James W. Loewen - Lies Across America: What our historic sites get wrong

When Donald Trump became President for the second time, among the batch of plans issued in the first few days, were two that raised eyebrows for their seeming ridiculousness. The first was the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The other, less commented on, was a plan to rename of Denali mountain in Alsaka, to Mount McKinley. Trump called this a chance to "restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs". 

Ironically, Denali gets the opening chapter in James W. Loewen's classic book Lies Across America: What our historic sites get wrong. In it, Loewen explains that Denali "the great one" is a ridiculous choice in the first place that caused nearly thirty years of debate when it first happened and doesn't actually name the President. That's not to say that Denali wasn't renamed Mount McKinley after William McKinley who became President and was subsequently assassinated. It's just that the renaming took place before McKinley was elected. The mountain was called after him because the namer "favored conservative fical policies, while most people in the West wanted to expand the amount of money in circulation by minting more silver coins". 

It was "little more than a joke" according to one historian. Once the name did get up, it became a battle ground for left and right - for those defending actual history and indigenous culture, and those who prefer to celebrate the history of white European settlers. "It's an insult to the former President" cry those who want to keep the McKinley name, but as Loewen point out, "most Americans don't rank William McKinley very high... They remember him if at all as a creation of political boss Mark Hanna, beholden to big business, and addicted to high tariffs". This is a case of the invention of tradition.

This discussion sets the tone for Loewen's fascinating book which discusses how history is remembered in the United States, and indeed why it is remembered. Sweeping West to East, and down through the American South, Loewen explores countless sites and shows how a particular view of US history is portrayed - one that expresses the dominance of European settler culture, celebrates imperialism, and downplays or ignores events and individuals that challenge this narrative. 

There are some shocking things. There are the monuments to slave owners and the "docile slaves". The celebrations of Confederate defeats that make them look like victories, and the lauding of vile, violent, racist individuals who are portrayed as their opposite. There are monuments and statues that mark the defeat of "savage" indigenous people, lie about massacres (even one marker that commerates a "massacre" that never happened) and portray non-white people as subservient and stupid. There are also booster monuments, designed to attract tourists to the places such as the location were the first car drove, even though it didn't. Lies indeed.

Loewen gives an interesting view into the debate about whether statues should "fall". He argues, convincingly, that statues should not necessarily be destroyed. They could be removed, or replaced with information plaques that celebrate real history, or give a truer account and explain why the original statue was there. However he also notes that some statues were placed as deliberate acts of intimidation and provocation. These should be removed. But how should they be recorded?

One statue, known for many years by the racist term "The Good Darky" shows how this can be the case. It was erected in downtown Natchitoches, Louisiana. It was "from the start, intended to beuseful only to the cause of white supremacy". It markes, as the inscription says, the "grateful recognition of the Arduous and faithful service of the Good Darkies of Louisiana". This "service" was the alleged support of some slaves for the South's war to defend slavery. It ignores the many slaves who escaped to fight with the Union, as well as those who didn't flee from fear of violent punishment - but certainly did not support the South. The statue was also designed to remind black people after the war of their place, and their subservient position during segregation. Jokes about the statue by local whites suggested that it was a place were drunk black people could find their way home. But the statue really showed the position that black people were supposed to have to white people - subservient, bowed, secondary. It was not a depiction of the past, but a demonstration of the present.

Loewen writes of the subservient posture of the person depicted on the statue that, "the servile pose of the statue was no myth but a rational response by African Americans to an untenable situation. The response, like the statue, was nevertheless a white creation."  Loewen continues about what should happen to monuments like this:

American rejoinced when Poles and East Germans toppled their statues of Lenin. Within our shored... we are not so sure. When statues become controversial... civic leaders sometimes suggest that they be carted off to a museum. The statue of 'The Good Darky' shows what can go wrong with that solution. Although run by a university, the Rural Life Museum [where the statue was moved to] has not used 'The Good Darky' to 'provide insight into the largely forgotten lifestyles and cultures of pre-industrial Louisiana,' the museum's avoed purpose. Instead it situated the statue in a place of honor. No plaque gives any information about it history of symbolic meaning.

I read the second edition of this book, is that Loewen explains how the book has changed since its first edition. The updates reflect real change since 1999, as the 2000s saw an enormous blacklash against monuments that depicted problematic things and a growing interested in how history was marked. This, Loewen argues, was the result of two events. The first was the murder of nine blcakc churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by a "neo-Confederate". Almost overnight many Confederate monuments that had been subject of long campaigns for removal, where taken down. The second was Black Lives Matter, which physically confronted statues as well as forcing a global reappraisel about how the history of slavery and racism were depicted and understood. As such, some of the monuments in the first edition have been moved, changed or destroyed. Others remain. But it is fascinating to see that while Loewen's book's first edition certainly did make a difference and forced some places to reconsider their monuments. It was the mass movements and the revulsion at racist violence, that made the real difference.

This is important for today. Because Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain is not a random act of stupidity. It is a calculated attempt to reshift how history and geography are used to understand and shape people's knowledge of the world. It is an attempt to reverse the gains of our movements, and it is an attempt to reconsolidate and empower white supremacy and racism. It should be resisted and reversed. Lies Across American remains a powerful tool in that struggle.

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Corbin - Gun Thugs, Rednecks & Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars

Jenny Erpenbeck - Go Went Gone

Jenny Erpenbeck's Go Went Gone was first published in German and deals with the important political issue of Europe and refugees. It's central character is a retired, and widowed, professor of literature, Richard, who finding himself at a loose end after retirement, discovers a community of African refugees who have set up a tent city in Oranienplatz, central Berlin. From late 2012, Oranienplatz was the site of such an encampement and Erpenbeck's book clearly draws on this political protest movement and its consequences, as well as individuals who were part of it. 

Richard is drawn to the refugees, his personal isolation, and his feeling that his life lacks direction in retirement, lead him to think about documenting the lives of the refugees. Quickly however he finds himself helping, encouraging and teaching them. 

I was initially skeptical about the book, worried it was going to turn into a "white saviour" trope as Richard solves all the individual issues that the refugees suffer. Instead it is quite the opposite. Richard finds himself unable to push through the legal barriers erected by a racist German state that provent refugees finding sanctuary or work. He is frustrated that the skills of these men are not utilised by a country desperate for young and experienced workers. He is trapped by the logic of a charity based system of refugee support that only treats the men as passive victims. And finally he is poleaxed by the horrors that he has seen.

Erpenbeck depicts all of this with sympathy, nuance and anger. One of the refugees, Rufu, is medically treated for psychiatric issues. Yet it turns out his fundamental problem is not mental health, but a agonising dental issue that no one has diagnosed, because no one has treated him as a human being and tried to communicate properly. Instead they assume he is having some sort of psychotic episode. Osarobo would like to learn the piano so Richard offers him the use of his own instrument. Richard buys Karon land in Ghana, not because he is a white saviour (he is...) but because the barrier has broken down between them. Richard sees the refugees not as numberless refugees who survived the perilous crossing, but as humans like him.

Since its publication racism directed towards immigrants and refugees in Germany has only increased. State support has been reduced, the lives of refugees have become harder, and the growth of fascist and far-right organisations has fuelled animosity and hatred towards the communities who are desperately seeking a new life and assistance. This book is not a political polemic. There's pages denouncing the European Union whose racist policies have led to thousands drowning in the Mediteranean and fuelled the far-right. But implicit in the book is a sense that liberal politics, when scratched, are really not that liberal - but quite racist.

There's a clever plot line in the book when Richard's middle class, intellectual and academic friends gradually realise that one of their own group is actually quite racist. The shock to them is real. The refugees and their situation, as well as their resistance as they protest the government's plan to displace them once again, has forced the liberal intelligensia to see things differently. The refugees here are not a backdrop - they are humans who want to live their lives, but are forced to fight back because the system itself won't let them have lives.

The ending is, well, ambiguous. Just as the refugee problem under capitalism with its borders, barbed wire and nation states will always be. But there is hope, on an individual level, for Richard and his friends. Their is sympathy, mutual learning and the sharing of meals. But if Jenny Erpenbeck's novel tells us anything - its that this is no solution to the fundamental problem. But that does not mean we shouldn't fight to make people, and governments, see refugees as humans who can help us build the future we want.

Kay Dick - They

Kay Dick's They is a forgotten classic of the dystopian fiction that is perhaps more relevant today than when it was first written. Despite Dick's popularity, when They came out in 1977 it sold badly. It was republished in 2022 after being rediscovered in the early 2020s. 

They is an unusual novel, seemingly more a series of interconnected short accounts, which defy easy classification. There is little "story" here, so to speak, rather a series of experiences in a future Britain, mostly set in a buccolic countryside to where dissidents have been banished, or escaped. They roam the country, hunting down culture and cultural producers. Artists, poets, singers and composers are imprisoned and punished, sometimes in the most barbaric ways. The punishment often fits the "crime". A poet has her writing hand held over a flame for eight minutes. Painters loose their eyesight. Others are taken away, and return, their bodies whole but their minds broken. They are mere cyphers, obeying and meekly watching TV.

Resistance is seemingly futile, but, resistance there is. People learn songs, books and poems by heart. Protecting the vanishing culture inside themselves. Books disappear, their absence noticed the next morning, because They come in the night, or when they are unobserved. Their vessels moored off shore, constantly monitoring and watching. In the face of the repression, many opt to collaborate, or hope it blows over, or even to shop those who are fighting to stay human and keep their art. Spies are everywhere, so are those who would, stasi-like, inform on their neighbours for singing or reading. Nonconformity is the only way to be safe.

Those who do not fit the standards deemed fit are also persecuted. Those who live alone, or don't watch TV, or behave unusually are singled out. It's not difficult here to see parallels for the persecution that Dick herself might have experienced as a gay person in mid-century Britain.

To me though the book is mostly about resistance, and how the act of resistance keeps you human. The central characters hold onto their humanity and their culture, not just to survive, but because doing so speaks hopefully of a better future. As Carmen Maria Machado notes in their introduction, the poet whose hand is burnt so badly for daring to write poetry is writing again. Having learnt to use their left hand. It is a powerful declaration of humanity and rebellion. While They might not follow normal patterns of writing it is, nonetheless a book that speaks to a time when having the wrong opinion or failing to conform, can, in many parts of the world have severe consequences.

Christopher S. Mackay - False Prophets and Preachers: Henry Gresbeck's Account of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster

This is a remarkable account of a remarkable series of events. From February 1534 until the early summer of 1535, the German city of Münster came under the rule of the Anabaptists. Then, Anabaptists were at the forefront of the most radical interpretation of the Reformation, and had developed a significantly radical vision of how society should be run. The Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster began as a radical utopian experiment in living, including the redistribution of wealth and resources. But for a number of reasons, particularly the appaling conditions caused by the siege of the city by the region's hostile bishop and lord, the experiment collapsed into a vicious theocratic state. 

The Anabaptists were inspired by a specific reading of sections of the bible, which drove their actions:

Acts 4 seemed to validate direct inspiration of men through the Holy Spirit; verses 32 through 37 were taken to mean that the followers of Christ should share their goods communally, and the radicals’ confiscation of the property of the faithful in Münster was one of the more shocking events to sixteenth-century (and later) sensibilities.

But until Henry Gresbeck's account became available, we've only had second hand sources as to what happened. Gresbeck was the only eyewitness to events within Münster who survived to write down his experiences. His survival was due to his escape from the siege toward its end and his betrayal of the city. This allowed the bishop's forces into the city where they began the most henious repression and pillaging. Hundreds of Anabaptists were killed and their leaders tortured and executed. 

Gresbeck's account is, as Christopher S. Mackay explains, extremely important. It is the only first hand account of Anabaptist Münster, and it provides important evidence to collaborate other sources. Mackay has done an amazing job of bringing together and translating the surviving copies of the original documents and creating a readable whole. But as Mackay warns, "Gresbeck’s retrospective account is not without its own difficulties". Principaly Gresbeck is silent on his own role during the period of the siege, and he is writing for a hostile ruler, intending to justify his own role in the capture of the city, and hoping to get back his own wealth and freedom.

Nonetheless, by reading criticially, and with the Mackay's superb annotations and footnotes we can learn alot about those strange and amazing times. Mackay also provides one of the best introductory accounts of the development of Anabaptist thinking, and the background to the Münster events. As he says:

The events of Münster are incomprehensible without a clear understanding that the main driving force behind the radical leaders was the belief that the events portrayed in the book of Apocalypse were about to come to pass and that they would play a prominent role as the 144,000 who would do battle with the forces of the Antichrist.

Gresbeck himself may, or may not have believed this. But it is notable that he did stay a lengthy time in Münster, not availing himself of opportunities to leave until absolutely necessary. Though, given that the besieging forces usuaully behaved appalling to those who did escape, and that punishment for those who were captured trying to get out was equally vicious, it's possible this was discretion being better than valour on Gresbeck's part. Mackay suggests however that while "abstract theological doctrines were not an issue of great concern to him. One is left with the impression that Gresbeck was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea that a community of socially and economically equal Christians was to be established in Münster."

That said, in his writing for the bishop, Gresbeck certainly hedges his bets. Here are some of his comments written after the defeat of Münster, about the redistribution of wealth:

The preacher Stutenberent continued, “It’s not appropriate for a Christian to have any money. Be it silver or gold, it’s unclean for a Christian. Everything that the Christian brothers and sisters have belongs to one person as much as to the next. You shall lack nothing, be it food or clothing, house and hearth. What you need you shall get, God will not let you lack anything. One thing should be just as common as the next, it belongs to us all. It’s mine as much as yours, and yours as much as mine.” This is how they convinced the people, so that they (some of them) brought their money, silver and gold, and all that they had. But in the city of Münster, the idea that the one person was to have as much as the next turned out unfairly.

Gresbeck's final caution here reads much like those who admonish 21st century revolutionaries that "it will never work". Nonetheless socialists today might be interested in reading about how the redistribution took place:

After the property became common in this way, they appointed three deacons in each parish who were to guard the property consisting of produce, grain, and meat, and any sort of foodstuffs that there were in the city. These deacons entered all the houses and examined what in the way of food, grain, and meat each person had in his house, and they wrote a list of everything that each person had in his house. These deacons went through the city. Each group of deacons went around their parish and were to examine what sort of poor people there were in the city and not let them lack anything. At first, they did this two or three times, but this practice was eventually forgotten because they still had provisions enough in the city. It was with a good appearance that they carried out this procedure in Münster. After they drew up the list for each house, no one had control over his possessions. But if they’d hidden on the side something that wasn’t listed, they were able to retain it. 

This redistribution of wealth was popular, and people did flock to Münster - no surprise given the prevailing poverty in wider society. But I am wary of those who suggest (as writers like Ernest Belfort Bax did) that Anabaptist Münster was some sort of precursor of the revolutionary Paris Commune. One reason for this was there was no democracy. As the siege progressed and deprivation increased power in Münster was concentrated in the hands of the self-declared king, John of Leiden. Gresbeck details how John of Leiden put himself at the top of a hierarchy of power that used violence to ensure his bidding was followed. While Gresbeck gives some account of events for laughs, he does give us an insight into how the "king" created a new, military, state that allowed him to enjoy wealth and food, while the masses inside the besieged town were reduced to eating cats, dogs and rats to survive. Hardly a socialist utopia. Instead this was a theocratic terror state that ruled by fear and murder.

One aspect of the Münster events that has led to much commentary was the institution of polygamy. This makes for some of the most distressing parts of Gresbeck's account. The rulers allowed men in Münster to take multiple wives, against the will of those women. This was justified on the basis of Old Testament scripture, suggesting that the men should have multiple wives and produce multiple offspring to spread Christianity. Whatever the ideological justification, it is clear that this was an incredibly oppressive experience for almost every women, and led to violence and rape, even of children. In fact this situation caused a small uprising against the Anabaptist rule, which John of Leiden stopped with brutal force. Gresbeck does detail other examples of hidden resistance, and people did escape and try to get messages out. But this was not the majority experience. It begs the question, why did Münster hold out so long? In part this is because of the threat of violence - both from the besiegers and from internally. It also was because people seemed to genuinelly believe, or were led to believe, that relief from outside was on its way - and there's so credibility to this. We know that sympathetic Anabaptists did try to rise up and come to the city's aid. But by the time it was desperately needed this was now just fantasy from King John, desperate to offer some hope to hold onto power.

By the time that Gresbeck escaped and led in Münster's enemies, it is clear from his account that the city was on its knees. That does not, however, justify the pillaging and mass murder of civilians by the invading forces. One of the reasons that Gresbeck's is the only account from an eyewitness, is that nearly everyone else was murdered. Münster's enemies wanted to end the rebellion. They also wanted to rub out any other idea that radicals should try and redistribute wealth elsewhere. One might speculate how things could have been different had the bishop not moved to isolate and break the rebellion immediately the Anabaptists were elected to power.

Henry Gresbeck's account of Münster is remarkable, if at times hard to read. It does however repay reading and Christopher S. Mackay has done a superb job of framing and producing Gresbeck's work in a format that is easily accessible to the contempoary reader. For those interested in the Radical Reformation and its consequences, it is a must read. Highly recommended.

Related Reviews

Bax - The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
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Leon Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany

The recent election results in Germany should have left everyone on the left thinking about the rise of fascism and how it can be averted. While the situation is not the same as the 1930s, emboldened by the second election of Donald Trump there is nonetheless a terrifying rise in confidence for far-right and the fascist movements globally, especially in Europe. 

In the 1930s the Russian revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky led a battle within the international Communist movement over the direction of the Communist Parties. This battle was principly over revolutionary strategy and at the heart of his argument was the question of Germany. Germany had a big Commuist Party, and a recent revolutioanry experience. It also had a mass Nazi party, and discussions over tactics to challenge and defeat Hitler were key to the differing visions of Trotsky and the Stalinist left. Trotsky was isolated within the Communist movement, exiled from Russia, he relied on newspapers and letters from small numbers of supporters, who kept him informed. Nonetheless, despite his isolation, he kept up a steady stream of letters, articles, pamphlets and polemics that desperately urged a shift in the course of the German Communist Party (KPD) to enable it to defeat fascism.

The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany is a collection of these writing by Trotsky published by Pathfinder with an introduction from the Belgium Marxist Ernest Mandel. There is a wealth of material here, though readers without some knowledge of the period and the Communist Left, as well as Trotsky's isolation from the revolutionary movement could do well to read some background material. This is in part because Mandel's introduction and some of the introductionary material in this edition is either too brief, or, in the case of Mandel, aimed at a different audience of the 1960s when fascism was not an immediate threat.

The articles represent a number of different approaches of Trotsky to the immediate tasks of the left. The first is understanding the nature of fascism in the 1930s, the second tactics to defeat it, and finally, understanding fascism in the context of Marxist ideas of "bonapartism". There is, out of necessity, repetition. But there are some important conclusions worth noting. Firstly Trotsky's analysis of fascism as a counter-revolutionary force:

Fascism is a product of two conditions: a sharp social crisis on the one hand; the revolutioanry weakness of the German proletariat on the other. The weakness of the proletariat is in turn made up of two leements: the particularly historical role of the Social Democracy, this still powerful capitalist agency in the ranks of the proletariat, and the inability of the centrist leadership of the Communist Party to unite the workers under the banner of the revolution.

Trostky here is clearly writing of fascism in the 1930s, in a period of prolonged economic turmoil and an era when there was an urgent desire of the capitalist class to see the workers' movement blunted and weakened. Its not strictly true today, as fascism has grown in slightly different circumstances. Nonetheless Trotsky's repeated point that "fascism would actually fall to pieces if the CP were able to unite the working class, transforming it into a powerful revolutionary magnet for all the oppressed masses of the people" holds true. What does also remain true today is the way that fascist forces and the far-right in general are growing in the context of general despair at the way mainstream parties have failed to deliver anything for ordinary people. It is also true that in many parts of the world the left, an the trade union leadership have failed to lead the stort of struggles that could win gains for working people and begin to rebuild the movements that can challenge facism. 

Trotsky rages against the analysis of the KPD and the Communist International under Stalin that sees imminient failure for Hitler after each successive election. Trotsky's writings become increasingly desperate and you can feel his frustration at missed opportunities by the KPD fail to undermine the Nazis. The election results, with the Nazis share of the vote declining slightly, that that of the KPD increasing lead to ridculously optimistic positions. In the same piece that was the source of the quotes above, Germany, the Key to the International Situation, Trotsky writes a brilliant piece of analysis that is directly relevent to today. He points out that in the fight to stop fascism "votes are not decisive" the struggle is key:

The main strength of the fascists is their strength in numbers. Yes, they have received many votes. But in the social struggle, votes are not decisive. The main army of fascism still consists of the petty ourgeoisie and the new middle class: the small artisans and shopkeepers of the cities, the petty officials, the employees, the technical personnel, the intelligentsia, the impoverished peasantry. On the scales of election statistics a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Commnuist votes. But on the scales of the revolutionary struggle a throusand workers in a one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives and their mother-in-law. The great bulk of the fsascists consists of human dust.

How to mobilise this force? The KPD was convinced that it simply needed to declare itself the inheritors of the Russian Revolution and win people to abstract ideas of socialism. Their "third period", in which they labelled the Social Democrats, "social fascists", was designed to tell workers that reformists were the same as Nazis and draw people to the genuine socialists. It had the opposite effect. It prevented the left from uniting over a common programme of stopping the Nazis. The millions of voters for the KPD and the Social Democrats could have been a power to stop Hitler, but were wasted because of the KPD's sectarianism, a sectarianism that as Trotsky repeatedly points out, came directly from Stalin in Moscow.

Some of the most powerful, and tragic parts of this collection are the sections when Trotsky seeks to win people to this vision of a United Front. He draws on his experiences in the Russian Revolution, particularly that during the attempted Kornilov Coup, as well as the early experiences of the Communist International which drew out these ideas for how revolutionaries could relate to workers in a non-revolutionary period. Some of these arguments are surprisingly practical, and provide some of the most interesting and useful parts of the book for today's socialist movement. For instance, in For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism Trotsky writes:

Election agreements, parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advanage of the SOcial Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are always useful to the revolutionary party... No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whome to strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be conluded even with the devil himself, with his grandmother and event with Noske and Grzesinsky. One one condition, not to bind one's hands.

Predicitably, Trotsky's enemies seized on the last polemical idea to unite with the enemies of the workers, to defeat the immideate threat. Their criticisms ignored the body of the argument - a clear strategy to defeat fascism through unity of action by the left and a united workers movement. Trotsky also polemicises against those in the Communist movement who attack Trotskyism, and points out the hypocrisy and the failings. But Trotsky has no mass movement to win the argument and the German working class is defeated. The final chapters in this collection show Trotsky drawing his conclusion that the Communist International has failed and that a new International is needed. 

One surprising thing about this book is that Trotsky doesn't analyse fascism mcuh in terms of its racism and antisemitism. He is mostly concerned with the tactical needs of the movement, and fascism as a force that has "raised itself to power on thew backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organisations of the working class and the institutions of democracy".

He continues, "but fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital". But Trotsky is well aware that fascism is a reactionary ideology based on "darkness, ignorance and savagery". Writing as he does from 1930 onward he doesn't need to highlight its antisemitism and racism - it is everywhere evident. He does point out that:

Everything that should have been eliminated from the national oranism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.

But while it is true that fascism was the rule of monopoly capital. The Nazis did demand their blood payment and that's what led to the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jewish people as well as four million others, plus a global war that killed millions more. Trotsky did not live to see that, though he had a clear understanding that Hitler in power would lead to mass murder. It is, however, a bit unforgiveable that Mandel's introduction doesn't in attempt analyse in any way the Holocaust and events after the Nazis came to power. It is a strange omission on any level.

While much of this book is a polemic by Trotsky at a crisis moment for the European working class, there is much here of interest and importance to the revolutionary left today, trying to build against the growth of the far-right and understanding the role of figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Trotsky's writings cannot be directly applied to 2024. This sort of crude Marxism that takes positions from the past and superimposes them on the present was exactly what he was attacking Stalin for. But that doesn't mean that Trotsky's analysis is dated or irrelevant. Far from it. It'd encourage socialists today to read, or re-read these essays, and think about "how to strike, whome to strike, and when to strike".

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - 1905
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Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
Cliff - Trotsky 1: Towards October
Cliff - Trotsky 2: Sword of the Revolution
Cliff - Trotsky 3: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy
Dunn & Hugo Radice (eds) - 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results & Prospects

Jo Anne Salisbury Troxel - Waiting for the Revolution: A Montana Memoir

In 1932 an extraordinary funeral took place in Plentywood, in the north-eastern corner of Montana, in the United States. Janis Salisbury, the fourteen year old daughter of Rodney Salisbury, was buried in a "Communist funeral". The room, drapped in red flags, saw a service culminating in the audience singing radical and revolutionary songs. It was a shocking moment for many in Montana, but Plentywood, alongside much of Sheridan County, had many radical and socialist activists and voters. They, angered by poverty, economic turmoil and unemployment repeatedly supported socialist candidates and organisations.

The story of Sheridan County's radicalism has been well told by Verlaine Stoner McDonald in her book The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana. Waiting for the Revolution, is a deeply touching and often inspiring memoir of those times and the aftermath by Janis Salisbury's half-sister by Rodney Salisbury, Jo Anne Salisbury Troxel. She tells the complicated and often stormy account of her parents with the radicalism of the 1920s and 1930s as the backdrop to her life. Jo was born to Rodney and his lover Marie Chapman, who was his partner for thirteen years until Rodney's untimely death in 1938. At the same time though Rodney was married to his wife Emma and, Jo's mother was also married. Despite their clear love for each other Rodney and Emma could not marry, as Emma would not divorce. Rodney was not just a socialist sheriff in his Plentywood days, he had been a Communist candidate for governor, an agricultural workers' union organiser and a revolutionary organiser.

These complicated relationships are emblematic of the wider conservatism of the years. Despite the radicalism of the era, and Rodney and Marie's on socialism, they were trapped by the logic of the system. Jo's memoir tells the story of them and their wider families, placing it in the context of their activism, but in many ways telling a story that is really about the impoverishment and unemployment of the 1930s in the US rural hinterlands. It is not surprise that Marie is an alcoholic, and her and Rodney's children have a different relationship with the adults around them. 

These conditions aside, it is remarkable to read about the radicalism. Rodney and Marie carry their politics through their lives, and it was imbibed by Jo, who maintains a radical set of principles to this day. But her parents, isolated as they must have been in Montana, were principled socialists - siding with Trotsky against Stalin, and working to build the earliest Trotskyist groupings in the US. Readers might like to read the obituary for Rodney that was published in Socialist Appeal on his death in 1938 to a get a sense of the radicalism that existed in 1930s Montana. Sadly it does not mention Marie, though it does talk about Emma a "good wife, companion and teacher, who sympathized with and joined him in his revolutionary outlook".

But most of Jo's account is not about this history - it forms the backdrop to her own story, and that of her family. Shaped by poverty and economicly difficult times, it reminds us that Montana is not just a state of beautiful National Parks, but of class struggle, trade unionism, and the fight for a decent life. Waiting for the Revolution is characteristic of much of American local history, often a little overburdened by complex family trees, these books are nonetheless immeasurably important insights into a history that is fast disappearing. 

Related Reviews

McDonald - The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana
Doig - Bucking the Sun

Louise Erdrich - The Mighty Red

Set in the lonely east of North Dakota, The Mighty Red is an impressive novel that draws out the isolation of small town, rural America and casts it against the swirling realities of capitalist agriculture, ecological degradation and loneliness. Alongside this Louise Erdrich draws out a story of a local tragedy that has left the town's population scarred and desperate for love to heal their collective wounds.

The novel opens with Kismet Poe, named by a whimsical mother, who hopes that hear daughter will escape that confines of small town America. But Kismet is in love with the bookish romantic Hugo, while being heavily courted by the high school sports star, aspirant farmer Gary. Kismet is too kind to refuse Gary's marriage proposal, and the confines of American culture to restrictive for anyone, even the adults, to understand that youngsters don't need to get married to enjoy sex and love for their early years. As Kismet falls into a marriage she knows she doesn't want but cannot say no to, their wedding day is nearly ruined as Kismet's father absconds with the church renovation funds.

Kismet is now trapped, literally, by Gary's family. Stuck on a farm whose topsoil is vanishing before everyone's eyes. The neighbours are trying out new-fangled organic, no drill farming, but they're the weird ones. Preferring to grow food instead of the local sugar beet cash crop. Hugo leaves his bookshop (Erdrich's novels often seem to feature bookshops, presumably like her own in Minnesota) and heads to Williston to make his fortune in ND's gas fields. Fracking is booming.

Kismet has to escape, but doing so means learning what really happened at that town tragedy, whose participants seem to have sworn some sort of pact of silence. The cover-up needs to be uncovered - not for legal reasons, but so that everyone can move on.

Erdrich has constructed a lovely novel of humanity, youngster's trapped by their circumstances and isolation, and the inward looking life of the adults. The drugs, drink, poisoned air and rapacious capitalism that undermine any effort to be different - or indeed normal. Kismet's at the heart of this, her steely character surviving the twin buffeting of her father's betrayal, her new family life and a soulless marriage. Her escape is wonderful, as is her steadfastness. It's a beautiful book. Louise Erdrich has her finger very firmly on the pulse of America. It will be interesting to see what she writes in the coming years.

Related Reviews

Erdrich - The Sentence

Alexander Rabinowitch - The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd

Alexander Rabinowitch is an interesting historian. From a Russian émigré family, he grew up listening to stories about how the revolutionaries had expelled them. Visitors to his family home in the US included figures as important as Kerensky, the former leader of Russia's Povisional Government during the 1917 revolution. Rabinowitch became a historian, and while a young man, as part of his research he travelled to Russia in the 1960s to research Lenin. Expecting to find evidence that Lenin was a dictator in waiting who brokered no argument, Rabinowitch actually found the opposite. What he discovered was that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were riven by debate and discussion, even in the weeks and days before the revolution, and that far from a monolithic organisation, the Bolshevik Party "was both responsive and open to the masses" in that revolutionary year. In his introduction Rabinowitch writes:

For all the lively debate and spirited give-and-take that I find to have existed within the Bolshevik organisation in 1917, the Bolsheviks were doubtless more unifed than any of their major rivals for power. Certainly this was a key factor in their effectiveness. Nonetheless, my research suggests that the relative flexibility of the party, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood, had at least as much to do with the ulimate Bolshevik victory as did revolutionary discipline, organisational unity, or obedience to Lenin.

It is a remarkable conclusion for historian who is not also a Leninist, or at least a revolutionary, and it is to Rabinowitch's credit that he did not allow his own prejudices to block his conclusions.

The book is not an account of 1917, though it does begin with a good overview of the background and the first few months of the revolution. The focus is the "coming to power of the Bolsheviks" and this means Rabinowitch begins with the crucial turning point of the revolution, the summer of 1917. July 1917 saw a mass revolutionary impulse, and how to respond to this caused enormous debate within the Bolsheviks. The author details the various disagreements - which essentially focused on whether or not to call for insurrection and support the Petrograd workers as they demanded a Soviet government. Lenin argued it was premature, though it is clear that not all the Bolsheviks agreed. The confusion over this, and the eventual repression saw the right-wing able to turn their guns on the Bolsheviks. Leading figures like Lenin went into hiding, hundreds of Bolshevik cadre were imprisoned and repression was high. In the aftermath things looked bleak. But the threat of a far-right coup against the revolution, and crucially, also against Kerensky, under the figurehead of the fascist general Kornilov, enabled the Bolsheviks to place themselves at the heart of a mass movement to defend the revolution. 

The United Front approach of the Bolsheviks here, allowed them to recover crucial ground and place themselves back in the revolutionary leadership. But as Rabinowitch explains, the success of the revolution from this point onward was not automatic, contrary to the Stalinist myths of the infallibility of Lenin and his party:

The entire history of the party from the February revolution on suggested the potential for programmatic discord and disorganised activity existing within Bolshevik ranks. So that whether the party would somehow find the strength of will, organizational disciple, and sensitivity to the complexities of the fluid and possibly explosive prevailing situation requisite for it to take power, was, at this point, still very much an open question.

But in the aftermath of the attempted coup by Kornilov, what mattered was not simply Lenin winning the rest (or the majority) of the Bolsheviks to his correct position. Lenin himself, as well as the wider Bolsehvik cadre, had to find their way forward. In some of the most fascinating sections Rabinowitch details how Lenin moves towards a position of calling for "All Power to the Soviets". But this "new moderation was not accepted without opposition". 

Lenin and the Bolsheviks were uniquely attuned to the way the masses were thinking and moving. It was flexibility around this that gave them their greatest power. Rabinowitch details, for instance, how the Bolsheviks didn't just adapt to the mood, they tried to shape it. As the hour of insurrection draws closely this interrelated process gets more and more intense. Even until the very last moment of the revolution, Lenin is waging war inside the Party to win the argument of revolution. Given that The Bolsheviks Come to Power is a work of non-fiction, readers may be surprised to find themselves a little carried away by the intensity. Here, for instance, is Rabinowitch's account of how the decision to go for insurrection and the overthrow of the Provisional Government immediately before the meeting of the All Russia Congress of Soviets:

There is very little hard evidence regarding the circumstances of this decision. Latsis later wrote that 'towards morning on the famous night when the question of a government was being decided and the Central Committee wavered, Illich [Lenin] ran to the office of the Petersburg Committee with the question: "Fellows, do you have shovels? Will the workers of Piter [Petrograd] go into the trenches at our call?" Latsis recorded that the response was positive, adding that the decisiveness of Lenin and the Petersburg Committee affected the waverers, allowing Lenin to have his way. 

While Rabinowitch is supremely sensitive to the way that the Bolsheviks' were linked to the masses, he also understands that Lenin was the key revolutionary thinker. The decision to go for insurrection, Rabinowitch writes, is one of "few modern historical episodes [which] better illustrate the sometimes decisive role of an individual in historical events". 

That said, in his close study of these events, it is noticeable how Lenin was not always able to shape events on a hour by hour basis. For instance, I was struck by how, during the Kornilov coup, Lenin was too far away in hiding to have a real impact. Straining at the leash to come to Petrograd from hiding, much of his instructions arrived too late to have a significant impact.

But whatever Lenin's abilities, it was the party he had striven to build that was crucial in October 1917, and revolutionaries today, ought to learn this lesson now. Rabinowitch puts it very well.

That in the space of eight months the Bolsheviks reached a position from which they were able to assume power was due... to the special effort which the party devoted to winning the support of military troops in the rear and at the front; only the Bolsheviks seemed to have perceived the necessary crucial significance of the armed forces in the struggle for power. Perhaps even more fundamentally, the phenomenal Bolshevik success can be attributed in no small meaure to the nature of the party in 1917. Here I have in mind neither Lenin's bold and determined leadership, the immense historical significance of which cannot be denied, not the Bolshevik's proverbial, though vastly exaggerated, organisational unity and discipline. Rather, I would emphasize the party's internally relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralised structure and method of operation, as well as its essentially open and mass character - in striking contrast to the traditional Leninist model.

It was this that enabled Lenin to shift the Party in the crucial moments of 1917, and it was this Party that enabled the revolutionary workers' and their organisations to take power. The alternative would have been fascism and further war. 

Alexander Rabinowitch's remarkable book was first published in the early 1970s. It deserves a reading today. Leninists might find things to quibble about. But in its detail of the events of 1917, and its exploration of the arguments at all levels of the Bolshevik Party, even those who have read much about the Russian Revolution will find much of interest. It is a fascinating insight into how a mass revolutionary organisation operated during the only successful workers' revolution in history and its conclusions are even more powerful given they are written by someone who comes from outside the revolutionary tradition.

Related Reviews

Bryant - Six Red Months in Russia
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed
Lenin - The State and Revolution
Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World
Smith - Red Petrograd

John le Carré - Call for the Dead

Call for the Dead is the first appearance of John le Carré's recurring character, the British intelligence officer George Smiley. Its a very short and puncy novel, dealing with the aftermath of a relatively regular interview that Smiley has with a civil servant Samuel Fennan. Fennan had been in the Communist Party in the 1930s, but that was long ago, and now he's a loyal worker with a decent income and a relatively nice house in the London suburbs. But the following day he is found dead, a suicide note nearby, and Smiley is being blamed for scaring Fennan so much that he felt compelled to kill himself.

But Smiley's recollections of the interview were much more positive. He found Fennan amicable and enjoyed their time together. As he begins to ask questions of Fennan's wife, the local police and probe a bit deeper he finds evidence of a much darker conspiracy. 

Call for the Dead is interesting in a number of ways. Truthfully its more of a detective story, and as Carré's first novel, this and the second, A Murder of Quality, suggest that the author was working out his position in the various genres. The book is also of interest because it gives a lot of background to Smiley himself, that really illuminates some of the later stories. 

But its a great read. The seediness of suburban life and the grimness of post-war Britain really come out well. Smiley himself, and his collaborators in this book, are part of the grey charm. But it's also a reminder that great thrillers do not always need to be 350 pages in length. 

Related Reviews

Carré - A Small Town in Germany
Carré - The Looking Glass War
Carré - A Murder of Quality
Carré - A Legacy of Spies
Carré - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Reading The Magicians for a second time, I cannot help but agree with my earlier review from a few years ago. Grossman's book feels, initially like a darker, grittier version of Harry Potter, where violence, sex and death are much more on display than in Rowling's children's fantasy. But re-reading The Magicians in a search for a quick escapist fantasy recently I was struck by how the arc of Quentin Coldwater's story is at odds with more traditional tales. Coldwater goes from naive youth, inexperienced in the world of magic, to a powerful wizard, isolated and cut off from those around him and desirous to learn more even as this leads to him destroying those around him. 

In fact, for almost all of the book Quentin's is a deeply unpleasant character, and his eventual exposing as such by his former partner is perhaps the most satisfying moment. The Magicians stands up well to a second read, its nuances (and its cheerful parody of the genre) becoming more apparent, even as the reader might find themselves repelled by the arrogant behaviour of the central protagonists. And of course, the thirst for wealth and power by a tiny class of unproductive, but extremely dangerous individuals has its parallels with the real world.

Related Reviews

Grossman - The Magicians (The first time) 
Grossman - The Magician's Land
Grossman - The Magician King
Grossman - The Bright Sword

Jonathan Sumption - Cursed Kings: The Hundred Years War IV

Everything that I have written about the first three volumes of Jonathan Sumption's epic history of the Hundred Years War is also true of this, the fourth and penultimate volume. Sumption's account is enormous in scope, with a masterful grasp of the archival material and an eye for interesting detail that enlivens the sheer volume of information. Readers will like me sometimes lose track of the bigger picture, but that's a limitation of the format.

Volume IV however does feel different to the other books, and this is mostly to do with the period it covers. Much of the book is shaped by the descent of France into violent Civil War, as the mentally distressed King Charles VI, becomes increasingly unable to rule for prolonged periods of time. Charles' frequent "absences" mean that the ruling class is riven by internal differences and tensions. To cut a long story short, two men come to represent the different approaches to ruling France as Regent for Louis of Valois, Duke of Orléans and John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy. Louis was close to Charles, though by no means a pleasant character. Sumption describes him as "extrovert, self-indulgent and extravagant" but a "politician of exception ability, charming and gracious, politically astute, highly intelligent and articulate in council". While unpleasant, and "addicted to gambling and womanising" he was thus an enormous barrier to the John the Fearless' own ambitions. Within feudal society such rivalries could easily become open warfare, and this is what happened. John has Louis murdered, and the quest for justice and resolution leads to a massive civil war, with both sides courting the English Kings Henry IV and V for assistance in the war. 

As with Sumption's early books, there is much detail of various alliances as the hopes of both sides ebb and wane. What makes this period different to earlier work to a great extent, is the involvement of the masses of Paris in this contest. While it would seem like the mass of the population would care little for one wing of the ruling class over another, John the Fearless proved adept at promising reform and change to benefit the lower classes. In particular he promised, and indeed did move, to enact some reforms and sack many corrupt ministers and servants of the crown and civil service. Thus the civil war that followed Louis' murder saw the involvement of ordinary people in a very different capacity to just being soldiers dying on the battlefield. Their protests, insurrection and risings helped drive events forward.

Then, as now, Paris was both the capital of France and its principle city economically. Sumption ably describes the power the masses had in the capital:

The growing power and volatile temper of the Parisian guilds would come to be associated with the most powerful and dangerous of them all, the corporation of the Grande Boucherie. This guild controlled the largest of the Parisian butcheries, occupying a maze of covered alleys west of the Chatelet, beneath the shadow of the church tower of St-Jacques-la-Boucherie... The butchers were a self-contained hereditary clan, much intermarried... their members were not much esteemed. They were 'men of low estate, inhuman, detestable and devoted to their dishonourable trade'... In spite of their low social status the butchers were rich, enjoying the benefits of a tightly controlled monopoly and a growing market for their product. WIth wealth came ambition. Their leaders coveted status and power, they relished their position as kingmakers, once the rivalries of the princely houses spilled out onto the streets. Concentrated in the narrow lanes of their quarters, they could summon up mobs in minutes, calling on hundreds of muscular apprentices and journeymen...

No wonder then, that "fear of revolution in their capital had been an abiding anxiety of the kings of France for many years". This power shapes the ensuing civil war. John's opponents, the Armagnac family, who take power in the aftermath of Louis' death, experience the strength of the Parisian power when up to 5,000 of the Count of Armagnac's followers are killed by them. The war itself is equally brutal, with John's forces rampaging their way across the country repeatedly defeating the Armagnac forces. 

One of the fascinating things that Sumption draws out in this, is the relative impoverishment of all those nobles who are fighting, both in the French civil war and their opponent in England. Feudal kings were desperate short of cash to fight battles. Keeping their armies in the fields cost a fortune, and the shortage of money (and consequently food and troops) is a key factor. It also helps explain why the masses of France were so volatile and angry at taxes, and open to the influence of someone who told them it would end.

Into this mess comes Henry V, whose invasion of France in 1415 seems to sweep all before him. The civil war has left France with limited ability to respond, and the massacre of the French nobility at Agincourt hamstrings the French nobility for years. By 1420, with the signing of the Treaty of Troyes (1420), Henry V has captured Normandy and expanded the English state into one of the most important parts of France. Paris itself is threatened and Charles has no option but to sign, making Henry regent and heir to the French throne.

It was a brief moment of success for the English throne, though it does not end the immediate conflict. But the death of both Henry and Charles in 1422, where this book finishes, pushes the war into a new era. While Henry gained fame as the victor of Agincourt and the winner at Troyes, it was built on tenuous grounds. As Sumption points out, the success was:

By its nature impermanent. [Henry's] ambitions depended too much on the slender resources of his English kingdom. His conquests had owed too much ot the extraordinary circumstances of France during his reign: fifteen years of civil war, the backlash provoked by the murder of John the Fearless, the political and military misjudgements of the Dauphin's advisers. And they had owed too much to Henry's personal qualities: his reputation, his military skills and his iron will and energy.

It could not survive Henry's death. The war, and bloodshed, would continue.

Related Reviews

Sumption - Trial by Battle: The Hundred Years War I
Sumption - Trial by Fire: The Hundred Years War II
Sumption - Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War III
Green - The Hundred Years War: A People's History
Barker - Conquest
Barker - Agincourt

Brett Christophers - The Price is Wrong: Why capitalism won't save the planet

This deep dive into the problems with and limitations of the capitalist energy system is a powerful argument against the free market's role in making renewable energy and sustainable energy systems a reality. My review of The Price is Wrong for the Climate and Capitalism journal is here.

You can also read my 2019 review of Brett Christophers The New Enclosure on the privatisation of land.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Alien Clay

*** Spoilers ***

Adrian Tchaikovsky is known for his big scale science fiction that often has unusual takes on alien planets and lifeforms - intelligent octopuses and city building spiders are just two. But Alien Clay is a novel about first contact with a very different form of alien ecology, and to further interest this reader, it is centred on a group of revolutionaries and radicals, albeit ones who have been captured and exiled to another planet.

The book opens with the arrival of Professor Arton Daghdev on the planet Kiln. He doesn't arrive as an explorerer of scientist ready to study the planet's unusual life, instead he is there as a political prisoner, exiled by the despotic Mandate to an interplanetary gulag. Forced labour on Kiln is brutal, and the environment unforgiving. But the workers are not digging for raw materials, they are aiding the project of unravelling Kiln's ecological and archaeological mysteries.

For Kiln is the site of ancient alien ruins. Among the chaotic and dangerous flora and fauna there remains no sign of the intelligence that surely must have built and inscribed the ruins with mysterious writing. The labourers, including Daghdev are set to clearing the jungle from the ruins and trying to understand the animal life. It is Daghdev's dream, one he is uniquely trained to do as a exo-biology scientist, but one fraught with danger. Some of this comes from the threat formed by the planet itself, but mostly it comes because he has to tackle a difficult contradiction. Mandate orthodoxy states that humans are the pinnacle of a neat evolutionary process. Alien intelligence that goes against this threatens to not just to turn science upsidedown, but to turn the Mandate's ideology inside out. This is why Daghdev had no idea of Kiln's reality before the arrival on the planet.

On the planet life is cheap. The brutal camp commandant whose need to enforce Mandate orthodoxy is only partly tempered by his desperation to understand Kiln as much as his prisoner scientists. He has plenty of scientists, for in a earlier life Daghdev was one of a growing revolutionary underground, and while Daghdev was one of that movement's leaders, he was also part of the intellectuals whose opposition to the Mandate found tiny ways to challenge the "ruling ideas" of society.

These twin strands of alien exploration and revolutionary action intertwine on Kiln and Tchaikovsky does a brilliant job of using his intellectually unorthodox main character to be the eyes and ears of the reader as we ourselves learn about the reality of Kiln. And what revelations await. Even with the spoiler tags at the start of this review I don't want to give too much away, but Tchaikovsky shows how thinking outside of the box is box helpful for both revolutionary leadership and for scientific enquiry. The dawning awareness of what Kiln really is makes for a great story: who is actually doing the "First Contact" between Kiln and humanity. Tchaikovsky unveils this brilliantly.

Unusually, I read this as an audiobook. Normally I prefer physical books, but Alien Clay worked as audio primarily because it is a first person narrative. In places this it is borderline horror, not just because of the alien life's impact on humans, but also because prison worlds and gulags are horror filled places. The commandant knows all too well that rule comes from the barrel of a gun. In his isolated, and numerically weak position, the Mandate's man on the ground, can only rule - ideologically and physically - by mimicking the rule of the state back home on Earth. As such, the novels ending is perhaps a metaphor for wider revolutionary change. 

Alien Clay is one of the most unusual science fiction novels I have read in recent years. It could be written by someone prepared to push the boundaries of the science bit in science-fiction. But Adrian Tchaikovsky's obvious sympathy with radicals and rebels means that the revolutionary bits to the story feel remarkably real. As such, this will appeal to science fiction lovers. But it will also be enjoyed by those sitting on revolutionary committees everywhere who need a bit of a break from the actual struggle.

Related Reviews

Tchaikovsky - Ironclads
Tchaikovsky - Walking to Aldebaran
Tchaikovsky - Children of Time
Tchaikovsky - Children of Ruin

Jane Harper - Force of Nature

This entertaining, if unsatisfying, detective story is the second of Jane Harper's novels featuring the detective Aaron Falk. Unfortunately I haven't read the first, but this did not seem to effect my reading of the book at all. Force of Nature follows the aftermath of a corporate team building exercise gone wrong. Two groups of men and women are sent into the hills outside of Melbourne and expected to make their way to the end point. Despite it being a well managed event by organised guides, when the group of women finally make their way out, one person is missing and others have mysterious injuries.

The story is efficiently told, with Harper jumping back and forth between the investigation led by Falk and the account of the women's trip. She handles the points of view well, and the story of the disintegration of the lost party as personal rivalries undermine the team. There's a real tension with the missing woman Alice Russell, as its not clear whether she is alive or dead. 

Unfortunately I struggled to care for any of the corporate types and their motivations felt unlikely. The detectives felt a little one-dimensional at times, and the back story felt squeezed in. All in all its a quick, tense read that lacked the dynamism and pull of Jane Harper's The Lost Man. A good light read but one I fear I will forget rather quickly.

Related Reviews 

Harper - The Lost Man
Høeg - Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Michael Scott - Royal Betrayal: The Great Baccarat Scandal of 1890

The Baccarat Scandal of 1890 might seem like a surprising topic of interest to a Marxist like myself. After all it concerns itself with a complex legal case that followed events at a rather dull sounding weekend party at Tranby Croft house in Yorkshire, when Sir William Gordon-Cumming, a distinguished lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guards was accused of cheating during two games of baccarat, where one of his opponents was the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.

My interest in these events was first piqued when I read Flashman and the Tiger which places Flashman at the dinner party itself. Returning to the real world, or at least history, the 1890 scandal is of interest for the way it exposed, and continues to expose, Victorian ruling class snobbery. The substance of the scandal is relatively simple. Gordon-Cumming was observed by one member of the party to be adding to his stake while playing baccarat in a way that would increase his winnings. Rather than confront Gordon-Cumming, the witness told other party members who then watched the game and Gordon-Cumming more closely the following night. When they thought they had seen him repeat the cheat, he was confronted by the Prince of Wales, and encouraged to sign a paper that swore he would never play cards again. It was essentially a confession, and when the paper became public, Gordon-Cumming faced ruin.

There are, of course, lots of facts that don't add up. Once it became clear that he was now publically accused of cheating Gordon-Cumming had only one option - a very public court case against his accusers. The problem was that while the facts didn't add up, it was difficult to prove anything and, the establishment moved to protect the heir to the throne. The Prince of Wales was a wasteral. He loved gambling, adultery, and parties. He was a man of limited grasp of politics, lacking interest in rule and frequently skirted scandal. It seems that Gordon-Cumming was made to sign the paper to protect the Prince of Wales by those who realised that another public scandal with the heir to the throne playing a forbidden game (it was banned outside of public homes) could well destroy the monarchy. Indeed, so low was the view of the monarchy among the public that many people thought it would die with the death of Queen Victoria.

Michael Scott's book tells the story of the events leading up to the court case, and the case itself. The ending is not a spoiler. Despite enormous popular support in the world at large Gordon-Cumming was found to have cheated and his reputation was destroyed. He was, luckily for him, able to retire to his wealthy landed estate and live his life out in pseudo-Feudal splendour. So it wasn't all bad.

It is clear from Scott's account (and indeed every other discussion) that Gordon-Cumming got no justice - the judge was biased, the legal process flawed and court-room procedure was laughable. But that shouldn't be a surprise. The establishment moved to protect itself was an external threat. Gordon-Cummings was its victim and was a fool for allowing himself to fall into the trap set for him. He probably believed a little more in British "justice" than he should have. It's hard to care much about anyone involved here - though the Prince of Wales was clearly a pig, and Gordon-Cumming's was likely not guilty. No one seems to have asked why the immensely popular and rich soldier would need to cheat, and its clear he was a pro at the game, playing in a style that was unorthodox, but not illegal. This was a situation entirely caused by the idle rich failing to solve a problem, and enjoying the subsequent gossip and shock while plunging headlong into scandal.

What of Michael Scott's book itself? It has all the information, but attempts to draw out new information and details add little to the story itself. Whether Gordon-Cummings was an agent of British Intelligence seems besides the point, and irrelevant. The back story that Scott provides to all the characters is overwhelming and adds little. It simply serves to show the author has read lots. There's a surprising reliance on US newspaper reports of the trial, rather than British acounts - which seems to place it a little third hand. There is also a typographical problem where the extended quotations are not distinguishable from the main text, leaving the reader a little confused between what are Scott's words and those of his sources. This, I suspect, is a problem with print-on demand books.

Ultimately the real meat of the story ought to be a critique of the establishment and its struggle to protect its own. I agree with Scott's conclusion that Gordon-Cummings was probably innocent, but in many ways that's actually irrelevant. I'd have preferred a deeper discussion of what the trial, and scandal, told us about wider Victorian society. That said, at least one journalist of the time quoted by Scott, understood some of what the trial exposed, though Scott just says this is "predictable" from the press on that side of the Atlantic:

No Magistrate thinkgs of arresting him [Prince of Wales] for doing what an ordinary gambler would be sent to prison for doing. When he enters court to give testimony concerning his law breaking, the entire audience rises to receive him, and he is placed on a bench beside the judge as an honoured guest. And when his gambling losses and his other squanderings bring him into trouble, he asks the bread-earners of Great Britain to pay his debts for him. How long are the 'plain people' of Great Britain going to stand the false system which makes of this gambler, debauchee, and idler, teir destined ruler, and exalts him to the headship of both the Church and the State?

How long indeed.

One footnote of interest to those of us more interested in social history of the period. One of the guests at Tranby House was the socialite Daisy Brook, known as "Babbling Brook" for her love of gossip, and mistress of the Prince of Wales. Brook was known as something of a lefty, and when she became Countess of Warwick, was the person who helped the agricultural trade unionist Joseph Arch to publish his memoirs and wrote an introduction to his autobiography. 

Related Reviews

Fraser - Flashman and the Tiger
David - Victoria's Wars
Mingay - Rural Life in Victorian England
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Arch - From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography

Elie Wiesel - Night

It feels inadequate, or impossible, to review a book like Night. Reading this short work is an incredibly emotional experience. It is the first hand account of Elie Wiesel's time in Auschwitz and then Buchenwald concentration camps. As such it is intensely brutal. It begins with his life in Romania, before the Nazis arrived, the naive illusion among the Jewish community that the war would be over before anything happened. Then the panic and despair as the community is forced into ghettos and onto trains. There is nothing cheerful here. Wiesel sees his mother and sisters as they disappear in one direction at the gates of Auschwitz, while he and his father, warned by a inmate to lie about their ages to make them eligible, become forced labourers.

This then is an account of brutality, of despair, of hunger and of the loss of faith. It is the story of millions of tragedies told through the eyes of one teenage eyewitness. Wiesel struggles to keep his father alive and is successful, almost too the end, when he dies just before liberation. 

As the Jews on Wiesel's train wait outside Auschwitz, some discuss rebellion. Even in their weakened state, some have knives and urged others to attack the guards. "But the older men begged their sons not to be foolish" says Wiesel. As the world sees the growth of the far-right and fascists, from the US to Eastern Europe, the most important lesson for me from Night is to stop the Nazis before the world goes that far again. Millions of people died in that death camp at the hands of the Nazis. Elie Wiesel's Night and indeed the remainder of his life, were dedicated to saying Never Again. That's why it must be read by every generation.

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Alan Wood & Mary Seaton Wood - Islands in Danger

Islands in Danger was first published in 1955 and claims to be the first full treatment of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands in World War II. These events have an interest beyond their uniqueness. They give an indication of what might have happened had the British Isles themselves been occupied by Germany. Unfortunately this is not a tale of systematic resistance, but rather one of official connivence, a general "keep on keeping on" attitude and rare (but incredibly brave) resistance by individuals. In addition there was brutal violence by the Nazis against forced labourers, the deportation of Jews and violent retribution against those British subjects who dared to oppose them.

The Channel Islands, Jersey, Guerseny, Sark and Alderney were unusual in their location, a few miles from  France, their semi-independent government and the vestiges of feudal relations. But they were, nonetheless, part of Britain. Photographs (not reproduced in this book) of British policeman with their characteristic uniforms, and Nazi soldiers are available. The collaboration between the two one of the great stains on this era of history.

The British authorities on the islands essentially carried on doing what they needed to do. Their cooperation with the Nazis was pretty much complete. The Bailiff of Guernsey, Major Sherwill, made this clear at the start of the occupation when he made a long address, that included the phrase:

May this occupation be a model to the world - on the one hand tolerance on the part of the military authority and courtesy and corectness on the part of the occupying forces, and on the other, dignity and courtesy and exemplary behaviour on the part of the civilian population; conformity - the strictest conformity - with orders and regulations issued by the German Commandant and the civil authorities.

Now Sherwill, it is true, did eventually get imprisoned by the Nazis for his role in protecting British commandos who had landed, but failed to escape. This was, it should be said, brave. But Sherwill and others set a tone for the relations with the Nazis, which saw British policemen enforcing and assisting in a Nazi occupation. For some the consequences were appalling. Was there an alternative? The authors of this volume suggest not. But the problem is not whether Sherwill et al might have led a revolutionary movement against fascism, but the extent to which they greased the wheels for the Nazis. They made it easy.

The problem with this volume is that it fails to properly interrogate this. There is far too much about "Dad's Army" still shenanigans, humourous annecdoates about how the Nazis were made to remove their shoes when entering various peoples homes, and funny stories about hiding wirelesses. There is far too little about what else happened.

Hundreds of forced labourers worked and died on the Channel Islands. Their treatment is discussed at length, and there are some heartbreaking anecdotes of how individual islanders tried to help them. But the question of the Islands' part in the Holocaust is examined less well. We know, for instance, that Alderney had a transit camp for French Jews to be transported to Auschwitz. Three Jewish residents of the Channel Islands died in the Holocaust. Hundreds of other residents were imprisoned and deported. As many as 1,134 people may have died there. What do the authors say about the Jews. Rightly they are critical of the authorities:

Some actions by the authorities were harder to defend. Anti-Semitic edicts, emanating from the German command in France, were registered by the Royal Courts both in Jersey and Guernsey. It was felt that the number ofJews was so small—less than ten in each island—that it was not worth asking for trouble by making an issue of the matter. In Guernsey there was one dissentient vote.

Then they describe some of the Nazi attacks on Jews on the Channel Islands:

Coutanche successfully resisted a proposal for making Jews wear yellow stars on their backs. In the end some Jews were deported to the Continent.*

Here the asterixed footnote reads: "We were surprised to be unable to obtain any reliable information as to their ultimate fate, even from present members of the Jewish communities."

This is an extraordinary inadequate comment. I wonder what the authors imagined happened to the Jews deported to the Continent? Tragically this is the only reference to what took place.

In recent years there have been serious attempts to understand what took place on the Channel Islands, both in terms of the collaboration, the resistance and the role of the Islands in the death of hundreds of people as part of the Nazi Holocaust. Sadly this book, even allowing for limited historical data available at the time, fails to do justice to these questions. Instead the authors opt for a more entertaining tale of plucky Brits trying to outwit the nasty Germans. 

In his book Empire of Destruction, the historian Alex J. Kay asks why the experience of the occupation was different in the West of Europe, to that of the East. The answer, is in part, due to the Nazis' project of colonisation, and their belief that the Eastern population were "sub human". The tragedy of this book is that ten years after the Holocaust the authors of this account did not even consider to ask such questions.

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