Angela Saini - Superior: The Return of Race Science

The election, and re-election, of right-wing governments around the world has encouraged the growth and confidence of racists and fascists. Racism is not a rational world-view, but racists, and those who want to encourage them often need to justify and explain their ideologies. Pseudo-scientific racist ideas have been around for some time - arising in particular out of attempts to justify the African slave trade. But, as Angela Saini's important new book explains, there has been a revitalisation of scientific racism and this is helping give confidence to right-wing ideologists today.

That these ideas should return is itself a shock. For most people the scientific justification of racism was closely linked to the Holocaust, and in the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazis, these ideas were banished. In fact, as Saini says, it seems impossible that rational minds could conceive of such ideas. Writing about the Max Planck institute, a prestigious scientific organisation in Germany which, in 2001, had to "accept responsibility for historic crimes committed by its scientists" under the Nazis:

The truth - that it is perfectly possible for prominent scientists to be racist, to murder, to abuse both people and knowledge - doesn't sit easily with the way we like to think about scientific research. We imagine that it's above politics, that it's a noble, rational and objective endeavour, untainted by feelings or prejudice.

She continues, "the answer is simple: science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out. It ultimately sits at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out." But there is a problem says Saini. The unique horrors of World War Two have made race science abhorrent. But, "were scientists in the rest of the world so blameless?" In fact, as my reference to the slave trade above indicates, "the well of scientific ideas from which Hitler and others... drew their plans for 'racial hygiene', leading ultimately to genocide, didn't originate in Germany alone. They had been steadily supplied for more than a century by race scientists from all over the world, supported by well-respected intellectuals, aristocrats, political leaders and women and men of wealth".

So the book is in two parts. The first deals with the history of race science. The second part looks at how those ideas are used today. But really there isn't a separation between these two halves. As one researcher from the 1970s who studied the far-right commented many years later, "I didn't really understand that there were these structures and networks and associations of people that were attempting to keep alive a body of ideas that I had associated with at the very least the pre-civil rights movement... going back to the eugenics movement... These ideas were still being developed and promulgated and promoted." Saini unpicks these networks, the shadowy sources of funds and the journals that allow those with similar beliefs to publish. Publication in particular gives a sheen of academic veneer to right-wing ideologists who want to push race science.

Today race science isn't solely pushed by those who want to see genocide. It can, as Saini points out, be used for all sorts of ideological arguments, for instance that equal opportunity programmes are "doomed to fail". In fact, one of the problems with contemporary race science, is that it often builds on the work of anti-racist scientists who thought their research (into eg genetics) was undermining the very basis for racism. Writing about the Human Genome Diversity Project, a 1990s programme that tried to understand human evolution and migration through genetics, Saini comments that the well intentioned scientists "failed to connect what they were doing with people's rel-life experience of race, with the history and politics of this deadly idea. They thought they were above it all, when in fact they were always central to it." Discussing one of the scientists who was central to the project, the esteemed scientist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza who at the end of his long life maintained "there are simply no races in humankind", Saini points out that "it is also difficult to read his work and come away convinced that his generation of scientists had fully abandoned race science after the Second World War. Although they had ditched race in name, it wasn't clear that they had necessarily shed it in practice". So some scientists argue that there is so much variation in human genetics that the idea that there are only a few races is incorrect, instead there could be thousands of "social groups" having some biological uniqueness. But, as Saini says:

Canadian philosopher Lisa Gannett has similarly warned about the ethical limits of thinking about race in this new way. To some, it may not seem racist to think about average 'populations' rather than distinct 'types' of people. Certainly, early population geneticists such as Dobzhansky believed that racism was rooted in the assumption that within ethnic groups, people are all the same, whereas those like him believed that, within these groups, people are actually very different. But in the racist mind... it doesn't necessarily matter how differences are distributed, so long as they are there in some form or another. This conceptual loophole in population genetics - the fact that we're all different as individuals but that there is also some apparent order to his diversity - is what has since been seized upon by people with racist agendas. Gannett calls it 'statistical racism.

Modern science doesn't back up race science. But, as Saini points out, that doesn't matter, "racists will find validation wherever they can". The problem is exacerbated she argues, because we are increasingly locked into generalisations and categories that have little basis in reality.

We can't help it. We keep looking back to race because of its familiarity. For so long, it has been the backdrop to our lives, the running narrative. We automatically translate the information our eyes and ears receive into the language of race, forgetting where that language came from.

Even well meaning scientists fall into this trap, as do some anti-racists. In her chapter on "Black Pills" Saini shows how pharmaceutical companies are targeting "black" people for specific medical conditions, even though the causes of those diseases and illnesses are entirely social. Such an approach "lets society off the hook. It places the blame for inequality at the foot of biology. If poor health today is intrinsic to black bodies and nothing to do with racism, it's no one's fault."

In other words, it's not society at fault, for treating people differently, but genetics - and that cannot be helped. But as this book demonstrates, the truth is the opposite. Society both causes poverty and inequality, and the racism that is used to justify it. At best race science provides a cover for this, at worst it opens up the door to those who would like to encourage genocide.

Angela Saini's book is an urgent and important read for every anti-racist. But it should also be read by scientists, and not just those in biology departments. It makes it clear that tackling racism and bigotry needs more than just facts, but also requires an approach that understands the origins of these divisive ideas and can challenge them.

Perhaps we need a revival of left wing science - both in practice and organisation. There's a long tradition, particularly in the 1930s, of scientists collectively challenging dominant right-wing narratives. In an era when we see the revival of far-right politics and fascism and growing concern about climate change such networks of radical scientists could come together with anti-racist and environmental movements to push back the right-wing agenda. That would be a powerful weapon in fighting bigotry and the system that causes it. Angela Saini's book is crucial ammunition for that struggle

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Stephen King - Elevation

Having thoroughly enjoyed Stephen King's most recent full length novel The Institute I was excited to see this novella in the shops. As I noted in my review of The Institute, one of King's skills is the description of life in small-town America, full of memorable detail and dark foreboding. So the fact this short novel, set in the fictional Maine town of Castle Rock, is based around this concept made the book even more attractive.

Unfortunately King fails to pull it off this time. There are two aspects to the story, both centred on the likeable, if dull, Scott Carey. Scott finds himself experiencing two simultaneous problems. The first is that he is losing weight rapidly. But unlike people on a diet he is experiencing no simultaneous decrease in size. Moreover, things he touches also lose their weight. At the same time Scott's lesbian neighbours, Deirdre and Missy, are experiencing the dark side of small town America. Here, the conservative minded locals, are boycotting their restaurant and silently mocking their marriage.

Scott, uses his new found weightlessness to rather unconvincingly pull the town together around the gay couple and rejuvenate their lives and business. This happens when he helps Deirdre, a former Olympic athlete, win the annual Thanksgiving run. The picture of Deirdre, her wife Missy and Scott on the finishing line is enough to convince the conservative inhabitants that gay couples aren't a bad thing.

There's nothing particularly bad about the tale. But it just doesn't work. Prejudice doesn't just vanish like this based on a pleasant photo in the newspaper. The one occasion that Scott does challenge the homophobia he is unsuccessful and warned off. For the story to work it needed a more powerful challenge to the bigots. The disease itself might be intended as a comment on contemporary politics, but it is unbelievable - and given that King can make killer cars, haunted hotels and giant alien spiders living in the sewers believable that's strange.

The weight loss, and its inevitable outcome, might work as a convoluted metaphor for Scott dying of cancer, but as a plot device it is completely unbelievable as King fails to setup Castle Rock as the sort of place were this sort of thing takes place. Clearly this is all a metaphor by King for Trump's America. But if King thinks that it is going to be this easy to knock back the bigots that he'll have a surprise. It's only a short book (in fact I was very annoyed to find some 30 pages of the already slim volume devoted to an extract from The Institute) so King fans can read it quickly without feeling they're committing to a major tome. But I guarantee most will be disappointed.

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Max Hastings - Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War

Max Hastings is not a natural ally of the left. He is, after all, a former editor of the pro-Tory newspapers the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard. Yet, despite his politics, his book on the Vietnam War turns out to be both insightful and readable. Unlike some accounts of Vietnam, which overly focus on the American experience in Vietnam, Hasting understands the need for the long sweep of history to understand both the US involvement in the country and their ultimate defeat.

Hastings begins with the French. Their colonial rule of the country generated enormous discontent. Their ousting, but a popular military uprising was an incredible feat of arms for an under-armed national liberation movement. Hastings' vivid account of that most symbolic of defeats for the French, the shambles at Dien Bien Phu, leaves the reader with no other conclusion than colonial racist arrogance led the French to believe that they invincible.

Unfortunately the United States failed to learn the lesson. As American involvement in Vietnam gradually developed from simply advising and funding the enormously corrupt South Vietnamese regime to active military engagement, its representatives behaved exactly like the former colonial rulers. Hastings' writes:

In 1961, and indeed thereafter, there was an insensitivity among policy-makers about the impact that a Western military presence makes. Many harsh things may be justly be said about what communist fighters did to Vietnam, but their footprint on the ground was light as a feather by comparison with that made by the boots of the US military. The very presence of affluent Westerners, armed or unarmed, uniformed or otherwise, could not fail to exercise a polluting influence on a predominantly rural and impoverished Asian society. Like other senior Americans posted to Saigon, the CIA's Bill Colby adopted a domestic style befitting an imperial proconsul, occupying a villa with a domestic staff of six. Army enlisted men took it for granted that a Vietnamese cleaned their boots and policed their huts.

Readers will detect that Hastings' is not a fan of the Communist movement that led the struggle to oust the Americans. It's probably fair to say that, on balance, he thinks that Communist victory was a "bad thing", a failure for Western foreign policy. But that does not mean he is gung-ho for the US. In fact his sympathies lie very much with the ordinary Vietnamese who suffered appalling during French and US involvement. In this regard while celebrating (to a certain extent) the expulsion of the French, Hastings sees a fundamental break with the movement that defeated the United States. He concludes that:

The fatal error of the US was to make an almost unlimited commitment to South Vietnam, where its real strategic interest was minuscule, when the North - the enemy - was content to stake all, and faced no requirement to secure or renew popular consent. Moreover, the 1964-65 American takeover of the South, which is what took place, legitimised Vietnamese communism.

Hastings is at his best in the book when he zooms from the strategic overview of politicians like President Johnson, or Kissinger or Hồ Chí Minh and Lê Duẩn down to the level of the ordinary solider (on both sides). The anecdotes he tells of the battle fields are often horrific, and he is balanced in making sure he covers the experiences from both sides. Aspects of the conflict that are often ignored - the experience of long-range high-altitude bomber pilots, or Russian and Chinese "advisors" in North Vietnam are covered. He is also scrupulous in trying to give the reader a sense of strategic interests of both sides.

He also is not afraid to expose inconvenient truths. Discussing the enormous corruption of the South Vietnamese government, including the vast sums of money given to them by the US and their involvement in illegal buying and selling of military materiel and the laundering of money. But he notes this could not have happened without "active or passive complicity of thousands of Americans, some of the relatively exalted".

It is no surprise then that Hastings can write:

It is among the themes of this book that the foremost challenge for the allies was not to win firefights, but instead to associate itself with a credible Vietnamese political and social order. Dr Norman Wyndham a... Australian surgeon who led a volunteer medical team in a Vung Tau hospital, was a devout Christian who made himself a fluent Vietnamese-speaker. He wrote in 1967 of the local people: 'Most want a united Vietnam, but not one controlled by the communists... the feeling is growing... that anything would be better than life as it is today.'

One of my major criticisms of Hastings is that his anti-Communism colours his ability to understand the dynamic of those opposing US involvement in Vietnam at home and in the country itself. For instance, he tends to imply that the left at the time (and by extension, the anti-war movement) tended to look positively on Hồ Chí Minh and celebrate a North Vietnamese victory. Hastings does acknowledge that hindsight makes this seem more credible. But I'm also not sure that it was true at the time. Many anti-imperialists understood very clearly that the Communist government of the North was an oppressive one, even in the 1960s. But Hastings doesn't have a framework to understand Imperialism - despite knowing it is real - and so he cannot understand the celebration of anti-Imperialist movements, even if they don't make a perfect social movement. As Lenin said of the Easter Uprising in Ireland, "whoever expects a 'pure' social revolution will never live to see it."

But for Hastings the biggest reason for US defeat was its methods in fighting the war.

The Vietcong exploited their own excellent local intelligence networks to eliminate enemies, often with conspicuous sadism. Yet none of the villagers assembled to witness beheadings and live burials doubted why appointed victims were killed: for opposing the revolution. By contrast, when Americans or ARVN killed civilians, while some where communist activists or sympathisers... others were not. The indiscriminate nature of American-led terror, caused by ignorance about the identities, never mind loyalties, of many of those whom its warriors killed, inflicted as much damage upon US strategic objectives as upon the moral legitimacy of its war effort.

To this we might add the high levels of racism towards the Vietnamese (even their allies) and the indiscriminate nature of warfare that involved blanket bombing and chemical weapons. As an aside Hastings downplays the scale of the impact of Agent Orange. He seems incorrect here as my understanding is that it was much worse than Hastings suggests. I hope to find further reading to clarify this.

Despite the length of the book, I thought some aspects weren't dealt with in enough detail. One key aspect to this was the anti-war movement in the west. Hastings mentions it, but doesn't go into detail and he certainly doesn't really get deep into the links between this and the growing discontent in the US military. There is nothing here about the anti-war newspapers produced by military personal, and while he covers events like the fragging of unpopular officers, he tends to imply it was more individual discontent rather than systemic, organised rebellion. Despite this he displays a subtle and sympathetic understanding of the reality of class and racial differences within the US army itself.

These points, which probably reflect Hasting's own prejudices and politics, I was very surprised by the book. It demonstrates that honest bourgeois historians can produce remarkably insightful accounts. Hastings shows how little the political leaders in the US cared for the Vietnamese, and the cynicism with which they condemned thousands to their deaths. For a book of nearly 700 pages of main text I was unusually gripped to the very end. Hastings has an ability, helped in no small part by being actually present in the briefing room and on the battle field as a junior reporter, to link the big political decisions, with the reality for the US marine, or the North Vietnamese soldier. It makes for a very useful account of what was an appalling war.

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Camilla Royle - A Rebel's Guide to Engels

2020 is the bicentenary of the birth of the great revolutionary Friedrich Engels. The anniversary is likely to see numerous articles, pamphlets and books about Marx's friend and collaborator. But few of them will get across Engels' ideas and life as succinctly as Camilla Royle's latest contribution to the Rebel's Guide series.

Engels came from a wealthy bourgeois background. While the money he earned allowed him to lead the life of a relatively well off member of British society, it also enabled the Marx family to survive, Karl Marx to write and Engels' the space and time to develop his own work. As a result Royle points out that Engels was "a disappointment to his parents and a traitor to his class". It is a description Engels himself would have been proud of.

Royle's book begins with Engels' early years locating him in the milieu of those progressive German thinkers who were breaking with Hegelian philosophy as they attempted to understand the changing world around them. Engels himself fought on several barricades during various Continental revolutions and, like Marx, had to flee the authorities on several occasions. These movements shaped Engels profoundly, as did his experiences of the working classes. Royle writes:

Marx and Engels had more less independently reached the same conclusions about the importance of the working class; Engels by observing workers in England and Marx through his reporting of the revolts of the Silesian weavers, where thousands of workers took strike action and smashed machinery in protest at declining wages and living standards.

With their re-acquaintance in 1843 Marx and Engels embarked on a lifetime of collaboration. But Engels also produced some significant works independently. Most famously his The Condition of the Working Class in England. Royle also emphasises the importance of some of their joint works, showing how both thinkers contributed significantly to what would become known as Marxism. In her discussion of The German Ideology, a book which she explains Engels wrote most of the text for based on long detailed discussions with Marx. In the book the authors show how Marxism roots its understanding of human history in the relationship between humans and the natural world. It is a key point that shows how an ecological understanding of human society is central to Marxism, with important implications for Marxism as a tool to understand capitalism's environmental degradation.

I'm pleased that Royle devotes two chapters to two of Engels' lesser known works - Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature. The first is a polemical critic of the near forgotten German Utopian socialist Eugen Dühring. Royle shows how Engels attacks Dühring's ideas explaining the centrality of dialectics to Marx and Engels' work. In her comments on Engels' Dialectics of Nature Royle shows that he was trying to apply these ideas to the natural world. Sadly, given the importance of "nature" to the current class struggle, Engels' book was left unfinished. Royle criticises the way that some of Engels' book has been interpreted, particularly the infamous question of the three laws of dialectics. She argues that these laws "can be useful in demonstrating the type of philosophy dialectics is. But if they are taken too literally, they can end in an attempt to look for rules in nature, which is more complex than trivial examples about boiling water". That said, she does celebrate parts of Dialectics especially the wonderful The Part Played by Labour in the Transition of Ape to Man. This is a section that stands the test of time and I'm glad Royle highlights its importance to a new generation of readers, given the parts of it where Engels writes on the human-nature relationship.

The final part of the book looks at Engels life in the aftermath of Marx's death. Engels helped make sure that Marx's unfinished work was published - a surprisingly difficult job; and he carried on the work that had been a near constant theme of his, and Marx's life, the building of socialist organisation. Here Royle defends Engels from crude attacks that argue he abandoned revolution at the end of his life, and show him remaining committed to the revolutionary workers movement till the end. Royle concludes by pointing out that the Marxism that both Engels and Marx developed was not an "unchanging dogma, but a method, a set of tools that we can use to help make sense of the world". Understanding the world helps us change it and Camilla Royle's book is an important contribution to making sure that 200 years after his birth the ideas and activity of Friedrich Engels helps our revolutionary struggle today.

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Carl J. Griffin & Briony McDonagh - Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality & the Landscape

2019 was a very interesting year to be a socialist in Manchester. The bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 was marked by a plethora of events: a controversial new memorial was (finally) unveiled, walking tours, exhibitions, meetings and a major day of marches to a central rally all took place. I suspect that there were many more, smaller scale, events in schools, colleges and trade union meetings. At those events I attended I was struck by the contemporary parallels with Peterloo. Many speakers also noted this - not because they expected an imminent cavalry attack - but because there was a sense of deep discontent, poverty and inequality about Britain in 2019.

Manchester has, to a certain extent, always marked Peterloo. In a recent book Katrina Navickas has shown how the protest was a touchstone for numerous protest marches in the years and decades after 1819. Radicals and social movements sought legitimacy for their contemporary causes by associating themselves with Peterloo - by marching to St. Peters Fields or invoking the name of the massacre.

But as Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500 shows this is nothing new. Those of us who have been involved in radical and trade union politics for a while will know our movement is often more fond of celebrating past victories and defeats than it is of fighting to win new struggles. But this was very much true of the past. As Nicola Whyte says in the introduction to her chapter in the the book:

Memory has not atrophied, but rather the relationship between society and its past always takes on new forms, being wrought in the dialogical space between official and unofficial perspectives. Meanings do not merely shift with the passage of time, they are renewed through the evocation of various, multiple and unpredictable pasts.... people interpret and employ the past for diverse ends, both as a social resource and means to articulate their own life-histories.

Whyte explores these concepts by looking at Mousehold Heath, the site outside Norwich where in 1549 Robert Kett and thousands of rebels camped as part of what became known as the "Camping Time". While 1549 rebellion was part of a much larger period of rebellion Andy Wood has shown elsewhere how it was highlighted to posterity by the local establishment who wanted to use it's lessons to undermine potential future rebellions.

But Mousehold Heath was a site of protest going back to 1381 and for long after 1549. A 1589 map reproduced in the book is as much as record of past events as it is of contemporary locations and pathways. It is a "way of seeing" as Whyte explains, a "lord's view of the world...that chronicles past events and actions attaching them to physical places, and embedding a hierarchical understanding of social relations in the landscape". Even in the 21st century there were protest events on the Heath that had links back to the distant past. It is not enough to think about the impact of an event like 1549 through "oral tradition" or the records people have:

Memories do not simply reside in the mind to be evidenced in the speech patterns of local people; rather, memories are made through routine practices and experiences of being in and making landscapes. Memories of Mousehold Heath operated at the level of the everyday, remembering past generations and... the material work of day-to-day resistance. A landscape approach provides a useful methodological and conceptual framework for our understanding of the dynamic and contingent relationship between people and the material worlds in which they lived.

Such an approach is further developed in Briony McDonagh and Joshua Rodda's discussion on the Midlands Rising of 1607. This "all but forgotten" event saw a major, though relatively localised protest against enclosure in Northamptonshire. However 1607 was not an isolated event in the grander historical narrative. The authors put the rebellion in a "longer-term historical context and wider landscape setting". For them, the key question is the way that "national and local politics of land" shaped events prior to, during and after 1607. Primarily this relates to the way that the enclosure of previously open lands impacted upon those who lived and worked in the localities - thus 1607 was not a unique event, rather a peak of struggle. As the authors write:

We can read the Midlands Rising not simply as a response to an unprecedented upsurge in the scale and frequency of enclosure in the English Midlands in the decade prior to 1607, but rather the most striking movement in an ongoing surge of discontent with enclosure which had been building at least through much of the previous reign.

Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that class struggle "was [an] uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight". History is full of peaks of rebellions and revolutions, but these are really the more visible parts of a continuum. McDonagh and Rodda bring this out extremely well as part of their discussion on 1607, an event that continued to inspire and worry both the authorities and the lower orders for years afterwards. The authors highlight several examples of those who raised the spectre of 1607 as part of their struggles (and legal cases) in the aftermath.

A similar continuum of protest is discussed in Simon Sandall's account of the protests in the Forest of Dean when protesters and rebels retained memories of previous social organisation (the Mine Law Court) to justify and bolster contemporary struggles against injustices caused by the development of capitalist relations in the region. This was more than simple tradition, but an active use of tradition as a weapon in their struggle - to inspire participants and give vindication to a cause.

Ruth Mather's chapter takes a different approach looking at the hitherto mostly ignored subject of the way that protest was remembered within the homes of working class people. Visitors to the Peoples' History Museum in Manchester and the Working Class Movement Library in Salford will know that the events like Peterloo were often commemorated by the issuing and sale of "memorabilia". But this was more than simply the purchase of pictures or plates that serve as a talking point, it was part of creating a radical tradition of memory and connection to the past.

This was not just about physical objects. Mather notes Peterloo was memorialised through "radical child-rearing". This included the naming of babies after radicals (136 children received the unfortunate first name 'Henry Hunt' after Peterloo), but also the production of materials to instruct children in the history of struggle. A map produced as a teaching aid, is Mather says, "physically materialising reminders of the events of the day" to "carry forward the aims of the radicals...to sustain the movement into the next generation."

Mather's chapter, draws on the memoir of Peterloo leader Samuel Bamford. She notes that the description of his home notes with pride the items that decorate a typical working class home. I raised a smile at this because in a recent visit to Rochdale museum's exhibition on Peterloo I noted that among the exhibits were Bamford reading glasses. The use of object to venerate, remember and memorialise history continues.

Samuel Bamford glasses, among other historical objects
associated with Peterloo in Rochdale Museum (my photo).

Space precludes a detailed discussion of all the chapters in this excellent book. They all, in different ways, contribute to a wider understanding of how radical movements create spaces for memorialising that draw on the past. Rose Wallis says in her discussion of the Captain Swing movement that "the memory of popular protest was... central in shaping both the resort to protest in the present and the responses of the authorities".

The past cannot be separated from the present. Historical struggles shape the terrain that contemporary women and men fight on, and within which they try to shape the future. Radicals planning incendiary attacks in 1830, riots in the Forest of Dean or organising marches to St Peters Fields in 1819 drew on their experiences, knowledge and understanding of what had gone before to try and be victorious. Similarly the forces of the establishment and authority learn their own lessons, for their own class. But what this book also shows, is that those memories are not simply remembered from generation to generation, but are often written into the very landscape that people act upon. As Carl Griffin comments,

we might usefully understand plebeian communities, individual bodies and the landscapes in which they lived as bearing the characteristics inherited of past tragedies, something akin to a cultural form of Lamarckism,... It is all there, but it is just that in the shift from the personal to the community narrative, the archive is used selectively, past events become written in the matter of place and in the body of the community...Through remembering to remember and remembering to forget, the past was constantly folded, remade, reanimated, becoming something always new.

Understanding how the past has been interpreted and memorialised thus helps us understand the actions and motivations of later generations. Learning from protest history is more than simply empowering our contemporary struggles - it helps explain the world we are in and the movements we have. Carl Griffin and Briony McDonagh's book is a wonderful insight into these processes. The individual chapters contribute to the central theme and are also very illuminating on their specific subjects. I highly recommend this collection to those interested in the history of protest and the writing of that protest.

Note: I do feel bound to comment on the disappointingly high price of Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500. Aimed at an academic audience it was only because the publisher had a massive online sale that reduced the price by about £60 that I was able to afford to get hold of it. Sadly this will price the book out of reach of the hands of almost any ordinary activists and readers who do not have access to an academic library. It is a real shame because its contents would appeal greatly to a current generation of radicals who might want to learn from the past.

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Jeff Sparrow - Fascists Among Us: Online hate and the Christchurch Massacre

This new book by Australian socialist Jeff Sparrow is an important contribution to understanding fascist movements in the 21st century. It is a short book that focuses on the Christchurch killer, a fascist activist who murdered 51 people and injured 49 more at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Person X, as he is anonymously labelled in Sparrow's book, left a detailed manifesto which was much more than the ramblings of a madman. Instead it was a carefully crafted piece of writing, that was designed to appeal to a particular set of far-right online activists and encourage further killing.

I initially picked up the book because I wanted to know more about "eco-fascism". This is the tendency for far-right activists to use concern over environmental crisis to push their own agenda. As Sparrow shows, close links between fascist ideas and nature are not new. While concern about the environment is usually seen as a left-wing cause, there has historically been a far-right strand of environmentalism. This, as Person X demonstrated, is usually tied up with ideas of over-population.

The concern of Person X and other "eco-fascists" is contradictory, and so , says Sparrow, needs to understood in what Person X "describes as his 'tactics for victory' - in particular, something he calls 'accelerationism'." Sparrow spells out what this means:

Person X's embrace of accelerationism means, above all, an advocacy of social and political breakdown as both necessary and desirable. Stability and comfort constitute, he says, major obstacles to the fascist revolution, which can only arise from the 'the great crucible of crisis'. As a result, fascists 'must destabilise and discomfort society where ever possible'. Even someone pushing for minimal changes with which fascists might agree should be considered 'useless or even damaging' far better, Person X says, to have 'radical, violent change regardless of its origins'.

So fascists can even celebrate climate change as a solution - one that will kill off many of those who they hate, and where, as one commentator points out "only the strong should survive". 

But Sparrow's book is far more than an explanation of eco-fascism or even a detailed study of Person X's motivations. He also shows how, perhaps paradoxically to the outside observer, Person X's appalling crime was actually a response to the success of the anti-fascist movements. Sparrow shows how, in the wake of Trump's victory, the fascist movement in the US was able to grow. Far-right politicians like Trump in the US, as in a host of countries post 9-11 created an atmosphere of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim feeling, within which fascists were able to grow. The movement tried to move from "online influence" to "real-world popularity". To do this, the fascists "needed to bring their supporters out from their computers and into the streets".

At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, USA in 2017, where fascists openly marched and chanted antisemitic and anti-Muslim slogans, a young anti-fascist activist, Heather Heyer, was killed. The violence that is never far below the surface among fascists surfaced. But in the context of 2017 caused massive revulsion. After this, fascist protests were massively outnumbered and proved unattractive for the Nazis.

A similar process took place in Australia where Person X originated. Finding it impossible to march and create the atmosphere of togetherness that the Nazis wanted, some, like Person X, looked for other strategies. Sparrow explains:

American fascism hadn't disappeared. But its key figures learned... that they couldn't convert their online support into a conventional political movement as easily as they had hoped. Such was the context in which Person X developed his own strategy for bridging the gulf between fascism's online strength and its real-world weakness. That strategy was terrorist murder.

Compared to other mass killings, Person X "injected political content into an apolitical form":

In his reshaping of rage murder - injecting a conscious political element into the already-existing massacre script - Person X hoped to set in motion a cascading sequence of atrocities, in which young men (on the fringes of the fascist movement or at least already vaguely sympathetic to far-right ideas), would individually decide to, as he put it 'stop shit-posting and make a real-life effort' with each murder inspiring murders to come.

Tragically Person X has already inspired copy-cats. Massacres like this will not provoke a fascist revolution - but that was never really Person X's plan. He hoped that such events would help spread the fascist message in a way that couldn't easily be stopped by counter-protests.

Historically we know that fascism grows during periods of political and economic crisis; it is then that the violent fantasies of the fascists can be taken up by mass movements. The task, as Sparrow explains, is to build social movements that can fracture the nascent fascist movements which people like Person X want to build. To do this means of course confronting the far-right and fascists wherever they appear - out-numbering them, exposing them and preventing them marching. But it also means providing an alternative to economic and environmental crisis. It means creating a positive message that can offer an alternative. As Sparrow concludes, "the more we offer an alternative to environmental destruction - and to the society that unleashes such destruction - the more squalid and miserable fascism seems."

Jeff Sparrow's book is an excellent, and much needed, introduction to contemporary fascism; online and in "real life". It contextualises this with a detailed explanation of historical fascist and Nazi movements, showing how fascism has evolved, while retaining links to its past. But Sparrow emphasises that fascism's ambition is to rebuild mass movements - to break out of the on-line ghetto - and that what the left does on the streets and online matters in terms of stopping it. I encourage everyone to read this, and then get involved in fighting the far-right, wherever you live.

Related Reviews

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Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Guerin - Fascism and Big Business
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Lipstadt - Denying the Holocaust

Ian Cameron - Red Duster, White Ensign

The battle for Malta during the Second World War was a key strategic question for the Allies and Axis powers. Malta had, for centuries, been a gateway to the rest of the Mediteranean. With Britain keen to protect its colonies and strategic assets in the Middle East and North Africa, the small island would be crucial. Initially however few, according to Ian Cameron's short history, understood this, with Winston Churchill nearly a lone figure in wanting to protect the island. Churchill would not have been motivated for his interest in the people of Malta - more the British Empire's needs.

Malta was a forgotten place for the London establishment. When the King visited the island in 1943 it was the first visit by a monarch since 1911. As Ian Cameron shows, the Maltese faced a horrific onslaught. The blitz that rained down upon the island was on a terrifying scale - far worse than that unleashed on London, though not on a par with the attacks on Berlin, Cologne or Dresden. The Maltese at least had nearly bomb proof shelters in the catacombs in the rocks. Nonetheless suffering was terrible, particularly when combined with hard rations.

The lifeline - the convoys, and the often forgotten supply trips by submarine - are the meat of the book. These were costly enterprises and the heroism of sailors from the Merchant Marine and the Navy is deservably celebrated here. Cameron tends to highlight the bravery, and like many others since the War, particularly celebrates the contribution of the civilians on the islands. Though there is precious little in the way of personal accounts, or detailed analysis of the feelings of those under fire. Cameron tends to give us the impression that everyone was supportive of the war, and hated the Germans and Italians. Is this true I wondered?

This is very much a short, readable account that focuses on the action and the famous highlights. It's worth noting that the air battles and bombing where on a scale far greater than the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz, but few films or novels are set in these battles. There are enough accounts by participants even in this short book to provide source material.

Malta was, eventually relieved as the war moved further away from its location and as German arms and bases were reduced. This short, readable account gives the general story, but I felt it lacked detail on the bigger context and the experience of the civilians. Perhaps there are more recent accounts that fill this gap.

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Nick Ashton-Jones - Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Part 2: Feudalism

Part two of Nick Ashton-Jones projected six volume study of the British Landscape and the way it has been shaped and used by various human societies. This book looks at Feudalism and the emergence of capitalism.

I've been asked to review this, and the previous volume, for a journal and I'll post a link to that article here when published.

Georges Duby - The Age of the Cathedrals: Art & Society 980-1420

Georges Duby's The Age of the Cathedrals is a classic work that shows how the development of feudalism transformed the sacred art of the time, in particularly how it manifested through the art and architecture of cathedrals, but also monasteries, churches as well as the actuality of worship. Duby shows, in great detail, how social changes were reflected (and encouraged) by artistic changes. But he also roots his explanation in an understanding that society was one of class inequality and struggle. Thus, in a passage I first read when Nortre Dame Cathedral was destroyed by fire in 2019, we can see both Duby's beautiful prose and his clarity of understanding:

By definition, a cathedral was the bishop’s church, hence the city’s church; and what the art of cathedrals meant first of all, in Europe, was the rebirth of the cities… They were lodestones drawing wealth. After a long period of obscurity, they became the principal centres, north of the Alps, of the most advanced culture. But for the time being virtually all of their vitality still came from the surrounding fields…Thus, although cathedral art was urban art, it relied on the nearby countryside for the major factor in its growth, and it was the efforts of countless pioneers, clearers of land, planters of vinestocks, diggers of ditches, and builders of dikes, all flushed with the success of a flourishing agriculture, that brought cathedral art to its fulfilment. The tower of Laon rose against a backdrop of new harvest and young vineyards; the image of the oxen used in ploughing, carved in stone, crowned those towers… The facades of the cathedrals in Amiens and Paris showed the turning of the seasons by depicting different types of peasant labour. It was only right to honour them in this way, fort it was the work of the harvester sharpening his scythe, of the vine-grower pruning or layering his vines or spading about them, that had made the edifice rise little by little. The cathedral was the fruit of the system of manor lords – in other words, of the peasants’ labour.

As society changed, art reflected these changes:

Within the ruling class, a split widened between the warriors... and the churchmen, who took over all the charismatic missions that had belonged to royalty. This is what matters, particularly for anyone interested in the conditions with which social structures surround the birth of works of art. In the course of the eleventh century the local lords seized most of the royal prerogatives... They thus deprived the kings of the benefits hitherto conferred by the position of supremacy...in doing so they limited the extent to which the sovereigns could play a role in artistic creativity, fostered instead by the muted yet decisive emergence of the new class of lords.

Thus art would be representative of the interests and needs of these new classes. But religion couldn't lose one of its primary roles - to offer hope in the heartless world - and so "eleventh-century art helped to reveal God's face. It shed light. It claimed to offer man the sure means of coming back to life bathed in light". This came through architecturally as Cathedrals became massive spaces of light, instead of massive towers and heavy columns, big windows, open spaces and thin beams allowed light to fill the void.

A few hundred years of artistic evolution and social change later, things and developed further. Art was now more show, don't tell. It had become, in the view of artists and patrons, "a means of dispelling the mysteries of the world and revealing its inner order... Art... became an illustration, a narrative, a tale....intended to provide an immediately intelligible relation of a story... of God, but also of the knights of the Round Table, and the conquest of Jerusalem". Duby continues:

In the fourteenth century, creativity turned into the pursuit of fancy. As a result, its major objective was not to provide a space conducive to prayer and suitable for processions or psalmody as before, but one designed for display. Thus painting, the most appropriate medium for suggesting visions, raised itself at that very moment in Europe to the highest rank of the arts.

But if art reflected the system, it also was part of shaping it. Emphasising the interests of one or other class against the masses - shaping their ideas, helping to control and manipulate them. In the 13 the century when feudal society had reached "fulfilment" the "two dominating orders, churchmen and men of war, gathered around the king in whom priesthood and knighthood were joined" and so "royal liturgies accordingly installed that equestrian figure in the cathedral". Art in the places of religion now sent a message about who God's representatives were on Earth. Poignantly, Duby points out that "nothing is known of peasant death". The fears, hopes and dreams of the nobility were written large in their art and architecture. The peasantry had to look at these, and donate money for the privilege of pilgrimage. Cathedral art (and feudal art in general) was a message from one side to the other.

Duby's book is fascinating. But I found it a slog. The Age of the Cathedrals is one of those books that I read, but felt I was only scratching the surface of its insights. Lacking an in-depth knowledge of the history of the period, or the detail of the Bible I was only really able to accept what Duby was saying, not follow through his ideas. I suspect that other readers will get much more from what is a deeply sympathetic, materialist account of the linkage between art and society.

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Nick Ashton-Jones - Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Part 1: Humanity

The first part of Nick Ashton-Jones projected six volume study of the British Landscape and the way it has been shaped and used by various human society. It begins with an examination of the underlying geology of the British Isles and an overview of hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies until the Roman era.

I've been asked to review this, and the succeeding volume, for a journal and I'll post a link to that article here when published.

Bruce Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture

Dark Emu is a remarkable book that deserves to be widely read and discussed. Firstly it is a fascinating discussion of the history and culture of Australia's Aboriginal people before European colonial arrival. But it is also a brilliant, and very readable, account of how that history was distorted, covered-up and forgotten in order for the colonial powers to develop their own political and economic structures that benefited a new capitalist order.

I suspect that most people who pick up Dark Emu might believe, at best naively, that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers before the arrival of Europeans. Using primary and secondary sources Bruce Pascoe shows that this is completely erroneous and, Pascoe argues, prevents us developing a clearer understanding of both historical Aboriginal society and how that relates to contemporary political, environmental and social politics:

Arguing over whether the Aboriginal economy was a hunter-gather system or one of burgeoning agriculture is not the central issue. The crucial point is that we have never discussed it as a nation. The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession. Every Land Rights application hinges on the idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did nothing more than collect available resources and therefore had no managed interaction with the land... If we look at the evidence... and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their closes and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.

Contrary to perceived wisdom, Aboriginal, pre-contact society was not just one of nomadic hunter-gatherers, though, as Pascoe points out that does not mean there were no communities like this.

It may be that not all Aboriginal peoples were involved in these practices, but if the testament of explorers and first witnesses is to be believed, mos Aboriginal Australians were, at the very least, in the early states of an agricultural society, and, it could be argued, ahead of many other parts of the world.

But the crucial thing is that Aboriginal societies were dynamic - they changed and evolved. And in most areas, by the time of European arrival, Aboriginal communities had developed complex systems of agriculture, aquaculture and villages.  For instance, Pascoe describes the work of archaeologist Heather Builth who shows how a complex system of fish traps at Brewarrina, in NW New South Wales, supported a community of about 10,000 people in a "more or less sedentary life in this town". With such a large population, people would have needed to store food and Builth shows how food was smoked and stored and "formed the basis of trade with regions in New South Wlaes, South Australia and other parts of Victoria".

The evidence for complex human society (particularly agriculture) from archaeological sources as well as records of early European colonists and explorers is incredible. What is even more shocking is the way that this evidence is dismissed, ignored and hidden. Part of the reason for this is the racism of the European eyewitnesses. There is an incredible example of this from the accounts of James Kirby who , in 1843, explored an area which not not yet seen European colonisation. He describes (using racist language) an ingenious fishing device whereby people fished with an rod in tension that when triggered by a fish, "threw the fish over the head of the black [the Aboriginal fisher], who would then in a most lazy manner reach back his hand, undo the fish, and set the loop again". Kirby interprets this in the most racist way. Rather than be amazed at the semi-automated fishing system, he says he has "often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow fish in such a lazy way, that what I had heard was perfectly true".

All human societies transform the landscape they inhabit. This is not usually recognised about the Aboriginal people because of the inherent racist assumption that they were savages who existed simply through an negative relationship with their environment. Again, the opposite is true. In one of the most fascinating sections of the book, a section that has particular resonance given the recent horrific wildfires in Australia, Pascoe shows how Aboriginal agriculture frequently relied on regular firing of the bush to encourage conditions for improved farming. Europeans, on arrival, feared fire and so they didn't use it to clear land. Ironically this encourages the conditions for more power fires, and undermined the fertility of the land itself: "Changing the timing and intensity of fires radically changed the nature of the country, so that what had been productive agricultural land became scrub within a decade." Fire was "part of a planned program of cropping or". This has implications for how we understand the Australian landscape. Pascoe quotes archaeologist Rhys Jones:

What do we want to conserve, the environment as it was in 1788 or do we yearn for an environment without mas, as it might have been 30,000 or more years ago? If the former then we must do what the Aborigines did and burn at regular intervals under controlled conditions. 

But this also has implications for continued agricultural practices that, driven by the desire to maximise profits, encourage environmental degradation and make fires more likely.

Pascoe doesn't pretend that Aboriginal societies were without conflict. Though he does point out that judging Aboriginal society by standards of European "civilisation" means that you miss the democratic, sustainable, non-hierarchical society that was able to provide for the needs of thousands of people for centuries. Nonetheless I think Pascoe is guilty of some naivety when it comes to understanding why, for instance, European societies were brutal and exploitative, and Aboriginal societies were not. It is clear, for instance, that class society had not developed in Aboriginal communities - historical development elsewhere in the world demonstrates that the invention of agricultural allows the creation of a surplus which can (I emphasise can) lead to the development of class society. When European colonialists arrived and smashed up Aboriginal society any further development was ended. What Pascoe makes clear is that had this development not been prevented, the peoples of Australia may well have begun the long historical road to further evolution of society - the had clearly already begun to develop complex agricultural based societies. But it is not inevitable that any future development would have retained social mores that made Aboriginal society so different to that which supplanted it.

Pascoe's use of source material shows what had long been hidden. Aboriginal societies, prior to the arrival of Europeans, were complex and extensive. But I am not sure how unique this is. Pascoe makes some reference to other pre-capitalist, indigenous societies. This could have been developed more and I think would have illuminated the way that capitalism has only succeeded through the destruction of other modes of production. Unfortunately for the limited analysis of this aspect of his argument Pascoe relies on the work of Gavin Menzies, whose work has been discredited.

However this does not discredit the arguments that Pascoe is making. In fact, I'd suggest that Dark Emu is one of the most important contributions to understanding the Aboriginal history that has been hidden and forgotten. It is also a powerful critique of contemporary Australian society - a society where the very land burns because profit is more important than people.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
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Cronon - Changes in the Land
McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
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Stephen King - The Institute

With The Institute Stephen King makes a big return to his classic form. The novel is a page-turner, building up from an unassuming start as disgraced policeman Tim Jamieson arrives in the small-town of Dupray, South Carolina. Here King excels at describing the lives of ordinary working class people as Tim gets to know the people and community. 

Thousands of miles away, and seemingly unconnected, Luke Ellis's parents are killed by intruders and he is kidnapped. Luke is a child prodigy who also has some unusual powers - he can move small things just with the power of his mind. Luke wakes in The Institute, in a room that is almost a total facsimile of his home at his parents'. Here he discovers a brutal regime that tortures children to develop their special powers, and, when appropriate, passes them on to an even shadier section.

I was less gripped by the subplot that centres on the aims of The Institute than I was by the story of rebellion by Luke and his friends. Luke's escape and his eventual meeting with Tim is gripping, but the climatic resolution seemed a little contrived. I'm not sure that the authorities would be so quick to believe Luke's outlandish story - though I did like the idea that the Institutes' forces could be defeated by the townsfolk.

But what makes the book so compelling, and indeed characterises the best of King's work, are the small details that make the impossible so believable. In this case The Institute is deprived of funding, is run down and badly managed. Anyone who works in the public sector will recognise King's depiction of a failing bureaucracy that has grown stagnant.

But the real meat of the story is the rebellion of the children, born out of their mutual solidarity. In a world where the US government does put children in cages, the points that Stephen King is making are not exactly subtle but the fear of powerful quasi-government organisations is real. A real return to form, and existing fans of King will enjoy this tightly written novel.

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King - The Stand
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W.H. Hudson - A Shepherd's Life

Many people have recently re-read W.H. Hudson's book A Shepherd's Life because it is mentioned early on in James Rebanks' more recent account of shepherding life. In that book Rebanks notes his pleasure at discovering Hudson's book because he wrote about people like him. I also saw this, but my interest had already been piqued by mention of Hudson's book in Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé's class work of history Captain Swing.

Hudson's book is fascinating partly because it combines many literary forms. It is very much a celebration of the landscape, people and animals of Wiltshire where the author spends much of his time. Several chapters are detailed accounts of the landscape itself, a living, breathing space which Hudson wishes more people could experience. In fact he argues that children waste time in schools when far better lessons would be learnt if they could explore the countryside.

The book is also historic. Hudson, writing in the first years of the 20th century is also describing a changing rural landscape. One of the first anecdotes he has is of a boy, working in a field scaring birds, running to see Hudson cycle past. Hudson stops, thinking something is amiss, but the boy simply wanted to watch him go past - bicycles presumably still being a novelty.

Much of these experiences are told through the conversations that Hudson has over many years with Caleb Bawcomb, a man who worked for fifty years as a shepherd. Caleb learnt his craft from his father Isaac, and Hudson tells many stories relating to both their lives - from the art of shepherding, to that of training a dog or the reality of poaching in the villages. The latter carries a strong sense of class struggle about it, as the villagers frequently united to both poach and protect those who stole. But what interested Hobsbawm and Rudé was Hudson's mention of the Swing riots and the treatment of those who took part. Hudson writes:

The incident of the unhappy young man who was transported to Australia or Tasmania, which came out in the shepherd's history of the Ellerby family, put it in my mind to look up some of the very aged people of the downland villages, whose memories could go back to the events of eighty years ago. I found a few, "still lingering here," who were able to recall that miserable and memorable year of 1830 and had witnessed the doings of the "mobs." One was a woman, my old friend of Fonthill Bishop, now aged ninety-four, who was in her teens when the poor labourers, "a thousand strong," some say, armed with cudgels, hammers, and axes, visited her village and broke up the thrashing machines they found there.

He continues:

Some more of the old dame's recollections will be given... showing what the condition of the people was in this district about the year 1830, when the poor farm-labourers were driven by hunger and misery to revolt against their masters—the farmers who were everywhere breaking up the downs with the plough to sow more and still more corn, who were growing very fat and paying higher and higher rents to their fat landlords, while the wretched men that drove the plough had hardly enough to satisfy their hunger.

Hobsbawm and Rudé particularly note the story of a curse on the Ellerby's of Doveton. Ellerby, the father of Caleb's employer had, according to tradition, allowed a innocent man be transported for his involvement in the Swing movement. From Australia, a letter, containing a fragment of a bible verse was supposed to have cursed the family to be childless from then onwards. The story is of interest, mostly because it was remembered so long after the events, part of a folk tradition that kept alive the injustices of the past.

One thing that modern readers might be amused by is Hudson's account of the decline of birdlife in the countryside, and the way that the military use of Salisbury Plain was destroying life, landscape and farming. Though in the case of bird decline the cause is somewhat different to today's ecological crisis:

Wiltshire, like other places in England, has long been deprived of its most interesting birds—the species that were best worth preserving. Its great bustard, once our greatest bird—even greater than the golden and sea eagles and the "giant crane" with its "trumpet sound" once heard in the land—is now but a memory. Or a place name: Bustard Inn, no longer an inn, is well known to the many thousands who now go to the mimic wars on Salisbury Plain... The stone curlew, our little bustard with the long wings, big, yellow eyes, and wild voice, still frequents the uncultivated downs, unhappily in diminishing numbers. For the private collector's desire to possess British-taken birds' eggs does not diminish; I doubt if more than one clutch in ten escapes the searching eyes of the poor shepherds and labourers who are hired to supply the cabinets.

Well written, the book was amazingly popular and helped to inspire some of the earliest social movements around protection of the countryside and the back to the land movement. I didn't particularly think that Hudson romanticised the countryside - there's plenty of poverty, low pay and hunger here. Though because he fictionalised some of the accounts and changed of people and locations the reader should be wary of taking things too literally. Nonetheless, as other books have pointed out, it is possible today to visit the places that Hudson writes about and corroborate much of the story.

Related Reviews

Horn - Life and Labour in Rural England 1760 - 1850

Horn - The Rural World - Social Change in the English Countryside 1780 - 1850
Rebanks - The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District
Hobsbawm and Rudé - Captain Swing

Kassandra Montag - After the Flood

After the Flood is the latest bestseller inspired by the contemporary environmental crisis. The novel is set in the near future when a catastrophic flooding event caused by masses of water leaking out of the centre of the Earth has flooded almost all the land except for the tops of what used to be mountains. What's left of humanity has become entirely dependent on the sea, and farming of the small amounts of remaining land. Pockets of people have formed dozens of communities, increasingly dominated by "raiders" whose violent, pirate-like behaviour means they can steal what they want and menace for goods to sustain themselves.

The book focuses on Myra who survived the rapid flooding of the interior of the United States, but whose husband, when the water finally arrived, ran off with her daughter Row. Myra herself was pregnant with her second daughter Pearl. When we first meet these two they are surviving by fishing and then trading their catch for other necessities. The author, Kassandra Montag, sets up the context very well - we get a sense of small communities on the edge of existence, threatened by external violence, and eking out an existence on what is left from the collapse of civilisation.

Myra has given up hope of seeing Row again, but by chance learns of her survival, likely as a breeding material for one of the pirate gangs. Her journey to find her, which involves becoming part of a crew on a boat capable of the long distance voyage, make sup the rest of the book.

Since I'm partial to novels about the collapse of civilisation, I was looking forward to reading this, but I found myself frustrated. I thought the characters tended to be one-dimensional, and behave unrealistically. I liked Pearl particularly, though her strange habit of collecting snakes made no sense at all and I thought that her mother treated her appallingly. Pearl's fear that her mother was more concerned with her first daughter than her well-being certainly felt true, though Montag has Myra deny it through the novel. I didn't however feel convinced by any of the characters motivations and while the action sequences were fun, they seemed to only exist to hold together a rather less enjoyable story based on the characters' relationships.

But the biggest problem was that the premise of the book was utterly implausible and no-one seemed to question it. The cracking open of the Earth's crust and the release of vast quantities of water (utterly vast if we're talking about covering almost all the continental United States) defied plausibility, physics and belief. This undermined everything else about the novel. Sadly I was left disappointed by this latest attempt to help us think through the consequences of climate change.

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Ken Follett - World Without End

Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth is one of the most popular novels around today - a blockbuster that grew famous through word of mouth and has now spawned a TV series and a computer game. Set in the fictional town of Kingsbridge it follows the trials and tribulations of a families as the town's Cathedral is built in the Middle Ages.

World Without End is a sequel set a couple of centuries later, and it is a sequel very much in the same vein. In many regards the book tells a very similar story. Many of the main characters are very similar to characters in the first book, and the story hangs around the building, or rebuilding of part of the Cathedral. The two main characters, Caris and Merthin, are on-off lovers, whose lives revolve around two central issues - the first is the Cathedral, the second the arrival of the Plague. Caris is a young woman who refuses to let her gender hold back her desire to succeed in the world. Accused of witchcraft by a rival, she becomes a nun to escape execution. In the nunnery she uses forward thinking medical practices to treat the sick and prevent infection. Her attitudes and approach incur further wrath from the hierarchy.

As I noted in my review of the first book, the author structures the book like a mini-series or soap-opera. Chapters invariably end on cliff-hangers and characters tend to come and go, revolving around the key people. Again, like Pillars of the Earth, the book focuses very much on working people and their lives though in this case the actual feudal relationship between lord and serf in terms of land use is much more explicit. The rich aren't simply oppressive - they are exploitative too. Follett tries to show how the decimation of the population by disease led to the breakdown of serfdom, though out of dramatic necessity he accelerates the process a great deal. Nonetheless he reflects real history here. I was just disappointed the book finished before the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 when the people of Knightsbridge might have got some collective revenge.

Unfortunately the author tends to imply that the behaviour of the lords against their peasants is based on personality rather than resulting from their position inside society's structure. There were exceptionally cruel lords like Ralph in the book, but all lords had a oppressive, exploitative, violent relationship to the peasantry.

While I enjoyed the book I had two problems with it. The first is the similarities in structure to the first novel. The other is sex. There is a lot of sex in the book, relatively graphic in places, though this isn't particularly a problem. The biggest problem I had was that Follett describes a number of rapes. Follett uses rape as a key plot device - by doing this he is showing the violently oppressive relationship of the local lord to those beneath them. The problem for me is that he describes the rapes much like the sex, and undermines the reality of the actual violence against the women. This marred an otherwise enjoyable, though very long read, which unusually focuses on the lives of those who are normally forgotten in books about the period.

Related Review

Follett - The Pillars of the Earth

Fred A. Wilcox - Shamrocks and Oil Slicks: A People's Uprising Against Shell Oil in County Mayo, Ireland

This charming account of a campaign of local people to stop Shell building a refinery and gas pipeline through the glorious coastal landscape of County Mayo in Ireland is both a rage of anger at a world were profit is put before people and planet; and a celebration of the ordinary people who stand up and protest against this.

In the early 2000s Shell decided to exploit the Corrib Gas Field. Suddenly, local people found workmen and surveyors on their land and in their communities. They made extravagant promises about how Shell's plans would create jobs and bring investment to local communities. They dismissed concerns about the safety of the extremely high pressure gas pipelines that would be laid metres from homes and communities.

Many people welcomed the opportunity to raise some cash. Those who weren't willing to give up their land, or stop fishing the waters that they'd worked for decades, soon found that a shady coalition of politicians, priests, company representatives and the state would organise against them. In some cases this meant even wilder promises. In other cases it meant intimidation, like the couple who found Shell had set up cameras and searchlights pointing at their family home, while men in masks watched through binoculars.

The local campaign grew though, as serious concerns were raised about proposals, and fuelled in part by the violent tactics of the Irish police. Famously five protesters, the Rossport Five, went to jail for 94 days in 2005 for their refusal to abide by a court injunction to stop them protesting. The jailing made the local campaign national news.

Fred A. Wilcox's book is a moving study of the campaign. An American who left the US in disgust following the Vietnam War, he is surprised to find that Ireland too had problems of democracy, accountability and the role of multinational corporations. When socialists discuss social movements we often point out the way that the struggle itself transforms people. When engaged in any campaign, strike, protest movement or struggle people change as they learn new things about the world, their friends and neighbours, the state and the government.

Wilcox's book demonstrates exactly how this happens. In particular many participants are shocked by the violence of the police, and the shady security forces that threaten the activists. One fisherman interviewed has his boat attacked by armed, masked men. Others are badly beaten. Many other activists, who had seen local policemen as friends and neighbours are shocked by the violence used against their peaceful protests. There are obvious similarities with even more brutal events in Nigeria when critics of Shell's pipelines, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were killed in 1995.

Anyone who has been involved in any sort of campaign will recognise what takes place. I was, however, struck by more contemporary parallels - particularly with the movement against fracking where fossil fuel companies often make extravagant promises to local communities, which rarely materialise. The campaigns too are similar.

I don't quite agree with Wilcox's framework for explaining the behaviour of the police. He, rightly, points out that seemingly ordinary men can do awful things to their fellow human beings. But I don't think that the use of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment or Stanley Milgram's electric shock experiments are particularly useful here. The Stanford Experiment has been heavily discredited, including in this excellent piece, and I don't think should form the basis of any left analysis of the role of the police (or other forces of the state). Instead it's better to understand the police as being far from ordinary. They can commit violence on behalf of the state precisely because they've been turned into a force for doing this. The vicious violence of the Nazi Holocaust and US soldier's in Vietnam (two other examples used by Wilcox) arises, not from ordinary people, but from people who have taught (through the dehumanising reality of radicalised war) to see others as sub-human.

This criticism aside, the experience of the campaigners who quickly learn how the capitalist system protects and supports the behaviour of the fossil fuel capitalism, is brilliantly told by Wilcox. Socialists also often point out that it is in the struggle that people learn that revolution is both possible and necessary - and its encouraging to see that some of the activists make that connection.

Sadly Shell wasn't stopped by these campaigners. But Shell didn't win either, selling the plant off a few years later. Ever wary about upsetting shareholders and concerned of their image, the local campaign in County Mayo made Shell's continued presence untenable. There's a lot to learn from these men and women, and thanks to Fred Wilcox for telling their story.

Jack Lindsay - The Normans and their World

For those of us brought up on a particularly British history education the Normans were something that happened to England in 1066 and very little else. For many of us, the Normans were "the French" and everything thing that entailed. We were even lucky enough to go on a trip to Normandy which meant that we could learn more about this, through the Bayeux Tapestry, and that other staple of British history - the D-Day landings.

Jack Lindsay's book is aimed at rounding out the story of the Normans. In the foreward he points out that he wants to "cast the net more widely" and so he begins with the Viking background to the Normans (and of course the importance of this to the English lords that would be defeated in the 1060s) and the importance of the Normans elsewhere in the world - particularly the Crusades and the history of Southern Europe.

It's a laudable plan, and really should fill in the gaps in history that my school education left me with. But the problem is that the book itself is very difficult. Lindsay fills every page with a myriad of detail, jumps back and forth between chapters in a way that obscures the whole picture and cannot decide whether he is telling a historical story or giving an account of the economic basis to the transition from Anglo-Saxon society to Feudalism under the Normans. Sadly I was bored by much of the book, despite finding that Lindsay was trying to deal with interesting topics - there was simply too much detail.

Readers of this blog who are interested in these things will find the author more fascinating than the book. Jack Lindsay was a committed Communist who was awarded the "Soviet Order of the Badge of Honour" in 1967. He wrote about 169 books - novels, history, poetry and biography - and clearly had an incredible well rounded knowledge. The source material for The Normans is filled with primary and secondary materials that demonstrate very detailed research. Lindsay's politics come through in his economic analysis:

The considerable orderliness of Anglo-Norman feudalism was thus the result of working out and applying a particular aspect of the feudal system under which land was the prim source of value and the extraction of profit from it (and from other value-creating sources) was done by non-economic methods: that is, through the lord's physical power to evict, kill and damage.

Lindsay sees Norman society as a qualitative step upward from the early feudalism of Anglo-Saxon society, celebrating it's "advanced" nature over other areas:

Normandy was one of the most advanced areas where the close link between land-holding and military service had developed; only a few other areas such as Flanders or Barcelona could be compared with it. It has even been called the cradle of feudalism: a term which is applicable enough if we take it to mean that in it the full logical conclusions of military tenures were first worked out in precise terms.

And rightly Lindsay emphasises the violence at the heart of Norman feudalism, seeing this as a break with what has existed before.

Under feudalism the lord deals with the producer in an open way, taking products, money or services directly by means of his superior power, whether that power is expressed nakedly through his retainers or in a legal and political form through feudal courts.

Having recently read Rosamond Faith's The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England it was noticeable how Lindsay too shows that there is a continuity and break with the earlier kin-based systems. But I felt that Lindsay emphasises the violent physical break, rather than the combination of this and the way that the Normans developed and used existing relations that Faith explains. Lindsay saying that there was a "sudden leap into fief Feudalism".

These debates are interesting and Lindsay marshals much material. Perhaps other readers and historians will get more from this, but I felt over-whelmed and bored by the vast amount of material, the feeling that the author wasn't able to selectively decide what information was necessary and, sometimes, a strange selectivity about what was important or not (only a single sentence about the killing of Thomas Beckett for instance). There's a lot here, but may be not the best introduction to the period.

Related Reviews

Faith - The Moral Economy of the Countryside
Bloch - Feudal Society: The Growth of Ties of Dependence
Parker - The Northmen's Fury