Welcome to year four of Mike Reads With Purpose. Not sure I will top last year's record of 42 books read (or that I even want to), but try we shall.
1. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World - Naomi Klein (link)
As a compelling combination of theory, research, and memoir, Doppelganger is in many ways Klein's most interesting work. What sounds like a thin premise (examining the life of a right-wing crank you share a name with) becomes a supremely honest reflection on the state of things, forgoing the melodrama and focusing on the real. As usual, Klein's work suffers slightly when it gets prescriptive, with a final chapter of vaguely anti-capitalist sentiment that ultimately lacks teeth. Which is too bad, because the preceding chapter (a detailed account of her own involvement with Palestinian advocacy) would have made a powerful and logical conclusion to her argument.
There are two specific areas where Klein's analysis shines. The first is the fraught subject of "conspiracies." While she rightfully considers QAnon and the like a scourge on society, she emphatically refuses to throw out the microchipped baby with the adrenochrome-tinged bathwater. This is partly because, in her concept of the "Mirror World," she understands that even the most deranged crackpot still lives in the same reality, and thus shares the same fundamental fears and anxieties. But even more importantly, she is able to discern how blanket condemnations of "conspiracies" undermines an honest search for the truth:
"When radical and anti-establishment writers and scholars attempt to analyze the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world, including the proven existence of covert operations to eliminate threats to those systems, it is common for them to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. In truth, it is one of the most battle-worn tactics used to bury and marginalize ideas that are inconvenient to those who wield economic and political power, or who feel personally attacked by anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, or anti-racist analyses because the critiques implicate them. Every serious left-wing analyst of power has faced this smear, from Marx onward.
In their effort to counter spiraling Covid misinformation, many establishment institutions fell back on this tactic. For example, the European Commission published a guide that defined a conspiracy theory as "the belief that certain events or situations are secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces with negative intent." Okay, but that leaves out the most important factor: whether the theory in question is false or at least unproven. Because plenty of events and situations—financial crises, energy shortages, wars—are indeed "manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces" and the effects of those manipulations on everyday people are intensely negative. Believing that does not make you a conspiracy theorist; it makes you a serious observer of politics and history."
Klein takes great care to situate this theorizing appropriately, citing similar observations from everyone from Adam Smith to Mark Fisher, and analogizing to similar periods from throughout history. The most obvious of these comparisons is to Nazi Germany, specifically in how Hitler's concept of "Jewish capitalism" provided cover for atrocities by directing real economic grievances at a convenient scapegoat. She then describes how a similar misdirection happens now, where capitalism inverts the meaning of the institutions that make up our society (housing is an investment, education indebts you, news is about driving clicks, etc...). This augmented reality serves to "breed mistrust and paranoia" to such a degree that even the most deranged conspiracist reveals a glimmer of truth:
"...conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else's profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extractions, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. the word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one every taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it's easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy. As Gilroy-Ware puts it, "Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.""
Klein's other critical insight concerns the "mirroring" present in the titular phenomenon—specifically how the Manichean nature of this psychology has come to dominate the discourse:
"Rather than being defined by consistently applied principles—about the right to a democratically controlled public square, say, and to trustworthy information and privacy—we have two warring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time. [...] Once an issue is touched by "them," it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else. And what mainstream liberals ignore and neglect, this emerging alliance lavished with attention."
This "alliance" that forms the doppelganger to Klein's own politics is referred to as "diagonalism," a fundamentally right-wing orientation that has incorporated certain tendencies (ie. health and wellness) that were previously not necessarily compatible with right-wing aesthetics. This is where Naomi Wolf, a self-proclaimed feminist and former (?) liberal, enters the picture. But Klein's analysis is not limited to her doppelganger; instead, she finds this binary thinking everywhere. She sees this, most relevantly, in the pandemic response ("Stuck in the binary of lock down versus open up, we failed to consider so many options during the first years that we live with the virus, and there were so many debates we didn't have."), but also more generally in critiques of power and capitalism ("...our critiques of oligarchic rule are being fully absorbed by the hard right and turned into...discombobulated conspiracies that somehow frame deregulated capitalism and communism in disguise."). She comments on how the concept of "ecofascism" has twisted genuine concern for the environment into a reactionary tendency that has usurped the very language we use to fight the forces of fossil capital. And she spares no sympathy for the centrist leaders and their lesser but no less real sins, admonishing them for "using words as intended, yet with no intention of acting on them." In short, a politics based on opposing an other, whether real or imagined, is not a sustainable proposition. Rather, a productive and meaningful political project must feature a positive vision that exists outside of the "Mirror World."
2. Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control - Daniel Pick (link)
Not precisely what I was expecting, but still moderately interesting. What I expected was a more detailed history and examination of the idea of explicit "brainwashing," perhaps along the lines of this, which portrays the idea as a Cold War-era projection of both the insecurities and sins of American empire upon its enemies. While there is some discussion of that, Pick's narrative is more concerned with the psychological implications of the phenomenon, which takes us to places far afield of what one would typically consider to be "brainwashing" (though to be fair, the originally squishy definition of the term lends itself to abuse, which the author makes note of when relevant). Additionally, this examination primarily takes the form of a literature review, which is not inherently a problem but is inadequate here because of the lack of an incisive perspective from the author. This is not to say there is not a perspective at all; just that it's so watered down as to be useless. Take this section regarding corporate control of the internet:
"If we are to step off the ladder, envision a different social architecture, choose an unknown future, rather than the continuation of a governing past, we need to consider both the structural features that entrap us and our existential choices. We need, indeed, to take seriously the convergence of surveillance, the cyber-based economy, the manipulation of politics, and all the rest; and keep alive the prospects of protest and major reform, of change to how reality is orchestrated, including online, by those corporations who, over the years since its creation have shaped and monetarized the internet."
While nothing here is wrong or even misguided, there's a noticeable absence of any sort of political analysis or any indication who "We" is in this instance. He does eventually close this gap somewhat, but in a similarly broad manner:
"Politics must mean more than formal parties, stage-managed conference, law-making chambers, with all the rest of the process reduced to shrill shouting matches on social media. Politics should not just be a means to an end; it is a value in itself. [...] A central implication of the material present in this book is, indeed, that we need to attend to how a society creates or hampers conditions for politics in that sense; and I'd add more specifically, democratic politics; how it enables or disables a population from having the means to think and to choose, as equals, deliberatively, wisely, when it most matters."
Pick comes closest to genuine insight in the closing pages, invoking "struggle" and "collective action" and the like, but he can't quite bring himself to consider any radical solutions, much less even suggest that any of the problems he identifies are inherent to liberal democracy (emphasis mine):
"Liberal democracy in its current incarnations is not best regarded, I assume, as some satisfactory political end point, but rather the foundation for a struggle towards more democracy and a deeper realisation of human freedom. We need to consider what the institutions are that we already have that can support this never-ending struggle, and to ask, what kinds of social conditions and modes of 'containment' are needed to reduce unbearable anxiety, manage passions and conflicts, sustain debate, foster thinking and enable measured and decisive collective actions?
[...]
For those who value liberal democracy or agree at least that it provides the necessary platform for a more egalitarian future, it is important to consider why it has proved so difficult to renew structures of social care and creaking old electoral processes, to counter the influence of big money, to resist cynical strategies of gerrymandering and voter suppression and to avoid grotesque online disinformation wars."
What is useful about Pick's narrative in this regard is that you can use his argument to partially diagnose the etiology of this ideology (beyond the obvious and reductive "he's an old British liberal"). Take his lengthy discussion of Cold War writer Czesław Miłosz. On one hand, Pick appears to provide an even-handed and comprehensive summary of Miłosz' critique of both Russian and Western culture, going so far to note that "the art of brainwashing had reached a kind of perfection" in the West due to its hidden nature. On the other hand, this same discussion is littered with some incredibly blinkered and reductive understandings of the Cold War that directly contradict what Miłosz wrote. After briefly describing the Red Scare, Pick opines that "...some spaces for spoken, written and artistic principled opposition remained in the post-war United States, unlike in China or the Soviet Union at that time" and notes that dissident authors like Arthur Miller weren't "sent to labour camps." Leaving aside the comical exaggeration of the spectre of the Gulag (and the incredibly low bar for American "freedom"), Pick's analysis here fails to listen to heed the very words of Miłosz' about the equally corrosive nature of American censorship. Which is doubly ironic, given that Miłosz himself is an example of the American propaganda machine, as his star-making turn in American exile was part of the CIA's project to court and promote the "compatible left." In this way, Pick's perspective is a perfect example Western bias in how it reduces Communism to a foreign stereotype while eliding the deep history that helped establish durable Western hegemony.
Pick's ideological blinders are not just a matter of incomplete historical understanding—they also point to an orientation towards the liberal ideals of individual self-determination and agency above all else. This echoes some of the critiques I had of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, where similar invocations to an unnamed "we" ultimately call for liberation of the individual. This similarity becomes most obvious when Pick cites Arendt liberally, sometimes with literally the same exact passages as Zuboff. Take the following dissection of a "totalitarian" society; while the analysis is not necessarily wrong, a critical read of Pick's argument reveals the invocation of so-called "totalitarian" states to be naked projection when you apply these same analyses to the West. It's impossible for me to read the following and then read Pick's subsequent chapters on corporate control of American society and not apply this analysis directly to us. Perhaps Pick meant for the reader to peek between the lines, but there's no real indication he's being that clever. Rather I will take his seemingly accidental coherence as a happy accident and move on.
"Ultimately the system required a vast and terrifying security state, even if it paid lip service to plebiscites or parliament. The latter, if still there, was just for rubber stamping decisions. Such states used new technological means to repress, and to disseminate their own core messages, including many lies great and small; they subjected their populations daily to centrally controlled 'news', or disinformation, and kept up a constant barrage of symbols, exhortations and denunciations, via radio, film, newspapers, magazines, as well as slogans, songs, pamphlets, pageants, marches, parades, rallies, popular dramas, etc. Perhaps people believed the political messages, or maybe they just gave up on believing, merely seeking to survive by paying the necessary dues. A totalitarian political system, those writers also explained, strips away entirely the protection of 'suspect' minorities, snuffs out freedom of the press and destroys all other liberal and democratic bulwarks."
3. Drug War Capitalism - Dawn Paley (link)
"Seen in this light, it becomes easier to understand how the drug war facilitates the continuation of a capitalistic economic model predicated on security, in part by creating a public discourse that allows increased state militarization on the pretext of implementing security measures to protect civilians in the face of heinous acts carried out by criminal groups."
A straightforward book that is essentially a compelling opening summary of her thesis (which ends with the sentence above) followed by several chapters of alternating personal anecdotes and incredibly dry material that directly reinforce the central thesis. Which makes for a slightly punishing yet certainly useful read. In fact, this repetitive nature helps to drive home a few truths about the titular phenomenon in a way that a straight summary couldn't. First, a good deal of the sourcing of historical record comes directly from the Times, the Post, and other mainstream outlets. This helps demonstrate that the purpose for and the violence of the War on Drugs are anything but hidden, and what's missing is an emphasis and/or synthesis of this information that this book helps provide. Second, the specific details of criminal syndicates in Latin America help show how American policy doesn't necessary create them, but certainly does create the economic and social conditions that allow them to flourish. Third, the way that governments and media frame the violence that stems from The War on Drugs as "apolitical" reinforces the central narrative of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist that there is a fundamental and critical relationship between politicians and criminals that both sides seek to obfuscate. And finally, the way the "rule of law" is repeatedly invoked by American politicians as the impetus behind interventions in Central America betrays just how much of a stalking horse for capitalist hegemony that phrase is in practice. All of this incomplete understanding and purposeful misdirection serves to create a "plausible deniability" that almost paradoxically makes American rule over Latin America stronger and more durable than when we used a heavier hand:
"The 2009 coup is different from previous coups in Honduran history, which were generally either carried out under pressure from the United States, or carried out by the army for its own sake. This time an important section of the Honduran elite; specifically the transnational elite as represented by people like Camilo Atala and Jorge Canahuati and the Facussé family, as well as organizations like ANDI, AHM, and COHEP, encouraged the army (some might say manipulated the army) in removing Zelaya from his private residence. Even though it was clear to observers from all points on the political spectrum that the Honduran armed forces violated the constitution when they removed Zelaya to Costa Rica, Honduran business elites and the Honduran army, along with some members of the judiciary, Congress, and the Catholic Church insisted that the coup did not represent an interruption in the country's democracy. This again contrasts with previous coups in Honduras, which were blatant military operations whose leaders did not attempt to mobilize the civilian population so as to appear to be fulfilling a democratic mandate."
4. Dirtbag: Essays - Amber A'Lee Frost (link)
Part memoir, part political analysis*, Dirtbag is most useful as a reminder that I am not crazy; that there is both reason for both hope and pessimism and that life is about determining how to balance the two so you don't go crazy. This frankness leads Frost's prose to read like a, ahem, dirtbag version of left thinkers who came before, which I think is a necessary exercise to, at the very least, keep the spirit alive. "Optimism is for suckers, but pessimism is for pussies" is a perfect Gramscian formulation for a vulgar age. The critique of Occupy Wall Street's consensus model updates Jo Freeman's analysis for the modern era. And her excoriation of Corbyn's apologetic response to the "mob that didn't actually care about, or really even believe, their own accusations" and reinforces every useful critique of his reign as British Labour leader. But most of all, her final words on modern progressive activism read like a stark echo of the Sedgwick essay I love to come back to again and again:
"And there's the real rub: back in the 1940s and 1960s you needed the police or the CIA to interrupt meetings; now we did a much better job of just sabotaging ourselves, without even knowing it, and for free.
Maybe some of these people were cops, but would it really matter if they were? When a group's strategies and tactics are indistinguishable from an "op," aren't cops and activists a distinction without a difference?
"With comrades like these, who needs capitalists?""
*I said this formula would have made Freddy deBoer's book better, and the relative quality of this book only reinforces that
5. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression - Kelly Oliver (link)
"This task, the task of acknowledging the unrecognizable singularity of each individual, a singularity beyond individual rights or the law, is what gives meaning to our lives and to our relationships with others. We do not know or understand ourselves. We do not know or understand others, perhaps most especially those closest to us. Once we fall under the illusion that we do, that we understand ourselves and others, then we lose the possibility of communication, of communion, of love, of the forgiveness that makes it possible to continue to be beings who mean. Acknowledging that we don't understand or know, and moreover that we can never fully understand or know, provides the impulse for interpretation. Because we cannot know, we interpret. Because we cannot know, we mean. Because we cannot know, we are beings who mean. And through endless interpretation, our lives become meaning full."
A sweeping analysis of the effects of oppression on both personal and social psychology that stretches from Freud to Fanon to feminist literature and beyond. I would quibble that Oliver spends a disproportionate amount of time on some subjects and parts of her theorizing is a bit banal, but the result of her synthesis is nonetheless fascinating. A crude summary of the basis of her logic is that an individual's psychic condition stems not from some wholly distinct wellspring within themselves, but rather from a combination of inputs determined by one's social position. She then feeds this fundamental assumption through various psychic theories to reveal what is useful and what is not, and more importantly, to synthesize them into something new that accounts for the material reality of the subject. Oliver's theorizing leads to the idea of the "intimate revolt" of an individual as the basis for larger social revolts, as well as the idea that forgiveness is what makes us truly human in that it "makes it possible to transcend alienation, if always only temporarily, through creative sublimation in language or signification." Put another way, this is a different approach and a different path to the same fundamental conclusions that Sedgwick reaches in the same essay that I share all the time. And lest you think all the psychology and/or feminism portends conclusions that are not sufficiently material or "radical," such a worry is largely if not completely incorrect:
"If we can imagine bodies authorized to act without having or possessing particular properties that legitimate them, then we can begin to live without reducing our bodies and actions to commodities with or without exchange value on the market within the global economy of property. This may seem a utopian goal, but the necessity of psychic revolt gives hope that the authority of the economy of property contains the seeds of its own transformation and that imagining the past differently can open up the possibility of alternative futures. This hope is based on the notion that the economy of property is itself fundamentally dependent on another logic, a time outside time, a past that cannot be contained within lineage, the unconscious. To realize this hope, we need to rethink our relation to time, history, and the past. And to do that, we need to conceive of bodies without properties, agency without sovereignty, and investment without ownership."
6. The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance - Peter Gowan (link)
"...the external policies of the Atlantic powers are not transparent, and...their operational goals are rarely captured by their public presentation. [...] If a democratic public opinion is to be able to exercise its responsibility to try to influence the behavior of the states in which we are living, then we must try to understand how the powers of those states are being wielded and for what purposes; and this requires that we don't take policy on trust. It also usually requires delving into the detail and engaging in 'backward mapping': reading back from actual policy outputs to hypotheses about policy goals.
...the statecraft of the great powers in the modern world, though often blundering and inept when viewed within a longer historical perspective, is sophisticated, arcane and complex in its tactics and detail. Of special importance here is the fact that contemporary statecraft encompasses policy instruments that go well beyond the traditional coercive coinage of diplomacy, and include a range of tools of economic statecraft, market management and information management.
[...]
This campaign should not be seen as being driven by a single compulsion, such as the search for cheap labour or the search for markets. It is better viewed as an exploitation of power over the international political economy by the US and the EU in order to extract every possible useful advantage through re-engineering societies outside the core; or, to put matters the other way around, to expel as many problems as can be expelled outwards from the core societies."
Both a useful summary of the transition from Bretton Woods to our current system and a fun time capsule of post-Cold War prognostication (this was written in the late nineties). The first half is well summarized by the passages above, but goes into great detail about why Washington progressed as it did (in a word, power). The second half is more mixed, but when it hits, it hits. There's a useful passage on why Russia wasn't brought into the NATO fold (essentially, it was necessary for the US to back Yeltsin's coalition against the Communists, but said coalition was too committed to maintaining control of its domestic resources to submit to American hegemony), but nothing is as preternaturally accurate as this analysis of Ukraine:
"Particularly dangerous will be the onset of intense American-Russian rivalry within Ukraine. Russia has powerful levers for pursuing this struggle, not least its economic leverage over the Ukrainian economy, its links within Ukraine's political elites and the crisis of Ukraine's armed forces and state administration (not to speak of its appalling general economic crisis). At the same time, American hopes that it has a strong base of political support in Ukraine may prove unfounded and a deep internal crisis within that country could ensue."
7. The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR - Jules Archer (link)
Less a detailed investigation of the Business Plot and more a biography of Smedley Butler, The Plot to Seize the White House works nonetheless because of just how compelling Butler's story is. His role as the primary whistleblower who helped stop the coup is fascinating in and of itself, but it acquires much more meaning when placed within the context of his All-American life. His decades-long experience as a Marine convinced him that "war is a racket," going so far as to say "it would probably be a good thing for our nation if we were to get a trimming sometime" to help us learn that "there is more in this world than unnecessarily fat bank accounts." In spite of this, he was still American though and through, saying that this "new Tory class" could and should be opposed by "the great mass of the American people who still believe in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States." The unresolved contradictions present in this worldview also revealed themself in his near-singular focus on opposing the war machine, where his aversion to American involvement in the leadup to World War II as the Nazi threat became more and more real led to some unfortunate rhetorical overlap with overtly fascist undercurrents. Regardless, his fundamental understanding that "defense" should mean defense is both commendable and sadly, still relevant:
"We ought to agree on a definition of the word "national." If it means defense by our Army and Navy of every dollar and American person anywhere they may happen to be on the surface of the Earth, then, just as sure as I'm standing here, we'll be fighting in a foreign war."
Returning to the titular event, one of my most notable (and surprisingly hopeful) takeaways was the fundamental infeasibility of the plot itself. Yes, there were powerful moneyed interests behind the plot that were never punished and have since found new and unique ways to rule the world. But their inability to execute an explicitly fascist takeover reveals a fundamental contradiction. Take this passage from Butler's testimony about the pitch these business interests made to him:
"The Morgan interests say that you cannot be trusted, that you will be too radical, and so forth, that you are too much on the side of the little fellow; you cannot be trusted. They do not want you. But our group tells them that you are the only fellow in America who can get the soldiers together. They say, 'Yes but he will get them together and go in the wrong way.' That is what they say if you take charge of them."
And also this analysis from reporter John L. Spivak:
"The takeover plot failed because though those involved had astonishing talents for making breathtaking millions of dollars, they lacked an elementary understanding of people and the moral forces that activate them. In a money-standard civilizations such as ours, the universal regard for anyone who is rich tends to persuade some millionaires that they are knowledgeable in fields other than the making of money. The conspirators went about the plot as if they were hiring an office manager; all they needed was to send a messenger to the man they had selected."
Neither of these assertions on their own feel 100% accurate to me, but taken together they reveal the larger truth that a durable fascist takeover requires a conscientious leader but also a conscientious leader would never actually agree to do such a thing! This doesn't mean fascism is not real or is not a threat; just that there is likely something too ingrained in Americans' otherwise perverted sense of "freedom" to allow for such tyranny to truly take hold. Knock on wood.
8. The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America - Margaret O'Mara (link)
"Although too young for the counterculture, [Steve] Jobs confessed that the tumult of the 1960s had been personally transformative. "A lot of ideas that came out of that time really focused on thinking for yourself, seeing the world through your own eyes and not being trapped by the ways you were taught to see things by other people." And what Jobs found, as he told his rapt listeners, was that the way to change the world was through business, not politics. "I think business is probably the best-kept secret in the world," he offered, "It really is a wonderful thing. It's like a razor's edge."
A useful high-level view of the development and subsequent preeminence of Silicon Valley in American life. I am reminded of my critique of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (near the bottom of this), where I found the content of the book similarly useful, but found that her muddled ideology (one that prejudiced a distinctly American concept individual liberty above all else) detracted from her message. The difference here is that there's almost no ideology on display, to the point that O'Mara's attempts to synthesize her material come across as incredibly banal. Take this from the intro, which is of course "true," but at the same time so vague and obvious as to be meaningless:
"To declare that Silicon Valley owes its existence to government, however, is as much of a false binary as declaring that it is the purest expression of free markets in action. It is neither a big-government story nor a free-market one: it's both."
This lack of incisiveness is frustrating because, among other things, the inclusion of the quote up top and her podcast appearances indicate that she has more to say than what's in the book. But still, the aforementioned usefulness of this tome stems from the sheer volume of facts that allow the reader to sculpt such a narrative themselves. The description of the "techno-utopians" whose vision shaped the reality of modern Silicon Valley is depicted as fundamentally conservative, at least slightly disingenuous in its rhetoric, and most of all, views technological innovation as not a means to an end but an end in and of itself. Even liberal advocates like Al Gore conceive of technology as "not just a policy, [but as] a solution to all sorts of other kinds of policy problems." The various boom-and-bust cycles endemic to the industry are also shown to be the product of larger economic forces. The push and pull of defense spending encouraged development during war-hungry eras and forced entrepreneurs to go in different directions during downturns. And novel compensation models like stock options created semi-perverse incentives around both recruitment practices and tax avoidance (can't be taxed on compensation that's not real!). Finally, the initial Valley spirit of "thinking small" gave way to large corporations flexing their power and dictating the market (especially once the dreaded eighties rolled around), which helps to explain the modern feeling of technological stagnation.
9. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World - Antony Loewenstein (link)
"If India is buying a fleet of fighter planes from, say, France, it knows that lynching and a little mass murder will, at most, get a delicate finger-wag. A big market is excellent insurance against moral censure."
-Arundhati Roy
"Israel is a pariah state. When people ask us for something, we cannot afford to ask questions about ideology. The only type of regime Israel would not aid would be one that is anti-American. Also, if we can aid a country that it may be inconvenient for the US to help, we would be cutting off our nose to spite our face not to."
-Former Knesset MP Yohanah Ramati
Much like my impression of Asa Winstanley's book from last year, The Palestine Laboratory is a useful and true book that is undermined a bit by the author's righteous fury. Somewhat poor writing aside, Loewenstein still manages to compile a good deal of info and context around Israeli foreign relations throughout its history. That the initial investment in the Israeli security industry came from German repartitions is a bitter irony that only fuels the rest of the narrative. From the analysis that suggests that anti-migrant sentiment in the EU stems in part from Israeli influence (both ideological and material) to the detailed description of Israel's relationship with the former apartheid government of South Africa (where according to a former Israeli ambassador "we gave the know-how and they gave the money"), there's plenty here to digest and incorporate into even the most firmly established anti-colonial worldview.
10. The End of Imagination - Arundhati Roy (link)
"I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let's pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes, and speak our secondhand lines in this sad secondhand play. But let's not forget that the stakes we're playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children's children. Of everything we love. We have to reach in ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight."
A pleasant book of essays and speeches that pulls the nifty move of rarely if ever addressing the title specifically (even in the titular article!) while still somehow managing to impart that idea throughout. Her analysis ranges from razor sharp to treacly and banal, but I'm willing to overlook the latter as speeches by their very nature (given to a specific, knowing audience at a specific time) will often read as such in retrospect, even when they're really good. Most notably, her theme of a populace unable to dream of a better world avoids the shallow and the obvious, and is buttressed by a firm understanding of how the economics of capitalism encourage an unthinking body politic. Her analysis calls out essentially every faulty understanding of our society: the concept of a "bumbling" government doing it's best to fix difficult issues (instead of being the cause of said issues), the Manichean conception of "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists," and the idea of American foreign aid as generous benevolence instead of what it is (a desire to control the world and profit off of the administration). It's this last item that really ties together the idea of American empire across decades, from John McNaughton's proposal for "rebuilding" a Vietnam that we destroyed to our current war on UNRWA in Palestine, all of which has the rather obvious goal of supplanting local/international support structures with something controlled by America. And Roy understands that this neocolonial mindset is above all else very practical: not only is it easier to use economic levers to manage things from afar, but the very structure of this management (think NGOs) serves as an inherent bulwark against political resistance by absorbing and neutering/redirecting protest.
But even though Roy is sufficiently materialist in (most of) her analysis, it's the ideas behind communication, language, and other basics of human existence that shine through the brightest. Her contrast of her own concept of language as "the skin on my thought" with how American empire's dogma of plausible deniability requires that "the whole purpose of [their] language is to mask intent." Her idea of empire as the "greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them" reframes an often academic concern as something more tangible and real. She interprets America's desire to manage public opinion as something fundamentally insecure, a "persistent and valid worry that if people were to discover and fully comprehend the real nature of the things that are done in their name, they might act upon that knowledge." Because of all of this, she concludes that "the corporate media doesn't just support thew neoliberal project. It is the neoliberal project."
Finally, as Roy is Indian, a good deal of her discussion is about political developments in India. Specifically, she invest a good deal of time describing how the overwhelming number of dam projects are used to further the interests of global capital at the expense of rural people. What's most interesting about this for me, an American, is just how much the political landscape surrounding this that she depicts (ie. the rise of Modi amidst feckless opposition from the Congress Party) almost exactly mirrors our situation here. Like, it's wild how much this just sounds like a plea to the Democrats of the Subcontinent:
"If the Congress Party wishes to be taken seriously as an alternative to the destructive right-wing religious fundamentalists who have brought us to the threshold of ruin, it will have to do more than condemn communalism and participate in empty nationalist rhetoric. It will have to do some real work and some real listening to the people it claims to represent."
11. Fire on the Mountain - Terry Bisson (link)
The tagline that appears on the cover of my copy reads "What if John Brown had won at Harper's Ferry? The classic SF novel of a Black utopia in the American South." The dreaded u-word gave me pause but I did not need to fear because not only is the book great, but any misconceptions the reader may have are addressed directly in the text. And sure, the story features flying cars, trips to Mars, magical shoes, and other developments typically meant to convey a world free from toil. But it's clear that Bisson sees the fundamental result of his alternate history as a much deeper and more meaningful liberation. In letters from the protagonist's ancestor (who describes his experience in the 1859 uprising many years later), we come to understand the real meaning of Nova Africa, the new state built out of the wreckage of slavery:
"My real dream...was to go far away, beyond the mountains, away from the black folks as well as the white, away from Virginia, from America: and I imagined somewhere over the rainbow there was a land where people lived in peace and harmony, didn't spit in the corners for boys to mop up; talked sweet to children; read books; didn't fight; didn't smell like wood smoke and horse shit. I now know it was Lebanon, a dream imparted to me along with reading by my homesick friend, the Arab—his idealized childhood Lebanon, mixed with every child's original dream of socialism, that genetic (I insist!) utopia without which there would be no actual socialism, with all its warts, for soul-hungering man. Some but not all of this sweetness I was to find in Nova Africa, some in Cuba, some in Ireland; but all that was still a lifetime away."
This re-contextualization of history is not only useful for helping to envision these realistic utopias, but also helping one re-examine their view of even the most well-trodden history. The most clever example of this is a work of alternate history within the book that appears to depict something like our actual reality (given to the protagonist by a "kindly" old racist lady, no less). In this narrative, the stakes of the war are less slavery (which was "about finished anyway") and instead nationhood. Seen in this light, Lincoln becomes not a great emancipator but a devious one: "He emancipates the whites from having to give up any of the land they stole. From having to join the human race."
12. Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War - Kyle Burke (link)
"But the Freedom Corps project was an expensive charade. Only a handful of volunteers ever made it to Southeast Asia and most of them just visited Taiwan. By 1968, it was finished. Marvin Liebman regretted his participation. "Despite our great hopes and rhetoric, I considered it fruitless," he later wrote. Recalling the disaster of the World Anti-Communist Congress for Liberation and Freedom in 1958, Liebman did not want to be "involved in building another facade, especially one that could be exposed as such." Ironically, the failure of the Freedom Corps affirmed Liebman's "sneaking admiration" for those young men and women who opposed the war in Vietnam. Filled with "frustration and rage, they took to the streets and campuses to fight for something they believed with all their hearts." He could "never find that passion in the activities of the conservative youth.""
A fun read that seeks to situate the desire by right-wing groups to form an "anti-communist international" during the Cold War not as purely an outgrowth of CIA machinations, but rather as a parallel development. These "similar networks of concerned citizens and NGOs" were their own beast, drawing their manpower from the military and intelligence spheres while seeking support and money from the business world at large. While the surface-level tenor of these organizations often read like bog-standard Cold War anti-communism, frequent displeasure with liberal governance suggested something even more sinister. Sure, only some of these organizations made this explicit, such as the Ukrainian-led ABN whose desire to "create ethno-nationalist states" behooved a vision best described as "national socialist, stressing the equality for the nation rather than the working class." South American guerrillas sounded a similar tone, labeling as "subversive" a broad swath of society that included "rock musicians, young people, journalists, teachers, and anyone who advocated for social justice." But it's striking how even the more anodyne organizations, including ones that ended up being nothing more than paper tigers, had the shared view that the checks and balances and democratic oversight of liberal governance was at direct odds with their goals.
Despite of all the useful facts and adept historicizing, perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is there there's a lot of psychology going on here. Burke explicitly makes note of the macho nature of the warrior subculture and how all of this fundamentally aligns with the individualistic, free-market ethos that undergirded it, but that just scratches the surface of the many layers of this pathology. The most notable overarching characteristic of these layers is how everything these people/groups said can be read as pure projection. The Soviet Union was seen as "the only empire in existence" which inspired "anticolonial discourses" among the right, who considered third-world conflict to be "well planned skirmishes...being directed from the communist control tower in the Kremlin." Iran-Contra participant John Singlaub had a little more awareness, recognizing the "inequalities created by centuries of oligarchic rule," but nonetheless considered third-world insurgencies "as little more than proxy warriors for outside communist forces bent on establishing footholds close to the United States." But perhaps no one was more addled by such ideological confusion than Ronald Reagan himself, who wrote in a letter to Singlaub:
"The struggle between freedom and communism is, in its essence, not an economic conflict but a spiritual one. It is a struggle in which those who love God, county, family and freedom are pitted against those possessed by ideological zeal who seek absolute power."
The ultimate irony of this was that the fall of the Soviet Union signaled the end of the effort to create an international alliance of the far right. As one would expect of a fundamentally capitalist project, the motive was less about heartfelt advocacy than it was "winning the hearts and minds of Americans, particularly wealthy conservatives who could donate to their cause." And seeing that there was no longer a grand communist threat, the impetus behind such an effort vanished, in large part because "it was based upon a mutual sense of what its members were against, not what they were for." A useful political analysis that works as a lesson for basically anyone!
Ultimately, Burke's narrative is perhaps most useful as a very full and detailed explanation of how Iran-Contra came to be, in part because of how it was far from anomalous. Several decades of crimes and other indiscretions performed in the name of anti-communism helped to shape the political space in which this sort of thing could happen more and more. And even though CIA covert ops were curtailed in the 1970s (supposedly) and the Reagan-led effort to support right-wing paramilitaries ended with his presidency (supposedly), this does not mean global capital has stopped using illicit means to further its aims. What the closing pages make clear is yet another example of neoliberalism absorbing its own critiques to make it more powerful. Private military firms that have arisen since the nineties (think Blackwater) may not have the free reign of the 1950s CIA, the sheer firepower of the US military, or the sheer desperation of the random American commandos depicted in this book. But they are still enforcing the rule of global capital all the same, perhaps with more blood-curdling efficiency and purpose:
"PMFs promised two major advantages over traditional militaries. First, they enhanced the abilities of governments, including the United States, to pursue geopolitical interests without deploying their own armies, thereby removing war-making from the realm of popular debate and citizen sacrifice. Second, by shielding their operations from public scrutiny, PMFs have offered new ways for states to clandestinely support unpopular or undemocratic regimes with horrendous human rights records."
13. Revolution's End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA - Brad Schreiber (link)
"We really thought groups like the SLA were nuts and horrible, and yet we felt some responsibility. We could recognize that level of craziness, and that someone needed to get a hold of them and say 'Just Chill.'"
-Rick Ayers
A perfectly fine read that I don't have much to say about, other than it's fascinating to see the contradictions that arise in acts of counterinsurgency. The SLA was inauthentic and bad, as one would expect from a creation of the forces that seek to crush the left, but it also aired real grievances and successfully agitated to appropriate a small amount of wealth in order to feed people. That the SLA "failed" and did not appear to have any meaningful legacy* is noteworthy, but if you squint you can still see a blueprint for how capitalism's subversion of revolutionary ideology could one day lead to its downfall.
*other than helping to make it really easy to sniff out fake revolutionaries
14. Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War - Volodymyr Ishchenko (link)
"The Western elites are trying to save the fraying international order; the Russian elite is trying to revise it to get a better place in the new one. However, neither can clearly explain how exactly the rest of humanity wins from either outcome. This is what 'multipolarity' may look like—the multiplication of national and civilizational identities, defined in opposition to each other but lacking any universal potential."
A sobering collection of essays on the realities of present-day Ukraine. Ishchenko's description of how the crisis of post-Soviet hegemony helped birth leaderless "revolutions" whose result was more a rearranging of deck chairs than any true social revolution echoes similar research from Vincent Bevins. Speaking as a leftist, he describes the political terrain of Ukraine as not entirely dissimilar from here, specifically in how dissidents are treated (spurious accusations of "Russian propaganda," serious scholarship being treated solely as "political activism," etc...). And while I wish there was more material here regarding the 2013 economic showdown between the West and Russia or some of the deep history of the region, there is still enough critical content to help paint the larger picture. Most notably, his understanding of the larger conflict as one between competing class interests is a useful lens:
"...taking the phenomenon of political capitalism into account, we can see the class conflict behind Western expansion, and why Western integration of Russia without the latter's fundamental transformation could never have worked. There was no way to integrate post-Soviet political capitalists into Western-led institutions that explicitly sought to eliminate them as a class by depriving them of their main competitive advantage: selective benefits bestowed by the post-Soviet states. The so-called 'anti-corruption' agenda has been a vital, if not the most important, part of the Western institutions' vision for the post-Soviet space, widely shared by the pro-Western middle class in the region. For political capitalists, the success of that agenda would mean their political and economic end."
Of course, the reality of a sclerotic ruling class in post-Soviet states does not make the Americans (nor the West more broadly) some great shining white knight. The alterative to a Putin-esque "stability without development" is not necessarily any better, especially when you consider Ukraine as a whole. Ishchenko mentions foreign debt to Western nations as a sort of sword hanging over not just Ukraine but the whole region. Forgiveness of this debt, long a demand of the Ukrainian left, would be the most meaningful step towards real self-determination, but it's made clear that this has been a dead letter across several presidential administrations. Additionally, there were many steps America could have taken to better support Ukraine and minimize the chance of war, but they didn't for...reasons:
"One strategy would have been to start serious negotiations with Putin, to agree that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO, because they never had any desire to invite it to join — nor do they have any desire to fight for it, as we see now. Another, opposite strategy would have been to send a massive supply of weapons to Ukraine before the war started, which was sufficient to change the calculations on Putin's side. But they didn't do either of those things — and that looks sort of strange, and of course very tragic for Ukraine."
15. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb - Gar Alperovitz (link)
"I told him that my own opinion was that the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. It is a case where we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way. They have rather taken it away from us because we have talked too much and have been too lavish with our beneficences to them. I told him this was a place where we really held all the cards. I called it a royal straight flush and we mustn't be a fool about the way we play it. They can't get along without our help and industries and we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique. Now the thing is not to get into unnecessary quarrels by talking too much and not to indicate any weakness by talking too much; let our actions speak for themselves."
"Byrnes—what we must do now is not make the world safe for democracy, but make the world safe for the U.S.A."
-Harry S. Truman
A detailed account of everything you would ever want to know about the titular subject, which effectively serves as a backdoor treatise on how knowledge is created in American politics. The combination of secret/missing information from the weeks leading up to August 6th and the way false justifications were laundered after the fact both combined to garner a popular understanding of the bomb (it was needed to end the war) that is not at all supported by the historical record. Even though Alperovitz is cautious about drawing firm conclusions about the precise reasons the bomb was dropped, I feel that his work provides more than enough support towards my theory that the bomb was the first shot of the Cold War. Hell, just look at those quotes from Truman above.
As Alperovitz tells it, the decision itself was sort of a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. Instead of Kennedy and a few others talking down his advisers that were pushing for war, the decision to drop the bomb appears to have come from Truman and his Secretary of State James Byrnes in opposition to most others in and around the government. The evidence he presents is both striking and convincing. For one, nothing really indicated the US was going down this specific path until Truman took office. Per the book, "it is quite clear that a very different strategic understanding steadily began to influence political-military thinking at this time. Eerily, it occurred at almost the precise moment Harry Truman took over the Oval Office on Roosevelt's death." What's more is that the cast of characters in opposition to dropping the bomb is a veritable who's who of future Cold Warriors. Lewis Strauss, Douglas MacArthur, and Curtis "bombs away" LeMay all voiced opposition. John Foster Dulles joined his fellow religious leaders to urge restraint immediately after Hiroshima. And conservative Catholic priest James M. Gillis basically turned into Kwame Ture for a minute:
"I would call it a crime were it not that the word "crime" implies sin and sin requires consciousness of guilt....The action taken by the United States Government was in defiance of every sentiment and every conviction upon which our civilizations is based."
Concerns about the USSR taking power in Europe after the war clearly played into American decision making. Alperovitz is especially candid about why this obvious fact slips past most people:
"Worries about this prospect (increased Soviet power) began to impact calculations concerning the forms of power the United States could use to influence Soviet behavior in Europe. And this began to bring the potential role the atomic bomb might play into much sharper focus.
Americans tend to be naive about "power." As we look back on much-admired figures in earlier periods of history (like Truman), we like to think that American diplomacy might somehow been above such questions. In some part of our awareness, of course, most of us know this is unlikely. Still, we need to be reminded that leaders of all nations think and reason about their real-world capacity to achieve their ends."
In this way, the bomb itself became its own diplomatic force, leading us down paths we might not have otherwise taken. Lt. Groves, overseer of the Manhattan Project, envisioned the post-war order as an "American-administered Pax-Atomica" based on not just technological superiority but also a presumptive monopoly on the raw materials needed for the bomb, such as uranium. Truman used the leverage gained from knowledge of the bomb to pursue more aggressive negotiations during Potsdam, challenging Stalin on the Balkans, in direct opposition to the previous approach under FDR and Stimson. This newfound "confidence" of Truman's even extended to Germany, where the specter of the bomb lessened the need to collaborate with Russia to extract industrial reparations from the defeated Nazi government. This approach served to birth the Cold War not only by institutionalizing a particular brand of American hubris, but also by "making it impossible ever to enlist Russian cooperation in the set-up of future international controls over this new power."
The last third of the book concerns everything that happened after the bombs were dropped. This section is pretty predictable if you know anything about Cold War history (newspapers publish Stimson's whitewashing uncritically, Henry Luce is involved, McGeorge Bundy even shows up as a ghostwriter of sorts), but it's just as critical to the story Alperovitz is telling. And just like any other event from the period, the slow roll of declassifications and revelations (not to mention the fact there's still classified info) is both maddening and fundamentally undemocratic. All this detail and analysis concerning one of the seminal events in the creation of our modern polity serves to make The Decision a great introduction to the rot at the heart of America, if you're not already inclined to such thinking.
16. Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America - Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (link)
"How can I be a fascist? I don't control the railways or the flow of commerce..."
-Barbie
I have rarely waded into the "fascism debate" for many reasons. For one, I think it's slightly too academic for my tastes, which I said in this post:
"Ever since Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, there's been an ongoing debate about whether or not all this is fascism. Personally, I have no dog in that fight, as I find it to be more about semantics than substance. The modern American right and its anti-trans/abortion/etc program is both fascist in one sense (it's a far-right political project bent on domination) and not fascist in another (we have our own bespoke and long-standing tradition of oppression). This doesn't mean I think this discussion is necessarily foolish, but instead that there are limits to its practical use in the face of a very real threat."
The rest of that post details the other reason I avoid the debate—that is, it is often very myopic, not just to history, but to the very concept of the world outside of America. Because we once joined with others to defeat fascism, there's a tacit assumption that all subsequent enemies are also fascist, and that ongoing American hegemony is the primary thing keeping fascism at bay. The thing is that this is not true, and is perhaps so untrue as to be the literal opposite of reality. As such, the popular conception of "fascism" in America is more of a non-specific concept that can be applied liberally in different contexts. Or perhaps put more succinctly, it's just vibes.
In this context, I picked up this collection of essays that has managed to both summarize this debate and reignite the animosity between the different camps. While few of the individual essays approach the brilliance of true revelation on their own, the collection as it's presented here is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a push and a pull to the reiteration of similar themes throughout the essays that builds and reinforces a thesis that the real "answer" to the fascism question is somewhere in between the binary poles of "Yes" and "No," which not even the most fervent interlocutor inhabits anyway.
The most useful of these themes are twofold. The first is the near-constant invocation of already existing American fascisms that render certain aspects of the debate toothless. Between the "long-standing institutional pathologies of a national security state that generates insecurity by design," the refusal of those same institutions to "attempt to tie individual [white nationalist] crimes to a broader movement," and the "dissolution of the masses" that predicated and created the demand for the atomization of the social media age, there are so many distinctly American pathologies to be concerned with that projecting Weimar Germany onto our current situation becomes quaint and, in a perverse way, almost comforting. And of course, focusing only on modern developments belies that they have roots in the Klan and other proto-fascist movements that pre-date the rise of European fascism.
The second useful theme is that the etymology of current uses of "fascism" do actually arise in part from "vibes," and that is actually just fine (to a degree). An essay by Peter E. Gordon synthesizes this idea best, relying on Wittgenstein to say that "terms to not require exhaustive definitions; we compare events not by applying rules but by recognizing family resemblances across a wide variety of distinctive phenomena." The idea that analogies to Nazism and the like require perfect one-to-one mapping is on it's face a ludicrous proposition. And while few if any would actually argue that, it does appear to be an overriding assumption of at least some arguing against the comparisons. Indeed, the elevation of capital-f Fascism "into a timeless signifier of absolute evil has had the effect of making it not only incomparable but, in a more troubling sense, unknowable." If we instead allow ourselves to understand that the term can simultaneously mean "both a historically distinctive ideology and a general style," this allows for a "more expansive appeal to the political past." Viewing "fascism" as "a common name for a style of institutionalized cruelty and authoritarian rule that recurs with remarkable frequency, albeit in different guises" allows us to incorporate the lessons of history without becoming slaves to them.
It was also interesting to see a critique of Bowling Alone here. I voiced my own misgivings when I read the book in 2021, but Anton Jäger's analysis is much more incisive and in-depth. His analysis of what was missing from Putnam's narrative (ie. the replacement of mass-membership organization with NGOs driven by the interest of large donors) is very useful, but his invocation of the third-rail that Putnam wouldn't allow himself to touch is key:
"...a Marxist interpretation [for the economic restructuring of neoliberalism] proved a useful supplement to the Putnamite view: individualization was an imperative for capital, and collective life had to be diminished in order for the market to find new avenues for accumulation."
17. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 - Kathryn S. Olmsted (link)
18. The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them - Aziz Rana (link)
