets of American patriotism.

The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) designed a flag ceremony to be held at City College. The national branch of the organization, quite taken with the idea, urged branches to engage in the “patriotic practice” of having veterans present school children with the flag and to teach the children to view the flag “with as much reverence as did the Israelites look upon the Ark of Covenant.” (5)

Aiding the GAR in these efforts was Youth’s Companion, a mass-produced family weekly magazine with a circulation of more than 400,000 subscribers. The story of the role this magazine came to play in the creation and dissemination of the Pledge makes fascinating reading. Long before Tupperware, this magazine had hit on the idea of using premiums to urge its readers to solicit new subscriptions. The October 1888 issue of Youth’s Companion offered a flag as a premium.

The head of the premium department, James B. Upham, took it as his task to rekindle the patriotism of America’s youth. A proponent of the schoolhouse flag movement, he sponsored an essay contest, with a flag as the prize. By December, the magazine turned increasing attention to the issue and sought to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Columbus by “raising a flag over every Public school…” in the country.” (8) This brilliant move linked the schoolhouse flag movement to the World’s Columbian Exposition, one of the most eagerly-awaited events of the late 19th century.

In 1891, Francis Bellamy came to work for the magazine. Upham and Bellamy shared a strong religious faith, one that shaped both their private practices and their views of public morality, as well as similar family and class backgrounds.

They soon came to share, as well, the work of the National Columbian Public School Celebration. Both men saw their efforts as continuing the work of their ancestors and rekindling the “spirit of selflessness, local civic involvement, and American patriotism” that they saw as threatened by “rootless and restless modern America.” (13)

Meaning, Ritual and War

Ellis next turns his attention to excavating the meaning of the Pledge. Naturally, those who study the Pledge of Allegiance attribute various meanings to it. In an engaging discussion of a children’s book, Ellis highlights the “civic patriotism” view generally current. Others, critics of American political culture, seek to emphasize Bellamy’s socialist principles and uncover a “hidden history” in the Pledge’s meaning. (26)

Ellis turns to Bellamy’s speeches and writings to find out what Bellamy himself had in mind when he penned the document. Bellamy’s words strike a note of anxiety about immigrants and emphasize the “potency of the flag to Americanize the alien child.” For Bellamy and others, public schools were the “front lines in the battle” to Americanize children of immigrants.

For men for whom war provided the requisite virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice, the military proved a seductive model. Thus, the original salute accompanying the Pledge was a raised arm with the palm held upward. (44)

How did we come to impose on our young people a ritual drawn from military exercises? The omnipresence of the Pledge owes everything to war. New York passed the first flag salute statute in 1898, the day after the United States declared war on Spain. (52)

In the years before World War One, there were few efforts to standardize the ritual and there existed a wide variety in its exercise. The Great War and the Red Scare that followed changed all that. In a 1923 essay entitled, “A New Plan Counter-Attack on the Nation’s Internal Foes” (including Pacifists, Wobblies, and others), Bellamy outlined his plan to use the Pledge of Allegiance to promote patriotism. (68)

The close connection between the mandating of patriotic rituals and the fear of subversion is illuminated throughout this discussion: The General Strike provided the context for the 1919 passage of a mandatory flag salute statute in Washington State. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the flag salute and Pledge of Allegiance gradually became a mandatory part of the school day in districts across the nation.

As the Pledge gained prominence as a symbol of American patriotism, resistance to reciting it grew apace. Sporadic resistance had, of course, existed from the outset. The most important and enduring sources of opposition to the Pledge were religious.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, in particular, faced great hostility and repeated episodes of vigilante violence for their dissent from the increasingly common practice. In Jehovah’s Witnesses’ opposition to the Pledge, they noted the similarities between the raised stiff arm salute then common in the United States and the “Heil Hitler” salute of Nazi Germany, where the sect faced persecution.

A shift in public perception after school expulsions and brutality against Jehovah’s Witnesses (often carried out by members of the American Legion), as well as an interest in delineating the American practice from the German one, led to an amended (and standardized) salute with the hand over the heart (“Lincoln’s Salute”), making the Pledge “safe for democracy.” (120)

Policing Americanism

Fear again raised its head in the 1950s debate about what distinguished the United States from Soviet Russia. Here another fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus, took up the mantle of “policing the boundaries of Americanism…” (130) Conceived as a weapon in the war against Communism, which deadened the “mind and soul by a materialistic philosophy of life.” The new phrase added to America’s arsenal of weapons a “spiritual weapon which will forever be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.” (137)

Protesting the Pledge in the following decades had a decidedly different cast. Students active in the Civil Rights movement and in protests against the Vietnam War began to object to the Pledge of Allegiance on political grounds. By the middle of the 1970s, students had won the right to remain seated during the recitation of the Pledge and not to be expelled from school for their refusal to participate.

Teachers, too, struggled to be free from the requirement of leading their students in the morning ritual. Here the issue was more complex, given the role assigned to teachers in the inculcation of patriotism. The courts, however, ultimately also ruled that it was not constitutional to compel teachers to lead their classes in such exercises when there were alternate methods of instilling civic education.

Why Pledge? To What?

“One nation…indivisible?” asks Ellis, as he illuminates the ways in which Republicans in the years since the Reagan Presidency have effectively mined public discussion of the Pledge of Allegiance and made great political theater out of public recitations of the Pledge to send their Democratic opponents scurrying.

By 1988, the Republican Party platform vowed to “protect the Pledge of Allegiance in all schools as a reminder of the values which must be at the core of learning for a free society.”(182) Throughout the 1990s, the Republican Party turned again and again to this successful technique for partisan political gain.

Republican strategists used frequent references to the Pledge as a symbol to the populace, allowing them to portray themselves as more “in touch with the values of the average American than are liberal Democrats.”(207) In the aftermath of September 11th, many states either enhanced existing statutes or added new requirements for the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

Why does the United States, almost alone among Western democratic nations, require its school children to swear allegiance to the nation-state? What does it mean to “pledge allegiance” in a liberal society? Bellamy chose the word allegiance, notes Ellis, as one which would resonate for a generation still familiar with the Civil War, for he noted that “allegiance was the great word of the Civil War period,” when it “had been used as a test of loyalty.” (210)

The unique feature of the Pledge, of course, unlike other all other pledges is that it is required of children. Ellis discusses, but does not explore as fully as he might, the ways in which anxieties about the American nation center on childhood.

A late nineteenth-century advocate of teaching patriotism in public schools, in language one might hear echoed today, viewed public schools as the “great fusing furnace” in which “from the plastic stream of American childhood” patriotic rituals make “American citizens.” (216) Then, as now, the Pledge is really about grafting the transformative power of war through the daily enactment of fealty onto children, thereby creating virtuous citizens for the republic.

Paradoxes abound. The Pledge expresses and reflects “a profound faith in the transformative and liberating power of American ideas.” Adherence to the central tenets of a creedal orthodoxy allow all to “become American.” Yet the price of admission is high: adherence to the central tenets of a creedal orthodoxy.

The irony, as Ellis so effectively excavates, is that those who promote the Pledge are often cast as the true patriots, while it is “arguably those who would dispense with a daily Pledge who are the ones who harbor the greatest faith in the enduring power and strength of American institutions and American ideas.” (222)

While incantations to God and justice might give us pause, national self-criticism and the mobilization of movements for social justice are perhaps two of the Pledge’s as-yet-to- be-fulfilled promises.

For those of us long accustomed to digging around in the dark underside of American history, there’s not much here to surprise. Yet this book offers a highly readable account of a complex and important aspect of our ever-so-mysterious political culture. Long used, as Ellis so convincingly conveys, in an almost entirely celebratory way to tell the tale of American greatness, the Pledge of Allegiance raises as well the possibility of other understandings.

“For the Love of Country,” Recommended Reading

Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The Case for Contamination" in the New York Times Magazine, January 1, 2006, pp. 30-37, 52. Appiah is also the author of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.

Joshua Cohen, Ed. For the Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism.

David Gutterman, "Beyond Belief: A Curious Quest for Democracy, " Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2005, pp.16-20.

Eric L. Muller Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II.

Cecelia Elizabeth O'Leary To Die For: The Paradoxes of American Patriotism.

ATC 121, March-April 2006

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Four Books on Hegemony and Resistance

— John Vandermeer

The Corporation:
The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
By Joel Bakan
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005 $14 paper.

Hegemony or Survival
America’s Quest for Global Dominance
By Noam Chomsky
New York: Henry Holt & Company 2004, $13 paper.

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim
America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror
By Mahmood Mamdani
New York: Doubleday Publishing 2005, $14.95 paperback.

Cuba
A Revolution in Motion
By Isaac Saney
London: Zed Books, 2004, $19.95 paper.

THERE ARE TIMES when a key analysis has a wakeup effect. The last year saw the publication of four books that together have a potential of such an event, at least for those U.S. citizens who are motivated to try and understand and change the world. The four were not written with the idea that they would be read together, yet taken together they are, I believe, more thought-provoking than if considered separately.

Hegemony or Survival, by Noam Chomsky, is about Euro-American Imperialism; Joel Bakan’s The Corporation describes the underlying source of imperial need; Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is about the aftermath of the Cold War; and the last, Cuba, a Revolution in Motion, by Isaac Saney, presents a potential model for the future. Chomsky shows what is wrong, Bakan tells why, Mamdani makes it current, and Saney provides hope.

Chomsky dissects U.S. foreign policy with typical penetrating insights, using his customary model of power and its maintenance. The emphasis is on the present, but with clear forays into the historical roots of particular policy choices made by recent administrations. He begins with a sobering biological note: as a species we seem to have developed the technology for self-annihilation, but not the sociopolitical skills that would allow for control of that technology. And in particular, the United States of America has developed a pathological need for hegemony that threatens our survival.

Chomsky’s focus is on the post-Soviet period, where the United States is the world’s unchallenged military power, and on the attack on the World Trade Center as a pivotal moment. As he noted in his book 9/11, the attack was certainly a turning point in world history, but not for the reasons given by Washington. Instead, he points out, for the first time in U.S. history, the guns of terror were turned around.

He notes that there remains only one country in the world charged with terrorism in a court of law, when the World Court judged the United States guilty during the contra war against Nicaragua. This remains an important historical point progressives need to cite more frequently: the country that boasts most loudly about fighting terrorism is the only one that has ever been formally found guilty of said crime.

As Chomsky points out elsewhere, a good first step in a sincere fight against terrorism would be to simply stop engaging in it. Chomsky dissects the U.S. political agenda with characteristic bluntness, and an irony that can be fully appreciated only by a progressive mind. For example:

“The final years of the millennium witnessed a display of exuberant self-adulation that may even have surpassed its none-too-glorious predecessors, with awed acclaim for the leaders of an “idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,” dedicated to “principles and values” for the first time in history.”

Having used Chomsky’s writings in undergraduate courses, I note that his style can be confusing to the naive. I have seen statements like the above passage taken literally without the irony intended — such being the state of U.S. higher education. But even if the irony is mainly to be appreciated by fellow travelers, the analysis remains profound, as in all of Chomsky’s work.

In elaborating the problems of Iraq and the Middle East, Chomsky predictably emphasizes the U.S.-Israeli axis. The almost universal animosity of the Arab world against the United States is grounded in the correct perception of the long-standing mutual association between the United States and Israel, the most dangerous entity in the Middle East.

Israel acts as a U.S. surrogate for strategic control of Middle Eastern oil supplies, and the United States is Israel’s sugar daddy. Bringing Turkey into the equation, Chomsky notes that much of the Middle East regards these three countries as the true axis of evil.

Chomsky’s model is, as in his previous works, the maintenance and projection of power and privilege. It is an attractive model for two reasons. First, it obviously works as an explanation of the world — ask who is powerful and examine what they do to maintain it. The curtain is usually pulled back to reveal a self-interested power broker at the controls.

Second, it is a model that almost everyone can recognize. Those who currently have power and privilege construct whatever needs to be constructed to maintain their own competitive advantage.

The Corporation and its Pathology

This brings us to The Corporation. Joel Bakan, a Canadian lawyer and law professor, provides an historical and legal analysis of the very idea of the corporation. The book’s subtitle The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power is not just dressing designed to sell books.

Bakan begins with the definition of pathology; moves to the nature of the corporation as an individual with rights and responsibilities, and concludes that this particular structure is probably not the best we can do, indeed it could very well lead to our ultimate end — the mechanism of Chomsky’s biological salvo about our ultimate survivability.

Bakan’s analysis is mainly legal. The corporation as a legal entity must not only operate within a prescribed set of laws, but also must evolve according to particular legal principles.

These principles, while set out for all to see, are remarkably at odds with the image that today’s large corporations seek to project: Pfizer seeks to produce medicines to help the sick; Archer-Daniels-Midland seeks to grow food to feed the world; Amco supports biomedical research to prolong life.

The philanthropic activities of corporations and the foundations they spin off are legion. The wise modern corporate manager seeks to project his or her corporation as having legitimate humanistic goals. But as Bakan so eloquently notes, it is not legally permissible for a corporation to pursue such goals.

After providing numerous examples of corporations’ good deeds (whether sponsoring Little League teams or feeding the world) he goes into fascinating detail about an interview he was granted with free-market guru Milton Friedman. In addition to the ultimately unflattering portrait of a self-absorbed and delusional egomaniac, Friedman’s analysis is ultimately correct. Corporations are not legally bound to do anything except pursue profit.

Indeed the corporation, by fundamental economic principles, is legally bound to do nothing except make profit. All the talk about corporate responsibility (especially in the areas of the environment and labor rights) is not just smokescreen; under its charter that activity is actually illegal.

A particularly instructive example is the experience of Henry Ford. Bakan reports Ford as saying “I do not believe that we should make such awful profits on our cars ... A reasonable profit is right, but not too much.” As a consequence he slashed prices on the Model T and raised workers wages.

But the Dodge brothers, major shareholders in the Ford Company, had big plans to build their own car company, using the dividends from their shares in Ford. When Ford decided to cancel the dividends in 1916 in order to provide lower prices for his customers, the Dodge brothers brought him into court arguing that “Profits belong to shareholders ... and Ford had no right to give their money away to customers, however good his intentions. The judge agreed.”

The court’s decision pointed out that a (publicly held) business corporation could not be run “for the merely incidental benefit of shareholders and for the primary purpose of benefiting others.”

Even if a hypothetical CEO wanted to be environmentally responsible, or give priority to labor rights, he or she is legally compelled to maximize profits and can engage in other social benefits only when these have a prospect of increasing those profits.

The legal system, of course, reflects the underlying requirements of the current stage of capitalism. Corporations, which are legally chartered for maximizing profit and capital accumulation, can’t be permitted to stray from that purpose. As Bakan summarizes, “Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal — at least when it is genuine.”

I do take minor issue with Bakan’s historical setting. He begins his story about 150 years ago, but my own reading of corporate history begins far earlier, with the Dutch East India Company.

The basic structural form, as so persuasively argued by Karl Polanyi in his classic The Great Transformation, was the consequence of the special kind of market that emerged in Amsterdam in the 17th century, where goods from far-off lands were purchased by men and women of means.

The combination of a need for investment capital and military protection gave rise to the fundamental corporate form. The Dutch East India Company dominated world trade for two hundred years, sharing some of the later period with the English East India Company. While the legal basis of the corporation was to be established in the early 20th century, the basic form, including exploiting foreign lands, top-down control and fealty to the bottom line, was a continually evolving structure that began in 1602.

Nevertheless, as a framework that explains much of Chomsky’s underlying model, Bakan’s contribution seems especially important. It is not necessary to resort to “it’s obvious” when seeking to explain the tendency of the powerful to protect their privilege. It is an outgrowth of capitalism itself, which mandates that people behave that way.

Political Terror and Proxy War

This is all put into a contemporary perspective in Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. The author begins with a recent history of both Christianity (at least its fundamentalist forms) and Islam. He emphasizes the West’s conceptualization of the good Muslim (basically secular) and the bad Muslim (basically fundamentalist), and argues that this conceptualization muddies the water.

Mamdani proposes instead that recent history of Islam is more understandable as a division between cultural and political Islam. Most importantly “terrorism is born of a political encounter. When it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture… [it is] a modern political movement at the service of a modern power.”

Mamdani’s reading of political terror, mainly perpetrated by the United States, between Vietnam and 9/11 is virtually identical with Chomsky’s. Nevertheless, his point is quite different. He seeks to establish a framework on which current events, especially though not exclusively in the Middle East, can be positioned.

His basic argument is that the Cold War was largely fought by proxy and largely in the Global South. The consequences for the people of the Global South, obviously of no concern to the powerbrokers in the North, were devastating in both the loss of human life and potential future development.

The U.S. strategy beginning with the Carter administration, but honed to terrifying efficiency by the Reaganites, called “rollback,” was to attack all left-leaning governments in the Third World, and to promote Vietnam-like problems for the Soviet Union on its borders.

This applied especially in Afghanistan, but also within the Soviet Union itself, mainly in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The overall plan was to transform the doctrine of containment into a more aggressive policy aimed at eliminating so-called Soviet influence from the world and then destroying the Soviet Union directly.

Obviously the Cold War strategy of building vast supplies of nuclear weapons and faster and more sophisticated tanks and other battlefield apparatus for the European theatre could lead to either stalemate or apocalyptic disaster. A more sophisticated approach was needed. This was the origin of the philosophy of “rollback.”

As Chalmers Johnson reported in his insightful book Blowback, the consequences of rollback have led to dramatic and unintended consequences — what the CIA calls blowback. Mamdani documents two major blowbacks. The first is the U.S. drug problem, initially manifest as a massive heroin problem (largely a consequence of CIA activities in southeast Asia) but later morphing into a massive crack problem that was substantially a consequence of CIA activities in Central America.

CIA operatives simply look the other way as their assets, frequently well-known drug czars or employees thereof, maintain drug operations, including modern industrial facilities.

Perhaps more important is the second blowback, from the war in Afghanistan. Mamdani traces the decision to create a “Vietnam” on the Soviet’s doorstep with the internationalization of a radical political Islam. He leaves no doubt that the roots of Al Qaeda lie with the remarkably complex maneuvers of the CIA in their war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

In the end, the most devastating consequence of U.S. behavior was the legacy left of a highly trained, ideologically narrow, and strategically single-minded cadre whose mission in life is, as they were taught by the United States, to destroy the infidel. Consequently 9/11 is the biggest irony in world history.

If Chomsky offers the historical overview, Bakan the underlying dynamic structure, and Mamdani the contemporary focus, all three share the same recipe for the potential antidote — movements of grassroots democracy, especially, but not exclusively, in the United States. With the U.S./Israel axis the overwhelming power it is, and with fundamentalisms of all sorts calling the shots today (fundamentalist Christian in this country, right wing Jewish in Israel, and several Taliban-like formations in Islam), it is difficult to root for any side in the current world conflict.

What might happen with the union of the traditional labor movement with the anti-racist movement, the feminist movement, the solidarity movement, and the environmental movement? If traditional politics with its currently fundamentalist character is driving the world toward oblivion, then a movement focused on global justice offers hope for the future. I concur with all three authors on this point.

Cuba and Global Justice

With Chomsky’s theoretical overview, and Bakan’s understanding of why many of the events are a necessary consequence of capitalism, and Mamdani’s bringing it home to contemporary problems, the inclusion of Cuba: a Revolution in Motion might seem out of place. In the first three books we have a view of the contemporary world as controlled by the most sordid requirements of corporate capitalism, while Saney’s book seeks to look at Cuba’s accomplishments and describe how they are directly related to socialist organizing principles.

The book’s historical narrative does intersect with the other three books in major ways, from the challenge to corporate principles, to the routing of the South African military in Angola, to the positioning in the Soviet orbit during the Cold War. However, its importance for this essay is in its placement of Cuba as a model.

Cuba has a world-class health system, a world-class educational system, the highest level of equality in the world, has recently survived the worst economic crisis in history, and is currently moving toward the best ecological system in the world. However, many progressives then ask “Would I give up all my personal liberties and live under a cruel dictatorship with no democratic means to effect change just for a good health care system?” Of course not.

Saney’s portrait of Cuba is a sympathetic one, beginning with an overview of Cuban history, followed by a detailed history of U.S. aggression. It is really quite foolish to try and understand Cuba without this history. It is useful to see it described in all its detail, from the Platt amendment giving U.S. “legal” authority to invade Cuba whenever it so pleases, to the continual expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars on the attempt to create an internal opposition.

Between those two effectively historical chapters he deals with governance (chapter 2), race and inequality (chapter 3) and criminal justice (chapter 4). Chapter 2 is important as most works on Cuba seem to ignore the special political structure that has evolved in Cuba, a structure that speaks to the issues of personal liberty and democracy.

Cubans see their democratic system as one in constant evolution. I was once told in casual conversation with a Cuban in Pinar del Rio that he regarded the U.S. system as incomprehensibly arrogant in “claiming” to be a democracy. Democracy, according to him, had to be judged on its practice, and was a project to be honed and perfected, not a thing to be declared.

Formally, the political structure in Cuba is based on the idea of popular power. Saney goes into all the details (and they are indeed complex) of how elections are structured so as to encourage active participation, from municipal assemblies to provincial assembles and up to the national assembly. The key idea is participation, and the most participation happens at the municipal level.

Cuba is not a perfect society, and a casual conversation with almost any Cuban will convince you of that. Cubans complain about their political system just as U.S. citizens do. But that criticism is not of the system, but rather of the current administration. It is not difficult to find Cubans who say “the government stinks.” However, very few will say the system is wrong. Such criticism is part and parcel of any democratic system.

In my own experience, after hearing a litany of what is wrong with Cuba from taxi drivers and others, I have taken to ask the question “so, would it be better to have the U.S. solution, which is to say, development of a U.S. style political system where those Cubans who live in Miami will come back and return to their traditional role?”

Thus far I have not found anyone in Cuba who thinks that would be a good idea. Indeed, when asking that question I am usually greeted with a look of astonishment and then laughter, as if I was asking if the earth was flat.

What Saney presents in his generally favorable review of Cuba is a picture of a new experiment, which despite Herculean U.S. efforts is working. It has produced some remarkable advances, acknowledged by all international observers. Even the World Bank has suggested that underdeveloped countries look to Cuba as a possible model.

As we move away from the irrational and self-defeating system described by Chomsky, Bakan and Mamdani, our international grassroots democracy movement needs to consider alternatives. Maybe Cuba won’t survive. Indeed at the beginning of the Iraq war there was serious concern that Cuba could be the next victim — a fear now somewhat reduced given that the U.S. government is so tied down militarily and bankrupt politically precisely because of that war.

When Fidel Castro passes on there will be even increased pressure from the US to disassemble the current system, and whether it can withstand such pressure remains to be seen. But even if it fails, as an experiment it is already a success and will likely continue to inform and inspire any new movements looking for true democracy and a fair and equitable form of governance.

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Jeff Halper's Obstacles to Peace

— David Finkel

Obstacles to Peace
A Critical Re-framing of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
By Jeff Halper
maps prepared and designed by Michael Younan.
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), PalMap (Palestine Mapping Centre). Third edition April 2005.
128 pp (large format). For ordering information (USA) contact: usa@ichad.org

“THE OCCUPATION CHALLENGES us all… Can a system of control, displacement, denial of fundamental rights and repression actually prevail? What does it mean if we are unable to end an occupation that is growing continually stronger by the day, before our very eyes, in defiance of international law and more than 200 UN resolutions? If occupation and repression actually defeat a people’s aspirations for freedom and fundamental human rights, then what are the implications for oppressed peoples in other parts of the world far from public attention?” (Foreword, iv)

OBSTACLES TO PEACE is a resource manual, an illustrated chronicle of struggle and an appeal to the international “civil society” to support “the joint efforts of Israelis and Palestinians seeking a just peace in the Middle East.”

The author, Jeff Halper, has presented guided tours of the Occupied Territories, particularly the ever-expanding area of “Metropolitan Jerusalem,” over the course of many years for visiting journalists, diplomats and students. The present book, after introducing the reader to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), proceeds through concise chapters on the context of the conflict, the “generous offer” of Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2001, the U.S. “road map,” Sharon’s “unilateral solution,” the emerging Bantustan scenario, the issue of terrorism and potential ways out of the conflict.

More than a dozen full-color maps trace the territorial changes, from the 1947 United Nations partition plan to the present realities of the carveup of the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Among the most important chapters is “The Matrix of Control,” a concept Halper has developed to show how successive Israeli governments have sought not only to consolidate the occupation, but to make it seem so normal and inevitable that it “disappears” from Israeli and international consciousness.

This is accomplished through a multiplicity of military controls and strikes; creating “facts on the ground,” from settlements and the carveup of the Occupied Territories to the Wall; and most insidiously, “Bureaucracy, planning and law as tools of occupation and control.”

It’s the bureaucracy of Occupation that makes Palestinian daily life unbearable, makes home construction “illegal” and therefore always subject to demolition, destroys economic activity and promotes population “transfer,” a generally unreported but devastating form of ethnic cleansing.

Every aspect of these policies could be explored at book length, but the essential facts are presented here in a concise and digestible package. The following chapter, “Barak’s ‘Generous Offer,’” demonstrates how the offers made at Camp David and Taba (technically in the latter case there was no offer at all, since Barak authorized no formal negotiation there) did not propose to dismantle, but would actually consolidate, that Matrix of Control.”

Addressing the myth that Barak offered 95% of the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state, Halper compares it to the blueprint for prison control:

‘(The prisoners) have 95% of the territory: the living areas, the work areas, the exercise yard, the visiting area. All the prison authorities have is 5%: the prison walls, the cell bars, the keys to the doors, some glass partitions. The prison authorities do not have to control 20-30% of the territory in order to control the inmates. Similarly, Israel needs only a few control points taking a limited amount of territory to completely neutralize a Palestinian state. (28)

The final chapter, “So What Should We Do?” is particularly relevant for activists looking for vehicles for meaningful action. It poses a way for “international civil society” to reframe the conflict in terms of human rights and international law, and carefully presents ICAHD’s support for selective sanctions and divestment efforts that can make an important difference.

The book concludes with an Appendix of significant documents, a listing of resources and bibliography. This is both a first-rate introductory text on the Israel/Palestine conflict and a guidebook for activism. Every peace and justice committee should have it on hand.

[To contact ICAHD, write to ICAHD, PO Box 2030, Jerusalem 91020, Israel. Website http://www.icahd.org. Tax-deductible contributions can be paid to AJPME, with ICAHD-USA in the memo, at this address: ICAHD-USA, PO Box 134, Carrboro NC 27510.]

ATC 120, January-February 2006

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Against the Current

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Barbara Zeluck Presente!

One Year of Obama and the Democrats’ Debacle

Regroupment & Refoundation of a U.S. Left

New Pamphlet: Hell on Wheels

From Abortion Rights to Reproductive Justice

Reviews

— George Fish

Prolific Recordings

A Crossover Giant

Affirmations

— Jennifer Jopp

Transcendalism as the “Historical Air”

The Use of Violence

Harpers Ferry and Beyond

Understanding Brown

— Jennifer Jopp

Transcendalism as the “Historical Air”

The Use of Violence

Harpers Ferry and Beyond

Understanding Brown

— Christopher Phelps

A Long View of Empire

The Invention of Iraq

From Revolution to Saddam’s Rule

America’s Gulf Friend

Sanctions, War, Occupation

Brief Critique

— John McGough

It’s Getting Hot in Here

Falling Through the Ice

Business As Usual?

— Patrick M. Quinn

The Haymarket Bomb

Honoring the Martyrs

— Dianne Feeley

Witnesses

Human Rights Meltdown

— Jennifer Jopp

Fearing Immigrants, Radicals, Communists

Meaning, Ritual and War

Policing Americanism

Why Pledge? To What?

— John Vandermeer

— David Finkel