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Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New York and London: The New Press, 2006).

Read this book! Better, buy a dozen and give them to your friends and family. Even better, pass them out like leaflets at your local high school or community college.

I hope I am not assuming too much. I assume you are passionately against the US war in Iraq. If I am wrong, there is all the more reason for you to read this book. Read it carefully, and then go to the footnotes, and read the sources. Then you will probably want to follow the advice above.

In this short, no-nonsense little book, Anthony Arnove lays out point by point why the United States should immediately withdraw from Iraq. One after the other he addresses, and demolishes, the arguments of reactionaries and liberals alike for the US invasion of Iraq, and for the continuing occupation. His arguments are well researched and well documented from the mainstream press.

At the very start of the book Arnove explains why immediate withdrawal, rather than a timetable or some other murky half-way measure, should be the goal:

All of these [half-way measures], in the end, are recipes for continued occupation and blood shed, for one simple reason: the people who will decide when the U.S. military and its allies are prepared to leave are the very people who started the war in the first place and now have so much at stake in winning it.

Veterans of the antiwar movement of the 1960s and ‘70s might find this book to be basic ABCs, but newcomers to the antiwar movement might be electrified by the blinding light of the book’s facts and its cogent, common sense arguments.

Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal is self consciously modeled after Howard Zinn’s 1967 classic, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. In fact Zinn wrote both the foreword and the afterword for Arnove’s book. In 1967 I personally had never heard of Howard Zinn, or his book. I wish I had. I was a high school sophomore, and was one of the very few opponents of the Vietnam war at my school in San Jose, California. Every day at lunch a small knot of kids gathered to debate. I argued against the war; a born-again Christian argued for it.

The next year, we continued. We started to take carloads of kids up to Berkeley and San Francisco to attend demonstrations. But I never came across Zinn’s great book. If only some closet leftist teacher had given it to me, the high school antiwar movement in San Jose would have grown faster, and would have been bigger.

Arnove’s book could do that job for the antiwar movement today. It provides the weapons and ammunition needed by the front line shock troops in the battle against this war: not Kalashnikovs and bullets, but the simplest basic truths -- facts, analysis, and arguments that are probably more difficult to find in the post 9-11 George Bush era USA than guns and bullets.

In just over 100 pages Arnove uses the statistics and words of the US government and its allies to prove most of the key points. Chapter one shows that the war in Iraq is offensive, not defensive. It is “a war of choice” motivated by a global grab for oil rather than any of the advertised motives.

Arnove provides all the evidence anyone might need to conclude that the occupation of Iraq is a devastating, brutal, and racist crime against humanity. He then examines the myth that the United States is a benevolent hegemon and shows this myth to be a continuation of earlier imperialist eyewash, nothing more than a new version of the “white man’s burden.” He follows with a brief overview of Iraq’s most recent history of struggle against imperialism, and attempts to analyze the reality of today’s resistance movement.

His next-to-last chapter, “The Logic of Withdrawal,” is the strongest part of the book. It lays out eight reasons why the United States should leave Iraq immediately, answering the most common arguments for the US war and occupation. It covers the issues of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, international law, democracy in Iraq, making the world safer, preventing civil war in Iraq, rebuilding Iraq, honoring US soldiers who have died in Iraq, stability in Iraq, etc.

The final chapter, “Out Now,” suggests the geostrategic importance of Iraq for US military planning and future dominance of the region, and goes on to offer a road map for building an anti-war movement powerful enough to reverse US military occupation of Iraq and US imperial plans in the Middle East. In this chapter Arnove draws lessons from the war in Vietnam. He concludes that the United States was defeated because of the mass resistance of the people of Vietnam, the resistance of US soldiers and veterans, domestic opposition on a massive scale, international protest and opposition, and the economic consequences of the war (inflation and deficits). He then goes on to show how these five factors are in play today in Iraq.

He also goes on to make a critical assessment of the antiwar movement in the United States, and to propose how the movement could go forward. He makes his most telling criticism when he writes, “The US left made a terrible and costly mistake in supporting the presidential campaign of John Kerry, giving up its political independence and political principles to support a prowar candidate. Kerry called for sending more troops to Iraq...”

Although the author identifies himself with the International Socialist Organization, nowhere does he sink into sectarian jargon. And yet he does not avoid the most contentious issues within the antiwar movement.

Is there anything wrong with this book? I think that Arnove misses a key point about the US defeat in Vietnam: the cold war. The United States was constrained in Vietnam by the existence of the Soviet Union in a way that it is not constrained today. The weakest point of Arnove’s excellent book, however, is its last page. Here Arnove very briefly gives his tactical and strategic ideas for what the antiwar movement should do. He writes, “Millions of people sympathize with the aims of the antiwar movement but have not been mobilized for actions. We need to involve these wider audiences in our movement...” Right on, I say. But then he goes on a paragraph later to write, “We should also no longer confine our civil disobedience to the day after major mobilizations when most protesters have gone home.” These two ideas are in conflict, a point that was fully debated during the movement against the war in Vietnam. Mobilizing all of those people who never attended a demonstration in their lives means that organizers cannot risk involving them unknowingly, or unwillingly, in civil disobedience or in police repression of civil disobedience.

From where I sit in Bogotá, Colombia, it is pretty hard to tell what is happening on the ground in the belly of the beast. The antiwar movement appears to have disappeared, except for traces on the internet. No doubt many of its activists have become sucked up into the congressional election activities of the Kerry wing of the Democratic Party. But the brutal invasion of Lebanon by Israel must be causing consternation and debate. Probably my high school experience of cafeteria debate is about to be repeated in hundreds of thousands of school cafeterias when schools reopen after the summer vacation. Most likely, the antiwar movement in the United States will explode onto the streets in April, 2007. This is the traditional time for mass protests, and the diversion of Democratic Party “peace candidates” will have been finished in November. Anthony Arnove’s little book could help make the protest more powerful.

Ted Zuur
Bogotá, Colombia
northbogota@yahoo.com

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Carl Mirra, ed., Enduring Freedom or Enduring War? Prospects and Costs of the New American 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 2005).

This book is a valuable collection of articles, some analytical and others more polemical, written to explore the causes and consequences of what Bush administration officials promise to be a decades-long war against terrorism. These officials (as well as their cheerleaders in academia and the news media) promise that ‘enduring freedom’ is the ultimate goal in this war – freedom from the fear of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, and the ability to pursue the economic and political freedom associated with capitalist democracy. The articles here subject these promises to critical scrutiny. As Carl Mirra states in his introduction, “the real questions raised by George W. Bush’s ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ are freedom for whom? And freedom at what costs?” (7).

The best articles in this collection provide strong documentation of the patterns of US political-military strategy. David Armstrong offers a history of neoconservative planning for the Iraq war beginning in the 1990s. ‘The Plan’ began with the draft “Defense Planning Guidance” in 1992, a document created by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. The DPG was designed to ensure that high and expanding levels of military spending would continue after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The major themes of the DPG were: 1) the US military should be sufficiently large and powerful to prevent the emergence of any rival to its power; and 2) should a potential threat to US interests arise, the United States should undertake unilateral action against that threat. These themes were later developed by the Project for the New American Century in their 2000 report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” and became the center of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Armstrong demonstrates that the strategy underlying the ‘war on terror’ and the US invasion of Iraq had been painstakingly crafted over the previous decade, thereby undermining the popularly held idea that 9/11 ‘changed everything.’

Carolyn Eisenberg takes this further, seeing considerable continuity between current US policy and US policy in the Cold War period. She rejects the argument, popular among liberal opponents of the Bush administration, that neoconservatives have ‘hijacked’ the foreign policy apparatus, imposing a unilateral strategy of preventive war in place of an earlier strategy that was more multilateral and made greater use of diplomacy and international institutions. She argues that the Bush administration’s assertion of “the right of the United States to attack another country when there is no immediate threat, but simply the possibility that at some unspecified time that country might become dangerous” (34) is not new; this strategic principle was the foundation of countless post-war military interventions by the United States. As in the Cold War, current U.S. strategy emphasizes the centralization of power, the hegemony of national security experts who “reflect a concern for the power of the nation-state, along with the prerogatives of capital” (35), and the strengthening of the military-industrial complex. What is new, she argues, is how boldly the Bush administration, freed from the constraints of so powerful a rival as the former Soviet Union, proclaims this right: “The real significance of the 2002 National Security Strategy is its public nature. For what the Bush administration is doing is conditioning the American people to a period of sustained warfare” (34). We might add that the rest of the world, particularly the global South, is likewise being conditioned to expect sustained war should it fail to accept its subordinate role in global capitalism.

Other articles apply this critique to specific conflicts in which the United States has taken a leading role. Phil Gasper, for example, reviews the history of US support for the mujahadeen in Afghanistan beginning in the late 1970s (i.e., before the neocon ‘hijacking’), which had the objective of stimulating Soviet intervention in support of its Afghan communist allies and creating, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, “the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War” (42). Of course, one of the other elements of this war was CIA support (through Pakistan’s ISI security services) for Osama Bin Laden and, after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban. Articles by Michael Parenti, Staughton Lynd, and Max Fraad-Wolff and Rick Wolff examine the US invasion of Iraq. Parenti argues that the invasion must be seen as part of a broader pattern of using military force to insure “the supremacy of global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower or, for that matter, any potentially competing regional power” (56). The neocon-led invasion of Iraq, for Parenti, differs little from Clinton’s bombing of Yugoslavia, in that both targeted countries developing outside the market -– further evidence of the essential continuity of US policy. Lynd agrees, stating that “Gulf War II does not represent a fatal change [referring to Arthur Schlesinger’s comment on Bush policy] from the policy that got the United States into Vietnam. It is the same old car with a new coat of paint” (61). Lynd, like Parenti, concludes that the invasion “is a war to prevent nations from operating outside the global capitalist order” (61). Fraad-Wolff and Wolff see the US invasion of Iraq as an imperialist war arising from capiitalism’s structural need for expansion. Bush administration themes of democracy, freedom, human rights, etc. “revise and update earlier imperialisms’ self-celebration as civilizing and modernizing missions to the planet’s backwaters” (64). The continuity here is not simply with US Cold War policy, but with centuries of imperialist domination of the capitalist periphery by the core.

In addition to addressing the goals of US policy, the articles in this book examine how state officials construct notions of ‘threat’ to mobilize citizens in support of these goals. Mark Salter coins the term “economy of danger” to refer to “the political use of danger as a commodity or resource in a particular field of public discourse… [T]he aim of the war on terror is not to achieve some kind of military victory condition, but to continually marshal perceptions of danger to justify American policies” (148). Bruce Cumings and Greg Elich, in their articles on North Korea, examine how the United States has manufactured a crisis over North Korean nuclear weapons in order to undermine efforts at reconciliation between North and South Korea, which would threaten US military and political interests in Asia. Cumings concludes from his review of US policy toward North Korea, “When you’ve lost your real enemies, the next best thing is to invent them” (71). Brian Martin Murphy’s article on Africa’s place in the National Security Strategy points to the significance of a ‘basket case’ narrative in NSS references to Africa, one that sees ‘failed states’ producing internal and inter-state conflict and safe haven for terrorists. By constructing a narrative that sees Africa as a source of threats requiring increased attention from the United States, the NSS provides justification for expanding US military involvement in Africa. In his article, Josh Klein argues that an important ideological development, which he refers to as “new militarism” (162), has played a major role in supporting the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq. Although new militarist ideology makes use of nationalism and racism, as did earlier forms of militarism, it is defined primarily by “1) more flagrant war-starting, 2) expansion of mass destruction weaponry, and 3) open contempt for arms control” (162). This ideology provides policy elites as well as their allies in the news media with the resources necessary to inflate threats and to obscure the roots and sanitize the consequences of US militarism.

The power to construct threats to win popular consent for state policy is, however, full of contradictions. Consent can be withdrawn, and this gives space to movements against war and militarism. One feature of this book that makes it useful for anti-war activists is the numerous selections from key policy documents and speeches. Stephen Shalom presents an “Iraq White Paper” containing statements from Bush administration officials justifying its war policies as well as selections from news reports and more extensive investigations that provide critical evaluations of the goals and consequences of US policy. In addition, the book contains an appendix with key documents in the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq. The most important of these are the Pentagon’s “Defense Planning Guidance” (1992) and “Defense Planning for the 1990s” (1993), the Project for the New American Century’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (2000), and the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002). Other documents include Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address, his March 2003 announcement of the invasion, and his May 2003 announcement of ‘victory’ in Iraq. These are useful resources for understanding the logic of US policy and for holding the Bush administration accountable for the outright lies and gross distortions that defined their case for war. As Josh Klein states, “A significant cause for hope in fighting the war machine is that hiding in power elite documents we can find evidence that they are concerned with losing control of public opinion… We should feel emboldened by the secret worries of the war makers. Since they can be made to care what we think, they can be stopped” (169f). This book makes an important contribution to achieving that goal.

Daniel Egan
University of Massachusetts-Lowell
Daniel_Egan@uml.edu

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Eric Stener Carlson, The Pear Tree: Is Torture Ever Justified? (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006).

In The Pear Tree, Eric Stener Carlson offers a personal meditation on the subject of torture. Carlson works on the sexual assault investigation team of Physicians for Human Rights at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Since he investigates “every form of sexual assault imaginable,” he suffers workplace hazards of insomnia, nightmares, excessive grinding of his teeth at night, and a slight ringing in the ears. He approaches torture from the standpoint of his Christian faith, asserting that “…there’s something good in all of us, innate, something at the core of our humanity that tells us it’s right to care for others and wrong to harm them.”

Born in Minnesota, Carlson passed most of his childhood in St. Hugh, Tasmania, where at the age of nine, he won first prize in the Municipal Council Crime and Safety Poster Competition with a poster exhorting children not to accept rides or candy from strangers. The “stranger” or dangerous “other” soon became real to him when a small girl in his community disappeared. A retired police officer and family friend, Mr. Foster, tracked down, apprehended and, through coercion or torture conducted in private, wrested a confession from the “stranger” who had raped and killed Lisa. The community was grateful for Foster’s doing what he “had to do” in this situation, and in retrospect Carlson comprehends how he himself benefited from a feeling of safety as a result of Foster’s methods. The theme of the “stranger” whose torture is tacitly accepted by society is repeated throughout the book.

The pear tree that grew in Carlson’s garden in Tasmania, “a withered brown shaft between the garden and the fence,” becomes a central symbol in the book. From Foster, Carlson learns that pear trees are “special things” needing seven years from the time they are planted until they bloom; only if one has cut back branches, dug at roots, and been “harsh with the pear tree,” will it grow. The pear tree seems to represent a state of innocent social well-being while at the same time its growth depends on a form of violence. Carlson needs “to know whether the pear tree will bloom if we cut its branches back, if we dig at its roots… whether we do more right in the end by torturing the Strangers among us to save our child. Or whether we are somewhat less because of what Foster did, whether we are somehow damaged and can’t grow back.”

His life’s experience informs Carlson’s views on torture. As an exchange high school student in Argentina he witnessed extreme examples of misogyny, homophobia and cruelty among his schoolmates. There he first heard the ubiquitous “ticking bomb” apologia for torture from a local newspaperman, who would “…take every tooth out of his [the suspect’s] head with a pair of pliers until he told me where the bomb was.” Files of perpetrators in former Yugoslavia would later reveal “Rambo” as a favourite nickname. In the Dominican Republic, Carlson witnessed children’s gratuitous cruelty and violence to helpless animals as well as virulent racism and exaggerated nationalism which resulted in the persecution and murder of Haitian workers. Working in forensic anthropology in Argentina, he learns about torturing people “for their own good,” to cure them of the “disease” of communism, an activity in which some members of the clergy colluded. In Peru in the mid 1990s Carlson witnessed a class war manifested by the cycle of murder and reprisal enacted by both state and local terrorists. In the lawless settlement of Sensor del Mar, where “…social justice was so distant as to be a permanent impossibility,” the police committed theft and murder with impunity. Reflecting on all these instances, Carlson is led to conclude that “we are all one extended family of torturers. In this, our lineage is undeniably intertwined. Croatians, Dominicans, Australians, Argentines, Americans, Peruvians, all.”

Carlson tackles the question of “admissible torture,” wondering if one can argue “right reasons” for a kind of “just this once” torture. After listing some particularly vicious tortures, he realizes that torturers often are able to live comfortably with and benefit from the fact that they have tortured and that some people he loves might even approve of their acts. Carlson can’t, though: “I would rather my society died, if its survival hinged upon my need to torture a child, anyone’s child. And we are all someone’s child, young or old.”

Carlson asks, “is torture ever justified?” His conclusion that it isn’t is primarily faith-based. He does not provide argumentation or conventional moral reasoning; rather he offers the reader the possibility of agreeing with his conclusion through having participated in his eloquently expressed reflections on his own experiences. However, the context is one in which the subject is often covered and debated in the media.

Most arguments in support of torture are grounded in the “ticking bomb” narrative with reference to the “stranger” or “terrorist.” In an attempt to give a humanitarian twist to the “ticking bomb” apologia, law professor, Alan Dershowitz,¹ has advocated the use of torture warrants issued by judges. He argues that interrogators will torture anyway and such warrants would make them accountable. He has been roundly criticized primarily on the grounds of the inevitable dangers of that particular “slippery slope.” On the other hand, the “ticking bomb” does present us with a real dilemma when the suffering of one individual could relieve the suffering of thousands.

A more insidious view is presented in the writing of Michael Ignatieff, late of Harvard and possibly a future Prime Minister of Canada.² He argues for what he calls a “lesser evil morality” which “may require us to take actions in defense of democracy which will stray from democracy’s own foundational commitments to dignity.” To Ignatieff the problem with torture is that it “inflicts irremediable harm on both the torturer and the prisoner.” However, he then addresses the problem of identifying justifiable exceptions and defining what forms of duress stop short of absolute degradation. His solution is simply to redefine what constitutes torture, blithely concluding that “permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in harm to mental or physical health.” He also argues that “isolation and disorientation that stop short of physical or psychological abuse” are permissible. One wonders in which category Ignatieff would put the following torture experience:

The interrogation was long and nerve wracking. The repetition of questions and my exhaustion made me easy prey for their traps. A child would have laughed at the statements I made. But what did it matter. To hell with it all. Let them do what they want, I thought. I felt I was growing stupider. I felt numb. My two interrogators grew in dimension. I saw them as a couple of giants seen in a concave mirror.³

Other than moral arguments, the most prominent utilitarian arguments against torture claim that the information obtained is often worthless; prisoners will say almost anything to make the torture stop. As well, torturing one’s prisoners invites the enemy to torture their military prisoners in reprisal.

We live in an environment where torture is domesticated on TV shows such as Law and Order and NYPD Blue. The police heroes bend the law by using methods of torture such as sleep deprivation, food and drink deprivation, denying use of the toilet to suspects, withholding information or lying, and obliquely threatening the safety of prisoners’ loved ones. Occasionally, exercised beyond endurance at the reticence of some “pervert,” they may even resort to physical assault. However, local police torture is enacted in the context of habeas corpus, where “mirandized” suspects can always “lawyer up,” but not for long if the currently debated “Military Commissions Act” is passed by the U.S. Senate and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Carlson’s writing has strong emotional appeal. However, he does not provide the reader with instruments of analysis towards an understanding of why some people choose to become torturers. Nor does he refute the rationalizations for torture that are offered by writers like Dershowitz and Ignatieff. Carlson would have brought his readers further had he explored connections between machismo, homophobia, racism, misogyny and the various other rationales for state torture. Since his examples are of male torturers, perhaps he could have addressed the role social constructions of masculinity have played in their character formation.

In a world where the production of instruments of torture and of torturers have become highly profitable businesses, heavily subsidized by the state and accountable to no one, there is an urgent need to offer convincing argumentation against torture. The Pear Tree gives the reader a moving account of what witnessing does to the thoughtful and passionate witness. Regrettably, it takes more than a subjective account to overcome the fear-mongering that has infected an entire society and refocused its priorities towards the ever receding goal of “winning” a “war against terrorism” whose ostensible purpose is to spread freedom throughout our planet. It seems to me that a much more rigorous refutation of torture is needed in the current political climate.

Greta Hofmann Nemiroff
Dawson College, Montreal
ghn@aei.ca

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Weather Underground, Revised

Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland: AK Press, 2006).

The Weather Underground -– an armed, clandestine, white revolutionary group that formed out of the 1969 break-up of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -– is currently a fashionable topic of discussion amongst radicals and historians of the left. This is not surprising. The historical context in which the Weather Underground formed is similar to contemporary realities. The United States is again waging a bloody imperialist war against a non-white, former European colony. And young American radicals are, again, searching for effective ways to counter their government’s actions in an atmosphere hostile to dissent. The current crop of student radicals has the potential advantage of being able to learn from the successes and mistakes of their “sixties” forerunners.

Outlaws in America is a voluminous historical account whose author, Dan Berger, goes further than any other young radical in his efforts to mine the usable past of the sixties. Berger is both a committed leftist and a serious scholar. The work is not without its problems -– such as the author’s apparent need to apologize for former Weather Underground members. But these problems stem from what gives the book its distinctive quality: it draws on interviews with an impressive number of the protagonists (more than twenty). This speaks to the contradictions of oral historical research. Berger’s subjects have become his friends and mentors, particularly David Gilbert, one of the founders of the Columbia chapter of SDS and a former Weather Underground member.⁴ But despite this weakness, there are too many good things about Outlaws to not take it seriously.

Most astutely, Berger works to counter the myth of “two sixties” -– one good, one bad -– a myth often propagated by former sixties radicals themselves, such as Columbia University Professor Todd Gitlin. According to this conventional wisdom, whereas non-violence, interracial cooperation, participatory democracy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Port Huron Statement marked the “good” early sixties, violence, irrationalism, nihilism, narcissism, nationalism, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the Weather Underground signified the “bad” later sixties. Similarly, whereas the “good” antiwar movement understood Vietnam as a tragedy of good intentions gone awry, the “bad” variant couched their critique of the war in “crude” anti-imperialist rhetoric, which alienated those working-class Americans who were doing the overseas fighting and dying –- those whom the “good” left sought as allies. Berger works to unmask this dichotomy as false, pointing out that, by this simplistic formula, King himself voluntarily made the transition to the bad sixties in 1966 when he began critiquing the war in language similar to Malcolm X.

Berger belabors the point that the Weather Underground was a product of their times. This truism is ironically built into the very concept of the group, named after an indicative Bob Dylan verse -– “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” If the Weather turned to violent forms of resistance, it was because the state was violently repressing dissent. This brings to mind an oft-cited passage from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed.” By the fall of 1967, violence was in the air and in the streets. With the onset of draft riots in places such as Oakland and New York, antiwar protesters “were beginning to look, talk, and act like urban guerrillas,” taking up Che’s call for “two, three, many Vietnams” (Outlaws, 45). An increasing number of white antiwar activists wanted to join with anti-colonial forces across the planet. They wanted to show solidarity with the Third World. Solidarity, according to Berger, is the key to understanding the Weather Underground and the 1969 SDS split.

Although “two, three, many” factions would eventually spell the demise of SDS, the two most important splinter groups at the infamous 1969 convention were the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which eventually became the Weather Underground, and the Progressive Labor Party (PL), a Maoist sect. The essence of the split was over whether to prioritize race or class, an “either-or” problematic that has long divided the American left (and spawned scholarly sub-fields such as critical labor and whiteness studies). The RYM (proto-Weather) sect believed that Ho Chi Minh, the Black Panthers, and non-white nationalists throughout the world were the vanguard of the revolution, and that militantly opposing white supremacy was the best way for white revolutionaries living in the “belly of the beast” to support that vanguard. The PL faction, on the other hand, “saw race as divisive” and insisted that all nationalism was reactionary, including that of the Black Panthers. They believed that organizing the American working class was the most important task for activists.

Berger does not hide his sympathy for the RYM/Weather faction. To him, their willingness to walk out on SDS signaled that hundreds of white radicals had consciously chosen to side against white supremacy. Berger smoothes over a complex history of the American left when he writes that the RYM faction “did not want… to fall victim to the same fate as all the major social justice movements in the United States, from populism to unionism to women’s suffrage” (85). Here Berger seems to imply that the left’s historical racism has weakened its position on the American political spectrum. Although there are obvious instances of this being the case, more often the opposite has proven true: the organized left has consistently taken less racist stances than the rest of American society, stances that, if anything, have relegated it to the margins. Consistent with this lack of nuance, Berger inaccurately portrays the SDS split as between the Old and New Lefts. “PL’s hostility to anti-racism and national liberation,” Berger argues, “showed that the organization was part of the Old Left” (78). Actually, SDS was re-living a 1930s Old Left debate over the Communist Party’s “Black Belt Nation Thesis,” which explicitly supported black nationalism as a legitimate form of working-class resistance rooted in the international struggle. To stretch this line of argument even further back, SDS was in some ways replaying sectarian battles that took place within an even older left, when southern Populists such as Tom Watson sought an interracial alliance against the “special interests.”

After the dissolution of SDS, the Weather Underground built what David Gilbert describes as “an unprecedented if seriously flawed group that carried out six years of armed actions in solidarity with national liberation struggles” (91). The first violent Weather action occurred in Chicago in October 1969, during what came to be known as the Days of Rage, as young radicals intentionally did battle with the police to prove their willingness to fight against the racist war machine. Spanning three days, Days of Rage resulted in over 300 arrests, some based on serious felony charges, and dozens of injuries, including eight protesters with gunshot wounds. These actions were not widely supported by the larger movement –- only a few hundred participated as opposed to the thousands Weather predicted.

Perhaps the most significant if unintended result of Days of Rage was that it compelled Weather to go underground in order to avoid lengthy and costly legal battles. Once underground, Weather rhetoric became increasingly violent, due in part to the fact that their comrades in the black liberation struggle were being murdered by the state, such as when Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was shot in his sleep by Chicago police. But until a powerful bomb accidentally exploded in a Greenwich Village townhouse on March 6, 1970, killing three members of the group, Weather’s conception of revolutionary violence was little more than an abstraction. Afterwards, it became something much more personal and visceral: the horror of the accidental death of their friends in the townhouse explosion engendered a sense of sympathy for their projected victims. (The intended target of the bomb was an Army officers’ dance.) Although they did not entirely eschew the philosophy of violent resistance -– especially since the violence of the state had increased both overseas and at home -– the group made a firm commitment to refrain from harming people.

In the course of the next seven years, the Weather Underground set off dozens of bombs that damaged millions of dollars worth of property, but never seriously injured anyone again. Weather termed its property-destroying bombs “armed propaganda” because their targets were carefully chosen in response to state and corporate violence and because they issued widely distributed “communiqués” explaining their rationale after each bombing. They had become the masters of the revolutionary spectacle. For example, they bombed the U.S. Capitol on February 28, 1971, as a response to the invasion of Laos and the continued fighting of the war under the auspices of “Vietnamization” –- an action Nixon described as “the most dastardly act in American history” (165). In retaliation to a massive increase in the scale of bombings in North and South Vietnam, Weather bombed the Pentagon on May 19, 1972. They responded to the killing of Soledad Brother George Jackson and to the infamous Attica prison massacre of 1971 by bombing various corrections offices. In 1973, the Weather Underground bombed International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) headquarters in New York City for its complicity in the overthrow of socialist Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected leader.

Berger thinks these symbolic bombings were widely cheered by young rebels and that the Weather was generally popular in the larger New Left movement. It is true that, for most of their time underground, very few Weather members were ever caught, reflecting a tremendous aboveground network of support. However, cleverness notwithstanding, surely Berger overestimates the degree of popular support for the Weather’s “armed propaganda” campaign, an overestimation that might be rooted in a more serious misunderstanding of the times. In his close reading of the radical sixties, Berger misses the broader history of that important decade. When he writes that “to speak of revolution in 1969 was not hyperbolic,” he seems to forget that student radicals were not the only ones on the move. The 1960s is best understood as a time of polarization, as the American conservative movement grew even more rapidly than did the New Left. Berger neglects to mention that although a majority of Americans came to oppose the Vietnam War by the end of the decade, an even larger majority opposed and even disdained the antiwar movement. Thus, just as the Weather Underground had a network of support, so too did the FBI, demonstrated by polls that showed a majority of Americans supporting violent crackdowns on student and black unrest. Nixon was elected less for his assurance that he would end the war in Vietnam than for his promise to bring order to the streets of America.

Despite these problems, Berger’s book deserves wide attention and should be viewed as an important scholarly revision of sixties radicalism. Berger correctly posits Outlaws of America as part and parcel of the “ideological battleground” and “contested space” that are the “sixties,” entreating us to fight for the radical sixties. In this sense, his work is guided by the historical philosophy best enunciated by Frankfurt School Marxist Walter Benjamin, who, in the midst of Nazi barbarism, wrote, “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”

Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University
ahartma@ilstu.edu

--------------------------

Andrew E. Hunt, David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Nobody ever said it would be easy” is the time-worn reminder in the movement for peace and justice when the moment has become miserable. Leadership is the light that somehow is found to fill the gap. Perhaps you remember the song, “Where have all the flowers gone?” These days we may almost be singing, “Where have all the nonviolent movement leaders gone?”

Well-presented by Andrew E. Hunt, this is the first biography of David Dellinger, one of the important 20th-century American moral revolutionary leaders. His life of speaking, writing, and living in action for the emergence of nonviolence as a public force, is a welcome reminder of how the integration of open-minded receptivity to truth and stubborn resistance to falsehood can move, however wrenchingly, toward constructive life-affirming social change. Given the many reasons we encounter each day to forget our better selves, reflection on the development of an inspired activist who described his own path in his autobiography as “From Yale to Jail,” may well have its use-value.

Professor Hunt has done his research well, using extensive oral history interviews and a wide range of documentary sources. His work shows us how the son of an Appalachian farm boy turned Republican Boston lawyer came to take the paradoxical American class values of his family into transformative expression: “I always felt that my politics were in a sense a carrying-out of the kind of attitude that he instilled in me toward human beings” was Dellinger’s reflection on his memories of his father.

The “American dream” of happiness through decency and prosperity has always been backed up by military dominance and expansionism -– from the ethnic cleansing of the Pequot in the 1640s to the green zone of Baghdad almost four centuries later. Dellinger’s hometown of Wakefield just outside Boston and his family’s adopted homeland in the North Carolina Blue Ridge country both had deeply painful indigenous histories. In his later years, David fasted on Columbus Day, in celebration of the indigenous people who had survived the onslaught of the American way of life.

Hunt’s graceful and detailed account of Dellinger’s emergence deserves recapping. At Yale, David was a Christian humanist, admiring St. Francis of Assisi. He joined in student organizing work, and was moved by reading of the nonviolent philosophy and campaigns of Gandhi in India. Arguing Marxism with no less a communicant than the young Walt Rostow, he rejected its approach as mechanical and lacking in the fullness of humanity, while respecting and allying with the dedication and effectiveness of its grassroots activists.

David had a lifelong depth of feeling for nature, and for the joyful physical communion that enlightens athletic competition. It took major repeated injury to his leg to force him out of track running, which had the effect of liberating him from the “myopic ambitions” of potential national or even Olympic championship.

Dellinger’s ambitions had refocused, segueing toward a more universal dream of decency and equality, rejecting war. After college, he briefly connected with Socialist Party leadership under Norman Thomas, but the militant personal opening to truth through nonviolent thought and action was more characteristic of his political heart.

He studied at Oxford, visited Spain, Italy and Germany in the fearful year of 1936, reinforcing his antifascist sensibilities, then returned to New Haven, plunging into pro-immigration and labor organizing, as well as life in shantytowns and hobo camps. From philosophical conviction, he went to direct experience of economic violence. Now his path was set, away from the accepted norms of his upbringing.

Seeking to explore the roots of his Christianity, Dellinger entered Union Theological Seminary, found the celebrated Reinhold Niebhur a “grievous disappointment,” and with a few fellow students started a pacifist community service and action communal apartment in Harlem, and then the Newark Ashram, in New Jersey.

When the draft came in 1940, the militant students were ready. Although allowed deferment as -- seminarians, they refused to register or seek conscientious objector status -– in part to reject the class privilege they were offered. Two hard sentences in Danbury Correctional Institution and then Lewisburg Penitentiary proved Dellinger to be a courageous and exemplary leader, enduring repeated solitary confinement and debilitating hunger strikes in struggle against Jim Crow policies and extreme authoritarianism. His marriage to Betty Peterson, a like-minded pacifist, began between the terms of imprisonment, and five children followed in short order.

On his release, well aware that freedom of the press resides in those who own printing presses, he managed to acquire one, and with fellow nonviolent activists produced a series of radical publications, culminating in the influential Liberation magazine, which helped set the tone for the broad movement of the sixties. The growing Dellinger family lived and worked in the intentional community they formed and maintained with co-workers in rural New Jersey from 1947-68.

Hunt meticulously details Dellinger’s steadfast persistence in blazing the public path against war and injustice throughout the sixties. Starting with his trip to Cuba in the early Castro days, and organizing before and after the Kennedy-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, supporting the youthful organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the South, calling early for national action against the US intervention in Vietnam, joining in the Committee for Nonviolent Action’s Quebec-Washington-Guantánamo Walk for Peace, which bridged peace, civil rights, and Cuban solidarity, and serving as one of the few counselors from the older generation sought out by the Students for a Democratic Society in their Economic Research and Action Project, which recapitulated some of his own early work in Newark as a student, Dellinger and the voice of Liberation were everywhere in action.

The seemingly interminable decade-long struggle against the growing war in Vietnam was emerging. Dellinger moved with its ever-shifting core. From National Coordinating Committee, to Fifth Avenue Peace Parade, traveling to Vietnam, returning to anti-war Mobilization (Mobe) and another Mobe, and into Chicago, to confront the Democratic National Convention, in those days when a major-party convention offered some hope of bringing change, Dellinger was co-chairing, Dellinger was speaking, and Dellinger was holding disparate factions together.

These were the heaviest of times in the peace movement. Extremism was rising, violent rhetoric and street battles escalating, with the war grinding on. Dellinger was the senior strategic coordinator and a key tactical leader during the bitter and conflicted demonstrations at the Pentagon and in Chicago. Reconstructing these difficult scenes, sometimes minute to minute, Hunt’s work is at its best. Dellinger’s wasn’t. Confrontations got out of control. As Gandhi had discovered, nonviolent direct action must be very carefully prepared and framed. Turning rage into critical love may be possible, but some of these street actions were too fevered for that.

Dellinger had empathy with the furious youth, and was responsible to the liberal and pacifist opponents of the war. These vibes didn’t meld well. The authorities grew savage, heads were bloodied, anti-war people rejected each other. Even though victories for the movement were declared, the energy was declining. So was the conflict in Southeast Asia. Dellinger wound up toward the end of the war on the Committee for Liaison, brokering with Hanoi on behalf of American war prisoners, while denouncing the Nixon Administration’s vindictive bombing of North Vietnam.

Although well-respected on the left, Dellinger became a public figure mainly through the 1969 trial of the Chicago 8, on the charge of inciting and participating in a riot. In the courtroom he struggled fiercely to put the government on trial, and physically defended Bobby Seale from the attack of marshals. At 53, Dellinger was the senior defendant, appearing in a jacket and tie, facing down the destructiveness of the American system by embodying its own best values. It is something to be remembered.

Betty Peterson and David Dellinger: their personal and family life with five children was at times so fully joyful but was also intensely strained. It is remarkable that the family was able to survive at all, through the onslaught of movement demands on time and attention, energy and consciousness. David lost a younger brother and they both lost a son to early deaths. Betty had to make do, holding the home together without him, again and again, and it endured, until exhaustion and the feminist wave opened a breach. Apart and together and again apart and together, they persevered and unlearned and learned to find a path that could be shared, into their last bucolic and yet politically active Vermont days.

In characterizing Dellinger’s legacies, Hunt points to deeply humane qualities: moral dissent, protest, optimism in the face of adversity, patient organizing and outreach, accepting imprisonment, all in lifelong struggle for truth and loving community, both locally and globally. He did not wish to be a star or hero, yet it somewhat happened to him anyway.

Dellinger is also important for his consistency in working to connect generations of activists and radicals. The dissenting youth of the sixties, seeking to overcome the forces of superiority and hegemony at home and abroad, could find little support on the adult left. David Dellinger was a notable exception. One can hope this book will carry his work a bit further, and serve as an informative reassurance and inspiration to guide some in the next generation of radical activists. New flowers of nonviolent leadership are yet to bloom and, you may sing, the next great movement will in time emerge.

Still, the ghastly war system goes on with its destruction. The deeper goal of developing values for the sustainability of human life on earth is gaining in recognition. Information technology is changing social, political, economic and cultural realities. Andrew E. Hunt’s biography of David Dellinger is a positive contribution.

Mike Vozick
City University of New York
mvoz@post.com

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Norman Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer, The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America (New York: Nation Books, 2006).

"Heidegger spent his working life laboring mightily in the crack of philosophy's buttocks, right there in the cleft between Being and Becoming." Thus spoke Norman Mailer in "Existentialism—Does It Have a Future?" Speaking of Sartre, Mailer says, "If only he had not been an existentialist!" Mailer comes at these philosophers with a playful, incisive, polymorphously perverse dexterity. He finds in Heidegger a redemptive opening, but wonders if that isn't just Heidegger masquerading more bad faith. He finds in Sartre an unsatisfactory "endemic nothingness installed upon eternal floorlessness," but he applauds Sartre's journey to socialism.

Mailer's essay on existentialism first appeared in Liberation in 2005; it reappears in 2006 in The Big Empty, in which Mailer, age 82, is interviewed by his son John Buffalo Mailer, actor, playwright and journalist, age 27. Partaking of the spirit of Hegel's dictum -- "The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk" -- John Buffalo performs an important service interviewing his dad, getting the stories down, letting us draw from the well of wisdom, if such there be, of those who lived through most of the twentieth century, soon to pass into the night. Norman Mailer is a great American story-teller; existential detective dissecting the Zeitgeist; gadfly, provocateur, social critic and philosopher.

The son engages in the joyful task of amanuensis and sparring partner. The transgenerational result speaks to the most important issues of our time. It is also a model of lucidity, fluidity and wit. Interspersed between the interviews are several short essays and speeches from the twilight phase of Mailer's career. The book as a whole makes clear -- because it is the guiding thread through the labyrinth -- that, yes, these are times that try our souls; and the twin issues which are putting our nation most at risk are corporatism and sophistry -- i.e., the corporate takeover of America, and what Eric Alterman once called "the mutually reinforcing nonsense that passes for [American] political discourse.”

The Big Empty is a set of "Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America." The key is bad conscience, a translation of Sartre's mauvaise foi, also called "bad faith." A faith that is troubled, anxious, haunted; cracked, split, schizoid; because resting on self-deception. Sartre said: "It is as hard to wake up from self-deception as it is to wake from a dream." Such is our current collective predicament; the ongoing American nightmare: those with money, power and control committed to what Chomsky calls "rational lunacy," driven by what Mailer calls "elephantiastical conceits." The most nefarious con game in history is the world's only superpower trapped in a will-to-power fantasy that threatens the planet. "Hegemony or survival," says Chomsky; "that's our choice."

Introducing the book, John Buffalo says: "The parallels between the rise of fascism in Europe and the current 'war on terror' were the primary topics I wanted to discuss with my father. They seem to me to be, in many ways, uncomfortably familiar." He reflects and summarizes: "Our conversations have left me with the realization that my generation has only just begun to reckon with the gravity of the times we are inheriting." John Buffalo's "realization" mirrors a comment by Mike Marqusee in Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art: "The '60s may someday come to seem merely an early skirmish in a conflict whose real dimensions we have yet to grasp." The Big Empty helps us to grasp and redirect our fate; and it does so with Nietzsche's "light feet," embracing Michael Parenti's advice: "It is always better to swim against the current than to be swept over a cliff."

Mailer asserts: "The Center which Yeats was so certain could not hold is Corporate Capitalism itself. Anyone who reads this book will know what we think about that. In doubt, refer to the title." Corporatism gone amok -- the temporary triumph of the Reagan counterrevolution against the spirit of the '60s -- has emptied America of any trace of national authenticity. The omnipresent commodification of experience confirms for us now what Nietzsche said of Germany 120 years ago: "This nation has made itself stupid on purpose."

Says Mailer: "I love this country with all its faults, but one of its huge spiritual crimes is that we're the bullshit kingdom of all time." Sophistry so pervades the social fabric -- engendered by government sold to the highest bidder -- that the lies told come to be believed, by the tellers as well as the duped, and constitute a national fantasy, myth, dream; dehumanizingly hollow at its core. A high-tech version of Plato's cave, where the social facticity of economic apartheid -- the distance between is and ought, measured by the distance between haves and have-nots -- is covered by "united we stand," imperial hubris, and divine sanction. Says Mailer: "Myths are tonic to a nation's heart. Once abused, however, they are poisonous":

America [is] pleasure-loving, which, for exceptionalist purposes, [is] almost as bad as peace-loving. So, the [Bush administration's] invasion [of Iraq] had to be presented with an edifying narrative. That meant the alleged reason for the war had to live in utter independence of the facts.… Fantasy would serve. As, for example, bringing democracy to the Middle East,… [which] proved to be nearer to Grimm's fairy tales than a logical proposition.

America's institutions are designed to ignorate; to keep us prisoners in what Gore Vidal calls "The United States of Amnesia." Chains of illusion are cheaper and more effective than a club. Howard Zinn observes: "The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it." It's gotten to the point, says John Buffalo, where "the left is beginning to figure out that they can't beat the right with intelligent argument." Mailer responds:

The primal fight…, the one that underlies all the others -- is the level of American intelligence. Is it going to improve or deteriorate? A democracy depends upon the intelligence of its people, [by which I mean] a readiness to look into the face of difficult questions and not search for quick answers... Patriotism gobbled up, sentimentalized, and thereby abased is one of the most powerful single forces to proliferate stupidity.

Noam Chomsky observes the Gordian knot, the epistemological conundrum at the heart of America the Absurd: "The problem is not that people don't know; it's that they don't know they don't know."
Mailer adds:

We're in danger right now of losing our democracy…. Global capitalism … does not need or look for inquiry into delicate matters. Its need, rather, is to keep the bullshit train running at top speed.… Global capitalism… is alien to… creative possibilities.

America pretends to be a Christian nation, yet worships at the altar of profit; pretends to revere the Prince of Peace, yet is never not at war. This contradiction is the bad faith, the troubled conscience, which haunts the American psyche; its most shameful secret, for which it compensates with flags and Patriot Acts. The Disneyfication of experience leads inevitably to abuse of power, betrayal of the social contract, political apocalypse and collapse.

Mailer asserts: "The war against the corporation is profound, as it should be.… To win this war… will take, at least, fifty years and a profound revolution in America." To help us move from the Wasteland to democratic socialism, Mailer invites the Democratic Party to cease being “Republican-Lite”; to

separate itself from The Big Empty; and… [to] recognize there's two kinds of capitalism -- each opposed to the other -- the capitalism of the corporation and that of small business. The latter is creative and the first is a totalitarian leviathan... I'll take socialism over corporatism. At least [socialism] is not slavishly dependent on market hype.

Mailer notes that if John Kerry had won the 2004 presidential election, "the situation down the road could have proved disastrous for Democrats. Kerry… would have had to pay for all of Bush's mistakes in Iraq. He would then have inherited what may yet be Bush's final title: Lord Quagmire."

The Big Empty is a raucous and rueful ride. Mailer is too quick to dismiss Bush administration complicity in 9/11. He mistakenly thinks "ethnic unresolvables… ravaged Yugoslavia," failing to note Bush the Elder's proposal in the 1991 Fiscal Appropriations Act, approved by congress, to do for Yugoslavia what Nixon and Kissinger did for Chile: "make the economy scream." And while it's true that in Russia, "after the Soviet Union broke down… corruption and greed came roaring to the fore," he fails to note Harvard's complicity in US/IMF strategic restructuring. From the womb of a genuine social democratic revolution emerged a disenfranchised, fourth-world population overlorded by a US-friendly mafia. One would think that Mailer would be more finely tuned to historical causality.

But if Mailer misses some of the details along the way, his voice is still prophetic. He digs right down to the cognitive dissonance at the heart of American dysfunction. Quoting Hermann Goering’s advice to warmongering politicians (“All you have to do is tell [the people] they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism…”), Mailer remarks: “It is one thing to be forewarned. Will we ever be forearmed?”

Stefan Schindler
La Salle University
schindle@lasalle.edu

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Inez Hedges, Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).

The story of Faust is one of the great floating signifiers of the last 500 years. Depending on what you want from the story, the protagonist can be seen as a rebellious over-reacher whose quest for forbidden knowledge -- gained by making an unholy pact with the Devil -- is rightfully punished; or perhaps he is the ultimate dissident -- a seeker after truth who rejects the oppressive and blindered worldview of the traditional hegemonic elite. As for Faust’s antagonist, Mephistopheles can be seen as the arch-tempter, intent on destroying Faust by playing on his innate hunger for knowledge; or perhaps he is Faust’s anti-self, his opposite equal twin brother, and a fellow dissenter himself, who facilitates the protagonist’s spectacular act of defiance.

Onto this fertile terrain Inez Hedges brings her formidable gifts as a scholar of film, as a cultural critic, as a historian of political discourse both Left and Right, as an appreciator of “plural feminisms,” and as an incisive student of the avant-garde. Framing Faust is in fact a dazzling reading of the politics, culture and intellectual struggles of the 20th century, with a masterful guide pointing out to us new aspects of things we thought we knew well, and new things we are glad to be apprised of. What we carry away from the book is an enlivened sense that a myth like the Faust story “can be seen as a battleground on which opposing ideologies fight for power -- in essence as the site of dialectical struggle.”

The author has chosen six foci for her discussion: 1) the crucial role the Faust legend played in the early years of narrative cinema, especially in Germany; 2) “the struggle over the German cultural heritage [specifically Goethe’s Faust] between the Weimar spirit and Nazism”; 3) how socialist thinkers like Anatoli Lunacharski, Leon Blum, Georg Lukács, and playwrights Hanns Eisler and Volker Braun reworked the Faust story for progressive ends; 4) how such disparate feminists as Louisa May Alcott and Hélène Cixous work at “gendering Faust”; 5) how avant-garde artists in the 20th century re-imagined Faust as “the enemy of reason, the necromancer who sets himself up as the opponent of those very humanist values with which the myth had been traditionally associated”; and finally, 6) how the Faust myth is reframed by (manufactured) Cold War anxieties about hidden conspiracies, especially in American film noir.

The arguments are so rich and subtle that a reviewer finds them difficult to summarize. But we can touch upon some of the high points in each of the six units.

In “Faust and Early Film Spectatorship,” Hedges argues that while film began as working-class entertainment, full of slapstick, eroticism and subversive depictions of authority figures, with Faust seen as a rebel and Mephistopheles as a clever trickster (a case in point is Georges Méliès’ Faust aux enfers, 1903), a steady movement toward attracting a bourgeois audience -– and drawing on the tropes of traditional theatre rather than popular fun -– defanged the sharpness evident in the early films. The critic Siegfried Kracauer, Hedges writes, saw that

[early] film was in a position to entertain and thus serve the need for distraction among the urban masses, while at the same time mirroring the disorder in society. This could prepare the way for what he called “the inevitable and radical change.” He argued that this galvanizing potential was thwarted by the movie palaces, where audiences were lulled into passivity by the reinscription of film’s radical form into conventional modes of theatrical representation.

By the time we get to Henrik Galeen’s Der Student von Prag (1926) the protagonist, Balduin, is “Faustian in spirit” but is far from being “a social rebel.” And in the same year F.W. Murnau’s Faust gives us a Mephistopheles who “has shed his ironic philosophical nihilism” and a Faust who is “usable in cinema’s bid for respectability.”

So as film moves from being disruptive delight for the masses toward becoming a capitalist industry, we come to understand the “dialectical relationship between film form and the evolving film audience and the economics of distribution and production.”

In “German Fascism and the Contested Terrain of Culture,” Hedges contrasts attempts by figures like Thomas Mann to “take back” the traditional humanist image of Goethe’s Faust—cosmopolitan, tolerant—while at the same time showing how vulnerable that view is to what Mann calls “the popular intoxications of fascism.” Well before Mann began Doctor Faustus in exile in California (1943-46), the Nazis had seized upon the Faust legend through a series of moves that Hedges calls a “mythic aggrandizement and distortion of the German cultural past.” A 1940 book by one Georg Schott argues for a “Führer Faust” and suggests, as Hedges puts it, “that Hitler is Germany’s new Faustian striver.” For Schott, Mephistopheles is a “slick Talmudic scholar” armed with irreverent and satirical barbs. Hedges moves from her fascinating reading of Schott to a discussion of contrasting (Nazi vs. anti-fascist) retellings of traditional fairy tales, and to a discussion of the figure of Mephistopheles in novels and films. It is an exciting chapter.

“Socialist Visions: Faust and Utopia” deals with the ways key socialist thinkers have reworked certain elements in the Faust story. Anatoli Lunacharski’s “reader’s play” Faust and the City (1908) depicts a Faust who renounces his role as ruler of the lands he has reclaimed from the sea and lives “incognito among his people as a plain citizen” although he does continue developing new technologies that will free workers from the burdens of labor. Lunacharski was an avant-garde poet and playwright, a commissar for education, and a friend of Lenin’s. As Hedges points out, both men were “steeped in the classical literary tradition,” but the advent of Stalin in 1922 meant the end to Lunacharski’s influence over communist policy in the USSR: he was charged with a “failure to distinguish ‘between bourgeois and proletarian elements of culture."

Even before Lunacharski, French socialist leader Léon Blum had written Nouvelles conversations de Goethe avec Eckermann (1901) in which Goethe is presented as “objective, rational and antiauthoritarian.” Both Faust and Mephistopheles in this imaginary set of conversations are socialist agitators but with radically divergent ideas about progress: “Mephistopheles leads the people in burning some newly invented labor-saving machines, on the grounds that workers will lose their jobs. Blum, through his character Faust, condemns this action and the assumption that technological progress and socialism are incompatible.”

In 1940 the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács wrote a study entitled Goethe und seine Zeit. “Lukács includes Goethe among the great realist writers like Balzac and Thomas Mann who, despite being members of the bourgeoisie, represented in their works the social contradictions that would inevitably lead to the demise of their class.” For Lukács, Faust is “a prescient critique of the capitalism that would not reach its fullest expansion until more than a century later.”

Two East German (GDR) playwrights -- Hanns Eisler in Johannes Faustus (1952) and Volker Braun in Hinze und Kunze (1973) -- also played theme and variation on the Faust story. Eisler’s Faustus is “a warning of what can happen if working-class leaders fail to identify with, and cast their lot with, the people.” And Braun’s play mocks the sort of GDR economic planning in which “workers alternately fill in and dig out the same hole.” Kunze, the Faust figure, says to Hinze, the Mephisto: “‘To burrow without thinking is sabotage; to drive yourself without logic is stupid.’”

Hedges turns to “plural feminisms” in “Gendering Faust,” with a remarkable overview of how feminist artists and critics have approached various elements of the Faust story “in twentieth-century expressionist theatre, in Weimar cinema, in French écriture feminine of the 1970s, and in modern fiction,” but in fact begins with a reading of a recently recovered manuscript by Louisa May Alcott called A Long Fatal Love Chase (first published in 1995) -- one of two works of fiction Alcott entitled “A Modern Mephistopheles.” Hedges remarks: “Alcott’s Faustian heroine bends her whole will toward escaping male domination, whether of the grandfather or the lover.”

Then, expressionist theatre: “As a play about a Faustian woman [Frank] Wedekind’s Franziska [1911] shows an awareness of the limitations to self-realization that society imposed upon women in his time. It is all the more remarkable that he explores this theme not because of any sympathy with feminism but because of a prescient awareness of the relation of power, gender and sexuality.”

Hélène Cixous’s Révolutions pour plus d’un Faust (1975), “written in the wake of the social upheavals of 1968, is a whirling star cluster of discourses that try to spin their way out of the male universe, while referring back to revolutions past, present and future.” In Hedges’ careful reading of this text, there are two Fausts for Cixous: one “a negative force, eternally unsatisfied, continually desiring,” and the other “the real Faustian spirit [which] is one of continual creation, reproduction, and multiplication.” “Counterhegemonic” readings of the legend, such as those of Alcott, Wedekind, Cixous, and Emma Tennant (in her Faustine, 1992), are the result of plural feminisms with distinctly liberatory aims, especially for “socialist feminists who will put their imprimatur on Faust’s active principle and prove themselves agents for revolutionary social change.”

Turning her attention to the 20th-century avant-garde(s), Hedges examines the work of playwrights, composers and filmmakers for whom a reconfigured Faust becomes an enemy of complacent humanist rationality. From fascinating discussions of Alfred Jarry’s Les Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, ‘pataphysicien’ (1897-98) and Michel de Ghelderode’s La Mort du docteur Faust (1925) to Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938), Hedges moves to a substantial reading of Stan Brakhage’s tretralogy of films dealing with the Faust story that he completed between 1987 and 1989. “In the Faust series, that search for inner light is still held within the narrative of the Faustian, yielding one of the most remarkable syntheses between myth and film form to be achieved in cinema’s first one hundred years.” And yet Brakhage both pays homage to the tradition and creates an Anti-Faust by insisting -- as do the other avant-gardists under discussion -- on “a renunciation of the interpretation of meaning.” In every case, “avant-garde artists played off the hegemonic status of the Faustian hero, subverting his role as model, his traditional humanist aspirations, and his authority.”

In “Oneiric Fausts: Repression and Liberation in the Cold War Era,” Hedges addresses a number of topics, including the way the film noir classics from the post-war period fused the grittiness of Italian neo-realism with the psychological power of German expressionism to create a genre perfectly in tune with the atmosphere of paranoia created by the Cold War, and quotes George Lipsitz’s observation that “film noir ‘powerfully registers the unstable state of class relations in the postwar United States.’” She also shows how on the other side of the Cold War divide, a novel like Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (begun in 1928, kept under wraps, and finally published in 1966) represents another dream-like fantasy of a dystopian (Stalinist) world in which the Mephistophelian figure of Woland is actually seen as bringing justified punishment to the wicked. And her analysis of Jack Kerouac’s Dr. Sax (written before On the Road but not published until 1959) seeks to show that, “As opposed to film noir’s emphasis on the destructive pact with the forces of evil, Kerouac experiences the Faustian as liberation from conformity and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the small town.”
Hedges concludes this wide-ranging, learned, immensely engaging book by urging us to learn what we can about the “negative pole” of the Faustian bargain—“the cost of what might seem to be an attractive, if temporary gain”—while at the same time seeking an image of “the positive Faustian hero(ine),” who will offer us those Promethean energies of resistance and liberation we so sorely need.

David Gullette
Simmons College
david.gullette@simmons.edu

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Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim, eds., Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006).

In a speech given in 1975 at the University of Texas at Austin on the question of literature and commitment in South Africa, Dennis Brutus said something that sounds like a personal credo: “You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist in an abstraction; it exists in action” (200). During a long life of radical activism in South Africa and elsewhere -– as a writer, organiser, poet, critic and international socialist -– Brutus has consistently sought to translate this link between the personal and the political into the reality of everyday living. This comprehensive collection of his writings, spanning his whole career, is a fitting testimony to his dedication to the cause.

For almost half a century Dennis Brutus was at the forefront of the campaign to bring down the apartheid system in South Africa, the place where he was born and which gave him the awareness of racism, poverty and injustice that has informed his work ever since. In 1963 Brutus was shot by the police in South Africa and later imprisoned for eighteen months alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. After being exiled from his homeland, Brutus became a prominent political organizer, who in 1970 led the successful campaign to expel apartheid South Africa from the Olympic Games. While working as a university lecturer in the US, he also became a pioneering advocate of postcolonial studies within academia, helping to introduce African Literature as a category within the curriculum.

He returns powerfully to his traumatic experience of punishment and isolation on Robben Island in the extracts from his Memoir published here. They contain some of the most harrowing descriptions of daily prison life, a season in hell that has left a lasting mark on Brutus both physically and mentally. These autobiographical writings not only provide unique documentation of the cruelties of an oppressive system; they also help us understand Brutus’s determination to convey the lessons of the past to those who are struggling for a better future.

One of the most profound and lasting ways in which Brutus has carried this torch of experience is through his poetry. Literature has always been a huge source of inspiration to him. It is fascinating to read Brutus’s own poetry in the light of his many critical comments in articles and speeches about the function of literature and its relationship to politics. At first this ideological connection troubled Brutus, forcing him for a time to stop writing poetry altogether. It was his encounter with the early poetry of W.H. Auden that helped him bridge the aesthetic gap between literature and politics, allowing him to overcome the problem of allusiveness and the often obscuring compression of traditional poetry:

While teaching W.H.Auden, a major English poet, I observed in him the ability to merge the private and the public, the aesthetic and the political. And I went back to poetry, because I saw a way that you could make a political statement, simultaneously and honestly -– you know, it’s not manufactured sloganeering. This is genuine poetic expression, which merges political comment with personal comment, including love lyrics. (154)

Without doubt, there is a certain Audenesque quality about Brutus’s own poetry, in particular in his ability to move from personal feeling to the spirit of the collective -- the shared hopes and fears of people who are usually on the receiving end of history. To use poetry as a means of fighting back against the forces of oppression and exploitation is for Brutus not just an intellectual choice but an existential cry from the heart for social change to come sooner rather than later:

In the dark lanes of Soweto,
amid the mud, the slush, the squalor,
among the rusty tin shacks
the lust for freedom survives stubbornly
like a smoldering defiant flame
and the spirit of Steve Biko moves easily. (253)

Auden’s poem “Spain 1937” is a particular point of reference in another poem by Brutus -- “Love; the Struggle.” When Auden writes “To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love… but to-day the struggle,” Brutus paraphrases this radical postponement with his own dialectic of personal freedom and political necessity:

Conched, contrapuntal our concord
Day’s breath wracks our peace,
Our dreams disrupt in blustery discord
Buckling to winds’ capricious buffet we desert our calms
- Ah love, unshoulder now my arms! (273)

Like the early Auden, Brutus also sees his role as that of a public poet, “the world’s troubadour” (392) as he describes himself, one who seeks to give a voice to those whom the system has silenced. There is therefore in Brutus’s poetry an implicit sense of radical dialogue with people whose lives remain outside the focus of the established media. This is where the real struggle is taking place, and it is within this context of solidarity with the dispossessed that Brutus has always situated himself as a writer:

An old black woman,
suffering,
tells me I have given her
“new images”

- a father bereaved
by radical heroism
finds consolation
in my verse.

then I know
these are those I write for
and my verse works. (255)

Poetry and Protest is a guiding beacon of a book that shines through our dark times with the wisdom, consciousness and radical optimism that have been gained through a lifetime of passionate engagement with the cause of human liberation.

Ronald Paul
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
ronald.paul@eng.gu.se

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Gene Santoro, Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004);

Mat Callahan, The Trouble with Music (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005).

These two excellent books, although dissimilar in scope and approach, complement each other nicely. In reading the two together, one gets a full picture of the dynamics of the contemporary pop music scene, and of its political, social, cultural and economic ramifications. Popular culture, and especially popular music, plays an important role, as it has since the Sixties, both in affirming and in undermining the political and cultural norms of the status quo. It can thus help us, in the spirit of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, not only to interpret the world, but to change it.

Santoro’s Highway 61 Revisited (the title is also that of Bob Dylan’s 1965 electric folk-rock LP) is an interpretive panorama of the leading genres of pop music in the United States since the 1920s and ‘30s, especially focusing on the avant-garde jazz of the ‘50s and ‘60s and the tumultuous new rock of the ‘60s and ‘70s, as seen through the jeweler’s lens of analyzing many of these genres’ leading artists. The book’s subtitle, The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country Music, describes its contents succinctly. Santoro’s well-developed thesis is that, out of the various and intertwining roots of blues, jazz, rock, rock ‘n’ roll, gospel, soul, R&B, country and folk music has grown a cultural tree of substantial dimension, with myriad limbs rich in foliage.

Callahan’s The Trouble with Music is likewise interpretive and panoramic, but in a different way: his book is a broader analytical polemic against the commodification of music -– an economically “valueless” commodity in itself, in which all humans share and which we experience communally -– into a commercial object that generates profit. In the process, Music, whose creation he calls “a substanceless activity producing an intangible result” (198), turns into Anti-Music, a marketable commodity “composed on commission by record companies to monopolize an existing market according to specific criteria” that “cannot … express the personal experiences or feelings of the people involved, but must instead propagate sugary sentimentality, loveless sexual fantasy, idiotic boasting or lamenting and ‘Hallmark Card’ philosophizing, accompanied by easily memorized but utterly forgettable tunes” (229). His book is an activist call for us to liberate the Commons from its enclosure by the recording industry with its deliberately manufactured “star” and “hit” system.

Both authors are solidly grounded in the subject matter. Santoro is jazz and popular music critic for The Nation. He displays an appreciative intimacy with the music, musicians and composers he discusses, having interviewed such major jazz artists as Max Roach and Miles Davis. As a teenager in the Sixties in New York City, he experienced first-hand the creative musical ferment then in the air. Callahan, for his part, is a working musician, record producer and writer who has been integrally involved with pop music ever since joining the Musicians’ Union as a teenager in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, 1968. Like Santoro, he knows contemporary music as an insider. But Callahan is also involved in music as a left activist and philosopher, and The Trouble with Music is very much shaped by this perspective. He draws insights from Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, Jacques Attali, Alain Baidou, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin and William Blake.

Callahan criticizes two leading left views of musical culture that he sees as too limiting. One of these is the all-enveloping Culture Industry thesis of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose pessimistic determinism is directly belied by the cultures of resistance that have been integral to popular music in our time, from the folk and rock music of the Sixties through the punk, world music and hip-hop of later years. Callahan also polemicizes against the folk purity embodied in Pete Seeger, as being too closed in upon itself and thus unable to comprehend that rock, jazz, blues, soul, R&B, country and other primarily urban and electric musical forms are vitally a people’s art as well, a lived folk music culture in its own right that also expresses the people’s hopes, aspirations, struggles and resistance.

The range of Santoro’s Highway 61 Revisited is represented by the artists shown on its dust jacket. They include: Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Woody Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, and Willie Nelson. The book’s two opening chapters are devoted to Armstrong and Guthrie, seen in Santoro’s eyes as Promethean precursors and seminal originators of what was later to come. In other chapters, Santoro vividly limns the pioneer days of be-bop and later jazz fusion; gospel, blues and soul; and the early 1960s folk music scene as represented by Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan. Dylan is central to Santoro’s deep exploration of the rock which originated in that small but fecund slice of a decade we refer to as the Sixties, 1965-68, and which continues to live on so richly, through artists as diverse as Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, and others. Santoro also has an ear for the hilarious, and the deeply serious within it, that he displays in sketches of Lenny Bruce and the Firesign Theatre, as well as an eye for the tragic within the seemingly maudlin, so illuminated in his sketch of jazzman-junkie Chet Baker. Highway 61 Revisited ends on an expectant, hopeful note, with chapters on some new jazz artists and on folk artist Ani DiFranco.

But, while Santoro finds much to celebrate in contemporary pop music, he knows far better than to be merely celebratory of an industry that has chewed up as much artistry as it has given forth, an industry where artistic standing and demonstrable creativity are, overwhelmingly, happenstances in an overtly profit-driven commercial realm. Santoro’s understanding of the recording industry and the “star” and “hit” system is every bit as profound and acerbic as Callahan’s, but is revealed much differently, through portraits of artists in their specific time and space. Both writers understand the centrality of the African American to the best of our popular musical culture, and both recognize the confusions and hostilities of a white America that belatedly came to appreciate African American art forms that were being created unnoticed by it, literally unseen and unheard by it, until they suddenly burst forth, exploded, as hitherto unknown jazz, blues and R&B, and became the basis of almost all that is vital in contemporary pop music.

For both Callahan and Santoro, the Sixties are central to the appreciation of contemporary pop. They recognize, however, that the Sixties were a happy accident, too little understood for the accident it was. While the unanticipated flowering of the Sixties exhilarated us as participants, its free, anarchic spirit also drove those who feared such freedom to move against it, so as to ensure -– through measures of repression, cooptation, replacement and substitution –- that such an accident would not happen again. The same fear, as Callahan and Santoro show, permeated the recording industry, which took the necessary steps to commercially corral this troublesome creative anarchy and to see to it that a future Janis Joplin would be a Britney Spears, a John Lennon, a Justin Timberlake, that Public Enemy would be 50 Cent, and that “Get Rich or Die Trying” would maintain itself forever as the alpha and omega of pop culture.

But the capitalist music industry, like other repressive forces, forgets that repression and silencing breed the very resistance it tried to squash, abort, and prevent in the first place. Santoro’s Highway 61 Revisited and Callahan’s The Trouble with Music stand strongly, appropriately, and triumphantly together. By enriching our understanding of popular music, they give us tools for confronting a commercializing, commodifying culture without futilely trying to make culture into a political locomotive.

The quality and the complementarity of these two books can be expressed by comparing Santoro’s Highway 61 Revisited to Engels’ empirical survey, The Condition of the Working Class in England, and Callahan’s The Trouble with Music to the more abstract and analytical Capital and Communist Manifesto. Both lead us back, finally, to Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.

George Fish
Indianapolis
georgefish666@yahoo.com

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Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (New York: Picador, St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

Jeff Chang, using a journalistic lens, attempts to answer the question: how does the political economy affect cultural production? He introduces the reader to the originators of Hip Hop, offering politically informed biographies of Hip Hop pioneers Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Baambaata, and also of individuals involved in the commodification of rap music in California (Dr. Dre and others at Death Row Records). Chang’s credentials include over a decade of Hip Hop journalism with publications in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, Vibe, The Nation, URB, Rap Pages, Spin and Mother Jones. He is cofounder of a Hip Hop label Quannum Projects and was senior editor at Russell Simmons’ 360hiphop.com. Clearly Chang has been one of the agents in the legitimation of Hip Hop culture and has had an active hand in making the history that he writes about. His narrative voice shifts easily from that of a scholar to that of a street-credible hipster, making this book accessible to many audiences and especially useful for teachers.

The biographies presented in this volume depict a cultural movement that in its three decades of existence has grown from a community-level event into a billion-dollar global industry: from a cultural expression to a commodity.

The history of Hip Hop consists of a series of battles. The author begins in 1977 with an anecdote about the New York Yankees, whose stadium is in the Bronx, Hip Hop’s ground zero. He recounts the tumultuous relationship between the highest paid baseball player, Reggie Jackson (a black man) and the white owners, managers and other players on the Yankees. The fact that manager Billy Martin opposed signing Jackson and when angry referred to Jackson as “boy,” even though Jackson was earning three million a year, fits neatly with the experiences that would generate Hip Hop. Jackson commented: “It makes me cry, the way they treat me on this team. The Yankee pinstripes are Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle and I’m a nigger to them… I don’t know how to be subservient.”

During this same time in Jamaica the Black Nationalist movement of the Rastafari developed, following the teachings of Marcus Garvey. Struggles for power between the Rastafarian-supported People’s National Party (PNP) and the dominant Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), still under colonialist rule, led to the murderous “clearing” of the Back-O-Wall ghetto, the home of two Rastafarian sects. Though Manley’s PNP had won popular support and ushered in social reforms, his move to reestablish relations with Cuba brought a disinvestment from First World countries which included a decline in US aid from $23 million in 1971 to $4 million in 1975. By 1976, Jamaica was under a State of Emergency (comparable to U.S. martial law), due to the high levels of gun violence between rival gangs linked to the JLP and the PNP. Kool Herc, the man who brought rap to the U.S., grew up in this hostility and embraced the music that became the bridge to quell the violence. Kool Herc brought the melodies, riddims, and toasts from Jamaica to the Bronx; he brought the politically conscious music of Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, and Bob Marley; and he brought the practice of talking over the music which set the stage for what would become rap. The development of Hip Hop, as Chang argues, arose from the struggles between structure and agency, between racism and democracy, and most importantly between producers and consumers of culture.

Chang describes the Bronx as a necropolis, a city of the dead. Though the role of deindustrialization in the rise of Hip Hop is well known, Chang provides descriptive statistics that even non-academics can find useful, numbers that help to explain the social context from which a new culture was formed. With the loss of 600,000 manufacturing jobs in the 1970s (a 40% percent decline), average household income in the Bronx dropped to half the New York City average and to only 40% of the national average. Youth unemployment was reported as 60%, but Chang suggests that in some neighborhoods it was closer to 80%. Indeed, as blues was said to come from an oppressed labor force, Hip Hop was to come from joblessness.

Chang provides anecdotal evidence of systematic oppression of inner-city residents. In one instance he describes the new economy that was on the rise wit