Brad Tyer - Opportunity, Montana

Early on in Brad Tyer's book about the town of Opportunity he makes a telling point about the brochures that advertise the tourist mecca of Montana. It is supposed to be an "otherworldly landscape filled with bears and wolves", but both those species and the iconic bison only survive because of direct and regular human intervention. Bison, for instance, are preserved mostly because they are good for eating. The point Tyer is making, is that Montana's nature is not natural, but an artifical construct.

The same is true of many of the rivers. Tyer is a canoeist. He relates to the landscape through the waterways he travels, and Montana's waterways have always been famous. Think of the flyfishing of the film (and story) A River Runs Through It. The film was made far away from the actual location, because that's not natural enough - too many industrial buildings and homes. The story ignores these too. But Montana's rivers have also had an important role in creating the United States. On them steamboats ferried the Seventh Cavalry to their ill-fated meeting with Sitting Bull's forces and, more importantly for the environment, boats moved the copper ore and mining materials in and out of the state. Some of the mineowners might have needed ships to bring in their profits.

The mines have also become repositories for pollution - heavy metals like arsenic and lead, and the muck that falls from the skies. Montana's mines made America, particularly the mines of Anaconda and Butte. But the poisonous waste had to go somewhere, and its ended up in tailings ponds and barely beneath the ground in what has become one of America's largest polluted areas - a superfund site that sucks in millions of dollars to create what is supposed to be a safe environment.

Opportunity is a tiny town, just outside Anaconda. It has become the tragic dumping ground for the legacy of nearly 100 years of copper mining. The people there have various diseases - likely caused by the pollution. There's been a campaign, on and off, by various people to clean it up. But many of the residents, tired of fighting, or worried about their pensions, aren't fighting back. Opportunity, Montana has become the dumping ground in order to preserve the wealthier and more tourist friendly parts of the state.

The Clark Fork River is supposedly being restored to it's "natural sate", but the millions of tons of toxic soil has to go somewhere. And like poor, working class towns from South America to China, Opportunity was chosen. It barely even got mentioned in the presentations about the work. 

Part personal memoir, part traveloge, Brad Tyer's book is an unusual look at the consequences of big business being allowed to get away with murder. The big mining companies made billions in profits, yet have been made to give a tiny percentage back to the communities they ravaged. They were happy to suck the life out of their workers' and kill the very earth around the state, yet they're barely accountable for the horror they unleashed.

Tyer's a great writer, and a decent journalist. He's good with people, and his interviews with locals, industry insiders and environmentalists are fascinating. He's a touch to cynical though - perhaps because he's seen it all go to hell before. I'd like to think we can make the bastards pay. Still, this is a great book for opening the curtain on the real Montana, which I finished a few short hours before flying there to see Butte, Anaconda and the rest.

Related Reviews

Punke - Fire and Brimstone
Spence - Montana: A History

James Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn

James Donovan's A Terrible Glory is widely described as the definitive account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It certainly is a readable account that does its best to use first hand accounts to tell the story of the battle as clearly and vividly as possible. Unfortunately it feels as an account of the US Cavalry. The book suffers greatly from a lack of the Native American perspective - not just on the battle itself, but on the context for the battle. 

Given the annilation of the men with Custer at the end, there is a natural tendency for the author to focus on the experiences of the survivors. As in many other histories of the Little Big Horn, this means that historians and authors tend to tell the story of the commands of Reno and Benteen. Donovan does this well, giving a real sense of how the troops there, a few miles from Custer's position, had little understanding of what had happened, and their terrifying nights defending their position while being unsure what had happened to Custer's force.

Donovan places pride of place to Benteen here. Benteen, hated by Custer, is built up here as a brave tactician, able to step in when Reno fails and loses control. Benteen's ability to organise the defence and a fighting retreat after Weir's unsuccessful attempt to reach Custer probably saved the companies on the hill. Reno himself is depicted as a coward and a drunk, though Donovan is perhaps less critical that other historians of the man himself. There's no doubt that Reno's initial charge was met by a heavy force, and could not have survived a full scale attack on the Native American village. In the aftermath of that collapse, Benteen could save the men, but there was an utter failure of collective leadership. The real failure of command however, was Custer.

Custer's luck ran out at the Bighorn. It is noticeable that many of those who survived with Reno (thanks to Benteen) assumed that Custer must have survived - he was considered unkillable. But that reputation was built on luck itself. Indeed what's really noticeable in contemporary accounts such as Donovan's is that the massacre of the Seventh Cavalry took place because Custer's command decisions were frequently made on the basis of his personal animosity and factional fighting in the regiment. Ironically, Custer took his friends and family with him, leaving his antagonists with Reno. They're the ones who lived.

Despite starting decades before, James Donovan's book is focused on the battle to the exculsion of much interesting contemporary material and suffers from a lack of Native American material and voices. It is interesting to compare and contrast the account of the Little Bighorn told in Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America. Which is entirely from the perspective of the Lakota forces on the day. Donovan's book would have been much stronger had it used this approach alongside the well worn tale from the Cavalry's side.

In the final third of the book Donovan tells the story of the recriminations and blame after the battle. Here the reader is likely to be disappointed. The survivors banded together, for the good of the regiment, and everyone failed to learn any lessons. Many of those who survived however suffered badly - what we would today call PTSD led many to drink, and tragic deaths. The Native Americans celebrated, but were rounded up and destroyed by a beligerent US and so it is right that Donovan finishes with the horror of Wounded Knee - making it clear how the US Army saw this massacre of men, women and children as revenge for the Custer's death. 

A Terrible Glory is a readable account of the Little Bighorn fight. But readers will likely find themselves wanting more than James Donovan offers here. Readers looking for a first book about this subject might find Nathanel Philbrick's The Last Stand a better introduction.

Related Reviews

Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
Estes - Our History is the Future
Philbrick - The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties

Peter Blickle - Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth Century Germany

What was the Reformation? A simple explanation would be that it was the movement of reform inititated within the Catholic Church by Martin Luther's 1517 criticisms of the Church's sale of indulegences. A movement of Reform that led to a schism and essentially resulted in two distinct branches of Christianity. None of this is inaccurate. But it doesn't really explain what the Reformation was in terms of a movement. How did it manifest itself and propagate, and why did it actually take off in 1517?

Today the historian Peter Blickle is best remembered (when he is remembered at all) for his controversial description of the German Peasants' War as a "Revolution of the Common Man". His book Communal Reformation takes the analysis he laid out earlier and applies it to the Reformation. What results is a much bigger imaginging of these periods of rebellion and reform as an interlinked, and reinforcing process. In particular he makes the strong argument that the Reformation could not have taken place without a longer historical process of class struggle that culminates in the Peasants' War, and indeed the Peasants' War fundamentally transforms the Reformation itself.

For Blickle, it was the struggle of "communal organistation" for self-identity and emancipation that led the lowest orders to drive forward change in town and country. As he writes, "with the help of communal organisation - and only in this way - did peasants and the burghers learn to say no, ro protest, to question the demands of lordship and the claims of the authorities. The protest of the faithful against the church in Rome was rehearsed in the protest of the subjects against their lords."

This insight is important. It makes the Reformation and extension, as well as an expression, of the class struggle against the ruling orders. Obviously it was intensely ideological. The criticisms of the Church unleashed by Luther were taken up and extended into criticisms of the system itself, as well as the established church. But as Blickle says "the common people... developed concepts of the reofrmation that were identical to their basic principles". He continues:

The common people in country and city listened to the reformers when they talked about the people in country and citiy and listened to the reformers when they talked about the realisation of ecclesia, they listened to the southern German reofmrers when they talked about the realisation of the hospel, but they wer enot merely imitators. Their struggle for the Christian Republic was a the qualitative leap from the throry of the intellectuals, who shied away from responsiblity, to the concrete day-to-day practice of the ocmmon peple. And this practice was not nourished by religious faith; tather, its explanation lies in the acutal living conditions, in the village and the city, in the political culture of the late Middle Ages.

These practical demands manifested in all sorts of ways, but particulary in what I would call a democratic impulse to extend control over aspects of village life, particularly the role of priests who were those who propogated the gospel, as well as the ruling classes' ideas. One revealing example of this comes from the Franconian village of Wendelstein, in late 1524, the earliest time of the peasant uprising. The community told their priest his duties and role:

Thus we shall not recognise you as a lord, but simply as a servant of the parish. You do not command us, but we command you. And we order you henceforth faithfully to preach to us the gospel and the Word of God, pure and honest in accordance with the truth (untarnished and unobscured by human doctrine).

The demand for communities to elect their own pastors or priests, was a central part of the Reformation, and one supported by Luther at the start. It was the "essence" says Blickle, of the peasant conception of the reformation. But even in this early period of the Peasant War one gets a sense of a much more powerful impulse coming from the community. It certainly feels like a group of people seeing their priest as an instrument of their community, not an authority figure to be obeyed at any cost. It is, as Blickle points out, precisely why Luther's Reformation buckled and strained under the enormous impact of the Peasant War, and why the Reformation became, after 1525, a Reformation of the princes and not the masses. And also why the slaughter of the peasants by the nobility at the end of the Uprising saw the "end of the Reformation in the countryside". The people who carried the Reformation through were broken and destroyed in revenge for taking it too far. Blickle argues that this was driven through to the fullest extent:

Peasants and burghers voiced the demand - an uncompromising demand - that authority submit itself to the gospel. All incidents of rebelliousness in city and countryside, from the sacking of monasteries by the peasants to the expulsion of recalcitrantly Catholic councillors by the burghers, had no other purpose than to push through this demand. Submission to the gospel became the stamp of legitimacy. Lordship as such meant nothing... The communal reformation posed a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of political authority.. This was a significant by-product of the communal reformation.... the rebellions in city and countryside were also much more fundamental and deep reaching than ever before... Where the authorities were deaf to the gospel, peasants' and burghers' reformations could merge into a revolutionary movement.

But what does "communal" and "community" mean in this context? Here Blickle is a little unclear. Firstly it is not clear to me that he includes women in this. He explores the meaning of "community" (Germeinde in German) as it is reflected by Luther - the "Christian community". But what I am interested in is how does this manifest itself on the ground. What was the community of Wendelstein who so admonished their new priest in 1524? Note that it included the mayor. Blickle explores how groups of leaders were selected and chosen from within the village/town to represent, decide and collective approach their lords. But this was not democracy in a mass sense. The "community" that Blickle argues drives the Reformation forward "had no real place in the political structure o f estates or their theoretical underpinnings". But the Reformation gave it a "theological justification". 

Essentially "community" for Blickle means all the people in a village or town who acted and lived together, and shared common interests - expressed he says "in the analogous uses in 'common Christendom' and 'common weal'." Its nebulosity comes, I think, from Blickle's particular interpretation of "common man" which he uses as "a general term for townsmen and villagers". But did not include "male and female servants, mercenaries, beggars and vagrants". It is a class term, but only by exclusion, "above the common man were the lords, lay and clerical, and below him were the lower social classes and those groups entirely ouside the hierarchy of social estates." It was, Blickle says, by the later half of the sixteenth century, a term interchangeable with "peasant" and "subject". It is noteworthy that never discusses whether or not "Common Men" includes women.

Does this help us understand the Reformation and the Peasant War? I think it does, in as much as we have to recognise the difficulties of understanding rural peasant communities as essentially being an amorphous mass. Marx wrote that the French peasantry was a "simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes". Its a helpful, if rude, metaphor, that recognises that the peasantry was a varied collection of wealthier and poorer households.

The differences between these peasants in wealth and consequent class interests would plague latter day revolutionaries from Marx to Lenin. But in the sixteenth century, these interests were close enough not to matter. To discuss a Communal Reformation and Revolution then, is to recognise that the vast majority of the subject classes in Germany at the time, had a collective interest in breaking the hold of the Catholic Church and fighting for control over their own villages and their wider society. It was a powerful movement that terrified the older order and those whose interests were tied up with the status quo. It explains why the enemies of the peasantry who slaughtered them on the fields of Böblingen and Frankenhausen, were from both sides of the Reformation debate.

As I wrote in my review of his book on the Peasants' War, Blickle's ambguity over the "Common Man" means that he has an ambguity over the nature of revolution itself. Nonetheless the insights in Communal Reformation give us a real sense of the Reformation being a social movement driven from below, whose initators struggled to control until they broke from it and forced through a Reformation from above.

Related Reviews

Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Pascal - The Social Basis of the German Reformation
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Engels - The Peasant War in Germany

Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

Best known today from the Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt film, Legends of the Fall was Jim Harrison's breakthrough collection of three novellas. The first story, Revenge, is an intricate tale of a man whose affair with the beautiful wife of a Mexican gangster goes badly wrong. Cochran wakes up after being rescued by a Mexican worker who found him in the desert. He's been very badly beaten and would surely have died. Recovering anonymously, he plots revenge against the gangster who has submitted his wife, and Cochran's lover, to the most unspeakable of punishments. The story is well told, tense and unexpected - even if the revenge relies on Cochran having just enough unlikely contacts with wealth and power that seems likely.

Much better is the second story, The Man Who Gave Up His Name which follows Nordstrom from his lacklustre time in college through twenty years of marriage and divorce, while he makes his fortune in business. It is really the story of Nordstrom's growing awareness that there is more to life than money, and that defining himself by wealth is inadequate. But it is also the story of wealthy men and their mid-life crises, and overcoming your inhibitions. Nordstrom, despite, rather than because of his wealth gets a lot of sex. That too is his awakening. I was prepared to dismiss this story as the fantasies of upper middle class mid-life crises, but I really liked the ending and Nordstrom's character arc.

But most people will read this collection for Legends of the Fall. The length of the book and the film are incomparable. The film is much more sweeping and grandoise, even if the story is essentially identical. What is different about the book is the fleshing out of characters. The Montana ranchers are much more buffeted by world history than in the film. Brad Pitt's character is decidedly darker, and their mother is not dead, but living a bohemian life abroad. Global events, like the Russian Revolution are more prominent, as are less well known, but important ones. Pitt's character's capitalist brother is overjoyed when the IWW leader Frank Little is lynched in Butte (though Little isn't named). Russia hangs over the characters in the novella unlike in the film - their mother even has an affair with the socialist journalist John Reed.

The three stories all have some common themes, though they are not at all linked. Montana gets a couple of mentions in the first two stories, and is the setting for the third. But all the stories centre of the lives of strong willed, powerful and usually wealthy men who experience loss of lovers and friends. There's also a common theme of violence - the men all seem to be able to kill and bury bodies in the wilderness with impunity.

Jim Harrison's style needs to be experienced too. It's clipped and free of waffle. Legends of the Fall in particular reads like a film script already. The other two stories would have also made fine films, though perhaps less accessible.

Hamza Hamouchene & Katie Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region

About twenty years ago me, and a large number of other activists, attended an environmental conference in London. One of the workshops at the event included a presentation on DesertTec, a plan to produce vast quantities of energy from solar power by covering large areas of the Sahara desert in soal panels. I think it is fair to say that at the time, myself, and the rest of the activists there, where impressed with this technical solution to the transition away from fossil fuels. Criticism at the time focused on how nation states, and capitalist interests, would prevent this happening.

But since then the work of activists and scholars, including the authors and editors of this important book, have taught activists like myself to think about things differently. What we were essentially told in that seminar was an old lie - that large parts of Africa are essentially empty, ripe for use by the developed world, and in doing this, some wealth might well trickle down into local economies who could use it to improve their situation. It is an old lie, and its shameful that we fell for it then. Today the environmental movement today is much more aware of the need for Climate Justice in the Global South, but there is still much work to do, and this book is an important contribution.

The Arab Region, to use the name from this books title, is simultaneously the origin of the vast majority of the oil that is helping cook the planet, and one of the places where climate change is already causing enormous suffering for ordinary people. But, as this important book explains, the people of the region are not passive victims. They are people who can, and are, fighting for an alternative sustainable future while, at the same time "the Gulf countries are working to ensure they remain at the centre of the global energy regime".

The contributing authors' essays approach this conundrum in various ways by looking at various different countries and experiences. Most essays focus on different aspects of the energy question. These explore a common contradication - that states in the Middle East and North Africa have enormous potential for renewable energy, while frequently relying for their economic existence on fossil fuels. It's a contradication easily exploited by the energy multinationals. This is a point made by Hamza Hamouchene in his discussion on "green" hydrogen in North Africa:

The drive for green hydrogen and the push for a hydrigen economy has already gained support from major European oil and gas companies, which see it as a back door to the continuation of their operations, with hydrogen being extracted from fossil gas (the production of grey and blue hydrogen). It is thus becoming clear that the fosssil fuel industry wants to preserve the existing natural gas and pipeline infrastructure.

He concludes, "it is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move towards renewable energy is to be welcomed and that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, is worthwhile." The problem is, as he points out, not fossil fuels bbut "their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine."

The Arab Region has, of course, been the victim of colonial history and imperialism. The ongoing geo-political reality of this situation means that any transition will, unless capitalism is challenged, "maintain the same practices of dispossession and exploitation that currently prevail, reproducing injustices and deepeing socioeconomig exclusion". Before we agree to such projects, we need to question who, what and why they are being done. With this in mind Hamouchene cautions a younger me about DesertTec!: 

This Desertec vision lends itself to the agenda of consolidating fortress Europe and expanding an inhuman regime of border imperialism, while trying to tap into the cheap energy potential of North Africa, which also relies on undervalued and disciplined labour.

Similarly, writing on energy in Sudan, Razaz H. Basheir and Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman, note that the current plan for energy there "relies on the full and unconditional adoption of neoliberal reforms dictated by international financial institutions. 

A second aspect to this, is that various regimes in the region are able to use the potential for renewable energy to "greenwash" their existence. Look at how Egypt and the UAE hosted COP27 and COP28 for this reason. But in one of the strongest chapters in the book Manal Shqair explores this with a timely look at the case of Israel. "Israel", she writes,

has always depicted itself as a dry coutnry which, despite this, and unlike its Arab neighbours, has developed the tecnology needed to efficiently manage its scarce water resources and mitigate the climate crisis... According to this narrative... Israel alwasys seeks to put its technology at the service of its prached neighbour Jordan.

Israel and Jordan's agreement to swop water for renewable energy seems then like a perfect match. But it has two consequences. Firstly it legitimises the settler colonial state, and secondly, it forces Jordan to rely on imported fossil fuel, because it is locked into an agreement with Israel to send energy over for water desalination. 

Shqair explores how Israel has stolen land, water and other natural resources from the Palestinians, and used these to strengthen its own hand. She concludes: 

The dehumanisation of the colonised, and the complicity of Arab states in this, are greenwashed by the EU and Israel as they collaborate in what is portrayed as a transition to a greener future and a lower-carbon economy.

Many authors however emphasise that the people of the region are not passive in the face of this inequality. There are some remarkable accounts of struggle against governments and multinationals against projects that destroy land and displace people, or for more equitable and just use of resources. In an important chapter on the neglected subject of agriculture in North Africa, Saker El Nour writes on the importance of "pressure from below, infoprmed by the needs and aspirations of small-scale farmers, peasants and farm workers, who remain indispensable in a just transition in the region and beyond". Similarly in an account of mining and renewable energy in Morocco, Karen Rignall writes that the "resource conflicts" often allow communities to "imagine and experiment with a different kind of politics or approach to rural governance. This new imaginary can be considered an emergent politics of the commons." She cautions that those arguing for "just transition" cannot ignore these inputs and ideas, and impose a "predetermined frame of analysis" or crutially tries to substitute existing social movements.

This review can only touch on a few of the articles. But running through all the chapters are two main themes. The first of which is that existing strategies for energy and sustainable transitions are trapped by the logic of a global capitalist system, that sees the region as crucial to the continued accumulation of capital, primarily in the Global North (though China is increasingly imposing its own interests). Thus the interests of the USA and Europe and the fossil fuel corporations that are so closely tied to them, tend to shape what governments across the Middle East and North Africa are planning. This distorts things in a way that rarely offers anything to the mass of the local populations, and in some cases, actively destroys their lives through pollution and displacement. Indeed, the greenwashing associated with energy plans actively empowers the worst states in the region. So Jawad Moustakbal is surely right to conclude about Morocco, in a way that could be applied across the region:

There will be no just transition as long as the energy sector remains under the control of foreign transational companies and a local ruling elite that is free to plunder the state and generate as much profit as it wishes, within a culrutre of authoritarianism and nepotism. The debt system and PPPs are a major obstacle to any model of popular sovereignty, including energy sovereignty.

But there is something else that runs through the book - this is the potential for popular revolt. While few chapters explore the "Arab Spring" in detail, the book carries with it a sense that mass radical change is necessary and possible. As Christian Henderseon concludes the book:

The pressures that led to the Arab revolutions of 2010 and 2011 have not been resolved; deep structural reconfiguration is still needed. It is not too early to foresee how these quandaries will develop but the Guld states are not immune from popular calls for democarcy, equity and redistribution that define the just transition.

I would go further. Without the sort of mass struggles that brought down dictators and rulers across the region, and without those struggles developing into popular movements for democratic control of the economy, we won't see the sort of transition that the region, and the world, desperately needs.

Dismantling Green Colonialism is probably one of the most important books published on climate justice this year. Every activist should try and read it, to learn more about the realities of the Arab Region, the barriers to change and the movements trying to shape a sustainable future.

Recommended read: Interview with Hamza Hamouchene about the book

Related Reviews

Alexander - 'Revolution is the Choice of the People': Crisis & Revolt in the Middle East & North Africa
Alexander & Bassiouny - Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers & the Egyptian Revolution
Ayeb & Bush - Food Insecurity & Revolution in the Middle East & North Africa
El-Mahdi & Philip Marfleet - Egypt: The Moment of Change
Shenker - The Egyptians: A Radical Story

Michael Punke - Fire and Brimstone

In early June 1917, one of the most horrific mining disasters in history took place near Butte, Montana in the United States. The Granite/Speculator mine was one of the most profitable mines in the world, bringing millions of dollars in revenue from the extraction of copper. At the time the industry was riding high as copper was in heavy demand for munitions. Ironically, the immediate cause of the disaster was as fire started accidently by workers installing a new sprinkler system into the mine to improve safety. Within a few minutes the fire was out of control and hundreds of lives were in danger.

Michael Punke's account of this disaster follows the accident almost minute by minute, from the initial accident to the spread of the fire and the attempts by various heroic individuals to warn and help people out. It is a horrible story, told well and with an eye on the human side of events. Punke draws out the lives of the individuals trapped, the heroism and the aftermath. This was a international immigrant workforce - the men trapped below, and their families above, came from many different heritages, and Punke gives a real sense of how the colonial US was built by workers from across the world.

However Punke does not simply tell the story of the mine disaster. He places it in the context of rising US capitalism and the extractivism that went alonside it. The copper from Butte didn't just fuel imperialist war, it was used to literarily connect America through  the telegraph and electric networks. A small number of "copper barons" enclosed almost all the profit from the miners' labour and grew fabulously wealthy. The "war" between these barons to control the mines was often a physical one, but it was also a war that left death, environmental destruction and devestation behind as well. Today, Anaconda and Butte are still horribly scarred by the ecological legacy of the mines and their poison.

So Punke frames the story of the disaster in the wider rise of extractivist capitalism, and the battles it caused. Some of these are the war between the "band of brothers", but most interesting are those of the miners' and associated industrial workers of Butte, who fought for a bigger share of the profits and better health and safety. In the aftermath of the disaster, tens of thousands of workers' struck - forming radical unions that broke from the traditional unions that were every much tied to the company. These radical unions led a general strike in the area, that briefly pushed the mining companies onto the back foot. However the mine bosses were experienced enough to "divide and rule" the different sections, and miners had to fight alone. The bosses also resorted to violence - they killed the most radical leader of the IWW in the area, Frank Little, lynching him and threatening other radicals - which helped break the strike movement.

The aftermath of the disaster was marked by countrywide shock and horror, but little lasting change for the miners. While some concessions were wrested from the bosses, mostly things carried on. Punke finishes the story by telling what happened to Butte and Anaconda later in the 20th century, as the industry faltered and collapsed in the area, leaving unemployment and poverty in its wake. The powerful mining companies whose wealth had allowed them unprecedented influence in Montana and national politics, were eclipsed. The workers' were forgotten.

Punke's book is an excellent overview of these events and the trajectory of Montana's mining. But he doesn't really have the politics to tell the story of the mineworkers' properly. For Punke Butte was trapped between the radicals and the bosses. Unfortunately the only people who really had a vision for real change were the radicals, but they are dismissed as merely part of the story. Punke's book falls back on a semimystical idea that Butte's inhabitants always have "hope" which should see them through. But the hope for a better world, as the miners' of 1917 really knew, only comes from struggle. In 1917 these ideas were not abstract - the Russian Revolution was in progress, and workers' were well aware of events. Hope, on it's own, is not enough. Nonetheless, Michael Punke's Fire and Brimstone is a good overview of a crucial period of US history, little known outside this part of Montana and not well enough known outside the country. A good starting place.

Related Reviews

Spence - Montana: A History
Lause - The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West
Carlisle - Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America

Stephen Baxter - Raft

Stephen Baxter's Raft was first published in 1991 but it bears the imprint of an earlier generation of science fiction which made science and technology the focus of the story and world building, rather than personal characters and plot. That said, Baxter's universe is certainly unique. It is set among the descendents of humans who inadvertantly entered an alternate universe where the gravitational force is much stronger. This means that massive structures cannot exist, there are powerful localised forces - in this world humans could attract each other quite literarily - and planets do not exist. Stars are tiny, and have brief lives. 

Most humans live on the raft, which is inside a nebula of breathable air. Some miners live separately, a symbiotic relationship with the raft which seas them mining burnt out stars for metal to be traded to the raft in exchange for food. There are lifeforms that travel through the nebula, and even an exile planet of, well, you'll have to see.

The plot mostly derives from the interactions between these three planets as there is a growing realisation that the nebula is dying. Rees, a miner, comes to this realisation and stows away on a transport tree to get to the raft, where he swiftly proves his scientific ability. The Raft is a technocracy - ruled by scientists who protect and hoard the knowledge of the old spacecraft - its books and machinery, to carefully manage the human population size and share out its limited resources.

Except such sharing isn't equal, and the scientists are resented and hated by small groups of rebels - who eventually, well, rebel. The ensuing revolution is the scene for the end of the novel. Not plot spoilers here.

The problem is that Raft feels like novel that only exists to discuss the universe building. But on closer examination there are some bigger problems. The plot hinges on the role of science and technology, and Baxter appears to be saying that the only scientists are those who are dispassionate and clever enough to run society. In an era when populist politicians and rightwingers are sowing distrust at science and experts, it can feel tempting to support this thesis. But surely the problem with the raft is not the ignorant masses and the clever scientists - it is the material limitations of the society that mean the future is only getting worse. Baxter's only idea in this is that the scientists - through their dispassionate, all seeing knowledge - have the only answers. The masses are ignorant fools who disrupt the natural hierarchy.

It is, sadly, all to superficial. Scientists aren't the best rulers based on their knowledge. It would have been a far better story had Stephen Baxter explored these themes in greater depth and tried to really interrogate what it is about the interaction between society and environment that can produce progress or collapse. Sadly Raft doesn't do the context justice.

Related Reviews

Le Guin - The Word for World is Forest
Tchaikovsky - Ironclads
Neuvel - Until the Last of Me
Ashley - The End of the World: and Other Catastrophes

Ivan Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

Ivan Doig's book is, superficially, what might be described as a memoir or autobiography. It covers, for instance, Doig's life in part of Western Montana known for the toughness of its soil and the difficulties it presents for farmers and cattle producers. Hard winters, relentlessly hot and dry summers and soil that barely produces enough food for cows or sheep. Doig grew up with his father - his mother died when he was six, and much of the book covers the story of how his father, like the generations before him - almost fought the land to survive. Doig relates the stories of the drinking dens in White Springs where his Dad sought relief, the endless stream of ranchs that they worked on - the horses, cows, chickens and cattle that kept them alive with food or payment. Doig tells how he goes to school, but learns on the ranch, gets work, more work, different work and then eventually breaks out into writing and college.

There are some great set piece descriptions - looking after sheep in the snow, and the heat. But if that were the only thing about this book it would be interesting enough - and Doig's writing is wonderful enough to draw the reader into the minutiae of life, the hardships and the jokes, like countless other memoirs of life in agricultural communities.

But what makes This House of Sky stand out are two other aspects. Doig's love for the landscape of Montana and the way he shows how life is tied up with the very soil, water and mountains. The fight to make a living is a fight to be human. Secondly, and what makes the book truely special, is that this is a book about love - the love children have for a deceased parent, for a father who fights for them even if he cannot articulate it, and for those other friends, family and community who make us all the individuals we are. Particularly, in Doig's case, this is about his father and his grandmother (on his mother's side) - the latter a singularly independent woman whose life on the prarie began when her grandfather arrived as an immigrant and worked to shape the land for a slice of its bounty. But who, though losing her family and her daughter, eventually becomes a simply inspiring woman, who gives her everything for Doig.

There's no real way to describe This House of Sky that does it justice. If you're heading out to Montana, it is, perhaps, one of the great books to read about the state. I suspect it will also be a gateway to Doig's novels.

Related Reviews

Spence - Montana: A History
Carlisle - Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America
Lause - The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West

Tom Scott - Freiburg and the Breisgau: Town-Country relations in the age of Reformation and Peasants' War

Tom Scott was one of the great historians of German history in, as the subtitle to Freiburg and the Breisgau says, the age of Reformation and the Peasants' War. This book is what might be called a microhistory, studying the detailed interactions between the city of Freiburg and the towns and villages in its rural hinterland. It charts the rise and fall of the city, through the interactions with its surroundings and the struggles within the city itself. 

What quickly becomes clear is that Freiburg's ruling class see the surrounding region as a place to strengthen their own wealth and power. It is a symbiotic relationship, but more of a parasitical one - with the villages and towns constantly striving against onerous taxes and obligations. Of course, this takes place within the exploitative fedual relationships between local rulers as well - and, naturally, the peasantry and lower classes everywhere come of worst. Within Freiburg different factions compete as well. In particular there's an ongoing struggle between nobles, merchants and guilds for power on the ruling council (the guilds "effectively seized control in the later half of the 15th century). Scott details these struggles through the 14th and 15th century in detail - its not for the faint hearted - and I was left amazed at the detailed knowledge he had of history through the archival material. 

As the economy gradually began to change this impacted upon the nature of the town's leadership. As Scott says, "as the continuing disappearance of nobles and merchants more or less forced the guilds to assume greater responsiblity... By 1490 the thirty members of the full council comprised six nobles, and twelve guildmasters, and twelve additioanl councillors from the guilds". This, however, did not represent democratic government, but wealth. 

The relationship between Freiburg and the Breisgau is characterised as by Scott as a conflict between city and hinterland. In fact Scott says that the relationship is better understood as that between a "civic lord bent upon extracting maximum economic and political advantage from its rural dependecies". This meant that in the rebellions of the peasantry that characterised the early 16th century, Freiburg found that the inhabitants of the Breisgau never rallied to the town, and indeed, he argues, they were entirely almost directly opposed. This "lasting disaffection" Scott argues, meant that the Peasant War in the region was experienced, not as class war, but as town against country.

When it comes to the Peasant War, and indeed the preceeding Bunschuh rebellions, Scott argues that the experience undermines Peter Blickle's thesis of the Peasant War being a "Revolution of the Common Man". Scott argues that the label "Revolution" doesn't fit, and that the Common Man thesis - the idea that the rebellion was an alliance of the commoners against the ruling class is undermined by the experience of Freiburg where the separation between town and country remained fixed.

I am not convinced by Scott's argument here. In many places there were significant allegiances made between town and country, and it does seem that Freiburg is a special case. Secondly I don't read Blickle's argument as one specific to relations between urban and non-urban areas. The variety of people making up the "Common Men" existed across Germany, and across the Breisgau. That's not to say there weren't differences - as Scott himself acknowledges - between the dynamics of revolution in town and country. As he says "of the Imperial Free Cities of Swabia and Franconia... not a single one entered voluntarily into an alliance with the peasants". But there were many places where peasant rebellion inspired urban rebellion too, and while the demands may have differed, they were, nonetheless demands that arose from rebellion. They represented the sectional interests of a particular group within the cities - who were striving for change as a result of the wider tensions created by the end of the feudal era and the rise of the capitalist. Which, incidently, is why its right to call events a revolution. Urban rebels might have risen up for different reason to the rebellious peasantry, but the conditions for revolt effected both groups - rural and urban.

Tom Scott's book however, by its focus on the detail of the interaction between Freiburg and the surroundings, gives plenty of insight into how complex a subject this is, and much material to grapple with while trying to develop a better understanding of the Peasants' War.

Related Reviews

Scott - Thomas Müntzer: Theology and Revolution in the German Reformation
Drummond - The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Word for World is Forest

When yumens arrive on Athshe they find themselves in the midst of plenty. Earth is short of crucial resources, but Athshe is covered in one of them - its lush forests providing enormous quantities of wood. The only people who live there are the primitive indigenous people, who are easily convinced to work, in slave like conditions for the yumens - as servants, labourers, and sex workers.

The Athsheans live a peaceful existence, their culture, art and communications are almost incomprehensible to the yumens, with the exception of Raj Lyubov the human colony's anthropologist who recognises that the Athsean are just different humans. They are not subhuman as most of the colony thins, its just that their culture is so different they are viewed as being lesser, childlike and alien.

Lyubov clashes with one of the colony's leaders, Captain Davidson. Davidson is in charge of a logging camp, meaning he directly overseas the forced labour of the locals. He is also a violent man, whose rape of the wife of one of the Athsheans, Selver, helps precipitate a revolt. Selver organisies, or reorganises the Atsean, leading them in a serious of brilliant military attacks that destroy the human colony and force Earth to withdraw.

First published in 1972, this is clearly a novel heavily influneced by the US war in Vietnam. Ursula Le Guin's criticism of US imperialism is clearly on display. Yet that's not the best analogy for the book - in fact it seems to me to be much more about the settler colonialism of the US within its own country - how the stripping of resources undermined and forced Native Americans into confrontation with the US military. In the 21st century, the struggle for resources (in this case wood) takes on a different sheen as well.

The brilliance of the novel lies in Le Guin's ability to show the incomprehension of the humans in the face of Athshean culture. Like countless encounters between European colonists and indigenous people, from Africa, to Asia and the Americas, the Athsheans are dismissed as childlike, lazy, stupid or subhuman. But Le Guin takes us into the alien mind, showing us an alternative world view, that clashes with the Earthling's quest for profit. But, in this encounter, the Athsheans cannot be unchanged. We are left knowing that things will never be the same again.

This is an incredible novel that stays with the reader long after finishing, and illuminates, perhaps more than Le Guin realised, the struggles we face today.

Related Reviews

LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Hard to be a God

 

Naomi Klein - Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world

Naomi Klein came to prominence as a journalist and author during the anti-capitalist movement of the early 2000s. Her book No Logo almost becoming a bible for the movement itself! After that she made her mark as an author of explicitly anti-capitalist books about the environmental crisis. Shock Doctrine told the story of how capitalism uses disaster to maximise profits and drive forward neoliberalism. This Changes Everything was one of the first, mainstream, books to link capitalism and the climate crisis. Within this Klein was also an activist, speaking and organising, within movements. 

So it might surprise some to find out that Naomi Klein has a doppelganger, who now holds diametrically opposed beliefs. In 1990, Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, a feminist study of beauty, capitalism and patriarchy. But today Wolf is mostly known for her contrary and right wing positions on everything from guns to coronavirus conspiracies. Formerly a feminist icon of the mainstream media, Wolf is now beloved of the right, including figures like Steve Bannon.

Klein opens by showing how the two Naomi's were commonly mistaken for each other. She gives a number of examples, some humerous and trival, the others deeply concerning and insulting, where she is mistaken for Naomi Wolf. There's much to be said about why this happens and its not just about the same forename - I suggest it is in part because there are so few female spokespersons in the media. But this aside, Klein explores what has happened to her doppleganger to take such a shocking and stunning trajectory. It involves, as the book's subtitle says, a trip to the "mirror world", a place where conspiracy, scapegoating and distorted pictures of reality dominant - and where the real cause of societies' problems - capitalism - is let off the hook.

Klein's books about capitalism, disaster and climate change are frightening. But I actually think that Doppelganger is truely scary and discomforting for leftwing activists to read. Because what it shows is how the failure of the left to relate to wider working class concerns in the United States has opened the door to some very reactionary people and even a figure like Naomi Wolf can become part of that. 

What is most illuminating is Klein's exploration of right-wing policies, and how she shows they get a hold precisely because they speak to real concerns and are often rooted in real problems. Take the question of vaccine conspiracy:

The words she [Wolf] was saying were essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to the many people now listening to her, they clearly felt true. And the reason they felt true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another. Moreover, as a culture, we have barely begun to reckon with the transformational nature of this shift.

It is not enough, Klein argues, to mock the right or laugh at the ignorance on display, one has to go further. And this requires building real movements that speak to, and address concerns, while tackling misinformation and errors. The rug must be pulled out from beneath the right. Klein describes the sort of massmovement that is needed, but points out it "does not yet exist", and "it is inside this vacuum that my doppelganger is currently wreaking havoc". Wolf, "not only validates those latent tech fears but also, along with her new partner Steve Bannon, has something progressives lack: a plan for what to do about it, or at least a facsimile of one".

Some might quibble about the nature of the movement that is needed. This is to miss the point. Klein describes being heavily involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign. I wouldn't agree with that strategy, but Klein is honest enough to acknowledge the limitations of a movement based on a specific election. The important thing is that she wants much more than that.

This, I think, really comes through when Klein writes about Palestine. She makes this a central part of the argument because it shows how the right is organising, and the particular trajectory of Wolf who broke from her Synagogue to oppose an attack by Israel on Palestine, bravely stood in solidarity with the victims, but then moved away to the right. Klein argues that it is on the question of Israel and Palestine "where so many forces we have encountered on this winding journey converge and collide."

Not least with the issue of antisemitism. Klein opens this discussion by relating how her mother blamed the confusion between her and Wolf on antisemitism - "They see you both as a type". There's no doubt this is true, but Klein doesn't keep this discussion in the realms of the relationship between her and her doppleganger. She uses it to explore how and why marginalised groups are oppressed and how they resist. Her discussion on what happened to Jewish people and how they responded is powerful (and incidently mirrors some of the discussion in a new book I reviewed here recently on The Radical Jewish Tradition). Klein ties this to more contemporary racism, antisemitism and rightwing ideas. QAnon, for instance, whose antisemitic arguements are "cursing and combining and morphing in our culture". 

Why is this important? Because it is in this "mirror world" where conspiracies "detract attention from the billionaires who fund the networks of misinformation and away from the economic policies - deregultation, privatisation ,austerity - that have stratgied wealth so cataclysmically in the neoliberal era." The mashing together of antisemitism, with a resurgent right, neoliberal economics and a left that is inadequate to the task has created a situation where the likes of Wolf can rapidly evolve into significant figures, abandoning principles and raising dangerous arguements.

What then is needed? Here I was excited that Klein looked back to a period when socialist politics was counterposed to right-wing movements and was powerful enough to win, at least temporarily. She looks at the Revolutionary era after World War One, and in particular the radical Jewish socialists of the next few decades that tried to find a way forward that took on antisemitism and created a new set of ideas to appeal to working class people. Among the figures and groups she mentions, Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, the Bund, Walter Benjamin and so on, she identifies a set of ideas that rose and fell with the fortunes of the Russian Revolution. It was in the aftermath of this failure that Zionism became the only answer to the "Jewish Question" and embedded the idea that antisemitism could not be defeated by "getting at its roots" and instead by "holding a gun to its head." Building on this analogy Klein says:

Partitioning and performing and projecting are no longer working. The borders and walls don't protect us from rising temperatures or surging viruses or raging wars. And the walls around ourselves and our kids won't old, either. Because we are porous and connected, as so many doppelganger stories have attempted to teach us. So there has to be another way. Another portal, to another story of us.

One key figure in this is Abram Leon who wrote deeply on questions of socialist politics and antisemitism while in hiding from the Nazis and then died in a concentration camp. Leon is a major inspiration for Klein and she tells his story and his politics movingly. Developing Leon's ideas further she discusses how antisemitism is not an automatic set of ideas constantly existing in society, but rather it is a racism that rises and falls, can be understood, countered and stopped. It arises from a partiulcar set of politics, and needs another set of politics to defeat it. These are the ideas of the left, and particularly the Marxist left, that Klein argues remain so important.

As an example, Klein tells an interesting story from Canada. It's a story of two trucker convoys. One of outraged and angry drivers disgusted at the latest evidence of the genocide inflicted on the First Nations people by the Canadian state in the aftermath of the discovery of mass graves of indigenous people. The second was also angry - but this time in protest at lockdowns, vaccine passports and filled with patriotism and right wing politics. "One was progress, the other a white-lash." Klein makes the point however that "some truckers participated in both convoys". They were dopplegangers in them. The point is that there is not a comfortable binary, but there is also the potential to win people away from reaction and toward progress. But it takes work.

This story then is one where the left builds movements that can form alternative polls of attraction and can draw people in, who feel alienated, cut off, forgotten and who experience poverty, housing crisis, pay freezes and all the rest of neoliberal capital's impacts. In the process of building those movements and coalitions, we have the chance to break people from reaction. As Klein says, quoting John Berger, this is because protest and demonstration (and class struggle) "people come to realise that they are not merely individuals... but that they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate and implies a common opportunity". 

This excellent book begins with a personal story - Klein's shock at having a "doppleganger" whose politics are moving rapidly away from hers. It evolves into an account of how capitalism has created the context, in the midst of multiple crises, for millions of people to be dragged into reactionary politics. Klein's exploration of these crises - from Palestine to the environment - demonstrates the need, and potential - for revolutionary politics that can win significant, and lasting, change. From the personal to the revolutionary. But, most importantly, this book is an appeal for activists to engage and fight to make that real, and not abandon those who are being sucked into a mirror world. It is, perhaps, Naomi Klein's greatest - and scariest - book.

Related Reviews

Klein - The Shock Doctrine

Klein - This Changes Everything
Klein - On Fire
Gluckstein & Stone - The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters & firebrands

Pekka Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

In the introduction to this outstanding new history of the Lakota Native American people, Pekka Hämäläinen makes the point that the Lakota are often defined by the events of a single day - June 25 187 when Lakota Souix, Cheyenne and Arapaho forces destroyed Custer's command at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. But this is problematic because it tends to ignore the rich and varied history of the Lakota both before and after that war.

Using extensive Native American sources as well as contemporary White accounts, Hämäläinen explores the long history of the Lakota, beginning when they were an "obscure tribe of hunters and gatherers at the edge of a bustling new world", through the varied conflicts and changes that led to them becoming a power on the American plains. At each stage, the Lakota demonstrate a remarkable capacity for change and adaption. Because of the images of the "Indian Wars", and especially Little Big Horn, we tend to think of them as brilliant cavalry troops, but this was only one particular point. Before they got horses (which was surprisingly late compared to other indigenous tribes) they were limited in hunting and travelling. Their were more sedentary, and like other Native Americans, often farmed for some of their food.

But they were defined by their relationship to other tribes and the European colonists. Hämäläinen gives a real sense of how the colonial wars between France and England, and later America and the European powers that remained on the American confict, shaped Lakota history. In fact, war and disease was a driving force behind the shift that saw the Lakota move into the Plains to their west, driven by the Iroquois who reacted to devastation of their population by striking out westward to capture slaves. This shift opened up the Plains, and the Lakota became part of a burgeoning trading network that saw them, and other tribes, collecting furs and hides for sale to Europeans, in exchange for food, weapons and other materials. It was a significant transformation, as this passage from Hämäläinen indicates:

By the late 1840s almost all Lakotas had made the western plains their home, visiting the Mnisose [Missouri River] only peridodically to bring their robes to steamboat stops for downriver shipment. Only Two Kettles, a small oyáte of some five hundred people, remained attached to the river. They made quick forays nto the West, but did not enage in large-scale raiding, and were known as superior hunters and tactful traders who were 'extremely fond of getting well paid for their skins'. Their semi-permanent villages near Fort Pierre were the last substantial Lakota bridgehead on the Missouri, which had lost its centrality in the Lakota universe.

The reader gets a real sense of how changing the indigenous world was, and how much they had become attached to a global economic system of trade. This transformed Lakota ideas and their social organisation, and created real tensions within their society - not least about how to relate to European power. But there is also no doubt from Hämäläinen's history that the Lakota, and other tribes were part of that great game between the colonial powers - a military and economic force that one side or the other tried to use in turn, while it also fought hard for its own interests.

Lakota power is a phrase used frequently by Hämäläinen and it is worth reminding ourselves that the Lakota were at one point, a significant national power on the North American continent. They were able, on several occasions to stop westward colonialisation, and certainly won significant gains from the American government. Indeed when their representatives negotiated with the American government they did so very much as equals.

As Hämäläinen emphasises, the Lakota's war with the US "was a shattering experience, but it did not define them as a people or their place in history". His book celebrates these "superbly flexible people" fighting for their place in a world increasingly squeezed by genocidal settlement. He continues:

Perhaps most strikingly, they emerge as supreme warriors who routinely eschewed violence, relying on diplomacy, persuasion and sheer charm to secure what they needed - only to revert to naked force if necessary. When the overconfident Custer rode into the Bighorn vally on that June day, they had already faced a thousand imperial challenges. They knew exactly what to do with him.

This is why the Lakota had to be destroyed. The Little Bighorn was their greatest moment, but it was also the beginning of their defeat. US settler colonialism could no longer keep up the pretext of living together and finding space. The punishment was explicitly genocidal, as seen at Wounded Knee, where Hotchkiss guns annihilated hundreds of Lakota.

But this was not the end, and nor did it stop the resistance, even as it transformed it. Hämäläinen continues with the history of the Lakota people in the 20th century, marked by racism and extreme oppression and economic punishment, but also by resistance. From Wounded Knee and the American Indian Movement in the 1970s to the battles over the Dakota Pipeline, the struggle continues. Hämäläinen concludes that the Lakota will prevail - "They will always find a place in the world because they know how to be fully in it, adapting to its shape while remaking it, again and again, after their own image."

Pekka Hämäläinen is an outstanding history. It never robs the Lakota of their agency, placing them in the heart of their own history - casting them not as victims, but as part of a rapidly evolving historical situation that could have gone in any one of different ways. It is noteworthy that the author uses indigenous language and spelling wherever he can, and writes from the point of view of the Lakota themselves. If you've read, like I have, countless histories of the Little Bighorn battle, then Hämäläinen's account based on indigenous sources, frames things very differently. If I have one criticism it is that I don't think the author really understands the term "imperialism" and tends to throw it about as a catch all term to describe American expansionism. For anyone interested in resistance to settler colonialism, and how that shaped and transformed the land and people on the North American continent, this is a must read.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
Cronon - Changes in the Land
Cozzens - The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Philbrick - The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Seishi Yokomizo - Death on Gokumon Island

Seishi Yokomizo's Death on Gokumon Island is the second outing for his famous detective Kosuke Kindaichi (though oddly in the English translations its the fourth book published). Kosuke is returning from his military service during World War Two in the Japanese army when his friend Chimata Kito dies on the repatriation ship. Chimata entrusts Kosuke to return to bring the news to his wealthy family on Gokumon Island, and with his final breath warns Chimata that his sisters will be murdered unless Kindaichi can stop it.

Arriving on the island, the horrific news shocks the family, and the detective is quickly introduced to the complex social and economic relationships centred on the fishing industry of which the Kito's are heads. Rather fascinatingly there's an excellent explanation of the Labour Theory of Value among fishers here, as Kosuke learns how families like the Kito's get their wealth from other people's labour. Gokumon island itself is a strange place, linked to a long history of piracy, and isolated from the mainland. There's a repeated implication that everyone on the island is different, and strange things are expected.

One by one, the three women are murdered. Kosuke proves unable to stop the sequence, indeed at one point he's suspected of the crime. The bizarre murderes, a series of red herrings and the strange behaviour of many of the inhabitants make it tough for Kosuke to find the killer. But, it should be said, this is not a crime novel were readers will work it out for themselves. The clues aren't all there, and I felt it a little contrived.

Yokomizo was clearly building a brand with his second book. There are plenty of call backs to the first book, The Honjin Murders, and at least one recurring character. It gives the reader a comfortable reassurance, and while the book is not as strong there's still much here about Japanese society, the aftermath of World War Two and a fascinatingly complex series of crimes to solve. The dishevelled, scruffy and dandruff covered Kosuke Kindaichi is certainly a worthy detective to follow into all the sequels. 

Related Reviews

Yokomizo - The Honjin Murders
Yokomizo - The Inugami Curse

Donny Gluckstein & Janey Stone - The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters & firebrands

The introduction to Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone's important new book locates the work exactly in contemporary debates. They make the point that there are two views of Jewish history, the "lachrymose" one (yes, I had to look it up too, it means 'sad or mournful') and one that celebrates the struggles and contributions of Jewish people to the fight for liberation and freedom. In the first, Gluckstein and Stoney argue, "Jews supposedly went to the gas chanbers like lambs to the slaughter", but it is the second that the authors are concerned with here. It is, they write,

an alternative view of modern Jewish history and an alternative solution to perpetual victimhood. We depict Jews not as victims, or a group apart, but as people who have repeatdly fought their oppression, and often in solidarity with other social groups.

The continue:

The lachrymose conception of Jewish history requires suppression of the stories of those partisans and revolutioanies, resistance fighters and firebrands because such stories suggest that Jews have it within their own power to respond to oppression and that others will in fact support them.

Why does this matter? I authors of The Radical Jewish Tradition must have begun writing their work long before the Israeli State began their current assault on Palestine. Nonetheless they write that the "lachrymose conception" of Jewish history is important to the Israeli state, because:

The persecution and expulsion of the existing local Palestininan population, the suppression of democracy in the interest of maintinain the state, the militarisation of society and the declaine of civil society because of the increasing domination of religious zealots - all these issues are subordinated to the idea that in no other way can Jews escape the historical existence of antisemitism and cease to be victims.

The above quotes come from the first two pages of the introduction, and the rest of the book can be see as refuting the arguements made by the Israeli state in this regard. The book is a refreshing and inspiring story of those Jewish radicals who fought antisemitism, racism, oppression and exploitation. Whose ideas and actions shaped the radical movements that we have today, and whose legacy remains important to everyone, not just Jews, who want to fight for a better world. 

Gluckstein and Storey's opening chapters look at what they call the "shaping of modern Jewry" showing how the pogroms and persecutions of the fedual and medieval periods fed into ideas and racism after the arrival of capitalism. The authors write:

The Jewish Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that 'the family was a network stretching across countries and oceans... shifting between coutnries was a normal part of life'. This feature had once set Jews apart and reinforced their community ties. Now integration into many different countries created a new relationship. Radical Jews brought a sense of living class internationalism to those they interacted with at a local level.

Jewish people moved around the world - to escape persecution or to find new lives for themselves - and when they arrived they fitted into a capitalist world that integrated racism and exploitation. This forced the majority of Jews to become part of the anti-capitalist resistance, and in turn begged the question of how they related to non-Jewish activists, and how non-Jewish workers, trade unionists and radicals related to them. The authors discuss what happened by looking at some key moments in world, and Jewish, history - life under the Tsarist regime and the Russian Revolution, the life of East European Jews in Poland, the experience of working class struggle over jobs, wages and against fascism in East London as well as similar struggles in the United States. Two chapters look at the struggles of Jews and non-Jews in Germany in the run up to the Nazi victory and resistance to the the Holocaust. These two are perhaps the most important, directly challenging the idea that Jewish people were "meek" in the face of the Nazis, and demonstrating the exact opposite. Writing about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, the authors say:

Defiance pre-dated the advent of the ghetto. We saw how, during the 1930s, the fight against the rising ride of antisemitism had involved Jews and non-Jews in mass struggle. This occurred in many cities and towns throughout Poland but was centred on Warsaw. The alliances that were foged at that time continued through the Nazi occupation and underlay much of the network of help and support that the ghetto inhabitants received. The population who rose up in April 1943 had been mobilising on the streets only a few years earlier in 1938. The memory must still have been there.

In the last two chapters the authors' return to the question of Palestine. Here they make the point that experience of the Holocaust has meant that many of those who fought for radical solutions to antisemitism, became part of a state that systemtically oppressed other groups in the Middle East. Left Zionism in particular "spread ideological confusion" becoming a justification for further horror:

It was a tragedy that those once inspired by the ideas of the left could become part to the forcible displacement of the Palestinian majority from their homes and country. This was the final nail in the coffin of the remarkable phenomenon of mass Jewish radicalism.

Can this tradition be rescued? The authors suggest that yes, it can. But that requires the building of mass movements of solidarity that work on the common interest of working people to fight oppression and exploitation. They say:

We have shown who historically has engaged in the fight against antisemitism. Based in the working class it was left-wing Jews and their non-Jewish comrades who defended the Jewish community against pogroms and won emancipation in Russia. The Revolution created the opportunity on an international scale to end capitalism and its divide and rule policies which bring misery to the oppressed everywhere... Despite attempts to ignore, or deny it, the progressive role of the left, and the working -class basis for it, endures.

Antisemitism, like other forms of racism and oppression benefits no-one but the ruling class. The rich tradition of Jewish radical theory and activism will inspire us to renew and rebuild those links. It is this that can free the oppressed everywhere and build a world of equality and diversity. Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone's book is a major contribution to this fight. I urge everyone to read it.

Related Reviews

Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Gluckstein - The Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy
Gluckstein (ed) - Fighting on all Fronts: Popular Resistance in the Second World War
Gluckstein - The Tragedy of Bukharin
Cliff & Gluckstein - Marxism & Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926
Sullivan & Gluckstein - Hegel and Revolution
Austin - The Jews and the Reformation
Pappe - Ten Myths About Israel
Sand - The Invention of the Jewish People

Clark C. Spence - Montana: A History

The States and the Nation series was a collection of books commissioned to mark the bicentennial of the United States. There were 51 in total, one for each state plus one for the District of Columbia. They were intended to be a lasting account of the states, but not comprehensive, rather a "summing up" of the history. Clark C. Spence's account of Monata is very much a summing up. Readers will find a decent overview of events - from the first furtrappers and settlers, through the era of homesteading and ranching, on to the period of mining and the modern day - up to the bicentennial at least.

But it is very much a "summing up", and the tone of the book (and indeed it's content) is very much that of its time. For instance, there is nothing here about the pre-state history. The book begins with Lewis and Clark's expedition. While they aren't depicted as entering into an empty land, the Native American societies that had existed in this part of North America for thousands of years are given no history at all. Indeed, this undermines any real attempt to understand what happened next as US settler colonialism exploited and destroyed the indigenous population and natural resources.

The book is dated in other ways. Consider this line on the Lewis and Clark expedition about the Native American woman who travelled with them: "Every schoolgirl thrills to the name of Sacagawea, the Shoshone lass, a mere slip of a girl of seventeen who carried her infant son, Pomp, on her back to the Pacific and return, and who made real contributions, though often her role is unduly magnified." I suppose we should be grateful that Spence even named this woman, before dismissing her as being of real interest only to schoolgirls. Doubly patronising.

The book is on stronger ground with later events. The reader gets a real sense of Montana as a place exploited for its resources, land and beauty, shaped by a series of changing economic interests - firstly the fur trade, then ranching and homesteading and finally mineral extraction. While these changing economic circumstances are summarised well, the consequences for people - indigenous and white - are often all to brief. There is a chapter on "Control of the Indians" gives a sense of the way that racist government policies destroyed entire peoples but it is inadequate. The chapter's title perhaps gives a clue to the approach taken. The author's desire to appear neutral undermines any attempt to draw conclusions. Notably The Battle of the Little Big Horn - Montana's seminal moment in the Indian Wars, only gets a brief sentence. There is a slightly longer treatment for the trade unionists, socialists and miners of Montana, especially during the Copper Wars and the First World War when figures like Frank Little made brave radical stands against war and exploitation. 

Modern readers will perhaps find the description of the arc of history, most interesting. Particuarly the way that agriculture and mining shaped the wider politics of the state. The influence of the mining capitalists on state politics is fascinting, as is the story of the 20th century which saw enormous poverty and hunger through the state. Tourists will be interested to read how much of the infrastructure (and indeed landscape) of the state park system came out of unemployment projects in the 1930s which built bridges and roads and planted thousands of trees. But the succession of politicians described from the post-WWII period is tiresome for a modern reader, though no doubt essential in 1978. 

All in all this is very much a summary, and a dated one. Readers looking for a comprehensive and modern history of Montana will inevitably find this because of the lack of alternatives. We'll have to find more info elsewhere - especially because the all to brief accounts and references hint at some fascinating detail.

Related Reviews

Carlisle - Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America
Lause - The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West
Hunter - Glencoe and the Indians
St. Clair & Frank - The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink

A.B. Guthrie, Jr - The Big Sky

The Big Sky is part of a loose trilogy of books that A.B.Guthrie wrote about the opening up of the American West by European colonists and descendents. It follows the adventures of Boone Caudill, who runs away from his violent and abusive father at the age of 17 and makes his way to the frontier where he becomes a trapper. Attracted by the romaticism and the adventure, Caudill goes through a baptism of fire as he quickly loses prized possessions to a thief and is let down by the law, at the same time as meeting the man, Jim Deakins, who would become his best friend.

The book is episodic, we next hear of Boone on a trip upstream to get furs and return a Native American girl, Teal Eye, to her tribe. A few brief sentences fill in the gaps between these chapters, allowing Guthrie to skip time and space, and avoid tedious stories of travelling. It makes the novel a little discombulating, but things hold together. Boone arrives on the frontier at a moment of change. The bison and beaver are becoming hard to find, the Native Americans are restless with the encroaching hunters and pressure is on from more permanent colonists who want to farm, not to hunt in the landscape.

Boone's teacher in this is the much more experienced Dick Summers, who leaves to take up farming in the East. Summers is a key character in one of the other books in the trilogy, widely travelled, experienced and hopelessly in love with the wild landscape. Is a poignant moment as he takes a last look around before heading back East to farm. Boone follows this pattern, becoming a loner, unable to cope with other people and visiting civilisation once a year to trade, drink and buy sex. His despair at the changing landscape is only matched by what his friends see as his desperate search for Teal Eye, last having seen her as a girl and wanting to make her his wife.

Here is one of the parts of the book that really jarred with me (the other is the repeated use of the N word). Boone is in love with Teal Eye, and the book sets this up from the moment he sets eyes on her. She's repeatedly described as a beautiful eleven or twelve year old earlier in Boone's life. By the time he finds her later, she is a woman. But Boone's obsession is thus deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable for the reader. Women in The Big Sky are very much cardboard cutouts, to be used by men for sex, or making home. This is exemplified by his relationship with Teal Eye, who as his wife (Boone lives with the Native American tribe) barely has anything to do other than cook and sleep with him. Later Boone abandons her, and rapes another (European) woman when he briefly returns home. In fact, by buying his marriage to Teal Eye - we're in no doubt that women are a commodity to Boone.

I have no doubt that Guthrie was trying to portray a particular moment in time, and a set of attitudes towards women and Native Americans. But the result is actually to remove the humanity of both Native Americans and most of the women (white and indigenous). A better writer could have told the same story, and made it much more rounded. I just got the impression Guthrie didn't care - he was more interested in the landscape.

There are some interesting set pieces. The chapters when Boone and Jim, and some travelling companions who want to open up a faster way to the West over the mountains to make more money, are trapped through the winter are well done. They give a sense of the horror and danger at the frontier.

But Boone for all the description of frontier life, hunting and the racous nature of the White outposts in Native American land, this rests on brutal violence and mass death. The Big Sky gives us a sense of some of this, but it wasn't the great classic I was expecting.