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Sunday, April 19, 2026

Frederic F. Van de Water - Glory Hunter: A life of General Custer

When George Armstrong Custer was killed, alongside all of the men who rode alongside him, at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, he was catapulted into eternal fame, elevated to the position of American hero, and reinvented as a military genius of unsurpassed bravery. He needed to be reinvented, because George Armstrong Custer, was a headstrong, genocidal killer, who's inability to follow orders was only matched by his supreme self-belief. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the Little Big Horn, this was forgotten. A nation whose self-belief had been badly knocked during its centennial year needed a hero. The dead Custer was more useful than he was alive.

The principle guardian, and part inventor, of Custer's legacy was his beloved wife Elizabeth. Libby, as she was known, jealously protected Custer's legacy and made it near impossible for critical voices to be published. Men who knew him, possibly "stifled criticism for the sake of the woman who spent her widowhood glorifying a memory." Elizabeth Custer lived to until the ripe age of 91, dying only in 1933 nearly sixty years after her husband's death. As the author Frederic Van de Water frequently complains, she outlived nearly everyone who could shed light on the key events of Custer's life.

In 1934, almost immediately after her death de Water published this, the first critical review of Custer's life. It is damning. While modern scholarship would flesh out the real story of Custer's life, this first demolition of the legend and it is highly effective. The Custer that emerges from this story is one whose headstrong hunt for glory was never satisfied. That, combined with breathtaking arrogance, led to the death of himself, hundreds of troopers and a number of his immediate family. It also saw the murder of hundreds of Indigenous people during the 1870s and, it must be emphasised, the probably massacre of some of an early command of Custer's when he abandoned them to their fate during a one-sided attack on a Native American camp.

Heroic biographies of Custer portray him as a brave and natural soldier. The reality was the opposite. Van de Water, says "few embryo soldiers have shown less qualifications". The multiple failures, defiance of authority and limited academic success that marked his time as a trainee are detailed here. Had the US not been plunged into Civil War almost immediately after Custer's graduation it would have probably been an ignoble career. But Custer, being a superb horseman, and in charge of a force of Cavalry rode his luck through the War. On several occasions victory in battle was the only reason that Custer's insubordination did not lead to discipline. The Custer that comes through here is a disagreeable bully. He enjoyed practical jokes, though these are, in hindsight, rarely amusing. Van de Water notes that they required "for inspiration, the spectacle of an abashed or discomfited victim". Even during the advance to the Little Big Horn Custer's practical joke on a "friend" terrified the man who thought he was about to be murdered by a Souix attack.

Custer was easily bored, hunting for distractions and often found writing long letters to his beloved wife. Their times on the East Coast saw him enjoying the theatres and music, dinner parties and wealthy company. But his wife and other friends were loyal. Others were much more critical. On two occasions, once during the Civil War and once later in the "Indian Wars", troopers that Custer commanded rebelled and deserted. On the latter occasion, Custer's order to "bring in none alive" led to Court Martial and nearly a murder trial after some deserters were shot. The irony was that Custer himself was willing to desert his own command on occasion.

In 1868 Custer massacred the village of Black Kettle at the Washita River. Van de Water writes that:

When the hour of slaughter ended they counted in one hollow the bodies of seventeen Cheyenne warriors and in a ravine, thirty-eight. One hundred and three Indian men were slain, not counting women and children. Fifty-three squaws and children were captured. Many of these had been wounded... Indian lodges, supplies and munitions were gathered for burning.

The destruction of the Native American homes and supplies condemned the remaining survivors. But the problems for Custer stemmed less from this massacre and more from his abandonment of Major Elliot and nineteen men who had got separated from the main force to their deaths. Custer's decision to not go to their aid, despite warnings from other officers and the sound of gunfire. Many have seen divisions in the 7th Cavalry that may have contributed to Custer's failure in the Bighorn as stemming from this point. De Water disagrees. He argues that the rot started much earlier, and the events at Washita simply contributed to the divisions and were amplified by the parallels in 1876 when Benteen (who mourned Elliot "with unpremeditated candor") failed to march to join Custer. As an aside, these parallels, seem to me, to be unjustified. There is simply no way that Benteen could have relieved Custer during the latter battle.

Custer's supreme arrogance, self-belief and racism led to his death. His decision to divide his forces at the Little Big Horn, arose out of monstrous belief that the Cavalry would drive all foes ahead of them, and the idea that Native Americans were weak and in no way capable of resisting. Van de Water has no doubt:

He was a man to whome abasement was intolerable; to whome renown was essential. In pursuit of Glory, he had lynched enemy soldiers and inspired mutinies. The spring of 1876 had found him in deep disgrace.

In Custer's willing defiance of his final set of orders, Van de Water sees the culmination of a career of insubordination.

All his life he had been insubordinate. His career at the Academu; his blind recklessness in the war; his dispute with Sully; his disobedience in 1867 that led to his court martial and suspension; his squabble with Stanley, his scorn of Reno for not disobeying his orders and bringing the Sioux to battle - these trace the grove in which his nature ran.

Custer was "a hard-pressed egotist and a gambler. He planned to whip the Sioux alone." The opposite took place.

"Death made him immortal" writes Van de Water. This is undoubtably true. The biography of Custer has the air of a Greek tragedy to it. Custer's character traits from his childhood onward, his prejudices and lack of self control manifest at key moments through his life led to his death. This analysis makes for a satisfying biography and Van de Water tells it well. But the book doesn't really get to grips with what happened. Van de Water is too quick to blame everything on Custer:

At Washita, Custer's luck was at its zenith. At the Little Bighorn, at its nadir. Bad generalship won his first Indian fight and lost him his last.

This analysis negates the differences on the Native American side. At Washita it was a small force, surprised in awful conditions, and at night. In 1876 the Native Americans were organised, united, out in huge numbers and fresh from a victory against Terry at the Rosebud. Custer's arrogance took him into a battle he had no hope of winning. The victory was an inspiration, albeit a temporary one, for those resisting the United States.

Since its first publication there have been many other biographies of Custer. Frederic Van de Water's book finally broke the mold. It is a masterpiece of writing though naturally dated. For those that want the unheroic truth this is an excellent starting point.

Tuesday, April 14, 2026

Bryan D. Palmer - Colonialism & Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500-1890

Running through this, the first of a trilogy of books on Canada's history, is an emphasis on the way that Indigenous Peoples were dispossed of their land and power through the "reciprocal historical projects" of colonialism and capitalism. "Canada's story", Bryan D. Palmer writes, "has always involved the interface of colonialism and capitalism,even as the latter was not truly and unambiguously established". The expansion of colonial powers into what is now called Canada, and the development of capitalism, saw the "obliteration" of some Indigenous People, and the subjection of all to a "cultural genocide" which, "was thwarted by Ingenous resiliency, as continuous historically as was the process of dispossesion that First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people resisted".

This first volume of the trilogy traces this process. But it begins with what was lost. Palmer explores the First Nations life before colonialism. This was not a Utopia, but it was one with a completely different conception of property to that of Europeans. One of the first European settlers, Jazues Cartier was, according to Palmer, "unsettled" by his encounter with the "original inhabitants of the St. Lawrence Valley". He sais, "These people live as it were in a community of goods". A frightening thing for Europeans obsessed with money and natural resources as a source of wealth accumulation.

This "community of goods" meant that Europeans would struggle with their relations with First Nations. The seemingly free landscape was not unused or unvalued. First Nations expected compensation for the loss of resources, and were prepared to fight if they didn't get it.

But Palmer is also careful not to idolise pre-colonial Canada. He quotes an incredulous First Nations account of visiting Paris in 1649 shocked at the extreme poverty adjacent to the wealth of the Court. But he rejects a romantic view of Indigenous Peoples. They suffered "want and war" and sometimes "abhorred one another". But Palmer notes how this view often dominated early accounts of Canadian history (and some more recent ones):

Romanticized notions of the innate goodness of Indigenous people - the 'noble savage' or the ecological preservationist - are thus misplaced, the mirror image of stereotypical, ethnocentric denigrations... Both judgements should give rise to discerning skepticism.

But, he also points out that colonialism destroyed all the realities of Indigenous life, upsetting and transforming social and cultural relations and dividing, or increasing, divisions between groups. As he says:

A struggle for dominance in the fur trade pitted First Nations against one another in new, intensified ways. Commerical, commodified exchange relations with white traders played a significant role in an evolving state of conflic, undeniably exacerbated by the introduction of trade goods, European-based pathogens and technologies.

The Canadian state, which emerges out of the colonial conflict between Britain and France, and then that between Britain and the US, was shaped by white supremacy, racism and the acceptability of forced dispossession and genocide. Canada itself was "born a conservative, counter-revolutionary colony" shaped by wider forces of industrial development and colonial conflict. But it was also born in the era of Revolution and this meant that Canada's capitalist development had to be "mirrored... in a rhetoric of constitionalist, liberal-democratic rights".

The contradiction of Canada's supposed liberalism and its treatment of Indigenous Peoples and workers is a key part of Palmer's analysis in the second part of the book. The development of industrial Canada, based on its plentiful natural resources - land, wood, fish, coal and so on - combined with racist genocide and the brutal exploitation of workers shapes the country on the eve of the 20th century.

The early Canadian capitalist class also had to be wary of a different dynamic. As land became the "decisive" commodity European settlers could hope to break free of their proletarian chains. Indeed just as in the United States, capitalism's development depended on a section of people doing just that and in doing so "opened up and developed land, enhancing the value of the larger holds of the elite". Simultaneously this helped to discipline and further displace Indigenous Peoples. But the capitalist class were worried. Lord Goderich, the British colonial secretary, worried in 1831 that "without some division of labour, without a class of persons willing to work for wages, how can society be prevented from falling to a state of almost primitive rudeness, and how are the comforts and refinements of civilised life to be procured?"

It is tempting to think that the "primitive rudeness" that Lord Goderich feared was one of "community of goods", but what this illuminating paragraph actually shows is that the capitalist class knew that they had to fight to construct a society in their interests. It was, as Palmer notes, the story of English enclosures "all over again" but "in a colonial setting in which Indigenous displacement seemingly created land's availability". At the same time though the British state was terrified of losing control of its wealthy colony, and deliberately tried to hold back industrial development in order to keep Canada's reliance on Britain.

The book's final chapters trace how, in the aftermath of independence, the late 1800s in Canada were characterised by two parallel processes. The first was the further dispossesion of First Nations, including such brutal experiences as Residential Schools, as well as their resistance including the Métis rebellion in 1885. The second process was a massive wave of workers' resistance and trade union struggle which emerges from the development of a new industrial working class. The "Great Upheavel" of 1886 saw mass strikes and the ruling class feared revolution. But the failure of these struggles to break through partly lay in the inability of the struggles to connect. This reflects, Palmer argues, the "Canada's history of uneven capitalist development combined with its historically evolving colonialism" which structure the struggles differently. The tragedy was the failure of these two struggles to connect in significant ways. And while Palmer highlights the "faint indications" that "both challenges to capitalism and colonialism were nonetheless gravitating in directions that might feed into common struggles", he also notes:

Labour's uprising rarely espoused an unequivocal anti-capitalism to the same extent that the Métis-led war of resistance in the North-West categorically rejected colonialism.

Having said this, Palmer finishes his fantastic book on a positive note:

Canadians need not be confined in the shapes that colonialism and capitalism have hammered out for them, over centuries, on an anvil of developmental determination. Paths once taken can be reversed; choices advocated and refused might now well be embraced, adapted to new circumstances. And struggles long separated from one another can be brought into new and exhilarating alignment.

It's a fitting conclusion for a remarkable history that traces the tragedies and horror that mark the birth of Canada at the same time as celebrating the struggles and resistance that shaped the state. I look forward to the next two volumes which will no doubt show these processes continuing in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Elizabeth Gonzalez James - The Bullet Swallower

In 1895 bandit Antonio Sonora lives on the border between Mexico and Texas. Sonora came from a very wealthy landowning family, but fallen on intensely hardtimes. He, and his own family, live in a shack made from the materials of his ancestor's mansion. But finding himself completely out of options, drought destroying the local farmland he embarks with his brother, on a final attempt to make it rich - a daring robbery of a train carrying plunder from Mexico to the US.

After the robbery fails, it's a bloodthirsty and desperate fight against the Texas Rangers whose renowned brutality strikes fear into the Mexicans (and Native Americans) and who are happy to murder Sonora's family to try and flush him out. Thus begins Sonora's quest for retribution - path of revenge that requires him to sacrifice himself, but also his past and his family's future.

In 1964 Antonio's grandson is one of Mexico's most famous movie stars. One day a mysterious woman gives him a book which is a history of the Sonora family, in all its gory and violent detail. Jamie Sonaro decides to make a film that tells the story, and rescue his family from obscurity. In doing so, he encouters a mysterious, shadowy stranger who seems to have magical powers. This stranger has the power of life and death, surviving a scorpion bite, and bringing the crushed creature back to life. Perhaps he is the devil, or Death.

The two different timelines gradually become closer, as Jamie learners the truth about his grandfather, and we follow Antonio's story of revenge, redemption. The latter forms the core of the novel. Antonio's story is told through a series of set piece encounters - a cross between a Western and a road trip. He meets a series of characters including very delightfully described Englishman whose inherited wealth includes slave plantations. This character embarks on a trip with Antonio as an adventure, until the bandit admonishes him. This is real life for him, not a game. The conditions of poverty, war and hunger all around are not scenery. They're real.

Normally I find magical realism difficult to follow. But this unusual Western brings fantasy, magic and a realistic tale of a bandit trying to escape poverty through violent action to life. It's a lovely book. It's worth noting that it tells a very different story of the Texas Rangers to the heroic bravery of that depicted in Lonesome Dove. A useful antidote to that rewriting of history.

Thursday, April 09, 2026

Lois Phillips Hudson - The Bones of Plenty

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is probably the novel that most people associate with the Dustbowl of the 1930s. Lois Phillips Hudson's The Bones of Plenty was published nearly 25 years after Steinbeck's classic and bares comparison. It is set in North Dakota, and centres on the Custer farming family whose patriarch, George Armstrong Custer (named for the General). The struggles of the family, and in particular George's struggles with drought, storms and disease, make up a novel that marks the gradual decline and fall of the Custers and their community.

George spends his time criticising the government, the banks and his fellow community. He recognises that something fundamental has gone wrong. Big business has stripped the little producer down, the hardworking farmer has been undermined by politicans whose support has gone straight to grain speculators and big capitalists. His rage at the banks, the government and the capitalists is only matched by his antisemitic anger at the Jews he imagines are running the banks. It's a powerful example of the contradictions that can sit in the brains of men oppressed and exploited by an anonymous system.

Hudson fleshes out her narrative with stories of what's happening elsewhere, so of which she tells narrator style, and on other occasions tells through George and his wife Rachel's reading of newspapers and listening to the radio news. Bankruptchies destroy families, farms and communities. George obsesses over prices for grain, and makes tough calculations about his possible yields and finances. Maybe next year will be the time he makes it.

His eldest daughter Lucy is just reaching adolescence and her naive, hopeful dreams carry the novel. She's the thread that links disparate stories, the eyes through which we see the frailty of the Custer's wider community. She, alongside Rachel, are also the victims of George's uncontrolled, abusive anger. He wishes that Luch had been born a boy. She desperately prays that she will change overnight so that her father will like her more and she can work on the farm. He blames the government, the banks and everyone else for the unstoppable calamity.

The community does resist. George helps collectively to fight against the selling off of a neighbour's farm, someone brought low by the banks, but helped to survive by collective resistance and refusal to allow his home and farm to be auctioned. But there's not enough of it, and as the system sinks further, the end is on the horizon for George and Rachel's farm.

This is then the story of tens of thousands of others who found in the dustbowl the inherent contradiction of a capitalist model of farming clashing with ecological realities. It was the smallest people who suffered and the richest who stood to gain the most. The crisis would only be resolved through World War and massive state investment from governments. That was in the future. It doesn't help the Custers.

There is plenty more to this remarkable novel - the story of the drifters, community spirit and solidarity and the anger of those crushed by the system, but not quite losing all hope. Tragically it's a bit of a forgotten book - perhaps because it is so bleak. But it ought to be read more widely. It's got a lot to say to the 21st century world.

Saturday, April 04, 2026

George Sturt - The Wheelwright's Shop

From 1884 until 1920 George Sturt ran a Wheelwright's Shop in the small town of Farnham, Surrey in England. Sturt inherited the business from his father, who had in his turn got it from his father. The business was popular, successful and employed a variety of skilled craftsmen who made the wheels and structures that made up the various different types of wagons and carts that were central to the rural economy.

The Wheelwright's Shop is an account of those crafts, the business and the men who worked them. First published in 1923 it is a detailed discussion of the work, and the craft, but it is also an elegy to a vanishing world. Sturt was an educated young man when he took over the shop, and an admirer of Ruskin. His book bemoans the loss of skills and knowledge that was happening as mass production of components was replacing handmade work. Metal tyres from America, chains made by the
women chainmakers in Cradley Heath and axles and other metal goods from Birmingham. Sturt bemoans the loss of work, and the sharpening class divisions in the workplace, but he also understands that some of these improvements were, indeed, better. Mass production made for lighter parts, and stronger, but easier to move waggons.

At the heart of the book though is the labour and craft of the craftsmen in the shop. This is described in great detail. I fancy that readers who are familiar with carpentry or metalwork, or built vehicles and wheels in particular, will understand more of this than I. As a non-expert I was not disintrested, but I was frequently unable to follow the detail. That said I learnt much about how waggons, and in particular, the wheels were built. Particularly fascinating though is how Sturt shows that this knowledge was the product of decades, generations, of experience, knowledge and training. Sturt calls it the "skill of England, the experience of ages". There's a fascinating, and telling, account of a farmer who wanted a cheaper waggon and requested it had none of the fancy decoration on the wood. Of course this was possible, and the saved labour reduced costs, but it also meant the waggon was too heavy to be pulled and put too much strain on the horses. The decoration was less to improve the look of the vehicle, but a clever way of reducing weight while retaining strength.

My own lack of knowledge in these fields is mirrored by Sturt's position. As the owner and employer he had a basic grasp of most processes and assisted in them. But the deeper knowledge eluded him. As he says "how simple is coal-hewing, fiddling, dishing, digging, to the student of books!"

Perhaps for most readers today what will strike them is how clearly Sturt sees the transformation of work taking place in his own time. He writes that "Old England was passing away; villas were coming, the day of farm-waggons was done" and as the waggons were "done", so were the skills in making them. But crucially the transformation of labour was transforming workers and their communities. As he writes about his friend and employee, George Cook, an expert woodworker, he notes the differences:

Yet for all this, we were no longer on the old terms. I was not in touch, through him, with the quiet dignified country life of England and I was more of a capitalist. Each of us had slipped a little nearer to the ignominious class division of these presnt times - I to the employer's side, he to the disregarded workman's... From being one of a community of rustics, [Cook] was becoming more and more a mechanic - a cog in an industrial machine.

This said, Sturt does not over glorify the situation. His opening session discussions the discomfort, long hours, and cold of working in an unheated shop, getting up before dawn and braving the elements. More importantly however he understands that the transformations taking place as industrial capitalism sinks its teeth into the countryside are transforming the very nature of work. In Marxist terms, alienation is increasing. Workers were losing control of their product and the world that it was to be used in. Mass production has removed skills and separated workers' from the wider social and economic countryside. If the peasantry were driven, forcefully, from the land, their compatriots in small, local workshops, were being destroyed by market forces.

In modern conditions work is nothing like so tolerable as it was say thirty years ago; partly because there is more hurry in it, but largely because machinery has separated employers from employed and has robbed the latter of the sustaining delights which materials used to afford them. Work is less and less pleasant to do - unless, perhaps, for the engineer or the electrician.

Later he continues, "there ought to be a little fun in work, for the workman's sake".

This is all true, though readers must remind themselves that Sturt was the owner and empoloyer. The long hours and pay that his craftsmen received may not have been adequate at times. While Sturt was closer to his workers' than the bosses in Cradley Heath, he was still addressed as Mister and treated with respect purely for his position. Several of his workers, by his own admission, appear to have died in poverty.

What Sturt's book reminds us of, apart from the great transformation of agricultural production in the late 19th century and early 20th, is that work can be skillful, enjoyable and rewarding. Industrial capitalism has robbed us of the final dignities of that. But early capitalism was only slightly better. Until class society is finished with we will continue to suffer the indignities and frustrations of capitalist labour. A future socialist society will not return to the structures of labour recorded in Sturt's The Wheelwright's Shop. But it will restore workers to a place where they can labour with pride, and be properly compensated. Reading Sturt today is to remind ourselves of the past, but also to understand exactly what capitalism has taken from us.

Monday, March 30, 2026

Mahmood Mamdani - Neither Settler Nor Native: The making and unmaking of permanent minorities

I came across Mahmood Mamdani's work while researching for an article on settler colonialism. Mamdani is a key thinker of decolonialism and this book is a study of both the processes of colonialism and decolonialism - or the aftermath of colonial rule. It is a dense and intense work, wide ranging in its scope and sharp politically. In setting out his view, Mamdani contrasts the Ancient Roman method of colonialisation with the British Empire:

The Romans were content to rule peoples as they found them, but the British were not. In this sense nineteenth-century indirect rule turned out to be a far more ambitious project than direct rule had been: whereas direct rule aimed at civilising elites, indirect rule looked to impose a native subjectivity on the entire local population.

Mamdani explores this through a study of several different colonial experiences - the dispossesion and destruction of the Native Americans, the experience of Apartheid in South Africa and colonialism and independence in Sudan. Regarding the later he writes:

Colonial authorities did not have to tell Sudan's various peoples that they were different from each other - the people already knew that. They pracrtices different religions, spoke different languages, tended different crops and animls, and had different ideas about how to structure communities. They dressed, ate, amrried and died differently. Rather, what the British did was to invest these differences with political meaning. The British turned differences of culture into boundaries of authority and decided what power that authority would possess.

This classic form of divide and rule was enormously successful. The problem was that the divisions were cemented to such an extent that the post-colonial experience was shaped by them. In Sudan this was devastating. As Mamdani says, "colonialism made ethnic violence thinable because colonialism made ethnicity an important contour of public life". In Sudan, post-colonial violence, civil war and the eventual separation of South Sudan saw tens of thousands of lives lost, ruined or displaced.

In contrast, notes Mamdani, South Africa was able to transition away from Apartheid in a peaceful process. Why the difference? In Sudan, "everyone in control was committed to perpetating the colonial nightmare", but in South Africa "various groups learned to reject the political identities they had been given under colonialism." Through political mobilisation, "Afrikaners... came to relaise that they did not have to be members of a racist white national majority".

The problem is that this doesn't really hold. Apartheid was dismantled by the Black majority. The white minorty did not abandon racism. They just understood that they could not longer hold on to their systems of power and in this they were helped by concessions from the ANC to maintain the South African capitalist state. Civil war was a real possbility.

Mamdani continues:

In South Africa today there is little angst about the results of the Truth Reconcilation Commission. The focus is on the deficits... specifically [the] failure to achieve a more socially just country.... If the demand is that the end of apartheid should have delivered socila justice, then it ignores the political contxt of the transition. The political prerequisite for attaining social justice would have been a revolution, but this was not attainable given the balance of forces. There was instead a stalemate between forces supporting and opposing apartheid, which was broken through a compromise agreement.

But this outcome was not inevitable. What was underminded the possibility of revolution of the Black majorty working class was not the balance of forces, but political leadership. Revolution, like Civil War was a possibility. But by abandoning the struggle for the former, to avoid the latter, social inequality was baked in. There's a similar absence in Mamdani's treatment of Sudan. While its an exemplary discussion of the crises caused by colonial divisions, the story stops short of discussing the Sudanese Revolution. This is, in part, because of when the book was published. But that Revolution demonstrated a real possibility for uniting disparate groups. A different future was possible there too - as I wrote in my own book Socialism or Extinction.

These weaknesses undermine Mamdani's chapter on Israel/Palestine which ends up looking to a politically rejuvenated Israeli middle ground who can decolonise the Israeli state. Indeed Mamdani is critical of BDS as seeing this movement as undermining potential allies within the Israeli population. The problem is that these groups have demonstrated no desire to overthrow Israeli Apartheid. Indeed, mass protests and criticism of Netanyahu during the most recent genocide have failed to raise Palestinian solidarity in anyway. Israel, as Mamdani says, is a racist settler colonial power - liberation for the people of Palestine will come from the wider working class of region dismantling Israel and building a new state where Jews, Arabs and others can live together. This requires revolution. Mamdani says that "in place of the nation... we might imagine a new political community". But its not enough to imagine, one has to strategise how to get there. The process of "stripping away the nation" as Mamdani wants requires struggle and the way that the Israeli working class have become tied to the interests of the Israeli state (and by extenstion Western Imperialism) makes this process impossible. That state will need to be defeated, and wishing or imaging isn't enough.

These are harsh criticisms. Mamdani's book contains, however, much of interest to socialists. There's a lot of detail about the processes of colonialisation in the US, Sudan, Palestine and South Africa that shows how settler colonialism created and expanded differences to maintain colonial power. There's also some fascinating accounts of struggles against that. A chapter on the failure of de-Nazification in Germany post-WW2 is also particularly good at exposing the methods and hypocrisy of the United States. That said, I was left wanting, because Mamdani wasn't able to articulate a strategy for liberation or clearly identify the agency for that change.

Friday, March 27, 2026

Daniel Oberhaus - Extraterrestrial Languages

In some ways this book's title is a misnomer. There are no extraterrestrial languages. Or at least none that we yet know of. But Daniel Oberhaus has not written a scientific text teaching us to speak another language, rather this is a fascinating study of how we could communicate and, indeed, what communication might mean to aliens. Oberhaus begins with a useful historical introduction to the science of communicating with aliens. There are some early proposals that set the scene - plans to use mirrors in the Sahara or burn messages into forests to communicate with Mars - but these are background to show the evolution of the idea.

More important are the beginnings of serious attempts to communicate combined with the development of the science of understanding language and communication. Here Oberhaus takes the reader on a series of discussions about how we might communicate with intelligences that do not share our culture, biology or indeed references points. Many readers will be familiar with SF films or novels that show communication where the two alien species attempt to communicate around common knowledge. Maths is the normal starting point, and indeed this forms the basis for much of how such communications might happen. Oberhaus shows how messages can be used to use simple maths to build up communications teaching, for instance, counting, then logic and so on. But there is always a problem. What knowledge is common across the universe? Will aliens understand our maths? Is maths even a thing likely to be held in common? Oberhaus writes, while discussing the possible use of set theory and logic to establish common ground:

Axiomatic set theory and symbolic logic have come to dominate mathematics over the past century to the point htat it feels entirely natural to conceive of the order of the world in terms of sets and cognition in terms of symbolic logic. Yet this misses the cirtical transition from grounding metaphors, which can reasonably be assumed to be shared with extraterrestrial intelligences since they arise from direct experiences... to linking metaphors, which are the creative productions of human minds meant to deal with human experience. In other words, a very useful mathematical invention that meets the idiosyncratic needs of embodied human intellifence has been naturalised to the point that it is taken to be a trait of the universe itself.

There's a good example in the book. We might think physical understanding is a common ground. But what if we had communicated with aliens when our only understanding of the atom was Bohr's model and not the quantum models now favoured. Might a more advanced alien race have ignored us?

Oberhaus grapples mostly with the sciences of communication and languages. But there are some interesting moral points. He notes, for instance, criticism of the Pioneer plaques that only depicted humans who looked caucasian. The Voyager records were better, mixing languages and music from many cultures, but still displaying cultural limitations. Indeed none of these languages offered enough information to allow real communication or understanding to develop. Perhaps their greatest success would have been in terms of inspiring future scientists here on Earth.

Oberhaus also makes a further interesting point. When we communicate, "do we want to tell extraterrestrials the truth?" Indeed do we share the limitations of our civilisation or, as we have done so far, share "messages into space [that] hve been filtrered through rose-tinted glasses".

Realistically there is little chance that any historic messages to space, or indeed any ones in the near future will be received or answered. While I was not convinced by Oberhaus' arguments that other aliens may well share biological traits with us, and indeed DNA might not be unique, the bigger problem is that aliens are likely to be extremely rare. I suspect that most life in the universe will be some form of slime or bacteria. That said the scale of the universe is such that statistically there ought to be intelligences out there, that we might converse with. That is unlikely to happen. But the science of how we communicate, and this fascinating little book, are part of developing our own knowledge of ourselves and our universe. As Oberhaus says, "each message... is like a mirror that reflects the spirit of the age that crafted it".

Related Reviews

Rubenstein - Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race
Bell - The Interstellar Age

Monday, March 23, 2026

Anthony Trollope - Doctor Wortle's School

Dr Wortle’s School is a later one of the prolific novelist Anthony Trollope's books. It is also one of the shorter. This era, and type, of novel is not one that I often read and I picked it up because I came across a discussion of its plotline which piqued my interest. The novel is a surprisingly interesting discussion of Victorian morals. Or rather the pious and pompous attitudes of a particular class to those morals.

Doctor Wortle is a clergyman and headmaster of a small, private, rural boarding school. His staff includes Mr Peacocke, a teacher and an occasional preacher in the church. His wife, Mrs Peacock, is American and while they are nice people, there is a reticience to engage in the social life of the village, or that of the wider (and wealthier) parents of the students they look after. Early on in the book Trollope tells the reader that he will explain the reason and the reader can continue if they like.

It turns out that the Peacockes were married, but that Mrs Peacocke was already married in the United States, to an uncouth, abusive and alcoholic Colonel Lefroy. Mr Peacock feel in love with her while Lefroy and his brother, also a Colonel, are in the Confederate army. Nothing improper occurs, though it is clear the two fall for each other. On hearing that a Colonel Lefroy has been killed during the Civil War, Mr Peacocke travels to the South to learn which brother has died. On hearing from her brother that it is Mrs Lefory's husband he returns and marries her, making her Mrs Peacocke.

On discovering that her former husband was not actually killed, and finding themselves not actually married, the pair flee to England and Dr Wortle's school where they live as husband and wife. Guilt eats at the two of them. Living in sin like this is considered a major social, moral and personal failing, particularly for those who would teach children and preach in Church. But it is clear they love each other very much, and Mr Peacocke decides to tell Dr Wortle. Before this can happen, Lefroy arrives and breaks the news, scandalising the local population, shocking the gossips and leading to many students to be withdrawn from school.

The plot then follows Mr Peacocke as he returns to the US to find the truth.

The novel is of greatest interest because of the moral questions. Dr Wortle is the lynch pin of the story, and the reader now (and then) explores the ambiguity of the Peacocke's position through him. Wortle understands that the Peacockes love each other greatly, and feels that they are effectively married. He looks after them, offering Mrs Peacocke somewhere to live while her husband goes to the US. This scandalises people still further but Wortle, a brave, principled, if inflexible, soul stands firm.

Readers today will find it singularly unshocking. Had Mrs Peacocke had the right to divorce, nothing would have mattered. I suspect that the scandal that is depicted is true to life. Trollope offers his readership a slice of gossip, a slice of amusement and a slice of morals. What is love? What is marriage? What should these things matter?

But matter they did. Trollope has to offer his married, but not married, characters a way out - and of course the first husband is found to be dead so the Peacockes can marry again. There's not defying of Victorian morals, but there is a challenge to those who would dismiss people so easily. Trollope knows his readers and he knows he has to give the steam an escape valve.

As such this is a novel very much of its time. Nonetheless, Wortle does speak to a more modern audience. Do you stand by your friends and colleagues when the world is flinging mud? Do you make snap judgements? Do you care for society's morals?

The book is shorter than the more well known Trollope novels. On the other hand, it does feel padded out in places. There is a somewhat unnecessary subplot involving the Wortle's daughter and her betrothed. Perhaps Trollope was being paid by the page.

Nonetheless there is a lot here, dated though the moral questions are, its an insight to how a certain class of people in the 1880s thought about each other.