ResoluteReader

Sunday, December 03, 2023

Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth

Reading Frantz Fanon at anytime is a heady experience. His writing is angry, revolutionary and liberating as well as being beautifully lyrical. His commitment to the fight against colonialism, and the liberation of ordinary people through their collective struggle shines through, but so does his care for individuals and their pain and suffering. But reading Fanon at a time when the Palestinian people are desperately fighting against their systematic destruction by the Israeli State is eye opening.

The Wretched of the Earth is Fanon's clearest discussion of national liberation movements. It was written in haste, following his diagnosis with leukemia, his friends wrote it down as he paced back and forth dictating. The text bears the imprint of this urgency, which seeps through into his passionate demand for self-liberation.

In Wrteched it is Fanon's discussion and defence of the oppressed use of violence that is most often discussed. Violence for Fanon, is not only a requirement to overthrow the colonial powers, but it is also necessary to cleanse and shape those fighting for liberation: "For [the native] knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realises his humanity that he beings to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory". Later he continues:

During the struggle for freedom, a marked alienation from these practices is observed. The native's back is to the wall, the knife is at his throat (or, more precisely, the electrode at his genitals): he will no more call for his fancies. After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life - the forces of colonialism. And the youth of a colonized country, growing up in an atmosphere of shot and fire, amy well make a mock of, and does not hesitate to pour scorn upon the zombies of his ancetors, the horses with two heads, the dead who rise again, and the dijnns who rush into your body whie you yawn. The native discovers reality and transforms it into the pattern of his customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom.

Here Fanon echoes Marx's argument that the revolution will cleanse the worker of the "muck of ages", removing the old ideas of racism, oppression and subservience. Fanon however is not a Marxist, though Marx is important to him. You get the impression that Fanon has imbibed Marx's writings but not taken them to heart: "Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem." This is perhaps most true of Fanon's writing on class, particualrly those parts of Wretched where he discusses the role of workers in the Global North (the colonial powers) and the role of workers in the colonised countries.

In fact, Fanon goes so far as to argue that workers' in the colonial countries are bought off by the system and can play a limited role in liberation movements:

It cannot be too strongly stressed that in the colonial territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the colonized population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime... In capitalist countries, the working class has nothing to lose; it is they who in the long run have evrything to gain. In the colonial countries the working class has everythign to lose.

But in South Africa and in India, it was working class movements that proved most crucial to overthrowing colonial rule and apartheid. Think of the strikers by black workers, or the mass movements and strikes by workers that made it impossible for the British to control India. In fact Fanon himself is ambiguous on the question of workers. Some pages after the above quote he can declare that "during the colonial phase, the nationalist trade-union organisations constitute and impressive striking power. In the towns, the trade unionist can bring to a standstill... the colonialist economy". But then go on to argue that the "unions become candidates for governmental power" after colonialism has been uprooted. What Fanon does is to identify trade unionists with their leader - obscuring the potential power for self-emancipation that is represented by the collective organisation of workers.

Partly I think Fanon makes this mistake because he is trying to warn and understand the way that revoluitonary struggles against colonialism risk constructing new chains for ordinary people.

The militant who faces the colonialist war machine with the bare minimum of arms realises that while he is breaking down colonial oppresion he is building up automatically yet another system of exploiation... The clear, unreal, idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilers the senses. The people find out that the iniquitous fact of expoitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one; and they raise the cry of 'Treason!' But the cry is mistaken; and the mistake must be corrected. The treason is not national, it is social. The people must be taught to cry 'Stop thief!'.

He points out that the "national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West". The national bourgeoisie then must be resolutely opposed, and a new vision of development fought for that doesn't try to copy the Western states. But I think it's fair to say that Fanon doesn't really answer what this might look like. Though he offers some interesting hints, they tend to be general and focus on culture, rather than wider economic and social institutions.

The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people's culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised man.

This is why, of course, the workers movement against colonialism is so important - but must be tied to a theory of workers' emancipation that goes beyond opposing colonialism and then fighting for social and economic equality. It is why the writings of revolutionaries like Lenin remain so important, and the Marxst tradition so crucial, for national liberation movements today. But against this project, Fanon essential sets a different system of struggle - violence.

Violence alone, violence committeed by the people, violence organised and educated by its leaders, makes it possible fotr the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there's nothing byt a fancy-dress parade and the blare of trumpeets.. a few reforms at the top... and down there at the bottom an undivided mass, still living in the Middle Ages, endlessly marking time.

This of course, poses a question of what Fanon means by "violence". Quotes like the above are often used to paint him as a bloodthirsty revolutionary. And, to be sure, Fanon refuses on principle, to condemn the violence of the oppressed against the oppressor. Indeed many of the leftists and pacifists who currently bemoan the "violence on both sides" in the Middle East, ought to read Fanon whose robust defence of the right to resist arises directly from his involvement in the struggle for liberation of Algeria, and brokers no cowardly refusal to take sides.

But I think that Fanon's "violence" is less about the actual violence itself, but more a substitute for the process of the overthrow of oppressive relations and institutions, which Fanon understands won't happen peacefully. This is, of course, far more revolutionary than many in liberation movements would like, and his repeated denunciation of those who would simply place themselves into new "national" positions of power emphasises this. So Fanon's work remains crucial, directly relevant, and inspiring. But it cannot be read on its own, as his focus on the peasantry instead of the working class, will not lead to the sort of liberation he wants and that oppressed people need. Nonetheless, his vision for change is, at times, intoxicating:

We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste not time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.

Wretched of the Earth was first published in 1961 and Frantz Fanon died the same year. One can only wonder what he would have learnt from, and thought of, the mass movements that exploded in France a few years later, which had an insurgent working class at their heart.

Friday, December 01, 2023

Willard Price - Whale Adventure

When I was young in the early 1980s I was obsessed with Willard Price's Adventure series. These books followed the unlikely adventures of Hal and Roger Hunt, whose father collected specimins for zoos. He gave them a year out to go on expeditions to capture (but not kill) animals for zoos, and I had South Sea Adventure, Amazon Adventure and Arctic Adventure. Somewhere I still have Arctic, it's cover is battered from repeated reading, and I dreamed of the others.

A chance find on a charity stall of a battered copy of Whale Adventure recently bought it all back. This was first published in 1960, but my copy is the 1973 edition. Rereading it has reminded me of the importance of those early books, and my enjoyment of them. But it's also shown me some pitfalls of youthfull reading!

But Whale Adventure is very different to the ones I devoured. In Whale, Roger and Hal kill animals. They are on board the Killer, one of the last three masted whale hunting sailing ships. The ship is captained by the cruel Grindle who enjoys violence and torture of his crew. His consequent shortage of crew forces him to take the two boys (19 and 12) onboard, but he treats them with disdain for their "gent" like ways.

Willard Price liked, as many young peoples' books do, using his writing to educate as well as entertain. So there's plenty here about life and work on a whaleship - the sights, smells and violence. Both Hal and Roger get to kill whales, and there's a lot about how the animals are butchered in the old way, and later on the factory ships. Price also introduces a host of other animals, Killer Whales, sharks of various types and seabirds. The reader enjoys it, and learns. But what do they learn?

Leaving aside the implausibility of the story line, which features boys proving their value to experienced sailors, cruel captains, shipwreck and mutiny, the problem is with the information about the animals themselves. It is true that in the last 60 years since the books were written our knowledge of these animals has vastly grown. In Whale Adventure Price quotes a few recent studies to show that whales communicate - something that was clearly considered novel at the time. But the hunt itself is certainly not criticised, and his depictions of the animals, in particular the Killer Whales, is often widely inaccurate. For instance, whale spouts - the air they breath out - are repeatedly depicted as dangerously acidic. That's not true. Checking some of Price's assertions led me to this fascinating piece on how inaccurate young people's books (including non-fiction) actually are. Particularly pertinent to this story are the comments in this about Killer Whales, "In the span of a human lifetime, we’ve gone from fearing killer whales to seeing them as cuddly entertainers and then as intelligent animals that deserve our respect and protection."

Do these inaccuracies matter? Well I certainly know that Price's Adventure stories impacted on how I understood the world and animals in it. They were informative and encouraged me enjoy animals and want to preserve the "natural" world. But I still retain, likely inaccurate, knowledge from those books. As the article linked above points out:

In a 2016 article called, tellingly, “Cetacean Frustration,” four British scientists surveyed picture books that feature whales and other cetaceans. Of 116 books, 74 had errors. The rate was higher in fiction, but almost half of the nonfiction books also contained errors.

The problem is that children accept uncritically the information they read. Not least because:

So good information matters, especially for kids. In a 2002 article in the journal the Reading Teacher, science educator Diana C. Rice wrote it’s a mistake to assume that science misconceptions from early childhood will be corrected later. Rather, “research in science education suggests just the opposite, that we cannot assume that children’s ideas in science will become more sophisticated.” She cited a 1999 survey of American adults in which about half of the respondents believed that early humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs, an idea, she wrote, derived from children’s books, movies, television, and—in some cases—religion.

In re-reading Willard Price, I've discovered that these books are actually not that great at developing children's understanding of the world - though most of them (where they don't kill) are actually desgined to foster a love of nature, animals and the world around us. Does this matter? Well all Price's Adventure books are currently available, with modern flashy covers. There are also, other, problems. For instance in the whole of Whale Adventure there are no female characters - not even in the background of the scene setting pages. I dread to think what Price's Cannibal Adventure might be like. Much as I loved them, perhaps these books should be left on the nostalgia shelves?

Saturday, November 25, 2023

Lyn MacDonald - Somme

Lyn MacDonald's Somme was the third of her books on World War One, drawing on her huge and detailed collection of reminisances and memoires of former soldiers. Like the first, They Called It Passchendaele, which told the story of the Third Battle of Ypres, it is an unflinching account of the brutality of trench warfare. Somme however, deals with the most famous of the bloodbaths of the Western Front. MacDonald starts with the meticulous, detailed and finely tuned battle plan that would see millions of shells fired at the German trenches, followed by coordinated attacks timed to the second. British troops would carry mirrors and flags so that their generals could track their victorious march. The reality was a blood bath. The detailed instructions gave no room for flexibility on the ground. As the Germans took out the first over the top, following troops had no idea what to do, as their objectives were not even close. As Sergeant Jim Myer's of the Machine Gun Corps recalled:

The biggest mistake that was made on manoeuvres and training was that we were never told what to do in case of failure. All this time we'd gone backwards and forwards, training, doing it over and over again like clockwork and then when we had to advance, when it came to the bit, we didn't know what to do! Nothing seemed to be arranged in case of failure.

Thousands, upon thousands, died. MacDonald's interviewees tell the stories of individual tragedy, and bravery. Of the groups of "Pals", from the same village, factory, industry, even sports teams, who died together. The survivors left shocked and demoralised by what they had seen. Corporal Harry Shaw, of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, summed up that first attack:

Whatever was gained, it wasn't worth the price that the men had paid to gain that advantage. It was no advantage to anybody. It was just sheer bloody murder. That's the only words you can use for it.

Most of the accounts MacDonald draws on are of front line troops. But a great strength of the book is that it gives a sense of the scale of the undertaking. She includes the voices and accounts of people who drove the ambulances, salvaged broken equipment for recycling into more shells and guns, and the people who laid roads, cooked food and reported for the press. But it is the horror of the front, the chaos of battle and the sheer bloody uselessness of the high command that will stay with the reader. The Battle for High Wood will stick with me, as troops captured and area, only to see it slip from the grasp as their Generals ordered in cavalry that took a whole day to arrive. The thousands who died in the follow up should never have died there.

Somme is not a detailed history of the battle. At times its hard to follow events, or even grasp the scale of particular attacks. The pictures are also unclear to me. But this is not a book to be read for detailed accounts. This is the human story of the slaughter of Kitchener's Army, "shipping clerks, errand-boys, stevedores, railway porters, grocers' assistants, postmen".

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Kate Wilhelm - Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang is an unusual end of the world novel. It begins with the incredibly wealthy Sumner family who seeing all the signs that civilisation is collapsing - failed crops, disease and sterility - decide to set up a hidden research hospital where they can create human clones to repopulate the Earth after humanity has died. The first few chapters are rather plodding, exploring the collapse and the frantic search for scientific solutions to genetic problems. But once the clones become viable and are part of the story itself, the novel rapidly takes off - with echoes of Earth Abides, The Midwich Cuckoos, Stepford Wives and perhaps, I Am Legend.

The clones are human, but not. They cannot function as individuals, in fact individuality has no meaning for them. On an exploration trip some of the brothers and sisters cannot function properly, and one of them, Molly, becomes isolated and develops traits of individuality. Isolated from the other clones because of this, and for fear of infecting them, she gets pregnant and gives birth to a child who grows up to be free of the psychological limitations that affect the cloned children. This child, Mark, then becomes a foil for the clones - useful to them because he can go where others cannot, and becomes confident and at peace with the natural world. But he also threatens to undermine the whole clone "group think", because of his individuality - never mind his interest in the arts, culture and the world around them. Its a novel that makes the reader uneasy, with no morally upstanding figures for you to identify with.

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang is a surprising novel for the 1970s. It deals, as many did, with the failure of human society, and the limitations of science in solving those issues. But it is also a fine rumination on the role of the individual and the limits of collective thinking. I wonder, to what extent, it was fueled by crude (right-wing) critiques of socialism which supposedly would destroy the individual. But it is as much anti-authoritarian as well as a critique of such ideas and consequently, today, the novel probably is read differently - there's quite a bit of focus on the natural world and its destruction, and resurgence after humanities' demise and at least one reference to the newish idea of global warming. Recommended.

Sunday, November 19, 2023

Stephen King - Fairy Tale

Written during Covid-19 Stephen King's Fairy Tale bears all the markings of a literal escapist fantasy, and that's why I found it perfect to read when I did. It beings with the troubled early life of Charlie Reade who is 17 when the novel is set, though the first 100 pages concern his childhood - the death of his mother and the consequent alcoholism of Charlie's father. Charlie's dad eventually escapes the cycle of alcoholism, and puts himself back on the straight and narrow, but the fear of a relapse haunts Charlie, whose efforts in the schoolroom and on the athletic field seem to be attempts to atone for his father's behaviour and some unsavoury childhood rebellion of his own.

But it is when Charlie meets Howard Bowditch, and elderly, reclusive and very rude neighbour that things enter the fantastical. It turns out that Bowditch, who becomes Charlie's friend and mentor, is the guardian of a gateway to a fairy tale world, but its a world attacked by evil, while has begun to disintegrate. As it's a fairy tale land the former royal family are actually rather nice people, rather than those at the top of a system of oppression and exploitation. Charlie sets out to restore the throne, and save the life of Bowditch's beloved dog.

It is actually a fairly classic fairy tale, though Charlie spends a lot of it in prison, forced to compete in violent gladiatorial combat with other prisoners. There is a satisfactory ending, and reconciliation with his father, and the dog lives.

As with much of King's writings, Fairy Tale is at its best when describing the mundane parts of his character's lives. The first third, focusing on Charlie and the relationship with the two adults - his father and Bowditch is the best. The reader is carried along on a sort of soap opera. By the time we get to the fairy tale, it feels a little like King has spent his imagination a little and the the rest of the story is cobbled together. It feels more like a computer game brought to the page, than a fully rounded novel. That said, there's plenty of vintage King here, some blood and guts, lots of excitement and a host of weird and wonderful fantasy characters.

Sunday, November 12, 2023

Beverley McCombs - The Ascott Martyrs

The 1870s saw an explosion of trade unionism across rural England as workers', sick of low pay, appalling conditions and the cost of living, joined new trade unions in their thousands. Many of them quickly went on strike and often one excellent pay rises from the farmers. The epicentre of this trade unionism were the Midland counties of Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, partly because of their proximity to the Warwickshire village of Barford where one of the leading figures of the new unionism, Joseph Arch, lived.

At a recent event in Barford to celebrate the life and struggles of Arch, I was reminded of a often forgotten episode of this struggle that took place nearby in the village of Ascott, near Chipping Norton. I had written about this in my own account of rural struggles, Kill all the Gentlemen, highlighting its importance because it is one of the few occasions where the workers' strikes explicitly involved a group of women. Despite the agricultural unions limiting membership to men, women were actually often agricultural labourers, or workers' in allied trades and certainly were workers. The Ascott Martyrs, as they became known, were a group of sixteen women who were sent to prison for trying to prevent scab labour breaking a strike. Beverley McCombs book on their lives and struggle is a fitting and important tribute to events.

Today the area near Ascott is a relatively affluent part of the Cotswolds, near to the wealthy market town of Chipping Norton. In the early 1870s, while there were pockets of great wealth concentrated in the hands of the landowners and farmers, workers experienced a hard life. Seven of the women who were imprisoned were farm workers, eight gloveresses and one a servant. Assembling gloves was a hard, repetative task often done in the family home or by groups of women visiting each other. As McCombs explains, they "sewed the pieces together by hand, earning between fourpence and fivepence a pair. A good gloveress could make up to three pairs in a day".

This pay did not allow luxury. As one contemporary report quoted by McCombs describes, some of the housing conditiond were appalling:

Imagine a narrow place, like a coal cellar, down which you go two or three steps, no flooring except broken stones, no celiing, no grate, rough walls, a bare ladder leading to the one narrow bedroom about six feet wide, containing two double bedsteads for a man his wife and three young children.

It is no surprise that within a couple of months of forming a union, local workers went on strike. By May 1873, the men had been on strike for four months and the strike was causing significant problems for the landowner. This led to him trying to employ two scab workers. The women decided to act and a newspaper reported:

On Sunday 11th of May [the women] were informed that two strange boys were working on Hambridge's farm, from which the Union men had retired. They discussed the matter and consulted together (the greater part of them being related to a family named Moss), and determined to wait upon the boys to represent to them the manner in which they were injuring their own order.

What happened next depends on which side you were on. As McCombs explains:

The two youths... made statements under oath to prove that they were threatened, molested and obscrtucted from entering their work place. The women, also under aoth, denied these claims, though they did say they had spoken to the youths and asked them not to go to work.

Whatever actually took place, and it seems likely that the scabs were encouraged to exagerate events by the landowner, the women were tried and seven women considered leaders were give ten days with hard labour, the remainder seven days with hard labour. Considering that two of the women had babies in arms, this was vicious and cruel sentancing by the two clergy acting as magistrates. They were ignorant of the law and in fact the outrage at the sentences and the riot that took place afterwards caused a brief national scandal, and McCombs suggests, an eventual reform of the law.

The riot was significant and demonstrated the outrage, some 1000 people protested outside the Chipping Norton police station were the women were awaiting transfer to prison. As McCombs says, "The crowd shouted, 'Fetch the women!', 'Stick to the union!', 'Cheers for the women!' and 'Cheers for the union!', along with further threats that they would pull down the police station unless the women were freed." Sadly this latter did not take place and the women were hauled off to hard labour.

McCombs details conditions - which were awful - and the longer time impact of the sentences on the women. Their release, by contrast, was marked by two celebratory events, parades and rallies as the two groups of women came home. In his autobiography Joseph Arch says that the women were given a silk dress in union colours, and £5 each. He also notes that £80 was raised for their support, £5 of which came in pennies - indicating that many poor people gave. McCombs discusses a long standing belief that Queen Victoria herself gave a dress to the women, though it seems unlikely to be true.

McCombs book has its roots in her own investigations of family history, and the book finishes with detailed individual accounts of each women, their family relations (many were related to each other as the newspaper suggested) and what happened to them. Many of the women, like many other agricultural workers in the union movement, emigrated to North America or New Zealand. Some of them had lives cut short by the conditions they had experienced, including in prison. Others seemed to live long and happier lives. Some of them lived into relatively modern times being young when the strike took place. Reading McCombs summary of their subsequent lives, I was struck again by how the experience of struggle is often transformative and life changing. Fanny Honeybone, who was sixteen when she tried to stop the scabs breaking the strike, and was sent to prison for 10 days with hard labour, lived until 1939. She had fourteen children, five of whom died very young and lived her whole life in the local area. In 1928 she remembered the strike very fondly, and her quote stands testament to the struggle and the role of women in these strikes, which is all too often ignored and forgotten:

During the strike... the farmer, had sent for two men to finish his pea hoeing, and the women, including myself, went up the Ascott-under-Wychwood road to stop them. There was something of the idea of fun in what we did - certainly no intention to harm them. I got ten days, second division, in Oxford Gaol. I remember the coaches which met us and the demonstration afterwards in the Town Hall at Chipping Noron. Those were stirring times and it gives me a thrill of pleasure to remember them.

Beverley McCombs short book is a fitting and detailed tribute to these women. It also raises the question about whether there were other such events involving women workers, that have been neglected by the union movement. As she points out, Arch himself believed "Wives must be at home" and there ought to be a family wage paid to their husbands. His union thought that women workers' would drive down men's wages. Luckily this attitude is long gone from the British labour movement, but it was a significant issue in the 1870s and likely undermined the strength of the strikes. Did other women agricultural labourers come out with their men?

The book will be an important source for family historians (I myself found at least one family connection!) and those interested in the history of women's struggle and radicalism in the countryside. You can order it from the Ascott Martyrs' website.

Monday, November 06, 2023

Eleanor Parker - Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon year

This, remarkably original, book is a fascinating study of how Anglo-Saxon people understood and talked about the seasons. Readers will find a very different understanding of the years, the seasons themselves were different, and the language and expectations of the different times of the year reflected a very different society. The nearerst equivalent to autumn was not known for falling leaves and misty mornings, rather it was called "harvest". As Eleanor Parker remarks, this reflected the different nature of an agricultural society, where

a good harvest was essential for sustaining life through the winter months, and bringing in the heavest required a huge amount of hard work, communal labour necessary for everyone's survival... August wasn't holiday time, but the season when many people were doing their harest work of the year.

Thus around harvest/autumn there were a series of important festivals and religious events that were tied to the hope for a good harvest and prayers for bountiful fruits. This was also a special, perhaps magical, time and as Parker says, "poests writing about this season often reflect on what might be the ultimate source of nature's bounty, the invisible power that makes the crops grow."

The reference to poets highlights another important aspect to this book - its focus on literature and poetry, two key sets of sources that give us an understanding of how the Anglo-Saxon people understood their world and its nature. It was as time of transition, when Christianity was replacing older, traditional beliefs, festivals and practices. The Christians understood the importance of tying in their festivals to older activities, few of which we know in detail. But the songs and poetry often retain their links to the earlier beliefs. Here is an old rune poem that Parker quotes, where Gear (which became our "year") refers actually to the "season of growth and harvest".

Gear is a joy to men, when God,
holy King of heaven, causes the earth
to give bright fruits for nobles and the needy.

It is not difficult to read in this Christian poem, allusion and patterns that are much older.

Eleanor Parker's exploration of the Anglo-Sazon era is far more than a series of accounts of how they understood the changing year. It is a discussion of how people understood time and their place in a world that constantly changed, but also cycled. It is rather a lovely book.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons
Lacey & Danziger - The Year 1000
Duby - The Age of the Cathedrals: Art & Society 980-1420
Faith - The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Ilan Pappe - Ten Myths About Israel

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's work has been some of the most consistent in explaining the origins of the Israeli state and its war on the Palestinians. The recent military assault on Gaza by Israel, following the October 7th attacks by Hamas, prompted me to read Ten Myths About Israel. This is one of Pappe's most well known and popular works and one that is currently available for free download from publisher Verso's website. It is a very readable and accessible book that offers a straightforward explanation of Israel's history and the debates around Palestinian resistance to occupation.

Pappe begins with some historical myths. He explains that Palestine was not an "empty land", rather it was a "rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization and nationalisation. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom; it was a pastoral country on the verge of enterting the twentieth century as a modern society... Its colonization by the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native people living there."

The argument that Palestine was empty before colonisation is one that is remarkably similar to the descriptions of North America, Australia and New Zealand as empty spaces, and the legal concept of "Terra nullius" to argue that there were no claims on land in Australia by the indigneous people. It is one reason why Pappe argues that Israel is a Settler Colonial state.

The question of "what Zionism is" is a key theme of the book. Pappe makes it very clear that Zionism is not the same as Judaism, rather Zionism began in a particular historical context: "only one, inessential, expression of Jewish cultural life" at its birth. Pappe's history of Zionism is essential reading - he shows how it arose out of the "Jewish enlightenment movement" but was frequently critiqued by Jewish people themselves, particularly on the left. "Socialists and Orthodox Jews began to voice their criticisms of Zionism only in the 1890s, when Zionism became a more recognised political force very late in the decade." It was the "diligent" work of Theodore Herzl who repeatedly put the argument for a "modern Jewish state in Palestine" which began to get traction among Western political leaders, who saw in it a way of strengthening their own imperalist power in the Middle East.

A great strength of the book is that Pappe explores the historical and political context, but he does not ignore religious debate, particularly about whether the Bible contains a case for a Jewish state in Palstine. He writes:

The final reason offered for the ZIonist reclamation of the HOly Land as determined by the Bible, was the need of Jews around the world to find a safe haven, especially after the Holocaust. However, even if this as true, it might have bee possible to find a solution that was not restricted to the biblical map and that did not dispossess the Palestinians. This position was voiced by quite a few well-known personalitiies, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These commentators tried to asuggest that the Palestinians should be asked to provide a safe haven for persecuted Jews alongside the native population, not in place of it. But the Zionist movement regarded such proposals as heresy.

The importance of Pappe's work is the place contemporary events in a historical context. As Pappe himself writes, and apologies for another extended quote, but hearing his arguments is important:

As long as the full implications of Israel's past and present ethnic cleansing policies are not recognised and tackled by the international community, there will be no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ignoring the issue of the Palestinian refugees will repeatedly undermine any attempt to reconcile the two conflicting parties. This is why it is so important to recognise the 1948 events as an ethnic cleansing operation, so as to ensure that a political solution will not evade the root of the conflict; namely, the expulsion of the Palestinians. Such evasions in the past are the main reason for the collapse of all previous peace accords.

The conclusion of Pappe's book, which argues that Israel is a Settler Colonial state is important. He makes no easy promises about how conflict can be avoided. But he does offer hope:

This barbarization of human relations in the Middle East can only be stopped by the poeple of the region themselves. However, they should be aided by the outside world. Together the region should return to its not so distant past, when th eguiding principle was "live and let live." No serious discussion about ending human rights abuses in the region as a whole can bypass a conversation abotu the 100 years of human rights abuses in Palestine.... Any discussion of the abuse of the Palestinians' human rights needs to include an understanding of the inevitable outcome of settler colonial projects such as Zionism. The Jewish settlers are now an organic and integral part of the land. They cannot, and will not, be removed. They should be part of the future, but not on the basis of the constant oppression and dispossession of the local Palestinians.

How we get to this future is not explored by Pappe in this work, but his reference to the "people of the region" offers us a glimpse. I would argue that it is the power of the working class, particularly the mass working class of Egypt that offers the strength to overturn social relations in the region and break the power of Imperialism. I don't know whether Pappe would agree with that specific argument. However his Ten Myths About Israel is an important, and very accessible contribution to understanding the history of Palestine and Israel. Readers will learn a great deal that puts current tragic events in context.

Related Reviews

Masalha - Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History
Alexander - 'Revolution is the Choice of the People': Crisis & Revolt in the Middle East & North Africa
Levi - If Not Now, When?
Rostami-Povey - Iran's Influence
El-Mahdi & Marfleet - Egypt: The Moment of Change

Monday, October 30, 2023

John Gardner - Licence Renewed

I will be honest. The only reason I picked up Licence Renewed was that I was ill and needed something easy. John Gardner was the author picked by Ian Fleming's estate and tasked with continuing the adventures of James Bond after Fleming's death. Gardner explains in the introduction that he wanted to bring Bond into the 1980s, and adds later that "everything provided by Q branch in this story is genuine". Readers might think this claim is rather laughable, particularly given Bond's reference to the "advanced Detectorscope" in the novel. A J-200 no less.

This comedy aside, the real reason for mentioning this is that the gadgets Bond uses, are constantly referenced by Gardner. Every few lines there's some clunky mention of a brand name, a model or some contemporary designer. One of Fleming's talents was that he could put Bond in an exotic environment and make him stylish, with oblique references and comments. Gardner lays it on with a trowel and it reads like an advertisment in the colour supplements.

Of course, this is the 1980s. And this, Gardner's first of the new Bonds, was on a mission in the shadow of Chernobyl, so his enemy is a nuclear scientist gone rogue. The fear of nuclear accident hangs heavy over this book, though the plot and the outcome is paper thin. Bond's love interest, the laughably named Lavendar Peacock is a stand in for every other Bond "girl". She's described as a young looking Lauren Bacall, which gives you some idea of Gardner's talents.

This Bond, greying at the temples, gadget rich and with a laughable enemy and ridiculously wooden henchmen is perhaps ideal for the 1980s. It was, however lapped up. Gardner's sequels were very popular - I know, I first read this as a teenager borrowed from Dad's shelf and loved it at the age of 12. Though oddly they have dated more than the originals. In this, Bond drives a Saab 900 Turbo - just Google a picture. The novels don't stand the test of time at all. Don't bother.

Friday, October 27, 2023

Robert Holdstock - Mythago Wood

Mythago Wood ought to have been a standout fantasy novel for me. It steers clear of the standard fantasy tropes of elves, wizards and quests and instead redefines the genre, taking as its starting point a strange forest outside Stephen Huxley's family home. This forest has obsessed his father, and in turn his elder brother, and eventually Stephen, returning home from World War Two and years in Europe, is also pulled in to its strangeness trying to understand his father's obession and his brother's disappearance.

The woods are far larger than the actual perimeter on the Huxley's land suggests and a series of strange events leads Stephen to believe there's something very odd about them. Unusually he employs modern technology to try and work it out, getting himself on board an aircraft to photograph them. This heighten's his curisoty further.

But what really gets him going is the appearance of a strange woman (though Holdstock insists on calling her a girl). This woman is some sort of warrior royalty, from Anglo-Saxon times, and turns out to have been the creation of the interaction of the Huxley's minds with the magic of the wood. When Stephen is nearly killed by an attack from the wood he decides to enter, and try to work out whats happening.

Its an interesting take on a genre were woods are normally places for mysterious elves to offer quests to travellers. Instead it becomes a story about mental health and obsession. But it turns out to be surprisingly thin, and sadly the novel fails to break from the other usual problem of fantasy, which is that female characters are paper thin, rare and sex objects.

All in all this was interesting, but I'm not sure I'll get drawn into the rest of the books.

Sunday, October 22, 2023

Tom Scott - Thomas Müntzer: Theology and Revolution in the German Reformation

Tom Scott is a distinguished historian of the German Peasant War and Reformation, and this, his biography of the radical Christian theologist and social revolutionary Thomas Müntzer is an excellent introduction to this fascinating figure.

Rather than the crude revolutionary and antithesis of Martin Luther beloved of many people who write about the period, Scott very much argues that Müntzer was an individual who evolved his ideas in the context of changing circumstances and the tactical needs of the moment. Pushing radical reformation ideas forward, going beyond those of Luther and those grouped around him in Wittenberg was very much Müntzer's ambition, but how he did this definitely evolved. This require Müntzer to evolve his own ideas, as this quote from Scott shows:

Müntzer's definition of the godless changed over the years. From the Prage Manifesto onwards, where he had identified the damned with the Catholic church and clergy, Müntzer gradually widened the category of those he called, from the German Church Service onwards, the godless, to include secular rulers who oppressed the Gospel, and, once the Saxon princes had ignored his exhjortations, latterly all rulers by virtue of their daily oppression of the common people, whose misery prevented them from achieving true faith. It was at that point that Müntzer's theology finally spilled over into secullar rebellion.

Thus Scott's Müntzer is not the fully formed revolutionary who set out on a life dedicated to overthrowing society and introducing a christian utopia. Rather he is a man whose ideas developed in counter-position to the ruling ideas - both Luther's Reformation and the social hierarchy dominant in Germany at the time. When these two forces came together to block his own radicalism, his closeness to the oppressed and exploited masses allowed him to develop far more revolutionary conclusions. But Scott also argues that Müntzer was never the spokesperson for the whole of the masses. Far from it.

the links between Müntzer's theological revolution and the mass of the peasants' aspirations and deamds were fitful, fragile and foruitoous. In the end the rebels saw well enough that Müntzer's religious ideology was inadequate to their cause: it suplied the framework for organised rebellion threough the Christian leagues, but it could not offer any detailed programme for those leagues to adopt. Only the lesser townsfolk, those whose grievances least reflectged entrenched social and economic relations of production, can be said to have embraced Müntzer's essentially amorphous vision in full measure. The peasantry, bu contrast, remained an uneasy ally in both its mentality and aspirations .The mass support with which Müntzer rekoned never materialised.

It is, perhaps, a fair conclusion of where Müntzer was in relation to the masses. Does it invalidate the position of those, like Friedrich Engels, who saw Müntzer as a revolutionary ahead of his time, unable to deliver the vision of the future because of the limited development of society? I don't think so. It perhaps is more realistic an appraisal of Müntzer's actual base which is often overestimated by those on the left. Nontheless Müntzer's programme was revolutionary, and also impossible at the time. Scott's work helps us understand why.

Friday, October 20, 2023

Angela Hui - Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter

I have been looking forward to reading Takeaway ever since I read an extract in the Guardian when it was first published. My attraction was several-fold. Firstly Angela Hui's takeaway where she spent her childhood and teens, and the subject of this book, is in the small Welsh village of Beddau. Some of my family live in a smaller villager very nearby which until recently also had a Chinese takeaway. Secondly I was intrigued by the combination of food and memoir, the idea of food being intrinsic to our lives, but conditioned by society and circumstance is not new. But it is an important one and this book covers that a great deal - not least with the author's inclusion of key recipes. Finally, but less importantly, I used to love Chinese takeaway food though I am unable to have it these days - it felt like an excuse to enjoy the dinner by proxy.

Takeaway is a great book. But it is not a homely food and family tale as the Guardian's extract will show. Angela Hui writes about being "robbed" of her childhood by the needs of the business. From a young age she and her brothers had to work, and work long and hard hours in the takeaway. They experienced racism and abuse - and the difficulties of that life. She also describes the family tensions - and domestic abuse - that accompanied the life, driven by stress and difficult economic circumstances.

The book also highlights the difficulties that children like Hui experience, trapped between two identities - that of their immigrant parents and their heritage and the culture that they grow up in. Hui writes about not being part of either, and being a conduit between the two. Translating for her parents, living in a immigrant household, and being part of the Welsh school and village. The situation is not helped by the economic circumstances of the village itself - a former mining town with few jobs and little money. She and her family are victims of abuse occasionally for that - scapegoated and blamed. In some regards her parents are insulated from this as they don't have the language. But they feel the pain of broken glass and smashed up gardens and the spitting hatred of the racists. I did cheer though, when her father finally snapped and chased a racist vandal with his cleaver. There was racism, but there was also kindness too. The regulars with their unchanging dishes, and the villagers who teach the family to sing the national anthem. But one always gets the impression of distance between Hui's family and those around them - only really broken down by Hui's generation as they make friends and then move on.

Food provides an anchor. Her father is not one for loving embraces and kind words. But he can cook a favourite dish, and food becomes in part the way that the family and the wider Chinese community are able to bond and link. But what comes through mostly is the way that life for this family, and likely for many, many other families working in this environment is that the work dominates life. There are few days out for Hui, no evenings at friends houses watching TV or doing homework, because she has to work in the shop. A visit to the Chinese supermarket in Birmingham is a big highlight. In essence, though Hui doesn't draw this out explicitly, there is a class basis to this situation - the position of Middle Class families - trapped by the economic logic of the need to run the business, shop or takeaway. Workers' can, at least occasionally, organise collectively and leave at the end of the day. People in Hui's family's position are trapped by the need to constantly labour to make money.

From a young age Hui and her brothers want out. They recognise that they are trapped, that there are better alternatives out there. It is only later that she comes to realise the sacrifices her parents have made. For them the takeaway is not a family business - it is a way to get the economic security so that their children can escape. As such, the background stories of Hui's parents life in China during the famine, are even more poignant. There too food is a factor, and some of the dishes relate to this period, not just the takeaway menu.

Takeaway is illuminating. It deserves to be widely read for in its subtle way it tells us alot about society, racism, food and family. It's not easy in places, and sadly the recipes are not ones that I will ever be able to make for myself, but other readers will. Enjoy.

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

J.P.D. Dunbabin - Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain

The nineteenth century was a time of great turmoil for rural communities in the British Isles. In Scotland the post enclosure era was being shaped by vicious struggles over land and Crofters' rights, in Wales battles of tithes and semi-rural protests such as the Rebecca Riots were causing a crisis for the rural authorities and in England the agricultural working class was making itself known - firstly in the wave of struggles around Captain Swing and then with the explosion of trade unionism in the 1870s and the strikes associated with that.

J.P.D. Dunbabin's Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain has long been a standard text for those trying to get their heads around the period and understand the dynamics of the struggles and their links to economic policies. I picked it up recently to read in preparation for a talk about Joseph Arch and I was impressed by several of the essays. The book is at its best in covering the struggles around trade unionism. While the book is authored by Dunbabin, two of the chapters are written by other authors, both giants in the field of rural history - Pamela Horn and A.J.Peacock. Peacock's essay on Vilage Radicalism in East Anglia is obviously focused, but there is a wealth of analysis of the Swing and other incenidary attacks localy. Pamela Horn's article on Oxfordshire and the agricultural trade union movement is superb. Her use of minute books from union branches and the details of the often angry fights between unions themselves, do not obscure a brilliant tale of deep rooted and brave trade union activism. She convincingly argues that the "Oxfordshire farm worker... was better off financially than he had been in the 1860s" as a result of trade unionism. It's an important, if contested argument, so Horn's conclusion:

it may be argued that the rise in wages which occurred in the 1870s would have come anyway as agriculture was prosperous and the demand for labour buoyant at a time when employment in urban industry was at a high level. But it must be remembered that such prosperity had existed before without the labourers deriving any great benefit from it. Union agitation pinpointed the need for some redistribution of agricultural income in favour of the farm worker.

It should also be noted that Horn's article includes a map of trade union branches in Oxfordshire which is remarkable in showing the scale of the movement.

The rest of the book belongs to Dunbabin and there is a real breadth here. Some of these are wider in their coverage, a general introduction to the nineteenth century and a chapter on tenant rights in general. Some of the other chapters are more niche - those on the tithe wars in Wales and the Crofters War in Scotland may appeal more to students of the topics rather than the general reader, though Dunbabin has a nack for putting interesting and illuminating anecdotes within the general analysis.

Dunbabin's conclusion though is interesting. Noting the disturbances in Wales and Scotland and the fact that local authorities there were unable to deal with the discontent, he makes the interesting point:

In ninetenth century Britain unrest sometimes passed beyond the control of the local establishments but never beyond that of central Government. So where concessions were made from weakness (as was the forced return of 10 per cent to Welsh tithe-payers), they wer emost likely to be the work of local men. Similarly the central Government did not frame its policies with a view to the avoidance of rural unrest. But such avoidance was one of the factors behing the southern English tendnency in the half-century after Waterloo, to spread work rather than to maximise productivity.

The authorities tended to react to events - dropping threshing machines after Captain Swing, or introducing farmers associations in response to strikes - rather than trying to prevent discontent - to their detriment. Dunbabin's general conclusions are also interesting. He notes the long drawn out struggle to get Parliament to agree a Land Act that would offer some form of justice. This was finally given a nail in the coffin by World War One, with Lloyd George failing to push it though. What might have happened had it "got under way" would "have provided an interesting bridge between the ideas and aspirations... [in the book] and the conditions of the new century."

That did not happen, but Dunbabin's book is a very useful, if a little dry in places, introduction to the swirl of struggle and ideology around rural communities and agriculture in this most fascinating of transitionary centuries.

Friday, October 13, 2023

Wu Ming - Thomas Müntzer: Sermon to the Princes

Thomas Müntzer was a radical theologian who, despite his short life, played a key role in the German Peasant War in the Thuringa region, eventually being one of the leaders of the peasant forces that faced the princes' armies at the battle of Frankenhausen in May 1525. The peasants were slaughtered at that battle and Müntzer was captured, tortured and eventually executed.

Müntzer has become, for many on the left, a radical precurssor figure of later socialist revolutionary movements. Part of the reason for that is the extensive role given to Müntzer in Engels' The Peasant War in Germany (1850). The bigger blame however lies in Müntzers' contemporary enemies, especially Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon who denounced him as a fanatic and a threat "to the orderly reproduction of society". There is much truth in this. Müntzer certainly did come to believe that society needed to be reshaped, particularly through a radical confrontation with the church and its authorities who had hidden the true pathway to God. Part of that was, an insistance, that rebellion was just and godly, if the authorities were a barrier. As Müntzer said, "the power of the sword as well as the key to realise sins is in the hands of the whole community".

This book, however, is a strange and perhaps unhelpful introduction to Thomas Müntzer. The preface by Alberto Toscano gives a good introduction to the afterlife of Müntzer, highlighting how his ressurgances have been associated with revolutionary upheavels, and giving some insights into his life, ideas and times. Wu Ming, the Italian cultural group behind the extraordinary novel Q and many other important radical cultural and political interventions have a framing essay that places Müntzer and their own interest in his work in the context of the post Seattle emergence of the anticapitalist movement. For veterens of Prague (2000), Genoa (2001) and various Social Forums like me this provided an interesting trip down memory lane, though there was a danger this review would slip into a detailed disagreement between Trotskyist and anarchosyndaclist analyses of that period.

Most of the book is however made up of a collection of Thomas Müntzer's most important works. These include his Prague Manifesto (here called the Prague Protest) and his Sermon to the Princes. Other letters and, perhaps controversially, his Confession are included. Problematically though these are not given anywhere near enough context and explanation. Müntzer's writing is seeped in mystical allusion, biblical reference and apocolyptic comment. It is hard to understand without a detailed context, and its not enough for the reader to skim for reference. I was quite surprised the publishers allowed this as I think most readers, not seeped in the history and bibliography of the period will be confused. Additionally the Confession is presented with only a passing mention in the endnotes that there are "doubts to its reliability". Indeed there are.

The endnotes and timeline of Müntzer's life are decent, but inadequate for the task they set themselves, and I would recommend readers find a decent biography of the subject before tackling these writings. Sadly given the state of radical publishing their likely to find Verso's collection first and I hope this doesn't put them off. Readers looking here for illumination might want to check out Tom Scott's 1989 biography of Müntzer, or Andrew Drummond's excellent forthcoming text (2024). The later will also be published by Verso.

Thursday, October 12, 2023

James Hunter - Glencoe and the Indians

This is a remarkable little book of history and autobiography, that uses the incredible story of the Scottish people who left Scotland and ended up in North America, to tell parallel stories about how the further development of capitalism in the 18th and 19th century transformed the lives of ordinary people. The book centres on the McDonald family, many of whom today live in the Flathead Reservation in West Montana. They ancestors arrived in North America, making a home and living for themselves in the territories being opened up by the defeat and expulsion of the indigenous people. They themselves had left Scotland because of a similar process, that saw the defeat and decline of the Highland clans as a result of wider, social and economic changes in Scotland. These parallels are obvious, if only for their inherent violence, but they are not exact. As James Hunter explains:

By 1815... both Glencoe and the rest of the Highlands had witnessed the complete disintegration of the clans which had for so long been central to the lives of Scotland's Gaelic-speaking communities. This disintegration was as inevitable - and had much the same causes - as the collapse, a hundred or so years later, of tribes like the Nez Perce. The civilisation which was coming into existence in eighteenth-century Britain... was utterly intolerant of older forms of social organisation. This civilisation... looked to the land primarily as a source of the commodities... which its burgeoning cities required in ever larger quantities... land had everywhere to be reorganised; that it was no longer sufficient for the Scottish Highlands to be given over to subsistence agriculture of the sort which had been practised by the clans; that it was not longer sufficient either for the American West.

In other words, the development of industrial capitalism transformed relations on the land, from ownership to usage, in order to further develop capitalism. The people who lived on that land were dispossessed, killed or forced into emigration.

Hunter tells the story of what happened to the Highlanders and Native Americans in painful detail. He also shows how some, like Angus McDonald, the key immigrant to Montana from the Highlands in this book, formed close and loving relations with Native Americans. Angus rose through a life working for the Hudson Bay Company, ironically, a company whose massive profits came from the systematic use and abuse of natural resources that Native Americans relied on. The fur trade that the Company developed becoming part of forcing transformation on to the indigenous communities, tying them into a global trading network which saw natural resources (like beaver fur) purely as commodities.

But Hunter shows that there was a fundamental difference between former Highland clan leaders and Native American chiefs. The former were white and could become integrated into a capitalist system that was based on white supremacy. The Native Americans could not. While Angus McDonald could form strong personal bonds, this was not the reality of the United States as a whole, where racism and white supremacy formed (and continues to form) an key part of its state ideology.

The links between native America and settler America... were always very tenuous. And though Highlanders were, from time to time, subjected to discrimination and persecution of a quasi-racial type, Highlanders were white. Highland chiefs, by virtue of that fact alone, had many more options open to them than were available to men like Sitting Bull, Looking Glass or White Bird. Because there was no insurmountable racial obstacle in their being assimilated into the upper echelons of British society, and because it suited the British government to hasten the destruction of clanship by thus subverting clanship's ruling elite, clan chiefs... found it surprisingly easy to take on what amounted to entirely new identities.

Hunter makes a further important point about race in this context. He emphasises that not all former Highlanders treated Native Americans positively. In fact most didn't. "More typical" he writes, where those who in the Red River area in 1813, "made good the loss of heir lands back in Scotland by appropriating other lands which had previously been occupied by the Metis.... Right across the North American continent... Highland refugees from eviction, clearance and other forms of oppression were to better themselves at the expense of the Indian peoples."

The point that Hunter returns to, is that the Highland people would have identified themselves as white, and the Indian people as inferior. When Patrick Sellar, who enforced the Sutherland Clearances and has gone down in history as an evil representative of the class who did this to the Highlanders, called those he dispossessed "aborigines", he did so to be deliberately insulting to his victims. Tragically "Most of North America's Highland settlers... were no less racist in their attitude to Indians that settlers from other places".

The tragedy, as Hunter draws out, is that many of the victims of the Clearances shared an understanding of the land and its use with the Native American people. Land as the "embodiment" of community. But this was not to stop them being drawn in to a violent confrontation which eventually saw the decimation and destruction of a way of life. This is shown, all the more tragically, through the book precisely because much of the McDonald clan and its descendants did become closely linked into the Native American communities and continue to play a central, and celebrated, role in those communities today.

James Hunter's work has long had an important role in highlighting how the destruction of the Highland communities had a global impact. This short book, by focusing on the story of one family, emphasises this and somehow makes it much more personal. He places the Highland Clearances and the dispossession inflicted on the Native American people as part and parcel of a tragic story that saw ecological destruction, genocide and dispossession as an essential part of the rise of capitalism. Today, the struggle to redress these historical consequences continues in both Scotland and North America.

Sunday, October 08, 2023

Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus

***Warning Spoilers***

The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a complex novel told through three very distinct, but linked short stories. These are all set on the twin planets of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, colonised from France on Earth, but now very much independent. The original inhabitants of Sainte Anne, whose mode of production was a nomadic, hunter-gatherer type, vanished soon after the colonists arrived. Likely driven extinct, but according to some thinkers, their ability to shape-shift actually saw them take over the identies of the colonists meaning the actual planet's inhabitants are the original indigenous population.

The first story is set in the somewhat steampunk Victorian atmosphere of a brothel on Sainte Croix. The narrator tells the story of his boyhood, under tutaluge from a mechanical teacher, and with only the most distant of attention from his father the wealthy brothel owner. There he eventually discovers that he is not his father's son, but a clone. Killing him he is imprisoned, but eventually takes over his father's position and wealth. It is implied its happened before. The anthropologist who provides the clue to his real nature returns in the final story in the series.

The second book tells the story of the indigenous people, through a dreamlike and very alien account of the arrival of the colonists - though this is very much the final part of a longer account that is mostly focused on the hunting of food, and attempts to evade the dangerous marsh people.

The final tale, that of the fall of the anthropolist from part one, is an account of this man's attempt to understand and locate any information on the original inhabitants. His expedition and experiences are told through fragments from taped interviews, newspaper clippings and the remains of his journal - as well as the police recordings of his imprisonment when tried for being a spy. But it seems likely that the anthropologist at the end of the story, and indeed at the end of the book, is not the same person who he was at the start.

This summary is important because the book is confusing and some of the important detail that links the stories and tells the overarching account is easily missed, particularly as the final section is told in fragments. The reader needs to work hard and I was not invested enough in the book to keep track of the various hints to the bigger narrative. This is not escapist science fiction - this is a very clear example of the genre as literature, and if you aren't prepared you'll miss out on what is actually quite an interesting novel about colonisation, identity and indigenous experience under settler colonialism.

Monday, October 02, 2023

Joseph Lortz - The Reformation in Germany: Volume 1

Joseph Lortz's mammoth history of the German Reformation is viewed as one of the major accounts of the period, and definitive in its coverage of the material and scope. The book, and its author, are however problematic and indeed pose troublesome questions for the reader and reviewer. All books are shaped by the views of the author, but this is particularly true of this one. Lortz was a committed Catholic, and a historian of the Catholic Church. He was also a ecumenist, who belived that the different wings of the Christian Church should work together towards unity. He was also a member of the Nazi Party from May 1933.

His account of the Reformation, and particularly Martin Luther, are framed by the idea that the Reformation arose not out of deep seated, but gradual, social and economic changes reshaping Germany, but out of a crisis within Christianity. Lortz is a good enough historian that he acknowledges that there was a wider context, but he cannot really see beyond the internal problems of the Church. So he writes:

The immediate, like the remote, effects of the indulgence theses [of Martin Luther], the theological and politico-ecclesiastical discussion which now began concerning Luther, the emergence and first advance, that is of what we call 'the Reformation', was entirely dependent upon the widespread vagueness of the theology of the age, vagueness, indeed, in the mind of the Church... this vagueness was both expression and consequence of the general confusion of the Church, as presented in the western schism... in the whole late medieval political and intra-ecclesisastical battle against the papcy... in the contradictions of Occamism and... by the shocking disintegration of the Christian and priestly ideal in the worldliness of the curia and the clergy.

Lortz spares little in his criticism of the internal failings of the Church, but by viewing the origins of the Reformation solely in these terms, he is thus able to have his cake and eat it. He can explain the origins of the Reformation within the Church and blame Luther for starting it all. He can write of the "fatal errors of the popes" but have as his real target Luther and the reformers. It means that he can write, frankly incredible, statements. For instance,

The whole idea of th Church was under examination. Luther could not find a lawful basis for this Church in scripture as he interpreted scripture. In so far as he understood scripture he felt himself bound by scripture as by the voice of God. This, then, is the explosive point: he, an individual, claimed the right to determine the content of scripture.

But Luther would likely have responded that individuals in the Catholic Church had been doing precisely this, and getting extremely fat and wealthy on it, for centuries. The Reformation becomes, in this analysis, not the outcome of a process of fundamental social change, but rather an accident of history. This does not mean that Lortz ignores the mass nature of the German Reformation. Far from it. He sees in Worms in 1521, for instance, the moment when the extent to which "the Lutheran cause had become a popular movement" becomes visible to everyone. Luther, he declares, "was a revolutionary":

In the extraordinary inflammation of these months and years his moving utterances against a corrupt clergy, and against good works, and his views concerning the summary expiation of sin... might well precipirate revolution... Luther publicly threatened an imminent revolution.

A revolutionary, for Lortz, is not a good thing. In fact, Luther and his predecssors were extremely dangerous in this regard. Erasmus is dismissed as a "father to fanatics", and the impact of all this is best shown for Lortz, and critics of Luther in the 16th century, by the Peasant War:

At a deeeper level, the Reformation as a whole was a revoutionary phenomenon, breaking through centuries-old institutions and laws, regarding its own conviction as sufficient legitimation. By this means, and by preaching the liberty of the Chritisan man, and also through the spiritualist character o it sconcept of the Church, and its battle against good works and clerical privilege, Reformation doctrine supplied a welcome basis for every kind of revolutionary unrest.

It's not a bad analysis. But it lacks any real sense of the discontent at the bottom of German society that had driven numerous local revolts through the 15th and 16th centuries, and crucially was being inflammed by the development of capitalist relations in society. Lortz cannot see the outbreak of revolution in Germany as being driven by anything but ideas. Nor, to be fair, could Luther. But neither could really understand or explain the Peasant Revolution that exploded in 1524. For Lortz, "Luther was the German Reformation; and the German Reformation was Luther".

But this is a decidely unhelpful explanation. Luther may have opened the floodgates - and he had to actually do that - but the flood arose out of the nature of German society and a multitude of crises. But this focus on Luther's ideas alone means that Lortz can respond in the same way - through a close, and very dull, Catholic demolition of Luther's Protestantism. Readers not immersed in theological studies may struggle with this part of the book. But Lortz really is avoiding the wider questions.

Which brings me back to Lortz himself. There's a couple of very interesting points in his condemnation of the Peasant War when he refers to the violence of the movement and notes the pogroms against the Jews that happened on at least two occasions. He then writes:

we may cite Luther's fight with the Jews also. Because he regarded their interpretion of scripture as lies, and because they paid no heed to his more moderate demands, he dcommanded their synagogues and houses be burned, their books to be confiscated, and their rabbis prevented from teaching. Their freedom of movement should be impeded; better still, they should be exiled. He had severe decrees passed against them in Saxony and Hesse.

Here Lortz is criticising how Luther's tone allowed the masses to vent their "baser impulses, of hatred, intolerance". But it would be interesting to know when he wrote these words. Because the book was originally written, according to Lortz's introduction, in 1938-1939 and first published in 1939/1940 (for the two volumes). The English edition of 1968, was based on Lortz's updated German edition of 1949. So when Lortz was writing the original book, he was not only under the Nazi regime, he was also a member of the Nazi party. He maintained that he tried to leave the party in 1937, but couldn't leave, though he continued to pay dues until July 1944. Indeed his academic position in this time was solely due to the Nazis who had imposed him and kicked out his predecessor (who got the job back after the war when Lortz had to be denazified). I don't know the extent to which Lortz was a supporter of the regime, though he did write a treatise on the "Catholic accommodation with National Socialism" in 1933. But it is no doubt true that his politics in the 1930s would have coloured his account of the German Reformation.

Had I known this before I began reading I might not have started the book. Readers and reviewers have to grapple with this question. How trustworthy is an account of the German Reformation that was written by a card carrying Nazi, favourable to the regime and published at the point war broke out? Personally it is another reason to reject Lortz's account. Not because he is mistaken on historical detail, but because his political framework would not have allowed a genuine account of the period.