bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with politics

For the politics/current events book club, we decided to read Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conways’ The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. It tells the very interesting story of the decades-long propaganda campaign that is market fundamentalism, which somehow made it “common sense” in America that any government action (except killing brown people) is tyrannical and too Big, while companies can never be too Big and the invisible hand of the free market can solve all our problems as long as we give it completely free rein to do whatever it wants and do not anger it by attempting to put any checks on the behavior of Big Business (which does not exist), lest it smite us, this is definitely science and not religion.

You might think that if I said I had trouble getting into this book it would be because the content about far-right libertarian bullshit was too upsetting to focus on for long periods of time. This would be incorrect! I had a hard time getting into this book initially for a few reasons, but honestly, once I got past then and well into the far-right libertarian bullshit, I got much more engaged.

The first stumbling block for me was just that this book is 500 fucking pages long, and I have way too much assigned reading this year. This is entirely my own fault, as I am doing my yearly longread, Whale Weekly, the Monday history class, one Vorkosigan Saga book each month, and the Year of Erics, in addition to whatever book we pick each month for this book club. As a result I have discovered the limits of my tolerance for assigned reading projects and am starting to get resentful that I have no fucking time to just browse my own bookshelves and make impulsive decisions about what to read next. This is not actually a problem with the book itself. For the past eight years of this book club I have usually been the one getting excited about reading big 500-page-plus chonkers about upsetting things; it is unusual that I have put myself in a spot where the idea of reading anything for this book club that’s more than 200 pages long has me glaring balefully at my TBR shelves that I cannot squeeze in the time for.

The second stumbling block is that this book is very carefully aimed at a specific audience, which is moderate American liberals who may or may not consider themselves progressive but are at least open to the idea that “progressive” is a normal and legitimate political position for an American to hold, but anything further left that than would self-evidently be Too Far. So a lot of the book, especially right in the beginning, is devoted to covering its flank from right criticism by assuring the reader repeatedly that they’re not socialists, none of what they’re advocating is socialism, the right wing made them up, the socialists probably aren’t real and can’t hurt you. A fair amount of this is factually correct in that there is indeed a lot of room between far-right anarcho-capitalism and total central planning, and that for at least the last 30 years nearly the entirety of human politics has existed in that vast middle ground. But the constant assurances of Not Being Socialist and the obvious veneration for finding Reasonable Middle Grounds is just really fucking annoying as a reader who actually is a socialist.

Anyway, once we get past all the fucking framing, the content is very interesting. The book is very long because there is quite a lot of information there, some of which I was sort of familiar with, and some of which was not. I found the most interesting stuff to be the development of basically the right-wing version of “vulgar Marxism,” where American goons took the at least somewhat nuanced writings of folks like Hayek and Adam Smith and wrote “condensed” or “study” versions that conveniently left out all the bits where these writers acknowledged that market failure were ever real or that there was ever a role for government in doing anything about it. The chapter about Rose Wilder Lane and her hand in editing the Little House on the Prairie books–plus her own writing, which was much less successful because it was mostly just psychotically hard-right polemic–was also fascinating as someone who read the Little House on the Prairie books and reasonably enjoyed them but never got super into them the way I got into, say, American Girl or Dear America.

Anyway, this book could probably have gotten down to 400 pages if it was just the content and not all the framing and argumentation so much, and I personally would have enjoyed it better that way, but that is also not how books are structured, especially not ones where you are specifically attempting to advance an argument for political purposes and not just dump info on people. I would have preferred the infodump because I am slightly out of range of the audience for this book, but there are probably more people within the intended audience for this book than there are people like me, so fair play to the authors, I guess, but this is my review and I get to complain about the bits I didn’t like. Socialism is a scare word used in deeply dishonest ways by the right wing but it is also a real political project and people should be more normal about actual socialists existing and even being correct about stuff, thanks so much.

In one of my book groups, we decided to kick off the year with Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s classic of media studies, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. I voted for this but for some reason I was under the impression that it was a short book; I was extremely wrong about that. This is a 350-page book only because it is blithely printed with small, single-spaced text on fairly large pages–basically, standard hardback sized pages, but mass market paperback print.

It is pretty content-dense (the prose, while hardly magazine-like breezy, is pretty readable by scholarly standards), and also the subject matter is very depressing, so it took me a while to get through even though I am very interested in this sort of thing. One of the strengths of the book as a work of both scholarship and argumentation is a weakness in terms of its readability: It backs up its points with evidence, and lots of it. The beginning of the book lays out the “model” by which media spin and servility happen and the rest of the book mainly consists of very detailed case studies about mass-media fuckery that were relevant at the time this book was published in the 1980s–the Vietnam war, the wars in Laos and Cambodia, coverage of foreign elections, coverage of specifically murders of humanist activist clerics in foreign countries, and a fascinating chapter on an attempt to assassinate the Pope that I had somehow never heard of. All of it makes the New York Times’ role in lying us into the Iraq War in the early 2000s sound more like standard operating procedure than a rare and embarrassing lapse, which, personally, I think is because it was (the New York Times is a bloodthirsty rag and I will never, ever forgive it).

This book is largely interesting as a Foundational Text of leftist media criticism and as a source of interesting information about stuff that happened during the Cold War, but it also does hold up fairly well as a way of explaining how media works. The media has changed quite a lot since this book was published in the ‘80s, and the rise of the Internet and of social media has really thrown a wrench in the way media works in many ways, but TV news still exists and millions of people still watch it, and the New York Times still exists and is still considered the flagship paper of the United States (because we are a fundamentally unserious country)–and, perhaps most importantly, the legacy media still portrays itself as a credible, resolute investigative watchdog against unchecked government power that works in the public’s interest and informs them about how the world works. This is a very important thing to have a realistic assessment of if one is evaluating or participating in conversations about how people these days are all stupid and don’t know how shit works because they get all their news from TikTok, which is indeed bad, but the solution proposed is usually to get these dumb-dumbs to “realize” that they should be consuming “real” news so that they can have a “realistic” and unified understanding of the world and consensus reality like the country did back when everybody watched Walter Cronkite every night. The conversation about the abandonment of legacy news in favor of whatever we’re flocking to now that Twitter’s unusable is incomplete if it does not address that people’s distrust of the mass media is correct because the mass media is indeed full of shit, it’s just that the correctness ends there and from there you can go in many, many different directions, most of which are dodgy. Anyway, I think the book provides enough explanation of the sorts of things that put pressure on media coverage that an intelligent person can extrapolate a bit when trying to factor in things like Facebook.

After some lobbying I persuaded the politics book club to read Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. This is a sort of case study in the labor and other organizing of Black auto workers in Detroit in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, focusing mostly on the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the spinoff RUMs at other plants, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, although plenty of other orgs come into and out of the picture at different times.

This is a really nuts-and-bolts study of organizing and many of the concepts explored and debates had by the people involved will be familiar to anyone who has done socialist or labor organizing–the uses and limitations of the media, of art, of the court system, of electoral politics, of student organizing. What does it mean to believe in revolution? How much of following its own stated rules will the system “allow,” and when and how will it play dirty in the face of its own contradictions? What is the most effective way to talk to people, and what are the limitations on the effectiveness of talking, anyway? I would not go so far as to say these questions are definitively solved, but it’s helpful to look at how they played out in concrete ways in the past.

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying does not really cohere into a single narrative with main characters and all that; it’s the history of a time and place in organizing, not of a single person or even group of people. This occasionally made it hard for me to remember who was being talked about. On the chapter level it tended to be a little easier, as there were usually just a handful of key organizers doing any one project, such as taking over the student newspaper at Wayne State University and turning it into a radical community paper. There is also one extremely interesting chapter that does focus on just one guy–“Mr. Justin Ravitz, Marxist Judge of Recorder’s Court.” This is an excellent look at how much of a ruckus you can cause in the legal system merely by taking the things it says about itself seriously, although it also looks at the limitations of the time and attention it takes to do so–and the ways in which the people who didn’t want Ravitz to take the Bill of Rights seriously started to counter-organize.

Other very useful chapters for current-day organizers include the one whose chapter title I am not going to repeat but which is about automation (real and fake) and work speed-ups, and “Finally Got the News,” about the one good feature film they made before everyone got too excited about films and came up with a thousand half-baked ideas they were never able to follow up on.

Of particular interest to me were the retrospectives from the second edition added to the end of the main text–at “thirty years later,” they are now themselves nearly 20 years old, and it is sobering to read what has and hasn’t (mostly hasn’t) changed since then. They are also interesting because they stick with one person’s perspective longer than is usually the case in the body of the book, and there’s an interesting contrast of perspectives.

Highly recommended for organizers of all stripes, just don’t expect to zip through it in one sitting. This book is for studying a chapter at a time.

I didn’t know if I was going to make this week’s book club because I left the reading to the last minute, but I did in fact read Melissa V. Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.

The first thing that struck me about this book is that it was written in 2011 and, while the stereotypes she dissects are still around, the current/recent events she uses as case studies are much less current and recent. The last section of the book is about Michelle Obama’s public image, which was a bit of a trip down memory lane, since it’s been a few years since Michelle Obama was omnipresent in public life. It’s also striking at times how clear it is that this book was written and published shortly before the first Black Lives Matter wave; it would be impossible to write this book now without ever mentioning BLM. Other sections feel a bit less dated just because their impact seems more lasting; I don’t think about Hurricane Katrina every day but it was a really big deal and the fact that there have been other hugely devastating hurricanes since then (most notably Hurricane Helene earlier this month) makes it more important, not less, to properly analyze all the aspects of Katrina and its aftermath.

Another thing I really liked about this book is its total avoidance of polemic, zippy overstatement, or One-Weird-Trick-ery. Harris-Perry is very up front about the limitations of her research and addresses critiques about overfocus on feelings/vibes/personal psychology over materialist politics. She defends her subject both by arguing for the place of understanding people’s perceptions in political action and by matter-of-factly acknowledging that this is one book on one aspect of politics and there are other books on the other aspects of politics that are important. It’s a refreshing change from a lot of current events writing, which seems to always have to frame itself as THE book with THE answer on THE key factor to solving THE problem, and I think that is almost never true, honestly.

Structurally the book had a bit of a grab-bag nature to its case studies that some folks in book club said made it feel a little disjointed, and I think this is probably true, but the individual sections were all pretty interesting. The book walks us through the three main stereotypes about black women imposed by white society–the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the angry black woman–and also looks at the idea of the “strong black woman” and its function in both empowering and limiting both black women’s self-images and the way they relate to political action and expectation.

While the expectation of strength was probably the most analytically interesting of the stereotypes examined, the one I found myself having the strongest reaction to was the “Mammy,” partly because I was less familiar with it and partly due to the inclusion of some really fucked up tidbits like the campaign to put a national Mammy monument on the Mall in Washington DC, or the photograph of a truly hideous kitschy restaurant called Mammy’s wherein the restaurant bit is inside a big hoop skirt, like the cake part of one of those Barbie cakes that used to be a thing. It’s really ugly and weird. I promise there’s a whole lot of actual analysis of the Mammy stereotype and how it affects black women but those two little tidbits were just so starkly gross and weird.

Overall I found the book illuminating and we had a pretty good conversation about it, even if we did end up getting off-track several times.

The next book in my Ben MacIntyre mini-kick was Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis’ Fortress Prison.

Colditz Castle was a grim medieval schloss in Saxony–well, technically it still is a grim medieval schloss in Saxony, although recent restoration work has sought to make it less grim and more Renaissance–that was used in World War II as a POW camp for “incorrigible” Allied officers, by which they mainly meant ones that had tried to escape from other camps. Somewhat predictably, a camp peopled exclusively by people who had already tried to escape from other camps became a laboratory of escapology, with the inmates and the guards in a continually escalating dynamic of finding security leaks and plugging them.

For a few years the camp was international, with Polish, French, British, and Dutch officers (and their orderlies) competing in national teams, or occasionally collaborating, to escape. At some point mid-war it became a camp for British and other English-speaking countries’ officers. It was eventually liberated by an American unit.

MacIntyre takes us on an emotional rollercoaster of daring escape attempts, crushing brutality, big personalities, strict rule-following, and a large and varied cast of characters. The inmates are sometimes heroic and sometimes huge assholes. The Wehrmacht prison guards, especially head of security Reinholdt Eggers, are pretty terrible, obviously, but the look at the tensions and differences in operation within Nazi Germany between the by-the-book career military types who love rules more than murder and the paramilitary psychos who love murder more than rules (these appear to be the top two German psychological traits) could be interesting. In classic Ben MacIntyre fashion the whole thing has the vibes of a screwball comedy, though with interludes of Nazi horrors that simply cannot blend in with the general air of Daring Shenanigans even when they are themselves sort of absurd. But most of it manages to keep, if not a lighthearted air, at least a very easy-to-read, fast-paced, dryly humorous sort of tone that meant I could read it in basically three evening sessions of 100 pages apiece.

For me the biggest surprise in this book was learning that apparently Colditz Castle is, or at least at some point in Britain was, a very famous piece of WWII mythology. I thought I knew a reasonable amount about World War II but I had never heard of it. Maybe because baby me’s WWII education was mostly focused on reading Holocaust memoirs and not on military history, and adult me’s WWII education has mostly been leftist analyses of the rise of fascism and also only a little bit of military history (and that largely in podcast form–thanks, Dan Carlin!), and also I guess it was more of a thing in Britain? Every time I think I am familiar with British culture I learn about something else I’d never heard of that was apparently huge over there (see also: my current mini-obsession with the Franklin expedition).

Anyway this is basically a very good trashy spy thriller except you get to also feel like it’s not trashy because it is nonfiction, you are learning very serious World War II history things, I swear.

I’ve decided that in the final few months of the year I’m going to read one Ben MacIntyre book each month, ending 2024 with a slew of spy shenanigans before I embark upon my Year of Erics/Year of Boat Books. To that end, and with some library shenanigans, I checked out and read Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, a biography of the life and work of Ursula Kuczynski Hamburger Beurton, codenamed Agent Sonya.

Ursula was born in Germany to a left-leaning Jewish family and grew up in the tumultuous days of the Wiemar Republic, where she got involved with the KPD, got beat up by cops, and became a dedicated antifascist. After doing some light troublemaking as a teenager she married a young architect named Rudi Hamburger and sold left-wing books out of a wheelbarrow. Rudi was then hired by a British firm to do architecture in the “international” enclaves in Shanghai, and Ursula went with him. There, she was bored stupid, hanging about with vapidly racist socialites and not being quite able to figure out how to do anything useful about the shocking poverty in China. In Shanghai she eventually befriends a vivacious American writer named Agnes Smedley, through whom she is recruited as a spy for the Soviet Union, with Richard Sorge as her handler. At first her job is mainly to provide a discreet place for other spies to have meetings. Eventually, however, the skinny young housewife is recruited for increasingly complicated and dangerous missions. She goes to a spy training school in Russia for the better part of a year, leaving her two-year-old son with his grandparents; then does a stint in Manchuria doing illegal radio transmissions in support of anti-Japanese forces. Upon leaving Shanghai–and her first husband–she is set up in Switzerland, along with nearly every other spy in the world, to keep an eye on Nazi Germany, where she does more radio transmissions and runs two agents out of the German interior, one of whom would become her second husband. As World War Two swing into full gear, Ursula and her second husband make it to the UK, where most of Ursula’s family has also fled. Here she continues her career as a spymaster, working to keep the Soviet Union apprised of things its allies weren’t sharing with it, including atomic research being conducted by fellow German expatriate Karl Fuchs. She inserted Soviet spies into a series of dangerous OSS missions into the German interior in the final days of the Reich, mainly for the purpose of allowing the USSR to get its hands on American walkie-talkie technology–the German labor organizers in exile that she recruited for this job were fully in sync with their American handlers as far as the actual mission itself went. In her years in the UK, Ursula comes under mild suspicion from British intelligence forces occasionally, but her domestic ordinariness causes the MI5 men to repeatedly clear her. Only Milicent Bagot–a Trunchbull-like figure and apparently MI5’s only competent Communist-hunter–really suspected her, but Bagot got the same treatment from the MI5 patriarchs and her warnings were ignored (and when she crossed streams and requested information from MI6, she would get the polite brush-off from Kim Philby, for entirely different reasons).

Like the other Ben MacIntyre books I’ve read–Operation Mincemeat and A Spy Among Friends–this was compulsively readable, exciting, reasonably sympathetic to the Communists given that the author seems to be a pretty mainstream liberal, full of amusing anecdotes and little digs at just about everybody. Thus far, MacIntyre’s books are not really works of political theory, but they are great looks into the real people behind all sorts of crazy mid-20th-century events, including putting these people into their cultural and political contexts. I found this book to be overall very sympathetic to Ursula Buerton, despite a bit of ribbing about ideologically rigid, dogmatic Marxists. It was also very sympathetic to her beleaguered first husband, who was cursed with the name Rudi Hamburger and whose fortunes only got worse from there. Hamburger was initially more of a progressive left-liberal type and did not want to join the KPD because they were ideologically rigid and gave “boring speeches full of jargon,” which is maybe not a very solid argument against the workability of a political philosophy but is very much a fair charge against many Communist parties. The fascist takeover of Germany, and finding out his wife was a spy, jointly served to push him into the arms of the Comintern, where he eagerly threw himself into spy work in a failed attempt to save his marriage and also a failed attempt to become a good spy. Hamburger ended up being tortured in a Japanese jail in China and then later spent several years in a Soviet gulag after his incompetence at spywork was suspected to be deliberate and he was jailed as a political subversive. And through all this hardship he was still cheerfully named Rudi Hamburger, poor man.

Overall, this book was super fun, I read it in basically 24 hours, and I’m excited for my hold on Prisoners of the Castle to come in.

I can’t remember what sale I picked it up at but for some-odd years now I’ve been in possession of a copy of something called The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. I had hesitated to actually read it for two reasons: one is that it is like 700 pages long, and I only have so many of those in me per year. The other is that I was not sure if it would turn out to be a total crank book, and I wasn’t confident I was familiar enough with the subject to tell. The author is David Talbot, the guy who founded Salon, who at least seems to be a real person in journalism, although certainly more than enough otherwise respectable writers turn out to be cranks about something. This book tells you right on the back cover where it’s going: It’s going to give you a biography of Allen Dulles, it’s going to give you a bunch of dirt on the CIA, and then it’s going to try to convince you that the CIA was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

I was not originally going to suggest this for book club. But when we had to skip July and take an extra-long time between book clubs, I somewhat jokingly put this forth for consideration, mainly because it was the longest book on my history-and-politics shelf. But apparently the rest of the book club thought it sounded fun and spicy, so here we are!

First of all, let it be known that David Talbot really, really hates his subject here. There is no pretense of academic neutrality; the book is just like “This is Allen Dulles, he sucks and I hate him and he ought to have been tried for treason before WWII was even over, and the world is a worse place because he was in it, and he was a shitty husband and a shitty dad and a shitty person and have I mentioned, fuck this guy.” I found this extremely funny, which was for sure a badly needed bit of levity because David Talbot is not wrong; Allen Dulles sucked enormously and so did all the ex- (for varying degrees of “ex”) Nazis and robber barons and Cold Warriors he surrounded himself with.

The book does not dwell for long on Dulles’ early life, just enough to set the scene and check in with his siblings a little about what growing up with him was life. The story really kicks off during World War II, when Dulles, a corporate lawyer at a firm that did lots of business with Reich-affiliated German clients until it got too embarrassing, is hired into the OSS, basically the precursor to the CIA. In the OSS, operating out of an office in the theoretically neutral but very strategically placed Swiss city of Bern, Dulles promptly begins giving the runaround to FDR’s very clearly stated policy of extracting total surrender from the Nazis. Dulles, his rotten heartstrings pulled on by the sad thought of rich guys being treated like criminals just because they did horrific crimes, starts cutting deals with various Nazis to try to broker a surrender of just Hitler that leaves something of the Reich intact for these ghouls to continue ruling. When that doesn’t quite work, he pivots to operating “ratlines,” running Nazi war criminals to safety to keep them out of the dock at Nuremberg and set them up as respectable citizens in other countries, or in some cases, back in Germany.

The most egregious of these schemes was his protection of Reinhardt Gehlen, Hitler’s spy chief on the Eastern front, who Dulles wanted to keep around to keep spying on the Russians. It seems clear that Dulles–like a truly unconscionable number of rich people–always thought the Bolshies were the real enemy, with the West’s alliance with them against fascism merely an unfortunate minor detour to clean up a moment of embarrassing excess on the part of the otherwise perfectly fine Nazi Party. Dulles, and the other right-wing Cold Warriors, kept that attitude throughout his entire life, eagerly collaborating with literally anybody, no matter how awful–Nazis, the Mafia, various mercenaries, autocrats and theocrats and other kinds of -crats and -garchs and -ocracies–in his total war against “world Communism,” here defined as anyone who thought regular working people maybe ought to have some kind of support or dignity in life, or that capitalism could stand to maybe have a single regulation put on it ever, or that brown people in the Third World actually maybe did have a reason to think being crushed under the violent bootheels of oil companies or United Fruit kind of sucked. A lot of the language Dulles and company used about “Communism” sounds suspiciously like the things we all actually learned about fascism the hard way, and it seems clear to me that guys like Dulles not just thought that Communism was worse than fascism, they psychologically needed Communism to be worse than fascism in every single particular and were not about to let piddly stuff like “the New Deal was an entirely different thing than the Soviet Union actually” stop them.

Anyway, the book walks us through the creation of the CIA under Truman (who initially envisioned it as just an intel-gathering agency and later regretted having created it at all), the consolidation of the Dulles’ brothers’ power under Eisenhower, and the tumultuous relationship between the national security services and the Kennedy administration. The stuff here that I did already know some things about, such as the coups in Iran and Guatemala, track with my prior knowledge and seem very well documented and credible. The things I didn’t already know about, like the MKULTRA program, also seem well documented, and I know there’s lots more information about these things available now than there was when I was a very young person being told they were just conspiracy theories. The setup here doesn’t try to hide itself, really: look at all these other things the CIA tried to have dismissed as conspiracy theories for decades, which turned out to be real; isn’t it likely the JFK assassination is the same?

And I will say, I am not sure I am entirely convinced that the CIA definitely killed JFK, but I for sure would put it in the “not nearly as far-fetched as it ought to be” bucket. I have not made much of a study of the JFK assassination, but from the cheap seats it kind of looks like every version of the story is kind of far-fetched and shady, which is maybe to be expected for something that unlikely.

The thing that really bothered me, though, about reading about the Kennedy administration’s, ah, difficulties in wrangling its various three-letter-agencies into doing what Kennedy wanted instead of doing whatever they wanted (mostly murdering anybody they deemed to be left of Eisenhower anywhere in the world), is what it might mean for the rest of us who would like to someday get the US off the path of being a vicious imperialist bully on the world stage. We’ve since elected presidents who got us out of individual wars–I think Nixon was the last Republican to maneuver us out of one, after deliberately tanking Johnson’s ability to do so, even though I think Gerald Ford was president by the time the war was declared officially over–but it looks like Kennedy was the last guy to be like “We should change our entire approach to foreign policy and stop being imperialist douchebags” and he simply could. not. get. the American imperial apparatus to follow his damn orders. Whether they actually killed him, or just kind of sat back and slow-walked doing presidential security because hey, this guy doesn’t respect the national security apparatus, or had nothing to do with the murder and were actually just planning to keep doing regular insubordination and sandbagging until the clock ran out, there are real serious questions the left needs to wrestle with about how to engage with a position like the imperial presidency, where the president has basically unlimited power to do whatever he wants as long as whatever he wants is violent imperial bullshit, but risks having the violence machine turn on him if he tries to rein it in. This was not fixed by electing Kennedy president and it wouldn’t have been fixed by electing Bernie Sanders president and it won’t be fixed if we elect the reincarnation of Eugene Debs president either.

Anyway, I think the book was good–depressing, but good. It’s always good to know more about the full depth and breadth of evil that America has committed in the world, if only for the sake of not being a gormless idiot. Figuring out what can actually be done about it, though, is a much more difficult task.

I already can’t remember how I found this book and I am only vaguely convinced it was the LitHub newsletter, but I found myself putting in a library request for a new nonfiction release: Henry Hemming’s Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland. This book appealed to multiple of my interests, mainly Irish history and spy shit.

This book tells the story of Frank Hegarty, IRA quartermaster and British informer, and his murder, most likely by the high-ranking British secret agent codenamed Stakeknife. A double agent getting whacked by another double agent! Juicy stuff!

And it is juicy but it is also profoundly sad. Frank seemed like a nice, regular guy, not at all the sort of hardened psycho that you’d picture spending years as a double agent (Freddie Scappaticci does seem to fit that vibe a little more, though). He seems to have become vulnerable to something as taboo and dangerous as informing because he had actually lost faith in the IRA militants’ strategy of a “long war” and wanted the violence to stop, and genuinely thought that helping the British would save lives. There are strategic notes to be taken, here, about the cost of violence, and the limits on the efficacy of terror to achieve political goals, but mostly the note in question is this: the same thing that gives a terror campaign its efficacy–mainly, that it’s terrible–also means that even people on your “side” may run out of stomach for keeping it going. By the time the Troubles ended, the IRA was absolutely lousy with spies. Most notoriously, Agent Stakeknife, the Brits’ most valuable spy, was the most valuable spy because he had infiltrated the Nutting Squad, the internal enforcement unit tasked with identifying and eliminating spies.

Though most of the action in this book takes place over the course of the Troubles itself–which was certainly long enough, dragging on for about thirty years–Four Shots in the Night takes us all the way up to the present day, through the murder investigation known as Operation Kenova, an attempt by one high-minded (by police standards) faction of the British police to identify and expose Agent Stakeknife and, in essence, solve all the murders that were attributed to him. This operation in some ways succeeded, in that it gathered a lot of information, enough to put a case together against the man they’d identified. However, the other police units–mainly MI5, the infamously shadowy intelligence organization that wasn’t used to answering to anyone about anything–were less than cooperative, and after the case against Stakeknife was submitted to whatever government body decides if the state is going to prosecute the case or not (I returned the book to the library already, sorry), two things happened before a verdict could be rendered. One was that Stakeknife died, under completely non-fishy circumstances, due to just being old by this point. And the other was that the British government introduced a bill to essentially make it impossible to prosecute anyone of any faction for any crimes committed during the Troubles whatsoever. This has been highly controversial and fits within a longstanding and infuriating British tradition of doing a bunch of war crimes and then immediately getting all “let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo” about it and making it illegal to remember anything they did because, you know, these situations are very complicated and we’re terribly concerned about reopening old wounds and at some point we’ve all got to coexist and move on with our lives, and other sentiments that are both true and clearly being abused here.

This book follows well in the vein of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland and Rory Carroll’s There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes that Changed History. All three books are engaging narrative nonfiction that explore one notorious IRA action and trace its history throughout the entire development and resolution of the Troubles. Some familiar faces and events start cropping up once you’ve read more than one of these, but since they each focus on events that are far enough away from each other–the murder of Jean McConville in Belfast, the Brighton Bombing in England, the murder of Frank Hegarty right on the border in Derry–they don’t get too repetitive. After having read the other two, it was interesting to get a much deeper dive into the British infiltration operation and into the IRA’s Nutting Squad, both of which had been only briefly addressed in the other two books, focused as they were on people who were not spies (even the McConville story, in which she was accused of being a spy, could only get so deep into Nutting Squad lore, given that it’s almost certain she wasn’t a spy and the story was therefore not in fact about spies). Writing-wise I found this one a little bit less tight than the others–I don’t necessarily mind a book that bounces around a lot, especially when it’s detailing a complicated story–but the bits that seem to be overdoing the melodramatic stage-setting are few and far between compared to the amount of just genuinely dramatic material, and it didn’t get in the way of being able to follow the story. I think this book maybe does a little bit less hand-holding on the public parts of the Troubles than, for example, Say Nothing does, which is carefully written to be accessible to even the most geographically ignorant American who can’t find Northern Ireland on a map. Overall, I would highly recommend it to anyone who has enough of an interest in the Troubles that they already sort of know what they are, and especially to anyone who liked Keefe’s or Carroll’s books.

I decided to get a jump on March reading (Irish History Month, no longer short-book February) by picking up a book I’d borrowed from my father: Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.

O’Toole was born around the same time as my father, which provided a certain reading experience for my dad, an Irish-American Catholic growing up in postwar suburban Connecticut. I am thirty years younger than both of them so the reading experience was quite different for me; I only started having that “oh yes, I remember what was going on over here during that time” and “I think I heard about that while it was happening” kind of comparative experience right toward the end, when he was talking about things like the gay marriage referendum and the repeal of the constitutional abortion ban. For the rest of it I was pretty squarely Reading About History Times, which suited me just fine as I enjoy reading about history times.

O’Toole is a very engaging writer. Most of the chapters start off with an attention-grabbing anecdote–sometimes personal, like the time he accidentally let the pigs out on a summer trip to the Gaeltacht and the pigs had to be rescued by Sean O Riada, but other times more traditional newspaper-article type teases–which he then ties into the larger analysis of whatever aspect of Irish life and politics in whatever year or years the chapter covers. He’s also got a good handle on that sort of dry, respectable humor that really good reporters ought to have, where they are funny without doing anything as overt as making jokes.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is largely a chronicle of the various hypocrisies, self-delusions, bits of wishful thinking, and self-defeating romanticism of post-Independence Ireland, including his own journeys of disillusionment with such pillars of Irish society as the Catholic Church, the Fianna Fail party, and militant nationalism (more specifically, the tradition of venerating doomed blood sacrifice to make songs about over figuring out how to actually win material political victories). In the hands of a less skilled and thoughtful writer it could be possible to conclude that independence was a mistake, or that the Irish really are as ungovernable and uncivilized as their critics say, with their slavish devotion to a backward, medieval faith and their affinity for doing terrorism. O’Toole is, fortunately, not that writer. He writes insightfully and sympathetically of the shame and insecurities that gave rise to the bad psychological habits of the Irish–the colonial survival mechanism of knowing things without acknowledging them, an increasingly maladaptive habit that festered until the country broke open–while being unsparing about the human toll of the various things Ireland looked away from for decades, from the physical and sexual violence of the Church institutions that ran so much of Ireland’s social infrastructure to tax evasion. (The tax evasion was a really big problem.)

The nuance, the attention to detail, and the determination to look through rhetoric and sentiment and justification to find the human element in every story, was really thrown into sharp relief when I was fortunate enough to have tickets to the Wolfe Tones’ farewell concert in Boston fall into my lap immediately upon finishing this book. The show was enjoyable but did not exactly showcase a coherent political analysis, being a celebration of Irish militant nationalist history without regard to its contradictions and carefully calculated to avoid offending the political sensibilities of current Irish-Americans essentially regardless of what they were, or at least to keep everyone so hyped that they don’t notice that they sort of offended everyone’s political sensibilities regardless of what they were. The show started off with a (regrettably very good) Boston police pipe-and-drum parade band that barely fit on the stage and then, following a reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in its entirety, went into a slideshow about the Easter Rising that began off with a photograph of an Irish Volunteers recruitment poster railing against the excesses of the “Peelers” (i.e., the cops). A very kumbaya-esque let’s-all-hold-hands-and-pray-for-peace-and-brotherhood type ditty (“Give Me Your Hand,” maybe?) segued seamlessly into “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a nationalist classic about getting into street fights with either the actual Tans or maybe your racist neighbors, depending on how you want to read it; it’s a bit ambiguous. “The Streets of New York” was dedicated to an NYPD police officer and was followed up almost immediately with a rendition of “Joe McDonnell,” a song about one of the hunger strikers, whose chorus begins “And you dared to call me a terrorist while you looked down your gun.” Pro-peace, pro-cop, and pro-terrorism all at the same time! Erin go bragh!

It’s undeniable that the Tones are a forcefully good time; O’Toole has a hilarious anecdote about himself as a teenager watching a Wolfe Tones concert and finding himself unexpectedly yelling “Up the IRA!” at the Taoiseach immediately afterwards. But being surrounded by the whitest crowd I’ve ever seen in Dorchester clapping for the BPD and yelling “ooh ah up the ‘ra” while a very 1990s-looking PowerPoint of grainy old photos of the patriot dead played behind the band was for sure a bit over-the-top, and I could feel a critical little ghost Fintan O’Toole sitting in the back of my mind, possibly having a nosebleed. (We left after a very drunk woman in a Free Palestine shirt–featuring a keffiyeh-masked militant with a rocket standing back-to-back with a balaclava-masked Provo with an Armalite–was gently removed by the mostly-Black theater staff–the only Black people on the property–after they asked her to stop putting her handbag on the stage about twelve times, and we decided we’d had enough of a politically weird experience to keep busy analyzing it for the rest of our lives.)

Where was I? Right, actual history.

This book clocks in at about 500 pages and I feel like if I got going I could probably write 500 pages about it, but I’d end up carefully rereading the whole thing in the process, and that might be a project better put off a bit, at least if I want to get through other books this year. I found this book unputdownable enough that I stayed up too late reading it more nights than one; at the same time, because it touches on so many different things, I also spent a lot of time looking stuff up on my phone (starting with aerial photographs of Crumlin and going through a bunch of music on Spotify and the artwork of Jim Fitzpatrick), and staring off into the middle distance while my brain struggled to tie in the things I was reading about here to all the others scattered bits and pieces that make up Irish history in my brain–here’s what O’Toole says, and here’s what Rory Carroll said in There Will Be Fire, and didn't Patrick Radden Keefe also talk about that in Say Nothing, and sure there was just an episode about film censorship on The Irish History Podcast, and hey look it’s Michael D. Michael D. Up On His Bikeldy Higgins!

At any rate, I understand why my dad’s been talking my ear off about this book for months and why he insisted I read it, and I may find myself becoming completely insufferable about it too!

For this Black History Month I finally (after too many years) read James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, which, at fewer than 200 pages, also counts for “short books for a short month.” I think I bought my copy at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture sometime in 2019. Five years is, sadly, not an atypical amount of time for something to sit on my bookshelf before I actually read it.

Reviewing Baldwin feels vaguely blasphemous not just because he is widely recognized as one of the greats but also because he is a Black man writing in the 1940s and 1950s and I am a white girl who wasn’t even born until the 1980s, so what am I gonna do, say he’s wrong about anything? I don’t know, I’m reading to learn here. Also, the first three essays are all critical reviews of books and movies that I haven’t read or seen; he could be making them up whole cloth and I wouldn’t know (I assume someone else would have noticed by now if that were the case, of course). But anyway all I can say about the first section of the book is that I’m not always sure what he’s talking about due to my lack of familiarity with the subject matter, but he is entertainingly savage in the particular digs he makes at these pieces of media. Baldwin is not known for showering praise upon pretty much anyone or anything so it’s probably unsurprising to see that he doesn’t really like “protest novels” or “social novels” by either white or black authors, although his diagnoses of what’s wrong with them differs.

The other essays are largely biographical, about life in Harlem, a job in New Jersey, his father, newspapers, getting arrested in Paris. Baldwin is unsparing in his analysis of the social and psychological ills of, again, basically everybody. Some of it is dryly funny in a way that Baldwin always manages to immediately make you feel bad about finding funny, because it really is a blistering look at a lot of harsh realities (and, perhaps more importantly, unrealities). There are a lot of the sorts of really profound quotes that people like to dig out of the essays and post as standalones and many of them do sort of do that themselves in the essays themselves, kind of jumping off the page and slapping you in the face, but they really work much better as punctuation of whatever tragically human anecdote Baldwin was telling us.

For book club I might have to google for smarter discussion questions than the ones I can come up with. It probably wouldn’t go amiss for me to re-read some of the more complex essays, like the titular one about Baldwin’s father’s death and the riots that broke out in Harlem at the same time. As one of the few non-Jews in the group I’m also particularly interested in the discussion that will ensue about the second half of “The Harlem Ghetto,” which is about Black anti-Semitism and Jewish anti-Blackness, and the causes and effects of each and their relationship to each other and the wider social structures of the U.S. I am personally more “at home” in the sections on “let’s talk about why newspapers are so bad” and, of course, the later essays where Baldwin dunks on the French (and on Francophiles), so I think it will be instructive.

Medieval January is over so I finally read the non-medieval book that the politics book club was supposed to read for January: Naomi Klein’s newest release, Doppelganger.

Nominally, Doppelganger is about the identity crisis Naomi Klein had that was precipitated by her continual conflation with Naomi Wolf, whomst has become a crank and a conspiracy theorist. This is actually quite interesting, especially if you’ve read a bunch of Klein’s other books, where she doesn’t tend to foreground herself that much. Getting mixed up with Other Naomi so much was deeply destabilizing for Klein (whom I have started thinking of as Good Naomi), and the psychological exploration of identity formation and maintenance that she goes through is fascinating, especially for someone whose public identity–or personal brand, as we call it these days–is so tied up with critical deconstruction of ideas like personal branding. But it would still be a pretty navel-gazey book if that was all that was going on–which, fortunately, there isn’t. Klein uses the trajectory of Wolf’s career as a case study/jumping-off-point to diagnose various ills in our current political discourse, and the political reality that discourse obscures.

I definitely regret missing the book club about this because there’s a lot of juicy stuff here–about Covid, about weaknesses in the left and the sort of mainstream liberalism that presents as the left (“progressivism”), about where conspiracy theories come from and how they function, about the power and the limitations of words, about Red Vienna, about Palestine. It’s a difficult book to explain but it really clarified and solidified a lot of stuff I’ve been seeing and worrying about over the past few years.

I don’t remember exactly how this book first came into my view but sometime in the last two months, when I’ve been thinking a lot about political violence and strategies for change and intractable conflicts that are popularly miscast as solely sectarian violence, I became aware that there was a recently released new book about the Troubles, titled There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and the Two Minutes that Changed History, by Guardian columnist Rory Carroll.

This book is structured similarly to Say Nothing in that it focuses on one event of the Troubles, and tries to build the fullest possible picture of that event–before, during, after, context, interviews with the major players (except Gerry Adams, who refuses to ever be interviewed for these things because he still maintains he was never in the IRA), the occasional photo. This one is weighted a bit less on the “history of the entire Troubles” end, probably because the actual operation of the Brighton bombing and the subsequent manhunt for Patrick Magee was somewhat more complex than the murder of Jean McConville. It situates the England Department within the rest of the IRA and the discussions about strategy and resource allocation that were going on in the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein.

After having just finished Let This Radicalize You and If We Burn, I found the strategy talk to be some of the most interesting stuff in the book–despite pearl-clutching from the respectable media there’s actually an enormous difference between organizing strategies that don’t involve armed struggle (known in the official literature as “nonviolent resistance,” although in popular parlance the designation of nonviolence can be revoked for any reason whatsoever) and organizing strategies in which shootings, bombings, and arson are the main tools one’s repertoire of resistance. But at the same time, it would appear that questions about burnout, opsec, training, not talking to cops, PR, public sympathy, the limits and contradictions of any given strategy, internal diplomacy, and resource allocation are fairly constant across any organization that is trying to effect political change. I find myself once again impressed by the IRA’s creative strategic thinking–combining the hunger strikes, which had gotten easy to ignore, with election campaigns, which necessarily force attention upon the candidate as an individual, was a stroke of genius that saved what seems like would have been an otherwise ineffective act of self-destruction; I also think Sinn Fein’s policy of abstentionism is the only way I’ve ever seen of disrupting or signaling illegitimacy in an elected government that isn’t self-defeating at worst or irrelevant at best. (Not contesting elections is a perfectly fine strategy for groups that aren’t interested in the electoral sphere or don’t have the resources to stand elections, but it certainly doesn’t exert any power within the electoral sphere, no matter what goofy shit you tell yourself about “not legitimizing” or “boycotting” or whatever. Standing an election, winning it, and then refusing to take the oath of fealty to the Crown or haul your ass to Westminster at least keeps the seat out of the hands of your political enemies, and allows you to do constituent services.)

Anyway, back to the bombing. This was a meticulously planned operation, and Carroll gets us inside the heads of both the IRA operatives involved with carrying it out, several of the Conservative Party targets and victims (not always quite the same thing–Thatcher was really the target, although I don’t think the republicans would have been upset if the execrable Norman Tebbit had got got), and a whole slew of police detectives, bomb disposal technicians, fingerprint experts, and other law enforcement and anti-terrorism personnel across at least a dozen different jurisdictions and departments, with working relationships to each other in varying degrees of functionality. The investigative work on display in this book is both riveting to read and an interesting look into what solving public safety threats can look like when the cops don’t have endless guns and free reign to just bust anyone’s heads that they feel like. A key quality on display was patience, in this case necessitated by political realities rather than any personal virtues of the cops in question: Magee spent quite a while on the lam at Ballymun Towers outside of Dublin, in the Republic where the English police didn’t have jurisdiction. England, for various reasons, wasn’t in a hurry to start another full-blown war with the Republic, and as such, simply airstriking Ballymun Towers to rubble wasn’t on the table. So instead they waited. This, as a quick look at the news will tell you, is not the only possible response of governments to terrorism; the political conditions have to make it not just the sensible and humane thing to do, but the only course of action that’s not suicidally costly.

Anyway, political analysis aside (it’s so hard for me to set it aside right now though!), this is a ripping good read. We get cameos from well-known shady characters in the IRA weapons pipeline, like Whitey Bulger and Muammar Gaddafi; we learn about bomb technology, Victorian engineering, and the art of fingerprint analysis; no detail is spared in the grisly account of the explosion and its aftermath. Carroll manages to mostly keep his own opinions out of the picture, but does a very good job with both dry, understated humor and in humanizing–not necessarily sympathizing with, but definitely humanizing–all parties involved. The actual historical events do more or less follow a conventional story structure–the plot is hatched, planned, and carried out, then the investigation is conducted and the perpetrators are caught and imprisoned. In the epilogue, to the degree that real life has epilogues, they are let out early as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. As we leave off, the Conservative Party’s paranoia and meanness had led to Brexit, opening up the tantalizing possibility that Ireland might, at some point in the near future, actually be reunited–democratically, by referendum. This is not to say that the Brighton bombing didn’t accomplish anything or that Violence Doesn’t Work or anything that simplistic–indeed, the psychological damage it inflicted upon Thatcher’s party may well have been part of what got Britain to this point. History is a funny old thing like that.

I made the book club read Vincent Bevins’ new book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, even though what I kind of really wanted to do was inflict The Jakarta Method on them, except that I really didn’t want to have to reread The Jakarta Method so soon. Anyway.

If We Burn is a wide-ranging series of interviews getting behind the scenes of major protest movements across the globe, mostly in the Third World, in the 2010s. I followed some of these at the time they were happening via Twitter, others I followed less, so my prior knowledge was very uneven, but even the protests I sort of thought I knew a bit about it turns out I knew a lot less about than I did about protests going on in the US, like Occupy and the first wave of BLM. Anyway, there’s a lot of interesting firsthand accounts of the behind-the-scenes action in uprisings from Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, Ukraine, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Some of these revolutions were more or less successful–South Korea’s ousting of Park Geun-hye seems to have been followed up in a pretty orderly fashion with somebody else kind of normal being president, although I think the current guy is a bit more right-wing than Moon Jae-in–and some collapsed into military dictatorship, as in Egypt, or worse, like whatever you want to call the current state of things in Libya.

While much of the value in this book is just having a ton of primary sources that were close to the issues at hand, so this information doesn’t get lost in the future, there are a couple of themes that do seem to emerge. One is that the big, digitally coordinated mass protests, however much positive press they got from Western media for being the right and correct and respectable way to make change, had a very uneven record of making any kind of change. Clearly, the theory of change that’s just “Have mass protests until a better society emerges” is missing some key details. Bevins doesn’t lay out a One True Way to Achieve Social Change–his stance even on the age-old “reform or revolution” question isn’t that one is inherently better than the other, just that you should consider doing whichever one you are better positioned to actually pull off–just that there aren’t any shortcuts to thinking strategically and having more than one tool in your “repertoire of resistance.” “Don’t create power vacuums and then leave them open for somebody else to step into, because they will” is a big takeaway, and probably one of the easier ones to start doing something about (Gabriel Boric isn’t having a perfectly flawless term as president of Chile, but he’s still the president, which is a better time than the Egyptian left is having).

Some of the lack of strategic thinking on display in this book is honestly very tragic. The Hong Kong protests were in a tight enough spot given the positive backing they were getting from the U.S., which has been concerned about China’s economic development because we still think it’s against the rules for any country to develop economically except the handful we hand-pick to be allowed to do the same things we coup other countries for trying (called either “democracy” or “communism” depending on whether the US thinks it’s strategically beneficial for the US). Foreign money, especially foreign money from the US, which has lots of it, seems to be capable of overwhelming whatever organic, domestic-policy-oriented protests occur in a nation if the foreign money thinks it could be useful for its own ends. The Hong Kong students thought they could use the US’ sympathy for their own ends, and ended up cosplaying The Hunger Games right into the sea waiting for the US/UK cavalry to come in and deliver them. Also, for Christ’s sake, they were literally cosplaying The Hunger Games. (Made me think of this essay: https://newsocialist.org.uk/outlaw-kings-rebel-chic/.) There’s also some talk with Egyptian leftists who boycotted the four-way election after the fall of Hosni Mubarak and then were shocked Pikachu face that one of the right-wing candidates won, all of whom regretted being all anarcho-vibesist about it and wished they had in some way engaged with the question of who would succeed Mubarak.

Unrelated to issues of theory and strategy, my favorite thing about this book was how personally insulted Bevins is by what the right wing did to Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Bevins is normally fairly good at not making himself part of the story, but he did get caught in some fairly escalated situations during the protests in Brazil, and he got to witness the soft coup impeachment vote that removed Dilma from office, and he was clearly deeply offended by what he saw. He really dislikes the smug little American-funded faux-punk neoliberal group MBL (named deliberately to confuse people by sounding almost like the more popular and sympathetic MPL) with a palpable and visceral dislike, and I am definitely here for it because they sound fucking insufferable. He certainly makes the case convincingly that Dilma was done dirty by just about everybody, but it’s adorable how hurt he seems to be about it.

Full disclosure: I went into Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care almost not wanting to like it, since it’s been praised to the skies and I get concerned about people just reading whatever they want into things. On the other hand, this particular type of burnout–suspicious, reading everything through a filter of “how resistant is this to co-optation by the most self-absorbed people in the world” (even though bad actors can co-opt anything), generally dour about my fellow leftists–is exactly the sort of thing I need some way to heal from, so I figured it was worth a shot to see what they had to say.

Hayes and Kaba go to great lengths to ensure this book is not just a litany of “how not to be” advice but let’s face it, there are a lot of potential pitfalls in organizing and a lot of ways that good organizers should not be. Advice on taking care of ourselves and each other, constructive (and not constructive) ways to onboard newbies, how to think strategically (and why it’s so important), the limitations of both traditional and social media, navigating hot-button rhetoric around “violence” and other buzzwords, the importance of political education and emotional processing… it’s a wide-ranging category of topics but it all comes down to being solid advice on how to safely and sustainably do organizing. Hayes and Kaba gently and compassionately insist that “organizing” means organizing, and not just any old shit you do to tell yourself that you are Making The World A Better Place. Honestly, one of the main strengths of this book is that Hayes and Kaba clearly have a lot of experience gently and compassionately telling people stuff they might not always want to hear, like “sometimes one thing really is more effective than another thing” or “here is some information you may not have previously considered” or even “the behavior you engaged in harmed someone else and you are not the sole wronged party in this situation.”

The timing of this read was interesting for me personally because I read it as an immediate precursor to Vince Bevins’ If We Burn, which covers mass protests from 2010 to 2020, and I think it’s useful to see how the advice in the two books compare. I think they dovetail fairly nicely, even though the Bevins book is focused mainly on one type of action and Let This Radicalize You is careful to survey a wide range of types of actions (lesson: you gotta have more than one tool in your toolbox).

It is very likely I won’t end up rereading this because I’m not nearly as good at rereading things as I ought to be, but I am nonetheless glad that I bought a copy of this instead of getting it from the library because I ought to reread it and I ought to be able to lend it out to other people. We’ll see how that goes.

As part of my project to slowly re-integrate into chapter life by doing reading groups, I joined the reading group for Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. As you can probably tell from the subtitle, this is not a lighthearted or uplifting book.

If you are involved in the U.S. left you are probably at least somewhat aware that the U.S. has done a lot of coups; the ones that I see discussed (or at least posted about) the most tend to be Chile and Iran, and I was aware that there were several more–in the dozens–but I didn’t know anything about any of them in particular. I knew some of them had to do with bananas, and I knew some of them had to do with oil reserves. I remember when Elliot Abrams resurfaced in public life and there was a big controversy about whether it was somehow Going Too Far or whatever to say that he shouldn’t be allowed to show his face in respectable society ever again given that his prior claim to fame was running PR for death squads in El Salvador. But what information I had about the CIA’s bad behavior for the rest of the 20th century after World War II ended was all in bits and pieces; I’d never really sat down and read a whole book about it before.

Well, I have now been enlightened, and as is generally the case upon digesting a large load of political enlightenment on the left, I feel punchy and awful and distracted. Everything around me feels very dumb and I want to go pick a fight with someone. I’ll feel better soon when I have actual concrete, useful things to do, but for right now I feel like I’ve eaten an entire rotten watermelon and I want to puke it back up all over Henry Kissinger.

This is probably not a great way to start off this review, given that the main thing I have to say about this book is that I think everybody should read it. It’s fantastically done–incredibly engaging, information-dense, easy to read, full of both paradigm-shifting historical context and illuminating interviews with individual survivors of anticommunist massacres, which serve to humanize the effects of US policy. It addresses both the outright lies that the US public has been told, and a number of the false assumptions about the Third World that we are quietly encouraged to not examine.

A constant and infuriating thread in the U.S.’ actions is that we treat the rest of the world as if they are dumb babies, and when they do something insufficiently babyish, we are very threatened and throw a big tantrum and knock all their toys over, then immediately hide-slash-forget that we did that, and just see this other country sitting in a big mess and conclude that they probably had the tantrum themselves and this just proves that they’re dumb babies who need us to tell them what to do… and the cycle continues. These days it is fashionable among mainstream liberals to look at the various repressive, right-wing governments in Third World countries around the world and lament at the backwardness that allows such right-wing dictators to thrive, maybe the U.S. should intervene and establish a democracy? In every case, the right-wing dictatorship was brutally installed by U.S. forces after we deliberately destroyed the postwar democracies. This book barely touches on the right-wing regimes that we “humanitarianly intervened” with in my lifetime–the Taliban, who we armed in Operation Cyclone, and Saddam Hussein, who we helped take power in 1963. This is not to say that the book ignores them, just that there are too many overthrowings of democratically elected leaders, installations of military dictatorships, providing of arms and training and kill lists, and other such crimes against humanity to give them all the in-depth treatment. The countries we spend the most time reading about, and the ones that Bevins posits are the most influential, are Brazil and Indonesia.

Indonesia gets to be the title country here for several reasons, one of which is that it seems to be the least known despite possibly having the highest body count of all the mass murder programs the CIA backed in the postwar period. In the twenty years following the end of WWII, Indonesia had the largest unarmed Communist party in the world. The PKI, as it was known, did all the things people lament those stupid modern leftists don’t have the sense to do–they participated in normal parliamentary politics, stood elections, built support by carrying out their campaign promises and meeting regular people’s needs, developed a reputation for not engaging in corruption, played nicely with the other parties–including supporting the immensely popular non-Communist president, Sukarno–and otherwise were an active and well-respected political party, full of normal people who also were Marxists, doing normal politics from a Marxist perspective.

In 1965, in the weeks following the 30 September Movement, as it became known, the PKI was completely obliterated from the face of the Earth. Over the course of about half a year, the Indonesian army, trained and backed by the U.S., murdered somewhere between half a million and a million Indonesian civilians for suspected previously-entirely-legal ties to the PKI, and put another million or so in concentration camps. Targets were picked in part from kill lists that the CIA supplied to the military death squads in full knowledge of what was going on. From 1966 onward, Indonesia has been a quiet and compliant ally state of the U.S., and basically no one in the U.S. has had any reason to think about it in fifty years, unless they are planning a scenic beach vacation to the killing fields of Bali. Apparently, no one except the locals, who still sometimes find skulls and bones in the sand, have any idea that the swanky tourist resorts of Bali are built on the sites of some of the largest mass killings of the 20th century.

The Indonesian coup was so spectacularly successful that the CIA would use it as a playbook for all of its post-1965 coups in Latin America, with the added twist that right-wing forces in Chile etc. started using “Jakarta is coming” as a threat, much the way modern fash use helicopter imagery as a threat.

Anyway, if you ever wondered if maybe Martin Luther King Jr. was exaggerating a little bit when he said that the U.S. was the largest purveyor of violence in the world today (the today in question being the ‘60s), be assured that he was not. You can read all about it here. And then, as Anthony Bourdain once said, you will never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.

Upon returning from my organizing hiatus I decided to start off slow and attend a nice little book club with my starting working group, political education. To that end, some comrades I hadn’t seen in a while and I got together every two weeks to discuss the late great David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the book-length expansion of his viral essay of the same title.

I wouldn’t say this was the most tightly argued piece of theory I’ve ever read but I don’t think it was supposed to be. It instead meanders around a fairly wide range of work-related complaints and attempts to create a usable taxonomy of bullshit, and does some exploration of what that bullshit does to us, why it happens, and what might be able to push back on it. Graeber’s writing is cheeky and readable, occasionally to the point of breeziness, but I think that’s more than balanced out by the way he’s able to talk about actual-leftist-not-just-left-liberal concepts–like his anarchist reservations about “policy”--in a clear, simple way that relies lightly enough on leftist theory terms that he’s able to explain each one that he does use. I don’t think every book of left theory needs to do this (not everything is an intro course, sometimes you need to have a 200-level discussion) but it’s nice when books whose audience is not just Marxists gets in a little Marxist political education without butchering the subject. (Graeber is an anarchist but apparently his dad was a Marxist, so he tends to take a sort of fond poking-fun approach at a lot of longstanding Marxist concepts that I suspect will make them seem a bit less threatening to non-Marxist readers, without misrepresenting them as just fancier terms for liberal ideas.)

The book obviously deals with some fairly infuriating subject matter (although cathartically so, if you have a bullshit job, or a fundamentally non-bullshit job that is undergoing bullshitization), but it’s quite fun to read. When Graeber comes up with new terms he tends to go for punchy and memorable, rather than laboriously constructed from Greek and Latin roots or older lefty terms: his main categories of bullshit jobs are “flunkies,” “goons,” “duct tapers,” “box tickers,” and “taskmasters.” (There is also a “second-order” or combination category of “flak catchers.”) There is also a great amount of qualitative survey data; the various comments and testimonials are definitely great reading and, while putting a number on how much of our economy is bullshit is pretty tough, they are very convincing indicators that something in our economy seems to have gone wrong.

After some really interesting dives into the psychology of being bored at work and the flows of resentment in modern political life, Graeber puts forth some thoughts on why this state of affairs has been allowed to happen in defiance of all theoretical assumptions about capitalist efficiency, and rather reluctantly offers a policy suggestion: a quick-and-dirty but thought-provoking discussion on UBI.

Overall I think this book raises more questions than it answers, but also I think that was kind of the idea. I think it’s very good for shaking up one’s thinking about work, efficiency, and value (and values), and also it’s fairly entertaining. It was definitely fun to read and discuss in a small group, and I recall the original essay being quite a conversation starter as well. Also it has the benefit if being considerably shorter than either Debt or The Dawn of Everything, so it’ll probably be easier to get other people to read!

After many years of being like “I’ve got to read this book next,” I did in fact read James R. Green’s The Devil Is Here In These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and their Battle for Freedom. More specifically, the book club graciously agreed to read it with me after I’d suggested it several times, thus prompting me to actually do so.

Overall I found this a really good read. It’s got it all: strikes, murder, leftist infighting, heroic underdogs, spy stuff, explosions, flooding of Biblical proportions, the lot. We’ve got cameos from big-name labor history leaders like Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, and we meet lesser-known-outside-of-West-Virginia folks like Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney. We meet lots of Hatfields (not as many McCoys, though).

One thing that sticks out to me as a modern socialist is that the West Virginians who took on the mine owners and their private guards were a politically mixed bunch who fought on every front at their disposal. They held rallies, they ran elections for political office, they unionized, they picketed, they talked to the press, they published their own press, they sued, they stole guns and sabotaged industrial equipment and had shootouts. Truly the whole gamut of tactics. And it wasn’t neatly divided up into, like, the business unionists did electoral work and the anarchists toted guns, or anything that neat and simple. The same people who supported more “moderate” tactics in one controversy would sometimes back the more “extreme” ones in another. The first time the National Guard was called in, most of the miners were pleased to have federal forces show up instead of just the coal companies’ private rent-a-cops; Mother Jones was one of a relatively small number of more radical voices in the picture who presciently warned that state power could never really be the miners’ friend and would eventually be turned to putting the strikers in line (she was right about this, of course). Later, when the strikers decided to march to the state capital to spring their brethren from jail, Jones went so far as to fake having received a telegram from the President to try to get them to stand down. Frank Keeney was usually one of the more militant “red” minority voices and butted heads with the more business-unionist head of the NMWA; he was also one of the people pushing the mine workers to go all-out on patriotism and shit during WWI. Turns out labor history is full of people after all, and people are contradictory and contain multitudes.

I feel like I learned a lot from this book but I will have to cudgel my brains a bit to come up with some good discussion questions. Maybe my brain is just tired but I’m basically like “I learned a lot of things! I don’t have questions about them ‘cause I learned them now!” so it’s clearly time to wake up my dormant brain cells.

For the politics book club we decided to read Mariame Kaba’s We Do This Til We Free Us, a collection of articles, essays, and interviews about prison abolition and transformative justice. I had bought this back when it came out and wanted to do more reading about said subjects.

It’s hard for me to separate out my thoughts on the actual merits of the book from all the psychic damage I’ve taken in my years as an organizer. I’m trying to not do the thing where I react to things people didn’t say because it hits a raw spot about shit completely different people did another time, if only because it drives me fucking bananas when other people do that and I don’t want to be part of the problem. But I do end up feeling like it was a bit of an own goal for me to suggest this book, because it is an overall pretty solid book that nevertheless pitched me head-first back into series of emotional rabbit holes that don’t even have the decency to be about, like, prison and police violence and all the really serious stuff that the book is about.

Some of this is because I made the mistake of not just reading the book, but also of reading other people’s reviews of the book, which started off my brain’s usual lamentations about the dysfunctional State of the Discourse. I am 0% here for any criticisms of admonition that “Abolition is not about your fucking feelings” and I am even less than 0% here for any criticisms that rely on fundamentally misunderstanding the word “about” because you’re too deep in your feelings to hear simple words clearly (which I sympathize with, even though I hate it, because I am currently struggling not to be so deep in my feelings that I can’t hear simple words clearly). The thing I find myself wanting to criticize is that I think Kaba was too nice in some of her writings about abolition not being about your fucking feelings, even though given the reaction to what she did say, I cannot actually think it would have gotten through to anyone if she were harsher.

A quick example. When reading the Table of Contents, I saw that one of the essays was titled “The Sentence of Larry Nassar Was Not ‘Transformative Justice.’ Here’s Why.” My first thought was, Did anyone say it was? I know Kaba’s a prolific Twitter user, and people on Twitter will say any batshit thing, but that doesn’t mean you have to respond to them. The dumbest thing I could remember anyone saying on Twitter when Nasser was sentenced was proposing exiling him to Wyoming, as if Wyoming weren’t a real state that still has schools and sports and teenage girls and a general public. More than half a million people live in Wyoming and they don’t deserve Larry Nasser any more than the people of Michigan do.

It turns out that I had stone cold forgotten the actual worst Nasser take, which was published in once-respectable mainstream magazine The Atlantic, where someone actually did try to argue that Nasser’s prison sentence was “transformative justice,” apparently on an understanding that “transformative justice” just means “justice with some syllables tacked on the beginning to signal that I am politically on-trend.” I think my brain blocked this out to protect myself, because since rediscovering this information it has been wallowing in a black pit of despair at the Sisyphean impossibility of keeping political terms tethered anywhere close to their meanings. Anyway, seeing as how this Humpty-Dumptying nonsense was in a headline in the motherfucking Atlantic, Kaba and Kelly Hayes felt this required a rebuttal, and wrote one. Over the course of six pages, they define what “transformative justice” means, outline what a transformative justice approach to sexual assault committed by an authority figure would involve, and reiterate a simple, eloquent, beginner-friendly version of basic abolitionist talking points about how the criminal justice system (which Kaba calls the “criminal punishment system,” because that’s what it actually does) occasionally convicts someone who did bad things, but is never really just.

It was a good piece that set out what it did to do, and did so with grace and patience, acknowledging that people have retributive feelings toward people like Nasser with very good reason. Personally, I hated every word of it, because my retributive feelings were in full swing–toward whoever wrote, greenlit, and edited that stupid piece at the Atlantic. Using language to try to create and communicate meaning, instead of to wantonly destroy it, is one of my big things, and I yearned for the emotional satisfaction of a response like: The sentencing of Larry Nasser wasn’t transformative justice because it was a prison sentence, and prison sentences aren’t transformative justice in approximately the same way they aren’t a wheel of cheese, i.e, because words have definitions. “Transformative justice” isn’t just extra syllables added to the term “justice” and you can’t use the terms completely interchangeably when having a values debate over whether such-and-such a thing constitutes justice. If you think Nasser’s sentencing was justice, fine, you can think that, but it’s still regular-ass criminal justice because it went through the regular-ass criminal justice system and not a transformative justice process. The criminal justice system does not deliver transformative justice any more than it delivers pizza. It delivers prison sentences, which are a different thing. That isn’t a statement of values; it’s a factual claim. Learn what words mean before using them in magazine articles, for the love of Christ.

(This is why Kaba is a well-respected public political educator and I am not.)

Anyway, “abolition is not about your fucking feelings” is one of the best lines in the book, as far as I’m concerned. The other bits that stuck with me the most are ones that I haven’t seen anyone else bring up:

“I think that people are new to these ideas. They’re trying to make sense of them in real-time, and they’re projecting the meanings they want and need onto these ideas… Oftentimes when you encounter something for the first time, it raises so much within you, it makes you grasp for familiar things to explain the thing you may not quite understand.” (p.190)

This quotation, as you can see from the paragraphs above, called me out. I think this is a really astute and compassionate way to explain why people do That Thing That Drives Me Absolutely Bugfuck Insane, why it’s so easy for sensible people to fall into butchering political terminology, why there’s so much talking past each other, why the discourse turns into an unintelligible slurry of radical terminology papered over thoroughly moderate unexamined assumptions. And things like prison abolition and transformative justice are probably particularly susceptible to this because a pretty good chunk of what they mean doesn’t seem like it should be that radical–stuff like “asking ‘how did this happen, and what can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?’ instead of fixating on figuring out who is The Bad Guy and making them Sorry” is just considered regular old maturity and problem-solving when encountered in contexts outside criminal law. How much of prison abolitionist theory and organizing is frankly just the basic morally defensible position once you get some of the facts about how the prison and policing systems actually work can easily obfuscate the parts of prison abolition that really are radical and that likely require more faith in humanity’s ability to do difficult things than, quite likely, most of actually have.

“Everyone doesn’t have to be an abolitionist.” (p.190)

I have thoughts on this. I will keep the most uncharitable ones to myself, because Posting Discipline, but let’s just say I combined this thought with her discussion about movements, not individual people, being the timeline on which things happen, and say I have made peace with the notion that it’s more important that the organizations I belong to be principled abolitionist orgs than that I personally be 100% abolitionist. Let’s say I’m 90% abolitionist and I hope the day where I actually get to find out who’s right about that last 10% happens within my lifetime. I would love to get to the point where that last bit about to what degree we can eliminate the idea of “people too dangerous to have around anyone” stops being purely philosophical and becomes an actual thing that we’re working to solve, because right now, it’s academic.

In “Everything Worthwhile Is Done with Other People,” an interview with Eve Ewing in the “Show Up and Don’t Travel Alone” section of the book, we get some really tantalizing tidbits about what I consider the real Hard Questions in an immediate, practical sense. In discussing the recent popularization of these ideas, they mention “the consequence of what happens when people are learning about concepts primarily through–” “Reading.” There are old, old questions about the relationship between theory and praxis that leftists have been wrestling with for the entire history of the left, which I think in our current political moment are exacerbated by the double-edged sword of social media and our current punditocracy culture to obfuscate the differences between political hobbyism, activism, and organizing. One of the critiques leveled at this book is that it’s too vague, not concrete enough, etc., and I’ve been sitting with my of-two-minds reaction to this. In some cases, I did feel like it was too vague, because I’m hypervigilant about people not defining things concretely enough, and have to wrestle with whether I’m holding them to unrealistic standards of idiot-proofing and how that expectation is actually a type of brainworms. On the other hand, I’m also wrestling with the contradictions between 1) I, too, am also reading this book because I want to learn things and 2) I believe that the expectations many readers have about the amount of How To Organize stuff that you should be able to learn from the comfort of your couch without interacting with anyone is unrealistic and frankly a bad idea. To get more case-study type material about transformative justice processes, you gotta do the think Kabe politely (but apparently not politely enough!) tells people to do repeatedly–go organize. Join an organization that is doing organizing work and start doing it with them. Take actual trainings and listen to your comrades and network with other organizers at other organizations about their processes and what you can learn to improve your org’s processes, because if you don’t have an org to have processes for, then what does it matter that you don’t know what a TJ process looks like? You will be neither running nor participating in one. The notion that everything needs to be publicly available in a book, including “real-life examples of handling people’s very personal, messy shit in a specific organizational or community context,” has… some problems! Concrete details are also potentially personally identifying ones, and one of the aspects of the criminal justice system that is frequently cited as one of its indignities is the putting on display of everyone’s personal business for public consumption and judgment. Even with that, Kaba references several useful online toolkits about TJ; this book just isn’t those toolkits. Should it have been? I’m leaning toward “no, it didn’t need to be” even as I also kind of wanted it to be. Also, any kind of short, easily digestible, publicly available resource is going to fundamentally run into the same problem–if it’s just words on a page, nothing and no one is there to stop you from reading it and just deciding it means what you want it to mean.

Anyway, this is the stuff that sticks in my brain the most because Hard Questions About Organizing are already taking up a lot of space in my brain. Most of the book is about things that are frankly more important but also more outside of my experience, since most of my organizing has not been around prison issues so it doesn’t hit me right in the raw spots. I’ve actually been quite lucky, even by white girl standards, that I have avoided police brutality and arrest to the degree that I have, given the organizing I have done. I’ve somehow never even been pepper sprayed. (I am intensely grateful for this.) Black people being attacked by police essentially at random is, objectively, a much bigger problem than another tiresome crank in your DSA chapter trying to convince the HGOs that it’s “oppression” for you to personally dislike them just because they are constantly disruptive, but I also don’t find myself really having as much to say about it besides “That’s real fucked up and we should stop it.” The stopping it doesn’t get done by me having opinions, online or otherwise; I will either put some portion of my personal energy into local anti-police and anti-prison projects when I’m done with my organizing break, or I will put it toward other things. (I will probably go back to antifascist/queer community defense stuff, which overlaps heavily with but is not the same thing as anti-police work. It overlaps much less heavily with anti-prison work in the day-to-day.) Anyway, I’m fully aware that my perspective is warped toward fixating on certain things and that I am in need of psychological healing before I can be a reasonable person about those things.

Overall, We Do This Til We Free Us does a fairly solid job of introducing the reader to key concepts around PIC abolition and TJ, but I don’t know if it can really do what it wants to do to make readers reprioritize what questions they consider important and generally shift their whole approach to these issues–but that’s because that’s a real big ask, and it’s not like she doesn’t pretty explicitly explain why she has the approach she does. Ultimately I think this book was pretty good, it’s just that the state of my brain re: organizing is pretty bad, so it’s on me as a reader that this ultimately pretty hopeful book managed to completely ruin my mood for a week. Discussion should be interesting.

For book club (somehow I’m now only in one book club) we picked Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, a book I have heard good things about and have been vaguely intending to read for several years now.

Robin’s main argument is that conservatism, as a political movement, isn’t really about tradition, or incrementalism, or even resistance to change per se, or any of the other things one could use the term small-c “conservative” for in everyday language. Instead, the thing that unites basically all of conservative thought since the French Revolution is an active defense of hierarchies that are perceived (rightly or wrongly, although usually at least somewhat rightly) as under threat. Conservatives believe that some people are just better than other people and are eager to retain some aspect of political life–the battlefield, the market, the monarchy–as a proving ground not just for some people to show off that they more skills or to accomplish more than other people (that, after all, would lead to a politics of trying to ensure a level playing field), but for the strong to dominate the weak. Robin argues that conservatives are largely concerned with “the private life of power,” which is why they tend to react hugely when oppressed groups make even very modest demands–the notion that their lessers have the right to speak at all upends their sense of the proper order of things and raises the specter of uppity backchat in all areas of life. He also argues that the central challenge of modern conservatism, as opposed to the actual traditionalism of old politics, is that they have to make elitism popular and, in a sense, democratized, in order to be competitive in mass politics–which they do with an arsenal of rhetorical and psychological tricks that Robin walks us through.

The book is structured as a bunch of more or less discrete essays on this theme, each profiling different key players in the conservative movement. The first part of the book concerns classic conservative theoreticians, like Edmund Burke and Nietzsche; the second part concerns figures of more immediate and recent impact on American conservatism in particular. One thing that was noticeable to me was the way the tone changes from discussing long-dead European guys that we only know through their writings to the essays that focus on more recent plagues on American politics–the profiles of Ayn Rand, Antonin Scalia, and Donald Trump are more overtly sneering and editorial, framing them less as formidable opponents because they are wrong but smart than as formidable opponents because they are wrong and dumb but cunning and also coddled by an American political culture that is far too willing to let them get away with their shit. Burke was “brilliant” but Scalia was just surrounded by people too polite to talk about him as nastily as he talked about them. The result is that the earlier chapters are more informative but the later chapters are more cathartic.

I’m excited to talk about this on Sunday and hope that I can put my brain back into my ears by then. This was maybe not the thing I would have chosen to read while recuperating from whatever I’ve been sick with all week if I were not on a deadline, but as far as having to read theory while huddling your aching joints under a weighted blanket and regretting that you can’t put the weighted blanket on your mandibles too goes, it was eminently readable! There were only a couple of words that I should have looked up earlier than I did (my man really loves the term “agonistic”), and overall I found myself engaged enough to almost forget how crappy I felt, which is fairly impressive for nonfiction.

At last year’s Boston Anarchist Book Fair I bought a copy of the then-brand-new The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Wengrow and the newly posthumous David Graeber. I did not attend this year’s Boston Anarchist Book Fair but it reminded me that I hadn’t actually read this book yet, so I suggested it and it was accepted as the first read of 2023 for the book club. I just got back from said book club when writing this review so I’m already a little talked out about it, so I may not put all my thoughts here.

The main project of this book is to challenge the metanarrative/3,000-foot level view of human cultural development that dominates in our culture on the basis that the archaeological finds of the past few decades don’t seem to support it at all, and at some point if there are enough “exceptions” and not enough things that follow the “correct” pattern then it’s not a very correct pattern. Given that the stageist narrative of hunter-gatherer → settled agriculture → industrialization is used to justify a lot of people’s politics and paint the current way we run the world as basically inevitable, it’s a matter of real political salience that we get this stuff right, and not simply a matter of historical curiosity. What follows is basically a 500-page romp through not just modern archaeology, but also through the last couple hundred years of historical and philosophical thought on early humans and their societies and What People Are Fundamentally Like. I enjoy this stuff because I really like looking at what makes certain ideas popular and also learning about when Common Wisdom is actually wrong. This book talks a lot about the legacy of the Hobbes and Rousseau debate (which you’ve probably heard of), a significant chunk of which is actually the fault of a guy named Turgot who for some mysterious reason probably did not show up in your Two Weeks Overview of the Enlightenment in high school European history. Hmm.

The Davids also do their best to retrace the discourse of indigenous American critiques of European society during early colonization. This was really interesting to me because the written versions of these critiques, or at least the versions of these critiques that got circulated in Europe in European languages and therefore seeped into Enlightenment discourse, were largely authored by Europeans, even when Native Americans traveled to Europe to engage in these debates the writeups always seem to be written by French people. This means there are also trends and orthodoxies and general politics about how to interpret these texts, including debate over to what degree actual indigenous people were saying these things and to what degree Europeans were just putting the spicier of their own words into the mouths of convenient outsiders. The Davids come down fairly convincingly on the side that assuming these discourses were actually all Europeans all the time is deeply incorrect.

Other interesting questions raised during this revisitation of the intellectual histories of archaeology and anthropology include “Why have archaeologists abandoned formulating big stories about the arc of human history” (the reasons here are mostly good) and “What are the consequences of not putting forth a competing metanarrative” (mostly bad–it cedes the space to people who don’t know what they’re talking about). There is also of course their stab at “What does prehistory/early history tell us about What People Are Fundamentally Like” which mainly seems to be that people have always been a) creative and b) political, which I admit is something I also definitely want to believe, and not merely am reluctantly convinced by. “How did we get stuck with the system we currently have, if it wasn’t inevitable” is also a major question. But mostly the book is really more about debunking the old narratives (from multiple sides) than about trying to build a new one, since the Davids’ main argument is really that people and their societies don’t conform to a single linear narrative. At any rate, it’s lots of fun! We get to visit lots of cool Neolithic archaeological sites all over the world and dunk on folks like Jared Diamond! It makes me want to read more about prehistory and ancient history! Archaeology is cool!

Honestly my biggest immediate complaint with this book was the lack of pictures; I had to search a lot of the archaeological sites described on my phone, and I try to stay off my phone when reading.