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Thursday, October 16, 2025

Owen Rees - The Far Edges of the Known World: A new history of the ancient past

The premise of The Far Edges of the Known World is demonstrated best with the quote that opens the book. The Greek hero Jason (of the Argonauts fame) says to his wife (whom he has taken on his voyages from far away, that "all the greeks consider you to be wise, and you are held in high regard. But if you still lived at the far edges of the world, there would be no talk of you". The Greeks knew that there were placesbeyond the borders of their own lands, but they held them in low regard. They were places of fear, monsters, cannibals and chaos. Home was culture, stability and religon.

The book then is a study of how ancient cultures dealt with the fringes of their influence, and how the places and people of the periphery influenced wider Empires. For most ancient people,"the further away you were from the core of that society, the further away you were from civilisation itself". But the reality was that those people did not see themselves in that way, and their own place was the centre of their universe.

Owen Rees looks at a number of examples of this. Olbia in modern Ukraine was a Greek city on the Black Sea. This was, says Rees, the "outermost reach of the Greek world". Nonetheless the Greek world did reach there. But it was an outpost of Greece among the legendary and violent Scythian nomads who fought on horseback and who might turn themselves into wolves. The city itself "almost absorbed that muthical mustique, that sense of unknown truths, rumours and misunderstandings". But the city wasn't a tiny outpost. It was a thriving city, an economic powerhouse and the centre of trading for a whole region. The people of Olbia, trading salted fish,

which could be transported throughout the Greek world as a luxury item. But they also exported leather, salt, grain and enslaged people, possiblity supplied by the surrounding Scythian communities... Olbia imported wine, olive oil and fine pottery from further south... as far afield as Egypt.

The Greeks believed that the Scythian's rejected their culture but in reality Olbia represents the coming together of culture and the exchange of ideas, as well as trade goods. The Greek myths of Olbia were just that. The city was not a "carbon copy" of other Greek places, but had a "flair all of its own". The edges of Greek influence were ragged and merging elsewhere.

We see the same elsewhere, in multiple examples. The blending and merging of cultures and ideas at the fringes of ancient empires but ones were sometimes the blurring goes much further in to the heart of that culture. Perhaps the most unexpected, and fascinating example, is one from Bais, in Madhya Pradesh, northern India. Here a monument commerates the Greek ambassador who came there and met with Bhagavata, the son of Dion, from Taxila (in modern Pakistan). Rees explores this remarkable and unexpected event - an ancient Greek ambassador in India. Not just that, but one who appears to have gone native. It demonstrates, says Rees, that Taxila was:

a city filled with learning and cultural exchange, where religious innovation and novelty was embraced and given space to thrive. It was a place where no one language superseded another, but where different languages sat side by side.

This might, perhaps, not seem to controversial. But Rees is tackling a problem whereby we tend to see history through the prism of a few, local, examples. Ancient Greece and Rome are the societies by which others are judged, and allegedly form the bedrock for modern culture and politics. Instead, Rees points out, they are also assimilations of other cultures, influenced, shaped and changed by much wider and less well known civilisations. Rees says, "by focusing out minds on the narrow, traditional narratives of history we do not appreciate just how many stories, innovations and shared histories we inadvertantly eradicate".

I enjoyed Owen Rees' book, but at times I found his central argument was lost in overwhelming detail. At times I also felt it was obscured and needed drawing out more. But the central idea - that cultures are not monolithic and are shaped by interaction and exchange, is one that we could do well to remember today.

Ken Macleod - The Cassini Division

About forty pages into The Cassini Division I realised that this was not the first book in the series. I then found a review that suggested it was NOT a good place to start the series. That said, occasionally you find yourself without alternative reading material, and so I ploughed onward. If this was an inauspicious start it was not a disastorous one. This is an engrossing read and I am determined to find the actual start so I can enjoy the books in series.

There is a long, fine, tradition of radicals writing books about visitors to, or from, utopian societies to capitalist ones. William Morris' splendid fantasy News from Nowhere is perhaps the best of these, though Iain M. Bank's Player of Games ranks high for me. Ken Macleod's The Cassini Division is clearly inspired by these, and others. His chapter titles are all examples of the genre, though many are realtively obscure.

But in Macleod's version, our protaganists come from an advanced future Communist society that has emerged from a complete economic and technological collapse. This is the sort of utopia that I've discussed in many Socialist Worker meetings. Or perhaps more often in pubs and cafe's after those meetings. Here people organise to help and satsify needs, rather than labouring for someone else's accumulation. There's a wonderful moment when Ellen May Ngewthu visits an airport in a capitalist society, and contrasts the chaos, advertising and shops with the relaxed environment of her normal travel hubs, were people help with luggage, look after each others kids and relax.

There are plenty of moments like this as Ellen builds a team to confront an existential threat to Earth, and this involves a travel to that alternative world. For the purposes of this review, the nature of that threat doesn't particularly matter - though things would likely have been much clearer if I'd read books one and two first. The point is that Macleod contrasts the chaos (and greed) of a world that puts profit before people, with the choices made by a world where decision making is made in the interests of all. Even if those decisions can lead the death and destruction.

For socialist activists reading The Cassini Division there is fun to be had at spotting in-jokes and self-referential material. But I was charmed by how Macleod demonstrated democracy in practice, as well as how life might work in an affluent society, albeit one constrainted by ecological and physical realities. Decisions here are made that give a framework to those implementing them. And those who have ideas are expected to try and lead on then. No elected leaders sending other people's children off to fight here.

This doesn't feel like the preaching that characterises some of the 19th century utopian works. But there is a certain smugness to it all - not unlike the smugness our socialist heroes feel when they arrive in a world where people haven't overthrown class society. All that said this isn't just a political novel. It's a great bit of Space Opera, with starships firing heavy weapons, adventure and some classic jokes. I really enjoyed it. But I am, perhaps, it's target audience.

Monday, October 13, 2025

Leon Trotsky - The First Five Years of the Communist International (Vol. I)

The setting up of the Communist Third International in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution was a conscious attempt to use the authority and experience of the Bolsheviks in Russia to spread and develop revolution and revolutionary organisation around the world. The leaders of the Russian Revolution, principly Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin had always made it clear that unless revolution spread, Russia's would be left isolated and die. The founding of the International in 1919 took place in a situation when revolution beyond Russia was real. Workers' soviets and revolutionary councils were a reality in countries like Germany, Hungary and many other places.

As one of the most authoritative figures of the revolution, Leon Trotsky's writings from this period, and specifically the writings, speeches and polemics that are part of this collection, are particularly important. They cover an intoxicating moment, when the Russian Revolution was a few years old and in the midst of Imperialist intervention, and when serious debates about revolutionary strategy are taking place. As part of the debates at successive conferences of the Commintern, Trotsky intervenes sharply in the internal discussions of three countries in particular - France, Italy and Germany. In the former there is a real debate about the need to break with the Reformist, opportunist, leaders of social democracy.

In France's case Trotsky writes two letters to leading figures using his personal connections to urge them to come over to the Communist cause. But, the main thrust of his polemic is to challenge the best elements of the working class movement - the anarcho syndicalists - on the need to break with their non-political practices. It is a sharp discussion that challenges the genuine revolutionaries to break with their past, and join the emerging Communist movement in France. It is also urgent, and the speeches drip with the pressure of events. Similar discussions, in slightly different contexts, take place with German and Italian comrades. Both of whom are grappling with the experience of Reformists in their ranks - the sell outs of 1914 and those in their ranks who are more concerned with revolutionary purity over and above the messy business of engaging in struggle.

In Italy in 1920 the revolutionary movement was inspired by the radical pronouncements of the Socialist Party, but these opportunists immediately backtracked when faced with a powerful working class movement leading strikes and occupying workplaces. In Germany similar groups of socialists had diverted the revolution of 1919 into Parliamentary channels, after murdering its best leaders. Some of the discussions at the meetings of the Communist International grapple with the nature of Reformism - a force that had little representation in Russia in 1917, but was a significant force in central and Western Europe based on the history of the Second International. Trostky says:

This epoch of proletarian reformation gave birth to a special apparatus of a labor bureaucracy with special mental habits of its own, with its own routine, pinch-penny ideas, chameleon-like capacity for adaptation, and predisposition to myopia. Comrade Gorter identifies this bureaucratic apparatus with the proletarian masses upon whose backs this apparatus has climbed. Hence flow his idealistic illusions. His thinking is not materialistic, non-historical. He understands the reciprocal relations neither between the class and the temporary historical apparatuses, nor between the past epoch and the present. Comrade Gorter proclaims that the trade unions are bankrupt; that the Social Democracy is bankrupt; that Communism is bankrupt and the working class is bourgeoisified. According to him we must begin anew and start off with – the head, i.e., with select groups, who separate and apart from the old forms of organization will carry unadulterated truth to the proletariat, scrub it clean of all bourgeois prejudices and, finally, spruce it up for the proletarian revolution.

Such debates are hampered by some wrong-headed thinking. In particular there are several early refences to the question of the labour aristocracy. Here Trotsky and others argue that a layer of workers are bought off by super profits from imperialism, and act as a break on the revolutionary movement. Though these workers were some of the most revolutionary in Petrograd in 1917, Germany in 1918-1919 and Britain in 1919. There is some truth though, but the Communist International, at least in this period, doesn't seem to get to grips with the real problem which is the trade union bureacracy who are a conservative brake on struggle due to being removed from the work force.

Perhaps the most interesting speech in this book however is the one that marks the transition from a period of immediate revolution to one where some economic revival in the capitalist nations has seen growing confidence on behalf of the capitalists. This Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International is a remarkable text. Trotsky grapples with both the (hopefully temporary) retreat of the revolution and the changing economic circumstances. In particular he analyses the growth of American capitalism and what that means for the dynamics of global struggle. It's a striking discussion of the impact of World War One, the changing global picture and things like anticolonial movements. In particular Trotsky is discussing whether capitalism "is it either restoring or close to restoring capitalist equilibrium upon new post-war foundations?" His answer was very much that any stability that capitalism was experiencing in 1921 was temporary, and that there were deep seated problems for the system. A prediction that would prove terribly prescient by the end of the decade, and which anticipated the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, even in 1921 he could note the threat of a destabilised middle class hit hard by economic crisis. In the 1930s this class would form the basis of the European fascist movements:

The reformists pinned great hopes upon the so-called middle estate. Engineers, technicians, doctors, lawyers, bookkeepers, accountants, functionaries, civilians and government employes alike, and so on – all these constitute a semi-conservative stratum which stands between capital and labor and which must, in the opinion of reformists, reconcile both sides, while directing and at the same time supporting democratic regimes. This class has suffered even more than the working class during the war and after, that is, its living standards have deteriorated to an even greater degree than the living standards of the working class. The main reason for this is the decline in the purchasing power of money, the depreciation of paper currency. In all European countries this has given rise to sharp discontent among the lowest and even middle ranks of functionaries and the technological intelligentsia.

Trotsky argued that:

America’s productive capacity has grown extraordinarily but her market has vanished because Europe is impoverished and can no longer buy American goods. It is as if Europe had first done everything in her power to help America climb to the topmost rung and then pulled the ladder out.

What would be the consequence? Instability and war. Take this prediction from later in the same 1921 conference:

The last great war was – in its origin, its immediate causes and in its principal participants – a European war. The axis of the struggle was the antagonism between England and Germany. The intervention of the United States extended the framework of the struggle, but it did not divert it from its fundamental course. The European conflict was settled by the resources of the whole world. The war, which in its own way settled the contest between England and Germany and to that extent also the conflict between the United States and Germany, not only failed to solve the question of interrelations between the United States and England but has, for the first time, posed it in its full scope as the basic question of world politics, just as it posed the question of interrelations between the United States and Japan as one of the second order. Thus, the last war was a European prelude to a genuine world war which is to solve the question of who will exercise the rule of imperialist autocracy.

It is a remarkable prediction of war, and war on a far greater scale. What was the answer? That was the question posed by all the early conferences of the Communist International: the building of revolutionary organisation. How to do this, and how that changed as the situation evolved provides some of the clearest and most useful parts of this volume. In The Main Lesson of the Third Congress Trotsky reiterates how the Social Democrats had stopped the revolution in the critical aftermath of the Russian Revolution:

In the most critical year for the bourgeois the year 1919, the proletariat of Europe could have undoubtedly conquered state ower with minimum sacrifices, had there been at its head a genuine revolutionary organizatiom, setting forth clear aims and capably pursuing them, i.e., a strong Communist Party. But there was none. On the contrary, in seeking after the war to conquer new living conditions for itself and in assuming an offensive against bourgeois society, the working class had to drag on its back the parties and trade unions of the Second International, all of whose efforts, both conscious and instinctive, were essentially directed toward the preservation of capitalist society.

Had their been genuine revolutionary organisations that could have been avoided. The failure to do this was not the end of the revolutionary opportunity. The next volume deals with the critical period and the grappling of the Communist International with further threats to revolutionary Russia, and tactics for Communist Parties with significant memberships in periods of low levels of struggle.

There is much in this first volume though, and the clarity of Trotsky's analysis, the honesty of the debate among attendees of the meetings, and the serious attempts to learn how to develop the struggle are fascinating. While these collections are only Trotsky's contributions, and other volumes contain more, we can learn a great deal from them all. I look forward to the second volume.

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Seichō Matsumoto - Tokyo Express

Traditionally Tokyo Express is described as a novel that opens with the discovery of two bodies on a grim, rocky beach in Japan. They are apparently a couple, who've died by suicide. But actually the novel really opens with the women who work in a small restaurant where one of the dead couple is a waitress.

It's worth noting this slight difference, because central to this classic detective novel are small details of ordinary life. The women who work at the restaurant, whose clients are often wealthy (and corrupt) business men, play an important role in the novel as observers. They are led to see things by the characters, and its how and what they saw which makes the detectives who think there's something odd about the suicide, reevaluate.

Tokyo Express was first published in 1958. It is very much a novel about post-war Japanese society. A society in transition from the stifled, imperial, past to one of open capitalism. While tradition remains important, businessmen are corrupt and easily led. Government officials are lining their own pockets and covering up shady dealings and ministers are under investigation. It's a society in transition, but also on edge. Almost everyone, with the exception of the disheveled detectives, is out to grab what they can.

One other difference is worth noting. The new Penguin edition is a new English translation. The original English title wsa Points and Lines. That, in my opinion, is a far better title. It captures the essence of the novel which hinges on the detectives working out exact timings, connections and travel on timetables. One of the characters (and I avoid too many spoilers here) is unable to leave their sick bed. In doing so, they've become obsessed with the Japanese railway timetable. A similar detailed study by a detective helps break things through. This is a novel that hinges on times and travel, because its all about who could be where and how. And, if they were somewhere specific, then Japanese formality meant that they would leave their name to be trapped by bureacratic paperwork.

This then is a novel that could not have worked in the same way in England. Timetables here might have constructed the context, but the bureaucratic record would have not matched the detective's thoroughness. Tokyo Express then is a tightly written crime novel relying on superb levels of detail. But it's depth depends on close attention to culture and society.

Friday, October 10, 2025

Ronald Blythe - The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958

Like many of my generation I probably know Ronald Blythe through his most famous work Akenfield, his semi-fictional account of a rural farming community through the long change of the twentieth century. Finding The Time by the Sea in a second hand bookshop I was expecting something similar, but got something very different. Though Akenfield runs through the book - mentioned as it is in passing and for the film being made. This is the intimate account of Blythe's arrival in Aldeburgh and the community of artists, composers and writers that swirled around him. It is not an account of the "ordinary people" of a Suffolk costal town - though they do occasionally appear. Rather it is a collection of essays about experiences and relationships.

There are probably many of an earlier generation of cultural critics, literary experts and well read folk who will find in these pages a sequence of famous names. Blythe will drop the occasional nugget of information that is likely to be the source of (or sourced from) gossip. Some will find this entertaining. Others will find interesting the way that individual composers or writers found inspiration, motive or confrontation from others in their circles. Many modern readers likely myself will regularly resort to Wikipedia to find out who some, not so famous name, was.

But if all this sounds like Blythe's self indulgent account of a time and people long since past, I would disagree. Blythe's gentle meandering essays have much to calm an anxious mind, as you walk along the Suffolk beaches or wood paths with him. His style of shortened sentences had me in mind of something else - until I finally realised it reminded me of 1066 and All That, as the author presents a series of slightly connected statements before finally concluding.

There are many in these pages that represent English culture of the 1950s in all its staid and restrictive sense. Benjamin Brittain, Blythe's friend and the founder of the Aldeburgh festival, looms over the book (and the town). His circle includes Imogen Holst, Eric Crozier and the like. Composers, directors and figures intimately connected to the previous century through family and networks.

But there's something else, particularly important for Blythe's friend John Nash. Nash, a painter and illustrator, had like most of his generation, been transformed by the slaughter of the First World War. Blythe encounters him as a figure strill trying desperately to come to terms with the impact of that war. But by 1955 there had been another war, and another generation of scarred people. This time epitomised by the two Jewish families, Leon Laden and his wife the artist Juliet Perkins and Kurt and Gretl Hutton. Blythe talks about "their silence on the Holocaust", not as denial but as shock and horror. This is a poignant chapter as it shows them carrying "the terror of their time" which never "quite vanished". Its important because of what it tells us, but also because of what it shows was lacking among this literary set. Blythe can write eloquently about people, place, landscape and, indeed, change. But he and his fellows lack any real explanation for what has happened and why. It is, perhaps also the weakness of Akenfield. A brilliantly observant and honest account of what happened to people as British capitalism rose. But without any real sense of why or how. Socialism here is the realm of the a few mystics and oddballs - principly HG Wells - everyone else drifts about buffeted by forces beyond their understanding.

Read this for the time and the place, for the mention of people famous and forgotten, and for Blythe's poetry, comment and lyricalism. I enjoyed it, but was left empty. I needed more.

Friday, October 03, 2025

Nicola Chester - Ghosts of the Farm: Two women's journeys through time, land & community

In late 1940 Julia White arrived in a small village in Wiltshire. She was as old as the century and she had dreamed for most of her life of being a farmer. She was to live, in a caravan, on the land of the wonderfully named Miss Marguerite de Beaumont and her "romantic and business partner" Miss Dorothy Mason. There she learnt the basics of agriculture and eventually she, alongside Dorothy, ran her own farm, taken on as the country descended further into war and Britain's agriculture became as closely managed as its military. White was to learn more than agriculture though. Her 15 years spent running Manor Farm saw it turned into one of the best in the country. Simultaneously she become a central, and much loved, figure in her community. She looked after evacuees, and scouts, introduced machinary, built roads, provided water and electricity to her tenants, and dragged Manor Farm into the latter half of the twentieth century.

If Nicola Chester had written a straightforward biography of Julia White, it would have been a good book by any measure. White's life was remarkable. Her entry into the male world of farming, her farming life at a pivotal moment in British history during a time when British agriculture was being transformed is fascinating in and of itself.

But Chester has gone much further than that. By comparing her own life in rural Britain she has used a "distant mirror" to explore the world we live in today. From climate change to gender, from LGBT+ issues to horses versus industrial farming Chester covers some big questions. In studying the past, Chester does not romanticise. True there is fun; laughter, jokes, food and drink and happiness. But rural Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, as in the 21st century, also had poverty, tied cottages, low pay and greedy landlords. There was also the risk that the roof would fall in because the previous owner hadn't done any repairs for years.

This then, is a book about change and continuity. In his wonderful history of the Second World War, A People's War, historian Angus Calder noted that the 56,000 tractors on British farms in 1939 mushroomed to 230,000 by January 1946. Milking machines increased by 60 percent between 19424 and 1946. Calder wrote:

Agriculture was dragged... into the 20th century, the ploughman servicing hist rtractor and the farmer calculating his needs for fertilisers drew closer in spirit and attitudes to the engineers and manger who made, among other things, the new farm machinery.

Chester's account of White's period running Manor Farm shows the human reality of that change. We have the beloved older farm worker who has built, and decorated, his last haystack, the horses that are not no longer needed and the flocks of birds and clouds of insects that will disappear out as industrial agriculture sweeps across the land. As Chester says, with pain born of personal insight:

The horses vanish so quickly from the countryside, in justa few short years ,it is astonishing. And with them, so much else - wildflower meadows, clouds of butterflies, blooms of insectrs, works from the soil, birds from the sky, and people and their voices from the land. Singing. Mechanisation saves people, it feeds them; it allows ease to those punishing hard jobs and lives and covers the yawning gaps in labour.

Chester imagines herself travelling in time to talk to Misses White, Beaumont and Mason. She thinks about how they would react to books like Silent Spring. Would they be horrified? She's sure they would. White clearly loved the natural world. But would they do something different? Here Chester is less sure. Modern farming, and White's role in Manor Farm, was to maximise food production and profit. That meant getting the tractors and the combines and, sometimes, seeing the workers go into retirement.

The question of gender is, perhaps, the most central of the issues raised by Chester's book. White stood out as a female farmer. But she was part of a small number of women who entered that "realm of men". But she also wasn't that unusual. The war, writes Chester,

broke further the leather harness and traces of those social restriants already broken, kicked over or weakened by the First World War, a still-fresh and reignited memory; the fields and farms and relationships depleted of men.

Chester gives us a rural echo of that fascinating process which saw women brought into the workforce in enormous numbers, rapidly transforming them and society and one which was impossible to reverse when peace came in 1945. With work, and money, came independence. Or at least more independence than women had ever had. It shook the system. It opened new vistas and began a slow process that would explode again in the 1960s. That said I can't help but wonder about class here. It is possible (Chester is careful not to say for definite) that White was gay. Marguerite and Doris certainly were. Chester wonders at how that was seen by the other villagers. Was their sexuality tolerated more because they were women? Or because they were from a higher class with all the protection that money can bring? Or did no one care?

Chester points out that "we can be blind to what kind of acceptance or awareness of sexuality and gender relationships existed then on a day-to-day, getting-on-with-it attitude in a rural community." But we can't also forget that things are always shaped by the prisms of class and wealth. I like to think that there was acceptance of these women, and not just because they were the masters, but because I like to think that people are generally nice.

But no doubt everyone went through a process that saw their ideas change. Just as the locals became more accepting of women farmers in the male "realm" of farming when the saw them doing the traditionally male jobs. Perhaps this was also easier in rural communities too. After all women very much worked on farms. There's an amusing moment when a group of women collecting fruit from hedges stop to peer at White working. "Have you never seen a woman work before" shouts out one of White's (male) workers to the onlookers?

So why was it that by the 1980s Chester herself could not live her own dream? Despite her experience and knowledge, she was not able to become a farmer. While they couldn't put women back entirely in the home, there had been a rolling back of the gains of the 1960s. Margaret Thatcher might have been a female PM, but she, and her government, made things much harder for women. Chester's first book On Gallows Down covered some of those battles and defeats. But it remains clear that what had been missing in rural Britain was the sort of struggle that could have defended and extended the rights of women and the LGBT+ community. Indeed after 1945 the British countryside saw few working class struggles, and still less the trade unionism that could have led that fight - another consequence of the atomisation of industrial farming.

The past, we are told, is another country. But we can, occasionally, visit it - even if we never get the full picture. Ghosts of the Farm tells us a very real story of people striving to live the lives they want to. It also tells us much about how we have got here, and in particular, how we have arrived in a situation where the food we eat comes at the expense of the environment we rely on to produce it. Nicola Chester has not written political polemic. Instead she's produced a beautiful engagement with the people and places of the past to enable us to look around us with fresh eyes. You'll love it. I did.

Related Reviews

Chester - On Gallows Down: Enclosure, Defiance & the Cuckoo's Return
Calder - A People's War

Sunday, September 28, 2025

Joe Allen - Vietnam: The (last) war the US lost

The American war in Vietnam was, says author Joe Allen, the "greatest military defeat ever suffered by the United States". In the decades since, various US governments have tried, and failed, to shake off the "Vietnam Syndrome". This is the fear that any US military intervention abroad would result in troops becoming bogged down in an unwinnable war, while domestic discontent, anti-war movements and rebellion rose. Understanding what happened in Vietnam and the nature (and scale) of US domestic rebellion is crucial in order to know what is needed today to stop the US imperial machine. Joe Allen's book Vietnam: The (last) war the US lost sets out to do exactly that.

Allen begins by framing the US's Vietnam with the history of colonial occupation. The defeat of France's forces in Vietnam was a harbinger of what was to come. When the French were kicked out of Vietnam, the US stepped into "a devastated country". They "used the remnants of the French colonial state to begin building a new one", but the new state the US created in South Vietnam in the 1950s was "a brutal corrupt dictatorship". The puppet governments and leaders that the US supported in South Vietnam could not contain the discontent of ordinary people, nor solve the political and social crises that dominated. Crucially however, the post-France colonial settlement left intact the forces that could step into the gap.

Despite their attempts to avoid deploying troops to Vietnam, the US became deeper and deeper embroiled in war. Growing discontent at war melded with disontent at a host of domestic economic and political issues - particularly the question of civil rights. By 1968, as rebellion back home exploded, the anti-war movement surged. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Martin Luther King, urban riots and the growth of revolutionary and radical movements such as the Black Panthers. If most of us know anything about the anti-Vietnam war movement it is from this year.

But 1968 was the result of a much longer process. The gradual development of the Civil Rights movement, coming together with the peace movement was a key part of this. There had been a small, if signifiant, movement against nuclear arms in the US. While this was fervently anti-left, it provided the context for a layer of activists to begin widening the scope of their pacifism into opposition to imperialism. Simultaneously the Civil Rights movement was creating the conditions for a generalisation of politics among its activists:

Throughout the spring of 1960, thecountry witnessed a new, more militant stage of the civil rights movement. Beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina, more than fifty thousand young Black and white people participated in sit-ins against segregation at lunch counters, theaters, parks and swimming pools throughout the country but mostly concentrated in the South and border states. These sit-ins captured the imagination of northern students, drawing many of them into the South, and led directly to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Allen continues:

In May 1960... white students in San Francisco proved that the nonviolent tactics of the southern movement could be used effectively against other kinds of unjust authority.

The occasion for this was a large protest against the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the body associated with McCarthyism and the US governments repression of left wing and progressive movements. In May 1960 the protesting students "battled the police" shocking the country. It was a moment that saw the "collapse in the ability of official red-baiters such as HUAC to inspire fear among Americans with liberal views".

This rapidly developing process of radicalisation came together with the defeat and demoralisation inflicted by the Vietnamese on US forces in Vietnam to create a potent mix of radical rebellion at home and within the military. But it was perhaps in "Black America" where this mix was to be so potent. Not least because the US military was dominated by Black troops - but also because of the reality of life in the US for ordinary Black Americans. Allen quotes an insightful comment by George L. Jackson, a US naval commander, "the Negro civil rights action has introduced definite constraints on the military capability of the US". It continues:

The most important of these constratings is that produced by the coalition of civil rights organisations and the anti-war organisations. This coalition has spearheaded the shift in public opiion away from support for the Vietnam conflict.

The intersection of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement is quite well understood. But Joe Allen adds another crucial factor with one of his most important chapters, which discusses the US working class (and its organisations) and their relationship to the war. This chapter is important because discussion of US workers and the War often starts and ends with the protests in favour of the war and against the "hippies". What Allen shows though is that even from the early days of US intervention there was significant opposition to the War from working people. By October 1969, "a full page ad against the war" appeared signed by trade unionist Cesar Chavez and Paul Shrade, Western director of the UAW. Others were signed by leading figures in the Teamsters and the Chemical Workers. "Forty unions endorsed the Moratorium march in New York, labour leaders poke at many of the protests... thousands of union members attended the various protests that day." Allen concludes:

From the first Vietnam moratorium events in November 1969 to the explosion of rage following the Cambodian invasion, to the spring events of 1971, millions of Americans were drawn into political action against the war. The actions were becoming more militant, more working class, more multiracial and more left wing.

It was the beginning of the end.

Vietnam: The (last) war the US lost was published in 2008. At the time it was an intervention into the US anti-war movement by a socialist author determined to learn the lessons of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the questions it tackles - such as the importance of mass demonstrations - are clearly engaging with debates that were crucial in the 2000s as the US government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Allen draws on the past to show how a radicalising and growing anti-war movement needed mass mobilisations to give confidence and develop the movement further. But he also shows how the movement needed to draw in wider forces, and wider social movements, to generalise the discontent and give a home to wider forces. Crucially he argues that US movements have to understand that the US imperialism is not all powerful, but that "the US must be put under tremendous pressure to turn away from its vital interests". At the same time it was the coming together of US resistance with Vietnamese resistance that swung the balance in the 1960s. When Allen was writing in 2008 that resistance, and that of the US "GI movement" in the 2000s was "still in its infancy".

While the book is a contemporary polemic it is, however, well worth reading today. When I reviewed Max Hasting's monumental history of the Vietnam War, I noted that it did not do justice to the anti-war movement in the US. This book does. But it also shows how that movement arose out of the intersection of other social movements, and the resistance in Vietnam against the US. Allen's book is a useful antedote to those who ignore the US movement, or see it as just a bunch of peaceniks and hippies. Crucially though, for progressives facing the rise of the right and the clampdowns of the US government today, it reminds us that millions of Americans have resisted, protested and rebelled again. That's was the force that helped pull US troops out of Vietnam and its the force that can defeat Trump today.

Alan Moore - The Great When

The idea of a secret world adjacent to our own is a compelling one in fantasy. In Alan Moore's new book, The Great When, the first of a promised quintet, the veteran fantasy writer and author takes it to a whole knew literary level. The Great When is the alternate London, only visible to those who have the imagination to join it, and then, perhaps only as the result of extreme tension, stress or danger. Young Dennis Knuckleyard, a second hand bookseller in a shabby post-war London first glimpshed the alternate London at the height of a bombing raid during the Blitz. He did not comprehend it then, and it is only with the discovery of a book that shouldn't exist, that he is able to stumble into the alternate space.

Moore places fast and loose with the alternate world. Its a place of danger and fantasy. Its a place where organic machines with multiple knives can escape into our world and murder. It's a space where death is all around, and where monsters and monstrous people pull strings to control normal London. Its somewhere were giant creatures epitomise riot, poetry and crime and those attuned during the Battle of Cable Street, or other events can glimpse them, striding about.

Dennis Knuckleyard has to return the book that shouldn't exist. But in doing so he is pursued by the criminals of the London underworld, determined to access the When themselves so they can profit from it. Young Dennis is swiftly exposed to a violent world, while navigating poverty, unemployment, sex and love.

Like all great fantasy novels The Great When is about more than just the fantasy world. Dennis' somewhat gormless entry into alternate London is matched by his gormless struggles to understand the much more sophisticated world of Grace Shilling, a young prostitute he falls for. But that world too exposes him to violence and horror.

There are some great moments, and some clever running gags. I enjoyed the LOSED and PEN references to the shop door. But the book is special because of its literary twists. Moore loves playing with language, throwing in references, double-meanings and references. London itself is a character in The Great When, and those who have lived there will get more than just clever puns on names on its street names. The more gothic prose, when the text changes to italics as Dennis enters other London, need a little more attention that some readers might enjoy. But it's worth perservering, as Dennis' comes to terms with the new world out there and learns who and where his friends are. Superb. I cannot wait for the rest of the series.

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Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

Adam Higginbotham - Challenger: A true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space

The first time I went to the United States in the very early 1990s, when I told anyone I was a space and astronomy enthusiast, everyone wanted to tell me their recollections of January 28, 1986. It was a seminal moment for that period, and perhaps the most important collective event for American citizens until September 11 2001. The Challenger disaster was particularly poignant and memorable because it was the flight which promised to make the possibility of the ordinary person in space more than just a dream. Christa McAuliffe was an ordinary teacher on board the mission, and she, alongside six other astronauts died several minutes after a leak on one of the shuttle's booster rockets exploded the fuel in the main tank.

In the aftermath of the disaster NASA came under extreme scrutiny. The Roger's Commission set up by the US President to investigate what happened declared it "an accident rooted in history". They singled out how a succession of choices made by senior managers at the company that manufactured the booster rockets and NASA bureaucrats combined to give the go ahead for launch on a day when temperatures made failure of the crucial O-Ring component very likely. This was despite the energetic and powerful opposition for key rocket engineers.

But Adam Higginbotham makes it very clear that the "history" of the shuttle, and the potential for disaster began many years before 1986. His account of the development of the shuttle as a break from the Apollo programme was rooted in the US government's desire to make regular space usage cheap and profitable - as well as a key component of the US's military strategy. Despite the enormous technical difficulties of a reusable spacecraft, Nasa was driven to make a vehicle that could be reused, with senious figures and politicians daydreaming of weekly flights. But cost cutting, out-sourcing, design flaws and extraordinary political pressure to get the Shuttle aloft meant a series of technical shortcomings and potential floors were made. In addition, as Higginbotham repeatedly points out, decisions about flights were often made under pressure - not the immediate pressure of a politician on the phone, but an internal pressure caused by NASA culture.

Higginbotham's book is very much the biography of a number of key individuals. The lives and training of the astronauts is told in detail which means the disaster, which you know is coming, is very personal. But it also serves to highlight the horror that results from budget cuts and bureaucratic pressure. But also here are the accounts of the engineers, some of whom never recovered from their failure to stop the flight and several of whom made enormous sacrifices to expose the shortcomings and failures that led to Challenger's explosion.

For a teenager obsessed with space, the Shuttle programme was shiny and inspiring. Challenger makes it clear that in many ways it was a sordid, overly expensive, project that could never deliver on early promises. That's not to detract from its potential, but to recognise that a system that puts profits before people and places national prestige above safety and rational planning, will only ever deliver space programmes that eventually cost lives. Tragically the deaths of the seven Challenger astronauts where followed in 2003 of a futher seven astronauts as Columbia exploded on re-entry. The investigation after that disaster found that few lessons had been learnt in the long term, and failures of communication and leadership overruled the safety decisions that could have saved lives. While Higgenbotham's excellent book is about Challenger, it is also very much about how organisational corner cutting can be deadly. The details may often be technical, but the story is very human.