tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49954383348918852822024-03-14T14:13:42.054-07:00 A Trumpet of Sedition.Org A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comBlogger458125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-17310538835522357962024-03-13T12:46:00.000-07:002024-03-14T14:11:09.478-07:00José Feeds the World: How a Famous Chef Feeds Millions of People in Need Worldwide February 29 2024, by David Unger and illustrated by Marta Alvarez Miguéns.<p><span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAwBgWwGovlOSQhW3l8suenh9C0jg51X1JnaOPo4vY6zF06MDHnQ5uIh0NC1s1junOXrObxT2oqGGDxM3oEYBvNR0uVWBBpSmVfOWMUcrGVGCdLyY0D_ss5GTk__9g5scL89TP7-6uywynsLV5KsVS2beucPpKLgeFEEkxWPaXlKJhpmUq-NQO89y7eVvY/s500/51Trf4HX8aL.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAwBgWwGovlOSQhW3l8suenh9C0jg51X1JnaOPo4vY6zF06MDHnQ5uIh0NC1s1junOXrObxT2oqGGDxM3oEYBvNR0uVWBBpSmVfOWMUcrGVGCdLyY0D_ss5GTk__9g5scL89TP7-6uywynsLV5KsVS2beucPpKLgeFEEkxWPaXlKJhpmUq-NQO89y7eVvY/w200-h200/51Trf4HX8aL.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David Unger’s new book is the true story of José
Andrés, an award-winning chef, food activist, and founder of World Central
Kitchen.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Jose%20Feeds%20the%20World/Jos%C3%A9%20Feeds%20the%20World%20draft%202.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This disaster relief organisation helps working-class communities when
catastrophe hits.</span> <span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Although primarily aimed at children,
adult readers learn much from Unger's understated and thoughtful text. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The book is beautifully illustrated by Marta Alvarez
Miguéns, a freelance illustrator based in La Coruña, Spain. Her previous works
have included A Tiger Called Tomás, Dinosaur Lady and Shark Lady, which was
named a Best STEM Book by the Children's Book Council and the National Science
Teachers Association. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Jose Andres and his organisation are very busy at the
moment. Every day, a new disaster, war, appears, coupled with the massive
growth of world poverty and hunger. According to The State of Food Security and
Nutrition in the World 2022, published by the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the International Fund for Agricultural
Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and World
Health Organization (WHO), have reported that up to 828 million people, nearly
11 per cent of the world’s population, faced hunger in 2022. The number has
grown by about 140 million since the start of the pandemic.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is no doubt about Andres's sincerity and
bravery in alleviating world hunger and poverty, saying, “What we’ve been able
to do is weaponise empathy. Without empathy, nothing works.”.But the cruel reality
is that Andres's work is insufficient to defeat world hunger and poverty.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Jean Shaoul writes, “World leaders are acutely aware
of the repercussions of the spiralling cost of food as workers demand pay
increases and take to the streets in protest over their deteriorating living
conditions in rich and poor countries alike. But the fight for decent wages,
affordable food, necessities and a massive increase in wages means that the
working class must unite across workplaces, industries, countries and continents
in a global political struggle against the capitalist class and its governments
and to put an end to the imperialist war.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Jose%20Feeds%20the%20World/Jos%C3%A9%20Feeds%20the%20World%20draft%202.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p><p class="MsoFootnoteText">
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<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Jose%20Feeds%20the%20World/Jos%C3%A9%20Feeds%20the%20World%20draft%202.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif;"> www.globalcitizen.org<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Jose%20Feeds%20the%20World/Jos%C3%A9%20Feeds%20the%20World%20draft%202.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif;">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/10/hung-j10.html</span><o:p></o:p></p>
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</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-81356414968796132282024-03-01T10:08:00.000-08:002024-03-01T10:08:41.165-08:00Keeping the historical record and its historiography accurate<p>Almost a decade ago, in May, 2014, I was able to go to
Trinity Hall in the University of Cambridge to hear John Walter of the
University of Essex reflect on the development of his career from his time as
an undergraduate in Cambridge, his period at the University of Pennsylvania
and, subsequently, as an academic historian on the University of Essex’s campus
in Wivenhoe. It was a privilege to be there and to hear him discuss the work of
historians who had influenced him as well as the intellectual trajectory of his
own studies. One thing, however, did strike me very forcibly on that occasion,
namely, that no measures had been taken to record what he had said. That was a
misfortune and a loss to future historians.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Since then, largely as a result of the deeply regrettable
impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, many universities have adopted the practice
of allowing their seminars to be accessible via the internet. I can sit in my
small study overlooking the wood and river to the south of my house and watch a
large number of historians delivering papers on their research and work to live
audiences and to larger groups of postgraduates and historians online. This has
made it possible for me to listen to and see major figures in my own field of
early modern history, people like Nicholas Tyacke, John Morrill, Blair Worden,
Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, Richard Cust, Peter Lake and many others. I have
also been able to sit in on papers given by younger historians, many of whom
are likely to become significant players in the discipline in the years ahead.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nonetheless, most of the seminars I have witnessed online
have taken place in the United Kingdom at the Universities of Oxford and
Reading or at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London.
It has been much more difficult to find such seminars in countries like Canada
and the United States of America, in Australia or New Zealand or on the
European continent. I have certainly become aware of a great deal of
interesting research and writing being done in those places but seeing and hearing
their work being discussed is much more of a problem. Perhaps, there may be
those historians who can help on this issue out there.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Christopher Thompson<o:p></o:p></p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-14446673647557660092024-02-25T11:23:00.000-08:002024-02-25T11:59:33.884-08:00The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Wordsworth Classics) Paperback – May 5 1992<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3qKjvPjEBHliw3FyTijm8Dms2qYrRIjojVi9HvhDjXQ6J_T2gP-0ycYpy8dLfsfBwprx2eX_R4c9s1rOvBn4rytQd40QnKP4lkpX_RoUA1Yxz1kawIVbVZwaSxAi1X9J281_czSdmrE91S_mGoQiXIfvMVMomZwUoJ7ReX2XoFnExGOCXBQnRTKrfZdfa/s466/71O-KIOHFBL._SY466_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="303" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3qKjvPjEBHliw3FyTijm8Dms2qYrRIjojVi9HvhDjXQ6J_T2gP-0ycYpy8dLfsfBwprx2eX_R4c9s1rOvBn4rytQd40QnKP4lkpX_RoUA1Yxz1kawIVbVZwaSxAi1X9J281_czSdmrE91S_mGoQiXIfvMVMomZwUoJ7ReX2XoFnExGOCXBQnRTKrfZdfa/s320/71O-KIOHFBL._SY466_.jpg" width="208" /></a></div> “It’s not all
rubbish,” cried Amory passionately. “This is the first time in my life I’ve
argued Socialism. It’s the only panacea I know. I’m restless. My whole
generation is restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the
most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to
sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents, I’d not be
content to work ten years, condemned to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to
give some man’s son an automobile.”<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">F Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“‘Her voice is full of money,’ he [Gatsby] said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the
inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’
song of it. … high in a white palace, the king’s daughter, the golden girl. …”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Great Gatsby<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I
suppose?” “Quite possibly,” admitted Amory. “Of course, it’s overflowing just
as the French Revolution did, but I’ve no doubt it’s really a great experiment
and worthwhile.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Great Gatsby<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Fitzgerald’s superb novel is set in the summer of 1922. The
plot is about a young man from the Midwest, Nick Carraway. Carraway sells bonds
on Wall Street and lives on Long Island. As Fitzgerald points out, Carraway
lives in a small house compared to the huge mansions surrounding him. The
enigmatic Jay Gatsby owns one. Gatsby lives close to a philandering husband,
Tom Buchanan, who represents older money to Gatsby’s new wealth. Gatsby has
made his millions (through bootlegging and stock fraud in partnership with
gangster Meyer Wolfsheim.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As the Marxist art critic David Walsh writes, “Fitzgerald’s
work is a brilliant effort, easy to underestimate in its brevity, delicacy and
the simplicity of the drama. The novel has something of the diaphanous
sensibility of Keats, the author’s favourite poet. At the same time, it is an
angry, scathing work, as thoroughgoing a debunking of the “American dream” as
there ever has been”.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Great Gatsby is a deceptive book. While it is only 146
pages long, it is an extraordinarily insightful look into the intellectual and
social life of the top echelons of the American ruling elite during the first
part of the 20<sup>th</sup> century.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> As Walsh writes, “ A
novel is not a history book or a political manifesto. The important artist
accumulates thoughts, feelings, moods and themes over the course of years and
works them into concrete and coherent imagery charged with meaning. Any serious
work also includes ambiguities, complexities, and “asymmetrical” elements that
are not easily reducible to immediate social analysis. However, the individual
artist does not draw his or her conceptions and emotions from empty space, nor
are they simply the expression of eternal psycho-biological urges. Significant
artistic ideas and representations are always shaped by collective human
experience by historical and social development. Fitzgerald thought a good deal
about political events and social life. His books and letters only have to be
read carefully for that to become apparent. Born in 1896, the novelist belonged
to a generation deeply affected by the First World War, the Russian Revolution
and subsequent developments.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Great%20Gatsby.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Fitzgerald's very subtle hints about the racist and fascist
outlook of a section of the American bourgeoisie are dropped into the text like
a bombshell. One example is when Tom
Buchanan talks about a book he has read called The Rise of the Colored Empires,
“by this man Goddard.” He goes on: “The idea is if we don’t look out, the white
race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been
proved.”Fitzgeralds' fictionalized reference is to Lothrop Stoddard’s The
Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). A deeply
reactionary. Stoddard was a Nazi sympathizer and anti-communist who wrote
“Bolshevism: The Heresy of the Underman” and “Social Unrest and Bolshevism in
the Islamic World.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Fitzgerald was not a Marxist or Communist, although he
certainly knew his way around Marx’s great works such as Das Kapital Walsh
writes, “One need not overestimate the references in Fitzgerald’s letters to
“We Marxians…,” “I’m still a socialist …,” “I’m a Communist enough …”, to grasp
the degree to which he knew his way around these issues. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Great Gatsby works on many levels. Aside from being a
great story, Gatsby is a stinging attack on the rich in America. In a line
that could describe America's ruling elite today, Fitzgerald writes, “They were
careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that
kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. …” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/14/grea-m14.html<o:p></o:p></p>
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</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-83465147729102825802024-02-12T11:18:00.000-08:002024-02-12T11:23:39.273-08:00The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution-by Tariq Ali-Verso publications-2017<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb0EqvUzwpDrK1kUqdJaOg3eRJ_DNkMAW9qoQbznGOGcPEFC-drlVWhRidm0yS3srrgE0ezl9b8RkwLv8IinmMKraYkcpi2p6wWMaszaG8iDrhAgHdZ1RgYHzi1N1SHmXqves00vteyVoNWXF8ukF5pDEpWakWR8XboJoS9xeMyLPNJA_2u3gKTfakDTAV/s500/41EVyWrrofL.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="325" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb0EqvUzwpDrK1kUqdJaOg3eRJ_DNkMAW9qoQbznGOGcPEFC-drlVWhRidm0yS3srrgE0ezl9b8RkwLv8IinmMKraYkcpi2p6wWMaszaG8iDrhAgHdZ1RgYHzi1N1SHmXqves00vteyVoNWXF8ukF5pDEpWakWR8XboJoS9xeMyLPNJA_2u3gKTfakDTAV/s320/41EVyWrrofL.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>“Before 30, a revolutionary. After 30, a swine!”<o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">French expression,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Gentlemen, we can neither ignore the history of the past nor
create the future. I would like to warn you against the mistake that causes
people to advance the hands of their clocks, thinking that thereby they are
hastening the passage of time. My influence on the events I took advantage of
is usually exaggerated, but it would never occur to anyone to demand that I
should make history. I could not do that even in conjunction with you, although
together, we could resist the whole world. We cannot make history; we must wait
while it is being made. We will not make fruit ripen more quickly by subjecting
it to the heat of a lamp, and if we pluck the fruit before it is ripe, we will
only prevent its growth and spoil it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Otto Von Bismark<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the
oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the
most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns
of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into
harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a
certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the
object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary
theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It has been one hundred years since the death of Vladimir
Lenin. I had intended to mark the occasion with a review of one of his books. Therefore,
I must apologise to my readership that I chose instead to review a book by such
a political scoundrel and political opportunist of the worst sort.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ali was born into a prominent family in Lahore. His uncle
was the chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence. While studying at Oxford, he
joined the International Marxist Group in 1968. The hallmark of the IMG was the
British section of the Pabloite movement, a group specialising in political
provocation.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ali is Verso’s go-to man on anything connected with Lenin.
This says more about Verso’s politics than it does about Ali. Given Ali's close
association with Stalinism, he should not be allowed anywhere near Vladimir Lenin.
Ali supported Gorbachev and Perestroika in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He believed Perestroika was a great advance for socialism.
He even dedicated his book Revolution From Above: Where Is the Soviet Union
Going?, published in 1988, to Boris Yeltsin, who later presided over capitalist
restoration in the USSR. He said of Yeltsin that his “political courage has
made him an important symbol throughout the country and that “The scale of
Gorbachev’s operation is, in fact, reminiscent of the efforts of an American
president of the nineteenth century: Abraham Lincoln.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Dilemmas of Lenin contains no new research and a very limited
insight into the mind and actions of Lenin. Ali is correct in saying that the
Russian Revolution would not have happened without the brain of Lenin, as Ali
points out in his introduction, “ First things first. Without Lenin, there
would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much, we can be
certain. Fresh studies of the events have only hardened this opinion. The
faction and later the Party that he painstakingly created from 1903 onward was
not up to the task of fomenting revolution during the crucial months between
February and October 1917, the freest period ever in Russian history. A large
majority of its leadership, before Lenin’s return, was prepared to compromise
on many key issues. The lesson is that even a political party – specifically
trained and educated to produce a revolution – can stumble, falter and fall at
the critical moment.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ali deals at length with the “Lenin cult<b>”</b> and the attempt
by the Stalinists to turn Lenin into a harmless liberal icon. Lenin believed
this would happen to all the leaders of the Bolshevik party, writing, “During
the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly
hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most
furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After
their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise
them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the
“consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the
latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its
substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">While Ali deals with the early attack on Lenin’s
revolutionary edge, his failure to examine more modern-day attempts to bury
Lenin under many dead dogs is unforgivable and hard to understand. However,
when one starts to investigate Ali’s political trajectory, only one conclusion
can be drawn: Ali has no interest in defending Lenin’s “revolutionary edge”.
The only ones interested in re-establishing Lenin’scontemprary importance are
the Trotskyists of the International Committee of the Fourth International(ICFI).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In a two-part Series, the Marxist David North defends
Lenin’s revolutionary edge from the blunt blade of Professor Sean McMeekin. McMeekin
wrote an article for the New York Times in which he accused Lenin, amongst
other things, of being a German Spy.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> His
article was based on his 2017 book The Russian Revolution: A New History, which
North said” cannot be described as a work of history because McMeekin lacks the
necessary level of knowledge, professional competence and respect for facts.
McMeekin’s book is simply an exercise in anti-communist propaganda from which
no one will learn anything.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He continued, “Why did he write the book? Aside from the
lure of easy money (anti-communist works are usually launched with substantial
publicity and guaranteed positive reviews in the New York Times and many other
publications), McMeekin has a political motive. At the start of this year, the
World Socialist Web Site wrote: “A spectre is haunting world capitalism: the
spectre of the Russian Revolution.” McMeekin is among the haunted. He writes in
the book’s epilogue, “The Specter of Communism,” that capitalism is threatened
by growing popular discontent, and the appeal of Bolshevism is again on the
rise. “Like the nuclear weapons born of the ideological age inaugurated in
1917, the sad fact about Leninism is that once invented, it cannot be
uninvented. Social inequality will always be with us, along with the
well-intentioned impulse of socialists to eradicate it.” Therefore, “the
Leninist inclination is always lurking among the ambitious and ruthless,
especially in desperate times of depression or war that seem to call for more
radical solutions.” McMeekin continues: “If the last hundred years teach us
anything, we should stiffen our defences and resist armed prophets promising
social perfection.” <a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In some ways, Ali and McMeekin are two sides of the same
coin. Both attempt to bury Lenin's revolutionary struggle, his true legacy and
contemporary importance. The only organisation on the planet that can truly
celebrate and thank Lenin for his insight and revolutionary struggle and bring
him to a new audience is the orthodox Marxists of the ICFI.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/3230-tariq-ali-asks-why-lenin<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Was Lenin a German Agent?By Sean Mcmeekin-June 19, 2017-https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/was-lenin-a-german-agent.html<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders (Part I)-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div><p><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Tariq%20Ali-Lenindraft1.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span></span></a>
Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders (Part I)-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html </p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-86278976443136152942024-02-07T11:29:00.000-08:002024-02-07T11:29:51.874-08:00The Future of British Historical Studies<p class="MsoNormal">Christopher Thompson <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Wed, 7 Feb at 12:09<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have been following the contributions to the debates on
the future of British Studies on the NACBS website with considerable interest.
There is a degree of pessimism in some of these contributions about the
prospects for this field in general and about the employment prospects for
existing and aspiring academic historians in particular. There are sound
reasons for these apprehensions, not least because governments and
universities' administrations across the English-speaking countries are focused
on wealth creation, on subjects that improve the performance of their economies
like the sciences, technology and mathematics. Amongst the wider public
in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, on the other hand, there is intense
interest in the past, in the histories of countries and communities,
localities, social groups and individuals. In that sense, historical studies
are in robust health and are likely to remain so. It is to the credit of the
Royal Historical Society in the United Kingdom that it has responded to the
threats to History Departments here by developing a strategy to contact public
decision makers about the merits of the subject and its importance in the
cultural and intellectual life of this country.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I do not think that it is very likely that historical
subjects will come under threat in universities like those at Oxford and
Cambridge. Elsewhere, I fear that some accountants and administrators see
history as a soft and dispensable target. This is a profound mistake.
Nonetheless, I do believe that historians engaged with the past of the British
Isles should begin to make a more active use of the resources of the internet
to establish links to archival resources for the subject, to create more
enduring on-line institutions to promote the subject, to make available
teachers and teaching to those unable to gain entry to courses at universities,
to supply suitable teaching materials and so on. Sites like Philosophy
Bites have been highly successful in addressing the needs of those
interested in that subject. The Open University has been able to reach
outside traditional audiences to address the interests of those beyond the
customary audiences for the discipline of history.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The time to start preparing alternatives as a supplement to
and support for the subject has arrived. It is not a counsel of despair but one
of prudent anticipation and preventative action here and across other
English-speaking countries. It is not a perfect solution but it may help to
avert a worse outcome.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p> </p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-4688252216894477022024-02-05T10:36:00.000-08:002024-02-05T10:36:27.071-08:00Mateo Ballester Rodriguez, Los Ecos de un Regicidio.La Recepcion de la Revolucion Inglesa y sus Ideas Politicas en Espana (1640-1660)<p> By Chris Thompson</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">How the events of the 1640s and 1650s and their consequences
are to be assessed is one of the enduring issues that historians of the British
Isles have to face. The analysis of their varying interpretations is in itself
a subject of continuing interest. By and large, historians based in these
islands and in English-speaking countries overseas have shown less interest in
and devoted less time to the studies undertaken by historians, by historical
sociologists and political scientists in other countries. Nonetheless, such
studies do exist and throw an interesting light on how these events were seen
and are now interpreted elsewhere.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Mateo Ballester Rodriguez’s essay published in 2015 is one
such example. It is partly a bibliographical description of the limited printed
publications that appeared in the Iberian peninsula and the apparently exiguous
manuscript material dealing with the conflicts in England in the period from
1640 to 1660. But it has some opening remarks by Rodriguez himself on the
significance of the disputes over sovereignty in England and some further
remarks covering the observations of figures from the world of political
science on the same subject. Many of the latter like Liah Greenfeld or Hans
Kohn or John Breuilly have not appeared on my horizon before.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Rodriguez’s formulation of his own analysis is relatively
straightforward. He held that there was a struggle between the supporters of
traditional beliefs in the divine rights of monarchs who stood at the apex of
English society and the adherents of novel ideas about the location of national
sovereignty in the institution of Parliament. On the whole, Anglicans and
Catholics supported King Charles I while radical Puritans were committed to
religious toleration and thus to Parliament’s cause.Absolutist political
theorists like Thomas Hobbes were rejected by advocates of legal equality like
the Levellers and, later, by John Locke. Admittedly, the conflicts of the first
and second Civil Wars divided English people of all ranks but Parliament’s
victory on the battlefields ensured that the new concept of authority resting
in the nation and embodied in Parliament was secured. Kings and the Church of
England were disposed of. One or two echoes of Christopher Hill’s work were
clearly reflected.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Liah Greenfeld apparently argued that the idea of the nation
as the repository of political authority, as the basis of political authority
and the object of loyalty was first embraced in England during its Revolution.
Hans Kohn came to the view that the Revolution represented the first example of
modern religious, political and social nationalism. On the other hand, John
Breuilly thought that it was difficult to make the nation the repository of the
principle of sovereignty or to figure out how that principle could be
institutionally embodied in the Rump and the Parliaments of the Protectorate.
In any case, the phenomenon disappeared when political stability was
re-established after the Restoration in 1660. Very little of the intriguing and
intense debates in the British Isles ever found their way into the hands of the
subjects of the Iberian Habsburgs in print or in manuscript as Rodriguez went
on to show. Ideological considerations and the practice of self-censorship
undoubtedly played a part in this outcome even though, in Holland and Venice,
interest in such events was much more obvious.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is tempting to criticise some of these contentions. How
far printed publications in the British Isles reflected the balance of
contemporaries’ opinions is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine. Highly
interesting though they are, the views of groups like the Levellers and Diggers
may not be as indicative of wider political opinions as their admirers in more
modern times believe. Puritans were not in any event all of one kind nor were
they uniformly advocates of religious toleration. All the regimes in England
after 1646, in Scotland and Ireland after 1651 depended on military force to
remain in power. Once the confidence of the soldiery was lost and the
supporters of Protectoral or republican rule became too divided, the return of
monarchical rule and of the pre-1640 state churches was increasingly likely.
Historical sociologists and political theorists alike need to look more closely
at the historical evidence before they venture onto the turf of
historians. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-19715354710532863182024-01-21T04:35:00.000-08:002024-01-21T04:41:05.990-08:00“The Crooked Path To Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution,” by James Oakes. £21.99-WW Norton & Co<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh422iOFFnt3yynMPncw750JOXhPShG_R46MPVEO_EMYpjYtn9hs_zQly_egkoNQl_UnRXOyi-AyK9JdaiAEluf4VtPhttqBqVZAMlZpuuVkb3-OsUzH7yP9JUhxNIYsom-tRFxEvrH5pXUZYKbOsRTApXM0FTETAKvWgvuPy2eOzloUld1m6mvyfnc9GzW/s2000/1392311024.0.x.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="1266" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh422iOFFnt3yynMPncw750JOXhPShG_R46MPVEO_EMYpjYtn9hs_zQly_egkoNQl_UnRXOyi-AyK9JdaiAEluf4VtPhttqBqVZAMlZpuuVkb3-OsUzH7yP9JUhxNIYsom-tRFxEvrH5pXUZYKbOsRTApXM0FTETAKvWgvuPy2eOzloUld1m6mvyfnc9GzW/s320/1392311024.0.x.jpg" width="203" /></a></div>We congratulate the American people
upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was
the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your
re-election is Death to Slavery.<o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">Karl Marx<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">“Scratch beneath the surface of any
debate about race in American history, and there you will find a struggle for
power, ultimately political power.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">Scorpion’s Sting James Oakes<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">“A slave-owner who through cunning
and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or
violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they
are equals before a court of morality!”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and
Ours<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">The relationship between Abraham
Lincoln and the institution of slavery is very complex. To Oakes’s credit, he
has written a book that is not only well-researched but, as David Holahan writes
in USA Today. “ brings clarity and insight to a political conundrum of
bewildering complexity.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">As James Oakes’s book The Crooked
Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution suggests,
there is not an easy path to understanding the relationship between Lincoln and
the question of slavery. From an early age, Lincoln hated slavery but was not an
abolitionist. According to James Oakes, Lincoln “never called for the immediate
emancipation of the slaves. He never denounced slaveholders as sinners and
never endorsed the civil or political equality of Blacks and whites… He never
opened his home to fugitive slaves. He endorsed voluntary colonization of free
Blacks… He certainly spoke at colonization meetings… but never at an
abolitionist meeting.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Although
not a Marxist historian, Oakes believes a dialectical relationship exists between
Lincoln and the struggle to end slavery.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">Oakes is a historian who is careful
with the words he uses. Again, as the title suggests, there was no
straightforward path to the abolition of slavery. Oakes spends a significant
part of the book examining the United States Constitution, which perhaps
unsurprisingly does not contain the word "slavery". Slaves are
referred to euphemistically as “persons” who are “held to service.” As Oakes
further points out, the Constitution contains much that is useful to both slaveholders
and abolitionists who point out that words “persons” and
"liberty" support their cause. Oakes does not sugarcoat the fact that
at the time the Constitution was written, slavery was on the ascendency, with
13 American states still practising chattel slavery.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">Oakes does not see the Constitution
through rose-tinted glasses, and his book attempts to place it in a more
objective light, writing, “Parse every clause of the Constitution, peer into
the minds of its authors, and you may never find the antislavery document
revered by so many ordinary men and women, Black and white.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">As the Marxist writer Tom Mackaman points
out, “The American Revolution made incarnate the thought of the Enlightenment,
the period of intellectual rebirth that undermined the divinely sanctioned
feudal order of the Middle Ages, and that grew in tandem with the incipient
capitalist economy. Just as scientists—natural philosophers as they were then
called—such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton challenged the feudal-religious
conception of the natural world, so Enlightenment political philosophers began
to raise questions about the political world—but not the social, which was only
dimly understood prior to Marx. Why did kings rule? What was the purpose of
government? What were the rights of man? Ultimately, in answer to these
questions, the Enlightenment established that there existed natural rights—that
is, rights that preceded government or that existed in a state of nature. <a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>One
natural right identified was the right to private property. Another was the
right to freedom of self-ownership. However, the right to property, as James
Oakes has pointed out, was increasingly viewed to be the outcome of
self-ownership and the right to dispose of one’s labour. “The property which
every man has in his labour, as it is the original foundation of all other
property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable,” This political conundrum
that Oakes mentions in the book was one that Lincoln would grapple with until
his political murder in 1865.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">In his review of Oakes's book, Richard
Kreitner concurs, writing, “This explication of the antislavery reading of the
Constitution represents Oakes at his best, showing how clauses that seemed to
protect slavery also opened, for a growing number of antislavery politicians,
doors to its potential abolition. The Constitution was a mess of
contradictions; it limited the possibilities of antislavery politics but
offered opportunities, too. Competing interpretations of the Constitution
“emerged in reaction to each other,” Oakes writes, adapting to new issues and
claims by the other, each invoking the founders to support its view. The
South’s increasingly aggressive twisting of the Constitution and demands for
slavery’s protection developed as much in response to growing antislavery
assertiveness as the other way around.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">Like all of Oakes's books, The Crooked
Path educates and increases one's knowledge. He brings a clarity of thought,
which is rare among historians of his subject matter. I like reading his books,
but from my standpoint, his most important contribution to historical clarity
has been his decision to take to the battlefield against what he called the
“new consensus history”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>. Over
the last five years, Oakes has been sharply critical of the various revisionist
narratives, including the historical racialism of the 1619 Project. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">Oakes believes most contemporary
scholarship offers only “a history or politics and of hopelessness.” Oakes
wrote in above mentioned article in 2017, “The new consensus history has shaped
large swaths of the American past, from the American Revolution of the
eighteenth century to the “long” Civil Rights movement of the twentieth
century. Here, I focus primarily on my field of inquiry—slavery, antislavery,
and the Civil War—where the drift toward consensus has been startling.
Everywhere you look, historians are collapsing fundamental social
distinctions—between slavery and racial discrimination, for example, between
being married and being enslaved, between the free labour system of the North
and the slave labour system of the South. The social bases of political
conflict thus erased, consensus historians go on to suppress the significance
of antislavery politics, even to the point of denying that politics played any
role whatsoever in the destruction of slavery. These crucial erasures are once
again explained by a reference to a broad political consensus—not the liberal
consensus of Hofstadter and Hartz, but the smothering, all-consuming consensus
in favour of “white male supremacy.” It’s still consensus history; it’s just a
different consensus.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">One revisionist narrative Oakes is
particularly hostile to has been the racialist viewpoint emanating from the New
York Times 1619 Project. For readers unfamiliar with the Vergangenheitsbewältigung,
visit the wsws.org<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>.
This website has extensive coverage from a Marxist perspective. In a recent interview
with the historian Tom Mackaman on wsws.org, Mackaman asked the following: “ Another
aspect of the way the 1619 Project presents history is to imply that it is a
uniquely American phenomenon, leaving out the long history of chattel slavery,
the history of slavery in the Caribbean. Oakes answered, “ And they erase
Africa from the African slave trade. They claim that Africans were stolen and
kidnapped from Africa. Well, they were purchased by these kidnappers in Africa.
Everybody’s hands were dirty. And this is another aspect of the tendency to
reify race because you’re attempting to isolate a racial group that was also
complicit. This is conspicuous only because the obsession with complicity is so
overwhelming in the political culture right now, but also as reflected in the
1619 Project. Hypocrisy and complicity are basically the two great attacks.
Again, not a critique of capitalism. It’s a critique of hypocrisy and
complicity. Here, I agree with Genovese, who once said that “hypocrites are a
dime a dozen.” Hypocrisy doesn’t interest me as a critique, nor does
complicity.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><a name="_Hlk156726810">James Oakes
is a first-rate scholar whose work is well worth reading. I look forward to his
next book.<o:p></o:p></a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><u>Notes</u><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]-->1.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span><!--[endif]-->February 1, 1959, issue of Commentary John
Higham “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]-->2.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->The
New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History- Edited
by David North and Thomas Mackaman-Mehring Books. </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]-->3.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span><!--[endif]-->Slavery in White and Black-Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
and Eugene Genovese<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"> <u><o:p></o:p></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><u>Books by James Oakes<o:p></o:p></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">The Radical and the Republican:
Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of antislavery Politics
(2007); <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">Freedom National: The Destruction
of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012). <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">The Scorpion’s Sting: antislavery
and the Coming of the Civil War (2014).<o:p></o:p></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
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<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln,
President of the United States of America-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
“The Crooked Path To Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery
Constitution,” by James Oakes. £21.99-WW Norton & Co<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Slavery and the American Revolution: A Response to the New York Times 1619
Project- <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/01/amer-n01.html">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/01/amer-n01.html</a><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Did the Constitution Pave the Way to Emancipation?- https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/james-oakes-crooked-path/<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
The New Cult of Consensus- https://nonsite.org/the-new-cult-of-consensus/<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div><p><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/The%20Crooked%20Path%20To%20Abolitiondraft4.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span></span></a>
An interview with historian James Oakes on the New York Times’ 1619 Project </p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-47533970105123125412023-12-31T12:26:00.000-08:002023-12-31T12:45:42.755-08:00The Protector: The Fall and Rise Of Oliver Cromwell - A Novel- Tom Reilly-Top Hat Books (June 24 2022)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFaCLJZRY9Pirrf3CZ1YqQpABScp_Z1vLiIIQ3PW6eT7-m2SCWWBBQEp4NR-tMRuZV9dn1YGQuoxVb_eBgU8h7w30ExB-2oY84Zar7heEdIEESH_QGc0eKAMHKQRO2rFhdle_-rXIpWoZGc4m8X3l8QsQ3n0jLyMSTiM2HvdBV_-eo29A2H_JEzw_LzFZx/s500/9781785351990.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFaCLJZRY9Pirrf3CZ1YqQpABScp_Z1vLiIIQ3PW6eT7-m2SCWWBBQEp4NR-tMRuZV9dn1YGQuoxVb_eBgU8h7w30ExB-2oY84Zar7heEdIEESH_QGc0eKAMHKQRO2rFhdle_-rXIpWoZGc4m8X3l8QsQ3n0jLyMSTiM2HvdBV_-eo29A2H_JEzw_LzFZx/s320/9781785351990.jpg" width="207" /></a></div> <span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">“The whole agrarian
history of Ireland is a series of confiscations of Irish land to be handed over
to English settlers. These settlers, in a very few generations, under the charm
of Celtic society, turned more Irish than the aborigines. Then a new
confiscation and new colonisation took place, and so in infinitum.”</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Frederick Engels<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">‘If I’m ever proven
wrong, I’ll shut up and get off the stage.’ <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Tom Reilly<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“Such issues are beyond
good manners, sir. Catholicism is more than a religion. It is a political
power. Therefore, I am led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until
the Catholic Church is crushed.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Oliver Cromwell<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“This ancestor of Lord
Lansdowne, the founder of the noble Lansdowne family, Sir William Petty, landed
in Ireland in 1652 with a total capital of all his fortune of £500. But he came
over in the wake of Cromwell’s army and got himself appointed ‘Physician to the
Army of Ireland’. In 1662, he was made one of a Court of Commissioners of Irish
Estates and also Surveyor-General for Ireland. As the native Irish were then
being hunted to death, or transported in slave-gangs to Barbadoes, the latter
fact gave this worthy ancestor of a worthy lord excellent opportunities to
‘invest’ his £500 to good purpose.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">James Connolly<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“What is History but a
fable agreed upon?”. Napoleon I.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">A new book on Oliver
Cromwell is always welcome, but this one is a major disappointment. I would not
go as far as to say that it wastes both the reader and author's time but it
comes pretty close to that. It is not Reilly’s fault but now all new work on
Cromwell will be defined by its attitude to the magnificent three volumes of Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver
Cromwell.<a href="file:///D:/Tom%20Reily/Tom%20Reillydraft3.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>His
book does not fair very well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Despite being an amateur
historian, books by Tom Reilly are worth reading. He has come under significant
attack for what is seen as an unhealthy fixation with Cromwell. However, not
all the criticism from modern academia has been fair, and some have been
borderline abusive. The book is not without some merit. It is well written and
researched and, to a limited degree, re-establishes Cromwell’s authentic voice.
How much of the real Cromwell appears
remains to be seen. My criticism of his robust and somewhat rose-tinted defence
of everything Cromwell did fails to place Cromwell in a more objective context.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Before the invasion of
Ireland, Cromwell had to do two necessary things, both crucial to a successful invasion
of Ireland. First was the execution of Charles I. Although, in the short term,
far from stabilising an already unstable ruling elite, the execution led
sections of the bourgeoisie to pursue negotiations with the Royalists in
England and Ireland. One of the reasons for the invasion was to subdue a
possible Royalist/Catholic revolt and to secure Cromwell’s and a large section
of the English bourgeoisie's strategic political and economic interests in that
country. Second, Parliament charged Cromwell to deal with the growing
radicalisation of the New Model Army. One manifestation of this radicalism was
the Leveller inspired revolt over the army being shipped to Ireland to put down
the revolt.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Most criticism of Reilly
has centred on his passionate defence of Cromwell’s role in Ireland.<a href="file:///D:/Tom%20Reily/Tom%20Reillydraft3.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> In
his new book, Reilly continues his theme that Cromwell was not to blame for the
massacres. He writes, “We should apologise to Cromwell’s family for blackening
his name, for making him a monster. We are teaching our children propaganda
that perpetuates anti-English prejudice.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Suppose we take out of
the equation Reilly’s hyperbole and infatuation. In that case, we are left with
the fact that Oliver Cromwell was a leading member of the English bourgeoisie
and, alongside others, not only made a lot of money out of the conquest of
Ireland but, if it happened today, would be guilty of war crimes.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The English Bourgeoisie,
from the beginning saw Ireland as a money-making adventure. As an incentive to
make the conquest easier, it got Parliament to pass an “Adventurers Act” in 1642 to invite the
“Middling Sort” to invest in the army. The greater the investment, the greater
the return of land. Cromwell had loaned over 2,000 pounds and had been promised
land in Leinster. Christopher Hill correctly states Cromwell’s conquest of
Ireland was “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big
defeat of English democracy”.While many of the bourgeoisie stumped up money for
their adventure in Ireland, Parliament felt a little more cooperation was a
need and this came in the form of a series of ordinances which was a demand for
money with menaces. In February 1648: it issued An Ordinance For raising of
Twenty thousand pounds a Month for the Relief of Ireland.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Frederick Engels states,
“ In the 17th century, the whole of Ireland, except the newly Scotchified
North, was ripe for a fresh confiscation. So much so that when the British
(Puritan) Parliament accorded to Charles I an army for the reduction of
Ireland, it resolved that the money for this armament should be raised <i>upon
the security of 2,500,000 acres to be confiscated in Ireland. </i>And the
“adventurers” who advanced the money should also appoint the officers of that
army. The land was to be divided amongst those adventurers so that 1,000 acres
should be given them, if in Ulster for £200 — advanced, in Connaught for £300,
in Munster for £450, in Leinster for £600. And if the people rose against this
beneficent plan, they are Vendéens! If Regnard should ever sit in a National
Convention, he may take a leaf out of the proceedings of the Long Parliament
and combat a possible Vendée with these means.<a href="file:///D:/Tom%20Reily/Tom%20Reillydraft3.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">In another part of the
same letter, Engels makes this point: “The 80,000 Protestants’ massacre of
1641. The Irish Catholics are here in the same position as the Commune de
Paris. The Versailles massacred 30,000 Communards and called that the horrors
of the Commune. The English Protestants under Cromwell massacred at least
30,000 Irish and, to cover their brutality invented the tale that this was to
avenge 30,000 Protestants murdered by the Irish Catholics.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The Irish socialist
James Connolly, while not blaming the English bourgeoise for everything that occurred
to the Irish people after the conquest of Ireland in the latter part of the
seventeenth century, but wrote “ Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise
above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above
the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its
inspiration. If we would understand the national literature of a people, we
must study their social and political status, keeping in mind the fact that
their writers were a product thereof and that the children of their brains were
conceived and brought forth in certain historical conditions. Ireland, at the
same time as she lost her ancient social system, also lost her language as the
vehicle of thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result of this
twofold loss, the nation suffered socially, nationally and intellectually from
a prolonged arrested development. During the closing years of the seventeenth
century, all the eighteenth, and the greater part of the nineteenth, the Irish
people were the lowest helots in Europe, socially and politically. The Irish
peasant, reduced from the position of a free clansman owning his tribeland and
controlling its administration in common with his fellows, was a mere
tenant-at-will subject to eviction, dishonour and outrage at the hands of an
irresponsible private proprietor. Politically, he was non-existent. Legally, he
held no rights; intellectually, he sank under the weight of his social
abasement and surrendered to the downward drag of his poverty. He had been
conquered, and he suffered all the terrible consequences of defeat at the hands
of a ruling class and nation who have always acted upon the old Roman maxim of
`Woe to the vanquished'.<a href="file:///D:/Tom%20Reily/Tom%20Reillydraft3.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">I do not hold out much
hope that Reilly’s next Cromwell adventure will produce a more objective study.
I will examine Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives, which emerged in 2020. Reilly
can write more books and hold more conferences, but the reality is that his
hero is not as innocent as he makes out. Perhaps his next book should contain a
few warts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/Tom%20Reily/Tom%20Reillydraft3.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 9pt;">The Letters,
Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell: Volume 1: October 1626 to January
1649 (Speeches & Writings of Oliver Cromwell) Hardcover – 7 Sept. 2022by
Andrew Barclay (Editor), Tim Wales (Editor), John Morrill (Editor)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/Tom%20Reily/Tom%20Reillydraft3.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 9pt;">See Cromwell and
Ireland: New Perspectives Hardcover – 30 Nov. 2020<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 9pt;">by
Professor Martyn Bennett (Author, Editor), Raymond Gillespie (Editor), Scott
Spurlock (Editor)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/Tom%20Reily/Tom%20Reillydraft3.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 9pt;">Engels To Jenny
Longuet-Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow
1971, pp. 326-329-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_24.htm<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/Tom%20Reily/Tom%20Reillydraft3.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 9pt;"> Labour in Irish
History by James Connolly<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-69040057884591396912023-12-19T11:20:00.000-08:002023-12-21T10:36:58.296-08:00A tribute to Dave Hyland- ( 1947-2013)<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdF1rgD5PGi8eFvJBcp0sUtIH5ebSZfbPHyladW6tQaRZaqZIFHudJP5hpXTcOUxpBbuXLDNqCOLmulHT7meOhvXqymnoPP5gynrx6Uhl28IHNMZGuyVbQYuDYsyF_Sflmy4pFzXM4d97TqqUCkuGg-beATGfzjeP3UvoMqs1AnQU53UslSEeyd4jSishM/s1280/056f4b8504b148ca8dd74917856c700a3a769505.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="723" data-original-width="1280" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdF1rgD5PGi8eFvJBcp0sUtIH5ebSZfbPHyladW6tQaRZaqZIFHudJP5hpXTcOUxpBbuXLDNqCOLmulHT7meOhvXqymnoPP5gynrx6Uhl28IHNMZGuyVbQYuDYsyF_Sflmy4pFzXM4d97TqqUCkuGg-beATGfzjeP3UvoMqs1AnQU53UslSEeyd4jSishM/w320-h181/056f4b8504b148ca8dd74917856c700a3a769505.jpg" width="320" /></a></p><span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">It is hard to imagine
that it is ten years since the passing of Dave Hyland. I first met him in
Hammersmith, London, on February 8 1986. The split inside the Workers
Revolutionary Party had just taken place, and the Internationalist faction, of
which I was a member, had assembled for the 8th congress only to be barred from
the meeting by police called by the Slaughter\Banda faction.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">I joined the WRP in 1983
after a nine-month candidate membership, which I think was a record for any
revolutionary organisation. When I told my parents about the membership, I
expected some hostility, but my mother said, “At least it will keep him on the
streets”. This quote will be the title of my autobiography. My path towards
membership in the WRP was pretty tortuous, and I will not burden readers with
the details of the many organisations I joined, which, in reality, were
thoroughly reactionary.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Joining the WRP was like
a breath of fresh air. I felt comfortable being a member. I had prepared myself
by reading and collecting classical Marxist literature. I bought so much
literature from the Militant organisation that they sent two girls around to my
house in an attempt to recruit me. I did not stay long in that party, which I
quickly saw was a front for the Labour Party.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Inside the WRP, I read
books and pamphlets about their history and that of the ICFI. A basic part of
membership was, of course, newspaper selling. I never really read the WRP’s
Newsline which was nothing more than a comic to me and did not advance my intellect
one iota. That bothered me, but I did not understand why the paper was so low
compared to the youth movement’s paper, The Young Socialist. The youth paper
carried articles from the US section of the Workers League. One such article
was David North’s Leon Trotsky and the development of Marxism. In my limited
outstanding of Trotskyist politics, the Workers League was far superior to the
WRP. It was only after the split and the publication of How the WRP Betrayed
Trotskyism did I fully understood why.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As I said, my first
meeting with Dave was in Hammersmith. He was handing out booklets that
contained a wealth of material on the split and various topics. One of which
was Security and the Fourth International. I had read the two books produced by
the ICFI, so I was very familiar with a subject that fascinated me and was
eager to read more. I still have the booklets I got from him. It isn't easy to
sum up a man's character in such a brief meeting, but my abiding memory was of
his energy. He was a fighter of very similar stature to the American Trotskyist
James P Cannon. Hyland had what Trotsky called the “physical power of thought.”
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As I got to know him,
while it was hard to become friends in a revolutionary party, it did not stop
me from having the utmost respect and admiration for him. Outside of David
North, he was the most important figure in my political development. He had many
important characteristics. He was well-read despite having a hard-working life
and raising a family, which was probably the most important family in the
political life of the British Section, if not the ICFI. He was very
approachable and easy to talk to and I like to feel we had immediate political
and personal rapport. One memory sticks out. It was during my victimisation in
1987. I was preparing for an important meeting and having problems writing a
speech. At the time, he was National Secretary of the British section of the
ICFI, yet he still found the time late into the night to coach me and make
changes to the speech. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">During my time in the
party, I had known that Dave was not well but did not know until his death how
terrible his illness was. So, unlike many who were close to him at the end, his
death did come as a great shock to me, and it saddens me terribly that he had
to suffer with such extremely aggressive rheumatoid arthritis for more than 20
years. But as David North wrote, “Despite the gravity of his illness, Dave had
manifested powers of resistance that seemed to defy scientific explanation. His
willpower, his desire to live and to participate in life as fully as possible,
exerted itself as a real physical force.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">In his appreciation of
Hyland, Nick Beams said, “Marxism bases itself on the objective laws of
society. But it has nothing in common with any fatalism or passivity. At
crucial turning points in the historical process, the decisions made by
individuals and their struggles based on those decisions prove to be the
decisive factor. Dave’s decision to fight for the programme of the IC was one
such decision”. It was his finest hour. In my heart and mind, Comrade Dave will
never be forgotten. As David North said, “ He will be remembered by his
comrades and remain an inspiring example of revolutionary steadfastness and
principle for generations to come.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p></p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-53816538701299220132023-11-28T11:02:00.000-08:002023-11-28T11:02:01.842-08:00Comment: Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee meeting on Sunday, November 26 .<p><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Sunday’s Postal Rank and
File online meeting was one of the most important for two reasons. Firstly, it
comprehensively nailed the lie that Falconer Review has delivered “justice” for
reps and members victimised during the year-long dispute at Royal Mail.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The Communication Workers
Union(CWU) has openly lied to its membership. As a victimized CWU rep has said
on the wsws.org, the union has trampled on the time-honoured principle “an
injury to one is an injury to all.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The second reason is
that it discussed the question of leadership. Leadership is an art and takes
time to develop. It will not happen overnight. It is clear from the meeting and
the numerous articles on wsws.org that the CWU is now an arm of corporate management.
The betrayal carried out by the CWU is unprecedented in the postal worker's
history. It will undoubtedly become a template for other union bureaucracies to
carry out similar betrayals. The question posed in the meeting is what can postal
workers do about it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Again, as was raised in
the meeting, it is not a question of lack of fight. The numerous votes for official
and unofficial strike action proved that postal workers were itching to prosecute
a fight against Royal Mail but were saddled with leadership from day one that
worked to betray the strike. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This brings me to the
point raised by Simon that postal workers were “sheep” unthinkingly following their
leadership. Leadership is a complex matter. As the great Russian revolutionary Leon
Trotsky wrote, “Our author substitutes mechanistic determinism for the
dialectic conditioning of the historical process. Hence the cheap jibes about
the role of individuals, good and bad. History is a process of class struggle.
But classes do not bring their full weight to bear automatically and
simultaneously. In the process of struggle, the classes create various organs
which play an important and independent role and are subject to deformations.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This also provides the
basis for the role of personalities in history. There are naturally great
objective causes that created the autocratic rule of Hitler, but only
dull-witted pedants of “determinism” could deny today the enormous historical
role of Hitler. The arrival of Lenin in Petrograd on April 3, 1917, turned the
Bolshevik party in time and enabled the party to lead the revolution to
victory. Our sages might say that had Lenin died abroad at the beginning of
1917, the October Revolution would have taken place “just the same.” But that
is not so. Lenin represented one of the living elements of the historical
process. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">He personified the
experience and the perspicacity of the most active section of the proletariat.
His timely appearance in the arena of the revolution was necessary to mobilise
the vanguard and provide it with an opportunity to rally the working class and
the peasant masses. Political leadership in the crucial moments of historical
turns can become just as decisive a factor as the role of the chief command
during the critical moments of war. History is not an automatic process.
Otherwise, why leaders? Why parties? Why programs? Why theoretical struggles?<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">To conclude, Postal workers
work extremely hard and are a very disciplined bunch of workers. They have not
always followed their leaders and have on numerous occasion sought to break
the strangled hold of the bureaucracy but to no avail. The meeting posed the
question of a new type of leadership. The CWU is dead. It is just that nobody
has buried it yet. It is down to the most politically conscious workers to
create a new leadership. Those in attendance in the meeting must now give that
lead.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif;"> The Class, the Party-and the
Leadership-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-6756254767619312132023-11-23T12:39:00.000-08:002023-11-26T05:11:13.110-08:00The Sisterhood: Big Brother is watching. But they won't see her coming. -Katherine Bradley-Hardcover – Simon & Schuster UK (16 Mar. 2023)<p><span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsjvdxsNvXFfLi1N4Dz2i97LayN56-G35j3f3uCIy-Svy-pJIWsgJNBAgPQOCnYoRXRVB3cAXpHpV_u_cNxykJ-FG6uyzzhxC7aZzO2Pc6n-UjrijIn3qpGrG1lRvVkzbZJcm-Rig9p2sFZz0GLK_EDD1mNhg5-Ozvu3gRt4X2uD0tgWj9b1ntoJT9tdlK/s500/51bSix6hXpL.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="328" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsjvdxsNvXFfLi1N4Dz2i97LayN56-G35j3f3uCIy-Svy-pJIWsgJNBAgPQOCnYoRXRVB3cAXpHpV_u_cNxykJ-FG6uyzzhxC7aZzO2Pc6n-UjrijIn3qpGrG1lRvVkzbZJcm-Rig9p2sFZz0GLK_EDD1mNhg5-Ozvu3gRt4X2uD0tgWj9b1ntoJT9tdlK/s320/51bSix6hXpL.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>While it has been seventy-three
years since the death of George Orwell, there appears to be no let up in the substantial
publication of books about him or what seems to be a popular new genre of rewriting
his most famous works, Animal Farm and 1984.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/the%20Sisterhooddraft1.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span></span></a><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">It must be said
Katherine Bradley's new book is a substantial improvement of what has been a
relatively bad bunch. What marks Bradley’s book out is it retells the story of
Julia from Orwell's book 1984 from a far more left-wing and even working-class
perspective than even Orwell contemplated. Julia and her fellow members of the
Sisterhood organisation try to reach a common platform with their male
counterparts in the Brotherhood to launch a joint campaign against Big Brother.
This cuts across the current right-wing MeToo movement's insistence on keeping women's
struggle separate from their male counterparts. For them, this is just “a
feminist retelling of Orwell’s beloved story, this time written from Julia’s
perspective.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Mainstream media
platforms have largely ignored the book, and it has come under attack from more
right media outlets, such as the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Jessa Crispin wrote in the
Telegraph, “We have, whether we like it or not, entered the second wave of
rewriting classic tales to align them with modern-day social sensibilities
about women, people of colour, and other marginalised groups who were prevented
from writing and publishing their own stories for too long. People are
rewriting “Little Red Riding Hood” like Angela Carter never happened. The
latest in this soon-to-be-remaindered trend is Katherine Bradley’s The
Sisterhood, a feminist update on George Orwell’s more referenced than read (and
let’s be honest, for good reason) 1984.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/the%20Sisterhooddraft1.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The response from
working-class men and women has naturally been very different. The book has
been well received. Writing on Goodreads, Shelves_by_sim wrote, “This book was
riveting, haunting, exceptionally well-written, terrifying and fantastic. Not
only was the story brilliant from the beginning, but the entire book was so
metaphoric it made my hair rise! Julia's thought process was so cutthroat and
straight to the point. The story was the right amount of intriguing,
captivating and utterly horrific. The author wrote at the end that she hoped
George Orwell would have approved, and I think he certainly would have. The
characters! The plot twists! The hope! The shock! The horror!! I loved the read.
I don't read much dystopian, but this book was phenomenal.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/the%20Sisterhooddraft1.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">This is well worth a
read, and previous knowledge of the work of George Orwell is a must but I would
highly recommend this book. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/the%20Sisterhooddraft1.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">See <a href="http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/11/julia-1984-by-sandra-newman-published.html">http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/11/julia-1984-by-sandra-newman-published.html</a>
and http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/the%20Sisterhooddraft1.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">This feminist update of 1984 won’t
bother Big Brother- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/sisterhood-katherine-bradley-review-feminist-update-1984-.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/the%20Sisterhooddraft1.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/147376927-shelves-by-sim<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-20255234287274301332023-11-19T11:58:00.000-08:002023-11-19T11:58:40.036-08:00The Centenary of Trotskyism: Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century.<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">On Saturday, November 18, I attended the above meeting
called by The Socialist Equality Party(UK). It was my first major meeting in
five years, and I picked a good one. The meeting was safe professionally
organised with a good bookstall.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">SEP Assistant National Secretary Tom Scripps chaired
the event. This was the second meeting held by the SEP to discuss what
political fight is necessary to stop the slaughter in Gaza.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The lecture was given by David North, the chairman of
the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national
chairman of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States. North is a
leading expert on Leon Trotsky. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The meeting was originally called to launch the UK
North’s recently published book, Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in
the Twenty-First Century. However, given the gravity of the situation in Gaza
North correctly departed from his original subject matter to give a complex and
detailed report on the events in Gaza from a Marxist perspective.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">North pointedly said that this was not so much a war
but a one-sided massacre. North’s lecture was complex and well-researched. He provided
a detailed account of the current situation, which included the brutal murder
by the IDF(Israel Defence Force) of thousands of men and women and the deaths
of 4000 children.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">North’s lectures on the Gaza massacres have been
complimented by the extraordinary articles from the World Socialist website (wsws.org),
many of which have been put into pamphlet form.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/North.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjyUwfSn4UEJ6_52v7Iu28Go_UprRUmxUysKIehJRLxvyj08OMYDLPtJ3fw0edqj64Tn3O5BzS077oQRcfzIYXbQvcAJg7UXPipPUO8kMdZV1w1dtk1sZOBe17HrfD8wI37SyoeLVp2MKJNZJcmoJX9ql1HiIktjt5S9sAn5lU4V08eHVXevCY6Zw5ElfF/s1200/F8mvdEnWAAA2dcQ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjyUwfSn4UEJ6_52v7Iu28Go_UprRUmxUysKIehJRLxvyj08OMYDLPtJ3fw0edqj64Tn3O5BzS077oQRcfzIYXbQvcAJg7UXPipPUO8kMdZV1w1dtk1sZOBe17HrfD8wI37SyoeLVp2MKJNZJcmoJX9ql1HiIktjt5S9sAn5lU4V08eHVXevCY6Zw5ElfF/w320-h181/F8mvdEnWAAA2dcQ.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">North, while noting that the war/massacre has
produced a significant amount of emotional outpouring, his lecture series have
sought to place the event in a more objective context, saying:</span><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">“We have been asked why we have not condemned
Hamas for the violence of October 7. The answer is that we will not participate
in or lend any legitimacy to the reactionary cynicism and hypocrisy that
condemns resistance to oppression or draws an equal sign between the episodic
violence of the oppressed and the far greater, relentless and systematic
violence of the oppressor.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The death of so many innocent people is a tragic
event. But the tragedy is rooted in objective historical events and political
conditions that made such an event inevitable. As always, the ruling classes
oppose all references to the causes of the uprising. Their massacres and the
entire bloody system of oppression over which they preside so ruthlessly must
go unmentioned.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Why should anyone be surprised that decades of
oppression by the Zionist regime led to an explosive eruption of anger? It has
happened in the past, and as long as human beings are oppressed and brutalised,
it will happen in the future. Those who suffer oppression cannot be expected
during a desperate rebellion, when their own lives hang precariously in the
balance, to treat their tormentors with tender-hearted courtesy. Such
rebellions are often marked by acts of cruel and bloody vengeance.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/North.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">From a personal standpoint, I thought North’s
research into the anti-working class and anti-socialist origins of Zionism to
be very important as North writes, “The creation of the Zionist state was the
direct outcome of the defeats of the working class in the 1920s and 1930s
because of the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy. Without the mass of
displaced persons, survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and without the
political demoralisation and loss of confidence in the perspective of
socialism, the Zionist leaders would not have had at their disposal the numbers
of people required to conduct a terrorist war against the Palestinian people,
expel them from their homes and villages, and create, through essentially
criminal methods, a Jewish national state.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">North spent a considerable time opposing the vile
slander that criticism of the Zionist-led war in Gaza constituted antisemitism.
North, in his previous lecture, cited the attack on the musician Roger Waters,
saying, “Throughout his recent world tour, the legendary musician Roger Waters
has been under relentless attack and accused of antisemitism because he has dared
to defend the Palestinian people. Everyone who knows the work of Roger Waters
knows very well that he is one of the most significant artists at the forefront
of the fight for human rights and that his opposition to the policies of the
Israeli regime has absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">North took questions from the floor. Only two were noteworthy.
The first came from someone who did not declare their political affiliation. At
the same time, ignoring most of what North spoke about, he accused the lecturer
of carrying out over “30 minutes of hate.” His remarks were a little insulting
and quite bizarre. His jibe about hate came from the novel 1984 by George
Orwell. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Orwell wrote, “The horrible thing about the Two
Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary,
that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds, any pretence
was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire
to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow
through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even
against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that
one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one
object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/North.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">North rejected that there was anything hateful about
his lecture and countered by saying the remarks echoed those who have the audacity
of attacking the Zionists as anti-semitic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My question was about Daniel Goldhagen. North had written
a brilliant critique of Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. I asked him
if he had heard what Goldhagen had said about the war/massacre in Gaza.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
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<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/North.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Stop
Israel’s Genocide-£2.00 Mehring Books UK<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><o:p> </o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/North.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Socialist
internationalism and the struggle against Zionism and imperialism- The lecture was
given by World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David
North at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Tuesday, October 24.</p><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div><p><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/North.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></a> Nineteen
Eighty-four, by George Orwell : chapter1. </p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-67494169009209014092023-11-08T11:37:00.002-08:002023-11-10T13:40:26.644-08:00Gerald Aylmer on the Crisis and Regrouping of Political Elites in England between the 1630s and the 1660s<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Gerald Aylmer was a distinguished historian of Stuart
England. He had been an undergraduate and postgraduate at Oxford, a lecturer at
the University of Manchester, head of the History Department at York and,
finally, Master of St Peter’s College, Oxford. His major contributions covered
the bureaucracies of mid-seventeenth century England but he was also a careful
contributor to specialised debates on the more technical issues of the period
as well as being the author of a valuable textbook.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I was fortunate enough to meet him in Balliol in the
autumn of 1967 and to correspond intermittently with him until the mid-1980s.
What he had to say was always well-informed and instructive. Coming across his
contribution to the volume on three British Revolutions published in 1980
reminded me of these virtues. He was concerned with changes in the composition
of political elites in England between the period of Personal Rule in the 1630s
to that of the Restoration in 1660 and just afterwards. Inevitably, even in a
relatively short piece, he had observations to make on the debates amongst
early modern historians on subjects like Court versus Country conflicts, on the
role of localism, on a fundamental breakdown at the centre and the significance
of religion as causes and explanations of the English Civil War.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Aylmer was clear that the events of 1640-1660 did
constitute a revolutionary upheaval. But there were then areas - e.g. about
demographic changes, on the development and size of the economy, and on popular
opinions - upon which knowledge was lacking. Even so, it was evident that the
composition of the ruling elite changed. By and large, most peers and upper
gentry had either been excluded or withdrawn by 1649. Men of lower status -
parish gentry or yeomen - were in charge of local government in the counties.
Army officers were important too in local and national affairs. After 1660,
however, there was a new ruling coalition composed of Royalists and former
political Presbyterians in the main. Puritanism, republicanism and military
rule were totally discredited. There was deep hostility on the part of the
Church of England towards Nonconformists as heirs of the Puritans. Control over
the press and censorship was more stringent than it had been in the 1630s.
Local government too was more readily manipulated by the Privy Council than
thirty years before. And there was no return to the levels of spending and
taxation experienced in the 1640s and 1650s until after 1688-1689.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Much of this analysis remains sound. But the
historiographical debates have moved on. Significantly more is now understood
about population changes and popular opinion thanks to the work of CAMPOP and the studies of historians like John
Walter. But it is less clear that Aylmer, who appears, prima facie, to have
been influenced by the speculative works of Lawrence Stone, was right about the
fortunes of the landed elite. It is arguable
that the peers and upper gentry were in a better position in 1640 than they had
been in 1560 or 1600. If so, then on the basis that political arrangements
necessarily reflected underlying economic realities, then the restoration of
the monarchy and its attendant institutions in 1660 was to have been expected.
(Marxists and other determinists shy away from addressing this issue.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Nor is it readily apparent that central control over
local government was less effective in the 1630s than post-1660: local
officials like the Justices of the Peace or Lords and Deputy Lieutenants were
engaged in bargaining and negotiations with their rulers at the centre in both
periods. Apart, moreover, from one reference to Scottish resistance to Charles
I’s rule, the problems of ruling ‘multiple kingdoms’ which faced Charles I, the
Commonwealth and Protectorate and Charles II and which now figure prominently
in British and Irish historiography, were missing. Perhaps, in an essay on
political elites in England composed in c.1979, that is comprehensible.
Personally, I am doubtful about whether the term ‘Revolution’ is the right one
for the uprisings - les grand soulevements - of the 1640s and 1650s. But that
cannot detract from the abiding interest of Aylmer’s observations.<o:p></o:p></span></p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-15164243902318741782023-11-06T07:01:00.002-08:002023-11-06T09:11:58.459-08:00Julia 1984 by Sandra Newman- published by Granta (£18.99) 2023<p><span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCj8w7SkTXbVlJcv0WR8_De2e1qkf-TUx1LaHW7qILS5I6ynBU8hI9Ngnjq2R1PimPeri52OU7NQAjRP-YOUSoW6mCF06nHdlmP0VLojb-5NQLnPxa9pmPSMFs6xMSEQl4aL_J0QFH9kog3eOvRWamiqToS05JPTo7YOrSYtXewyZrAXDm6dFbWv7gh0J9/s275/download.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="183" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCj8w7SkTXbVlJcv0WR8_De2e1qkf-TUx1LaHW7qILS5I6ynBU8hI9Ngnjq2R1PimPeri52OU7NQAjRP-YOUSoW6mCF06nHdlmP0VLojb-5NQLnPxa9pmPSMFs6xMSEQl4aL_J0QFH9kog3eOvRWamiqToS05JPTo7YOrSYtXewyZrAXDm6dFbWv7gh0J9/w213-h320/download.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div>Newman hasn’t proved
herself a worthy successor to Orwell; she’s outclassed him, both in the knowledge
of human nature and in character development. “Julia” should be the new
required text on those high-school curricula, a stunning look into what happens
when a person of strength faces the worst in humanity, as well as a perfect
specimen of derivative art that, in standing on another’s shoulders, can reach
a higher plane.”<p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Bethanne Patrick<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“If there was hope, it
must lie in the Proles because only there, in those swarming disregarded
masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to
destroy the Party ever be generated."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">George Orwell 1984<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">"Who controls the
past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">George Orwell 1984<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“If you want a picture
of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">George Orwell <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">” Orwell’s vision may
have been inspired by the USSR, but the rest of the world has become more
Orwellian in the years since. “It actually is frightening,” says Newman. “We
live in a world where if you walk down the street, there are screens everywhere
that are filming you, in New York at least. We’re living in a Nineteen
Eighty-Four in which we get to choose the government.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Sandra Newman<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“Julia” is Sandra
Newman’s retelling of George Orwell’s classic “1984. The book is well written
and researched; remaking a classic is no mean feat. The Orwell Estate
commissioned the book. Although The main executor of the Estate is Orwell’s son,
Richard Blair, he did not make the final choice of author. It must be said that
the Estate has not always acted with the utmost generosity. In 2015, it notified
CafePress that it had infringed copyright by having T-shirts with 1984 written
on them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">TorrentFreak, the
company that produced the T-shirts, said, “First off is the irony of the Estate
of George Orwell being all Orwellian, but second is that you can’t copyright a
number. This is a blatant abuse of the copyright system, and, more often, it’s
a ridiculous attempt to control something that needs no control. I am in the
process of having this image retouched and added to the store on my current
site, as I will not allow this kind of abuse of authority to stand.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/keith/OneDrive/Desktop/JULIAdraft4.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Although since 2021, the
Orwell Estate has lost the copyright to the book 1984, it is still a big deal
that it asked the writer Sandra Newman to give the book a “feminist” slant. Newman
says, “people are re-examining his legacy” in light of the MeToo movement – it
seemed inevitable that somebody would produce a feminist take on Nineteen
Eighty-Four, with or without the Estate’s approval, so, “I think they had
decided almost that time had run out on not doing it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Newman is not alone in rewriting
classic books. Many contemporary publishing houses are retelling classic
stories from women’s perspectives. Apart from Sandra Newman’s feminist
retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Katherine Bradley’s novel The Sisterhood is
also a feminist retake of 1984, published in March this year. Other non-Orwell
books include Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Helen Oyeyemi’s Snow White, and Barbara
Kingsolver’s recent Charles Dickens Demon Copperhead. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">But who knew there was a
literary term for it? The academic term “anastrophe” refers to the technique of
reversing word order in a sentence for effect. It means taking one author's
work to produce another relatively new work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The Orwell Estate must have
come under extreme pressure from elements of the right-wing MeToo movement to
sanction this piece of “anastrophe”. The right-wing fanatics that make up the MeToo
movement believe Orwell was a misogynist. Daisy Lafarge says “Julia” would appear to “fix” Orwell’s novel
for a contemporary feminist readership. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">This is not to say that
the book is worthless. As Natasha Walter writes in her Guardian review, “In the
most basic way, Julia is a satisfying tribute act. Newman has deeply considered
the language and culture of Orwell’s novel, which created its future setting by
way of early 20th-century Britain and takes us carefully through its familiar
landscape. Indeed, these scenes are so well-trodden for many of us that
re-entering each one, from the grim windowless factory floor of the Ministry of
Truth to the fragile respite of the room above the junk shop to O’Brien’s
luxurious but threatening sitting room, can feel almost like encountering scenes
from your memories.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Although Newman’s new
book is not a direct attack on Orwell’s reputation, it is nonetheless a by-product
of a growing assault on his reputation. Newman's half-hearted defence is quite
touching: “I don’t fully understand those who are judgemental to such a degree
that they think somebody should be erased from the book of life posthumously,”
she says. “It’s not like we’re giving money to George Orwell and rewarding him
for being a misogynist.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">It seems a host of new
books and articles have one goal: to bury the already long-deceased author
under a mountain of dead dogs and, therefore, destroy the reputation of one of
the greatest writers of the 20th Century.<a href="file:///C:/Users/keith/OneDrive/Desktop/JULIAdraft4.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">While Newman’s book
complements the original, she has none of Orwell's highly developed political or
historical understanding. At the same time, Newman writes of a future beyond
Orwell’s ending. She prevents Julia from saying anything about the political
developments after 1984. Newman is not interested in placing Julia in the
context of today's political developments. As Lafarge writes, “The novel was
written in direct response to Stalin’s regime, yet the motives of “Julia” don’t
seem to be concerned with the differences between Orwell’s period and our
political moment. Instead, its main project seems to be redressing the gender
balance in Orwell’s fiction. As a result, claims for its “timeliness” can only
lead to vague generalisations about women’s oppression rather than examining
the political structures imposing it. For contemporary readers, whose
reproductive rights are being encroached on by the right, the novel’s
simplistic depiction of amalgamated socialist evils may feel somewhat out of
step with present affairs.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/keith/OneDrive/Desktop/JULIAdraft4.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">George Orwell’s “1984”
was published in 1949 with its Newspeak and Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love
and Plenty, “doublethink” — “Truth is Hate, Peace is Hate. Love is Hate” — “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance
is Strength.” we are back with a contemporary bang. It does not take much
imagination to easily recognise a description of “Oceania” or any of the terms
above as having a very contemporary resonance. The futuristic dystopia
immortalised by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four exists in today's capitalist
society. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Richard Mynick is spot
on when he writes, “The novel’s police state bore an obvious resemblance to
Stalin’s USSR. Coming from Orwell—a self-described democratic socialist who was
deeply hostile to Stalinism—this was unsurprising. But while Orwell was too
clear-sighted to conflate Stalinism with socialism (writing, for example, “My
recent novel [‘1984’] is NOT intended as an attack on socialism…but as a
show-up of the perversions...which have already been partly realised in
Communism and Fascism.…”, his Cold War-era readership was often blind to this
distinction. His cautionary notes (“The scene of the book is laid in Britain…to
emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone
else and that totalitarianism…could triumph anywhere”) were largely overlooked,
and in the public mind, the novel’s grim prophesy (“If you want a picture of
the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”) attached itself
mainly to political systems seen as enemies of Western-style capitalist
“democracies.” Yet <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i> was no endorsement of
the West. It posits only an unaccountable elite that rules in its interests and
maintains power by taking state-run mind control to its logical extreme. It
examines what’s operationally involved in compelling a population to submit to
exploitative rule—without regard to the nominal form of economic organisation.
Put a bit differently. The book considers the psycho-social machinery of
unaccountable state power <i>in general</i>—regardless of whether it
originates from a ruling bureaucracy or finance capital. It explores the
general problem of maintaining social stability in a highly unequal society,
which can be done only through some combination of repression and controlling
the population’s consciousness.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/keith/OneDrive/Desktop/JULIAdraft4.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Newman has written an
interesting and competent book but does not have a single inch of
subversiveness. In this age, to be subversive is to be revolutionary. As Richard
Mynick writes, “Early in the novel, Winston undertakes to commit a subversive
act: he begins writing a personal diary. He wistfully addresses it: “To the
future or the past, to a time when thought is free.” Orwell has elsewhere been
credited with “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act.” Assaulted by the <i>Newspeak</i> of the US
political class, we manifestly live in a time of universal deceit. We are all
Winston Smith and must look to revolutionary acts of telling the truth to light
the way to a time when thought is free.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/keith/OneDrive/Desktop/JULIAdraft4.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">George Orwell's estate denies 'Big
Brother values' after challenge to 1984 merchandise-https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/28/george-orwell-estate-disputes-allegations-orwellian-cafepress<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/keith/OneDrive/Desktop/JULIAdraft4.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">See book review-Wifedom by Anna
Funder-Penguin Books Ltd,
£20-http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/keith/OneDrive/Desktop/JULIAdraft4.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">A New, Feminist Retelling of
‘1984’-www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/books/review/julia-sandra-newman.html<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/keith/OneDrive/Desktop/JULIAdraft4.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">A comment: Revisiting George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010</span><a name="_Hlk150175121"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">Richard
Mynick- https</span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif">://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/1984-j12.html</span></p>
</div>
</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-3424547294481272922023-10-24T12:30:00.003-07:002023-10-26T10:06:36.459-07:00Revolution: The Rise of Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal by Charles Watts is published by Harper Collins, £20<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0rq2AseNvDyqiOOPIuPNzirPAn1jk9Zrq2eGRUfIuAWCGA5aU0qvn-NY7wbB1nMgAi00hVRKBpYrpd_5WGCBkTjirorl7FVxY-Vim2Z93NKzd083i2DeSDVYDX8CmPfvc7Vub7YSu0bY0vG4Gdd4ZDBQ_ei1O2bRylYupWyAtlFeHp-Xug1-1f4-n1bMS/s466/71ZgO58wkRL._SY466_.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="303" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0rq2AseNvDyqiOOPIuPNzirPAn1jk9Zrq2eGRUfIuAWCGA5aU0qvn-NY7wbB1nMgAi00hVRKBpYrpd_5WGCBkTjirorl7FVxY-Vim2Z93NKzd083i2DeSDVYDX8CmPfvc7Vub7YSu0bY0vG4Gdd4ZDBQ_ei1O2bRylYupWyAtlFeHp-Xug1-1f4-n1bMS/s320/71ZgO58wkRL._SY466_.jpg" width="208" /></a></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“All great football
managers are revolutionaries at first. Take Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger. Appointed
in 1996, he was Leon Trotsky: the general brimming with new ideas, ferocious
energy and seemingly countless different ways of doing things. By the time Wenger
was eased out in 2018, he was north London’s Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the
Soviet A revolution in a particular area of human activity is an important
change in that area.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“ A revolution in a
particular area of human activity is an important change. The nineteenth
century witnessed a revolution in ship design and propulsion....the Industrial Revolution.
Synonyms: transformation, shift, innovation, upheaval. More Synonyms of Revolution.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Collins Dictionary<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The title of Charlie
Watts's new book is Revolution. The word means many things to many people. In
the context of this book, it is about a football manager who turned around a
failing club by initiating a revolution. Harper Collins has called this book a
“first of its kind.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The writer of Revolution
is Goal’s Arsenal correspondent Charles Watts. The biggest challenge facing any
writer about football is to tell us something we did not know, which is very
difficult given the scrutiny every club gets from the media. To his credit,
Watts does exactly that. A significant part of the book concentrates on how the
new Arsenal manager, Mikel Arteta, managed to change the toxic culture at the
club and reconnect with the fans.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">One spectacular and
emotional way he has done this is using the English singer Louis Dunford’s song
The Angel as an anthem played and sung at the beginning of every home game. Dunford
was born and raised in north London, released a single called 'The Angel' in
February 2022, and Gooners have picked up the chorus, which goes:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">North London Forever<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Whatever the weather<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">These streets are our
own<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">And my heart will leave
you never<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">My blood will forever<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Run through the stone<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The new Arsenal Football
Club manager, Mikel Arteta, was a former Arsenal captain from the Basque region
of Spain. His first coaching job was under Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola. He has
been compared to Arsenal’s former great manager, Arsene Wenger. Like Wenger,
Arteta has revolutionised this old club.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Charles%20Watt/Revolution3.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> In
a limited sense, Watts is correct in saying that Arteta would prove to be a
revolutionary, and the results of this Revolution are showing in his new team
now.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Charles Watts is a man
of many sides. He is part of the Arsenal press pack and has been a fan since
1989. A year in which all Arsenal fans cherish the memory of. <a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Charles%20Watt/Revolution3.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>Although
close to the Arsenal establishment, his book does not glorify the club or its
personnel. Nor is it a biography of Arteta, as it contains little of his life or
upbringing. It concentrates on how Arteta has continued the legacy of Wenger. Arteta
acknowledges the past by displaying a giant Wenger picture and quoting Wenger
at Arsenal’s London Colney training complex. He also invited Wenger to return
as a spectator to the Emirates last Boxing Day.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Arteta, like Wenger,
lives and breathes football. Both are highly intelligent men. According to Watts,
outside of his family and football, Arteta has little other interest except
barbecuing. Even in a bitter London winter, he uses these to bond with his
staff and players leading former Arsenal player Bacary Sagna to say, "Before
I could say hello, he was hammering me about formations. All I was doing was
looking for the snacks.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps the book's most
interesting and insightful parts are when Watts examines the nuts and bolts of
Arteta’s Revolution.</span><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> </span><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Watts
is more a chronicler than an interpreter of events. Most Arsenal fans would
have seen much of Arteta’s Modus Operandi in the extremely interesting 2021-22
Amazon Prime Video’s All Or Nothing series. Arteta operates on very simple principles
revolving around “non-negotiables”. These are chiefly mutual respect and taking
responsibility on the pitch. He sees Arsenal as a collective rather than a set
of disparate individuals.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">A brutal example of how
Arteta applies his method is the treatment of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. When
his captain and leading scorer missed a COVID test, broke lockdown regulations
by having a tattoo, and arrived back late from compassionate absence. Auberyang
already had a catalogue of poor timekeeping. Arteta was ruthless. He even
compiled a dossier of Aubameyang ‘s misdemeanours for the Arsenal legal team. The
£56 million player man left on a free transfer to Barcelona.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As was said earlier,
Watts is not completely in Arsenal’s pocket and to his credit, as Dan from the
website Just Arsenal writes:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“He puts any connections
to one side and gives both sides of an argument. Other journalists would have
feared impacting their relationships with the club and/or Arteta, but Watts
doesn’t only write what those two want to hear. For example, he strongly
implies the belief held by many that Ozil was dropped for non-football reasons,
giving strong facts to back up that theory. I won’t give spoilers, but it’s
fascinating how, essentially on Zoom, the squad were asked to agree to a wage
reduction to save staff jobs during the pandemic. When Arsenal couldn’t get the
75 per cent agreement they needed (Arteta steps in and convinces some to change
their mind), Watts asks why Ozil was the only name leaked to the press. He
bravely points out that Arsenal lied. 55 staff were still made redundant
despite their employer being worth 6.3 billion! He also questions why Matt
Smith was on the bench in the Cup Final at the expense of Ozil purely for
footballing reasons. (Smith would never kick a ball for our first team).<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Charles%20Watt/Revolution3.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">While Watts is a gifted
writer and communicator, he shies away from examining Arteta and the club in the context of the
growing financialisation of football. Football is big business. FIFA, the world
governing body, controls a budget of 4bn Euros. Although he briefly mentions that
Arsenal was involved in the attempted creation and debacle of a European Super
League, his analysis is superficial. As Robert Stevens writes, “The corporate
interests in control of the ESL clubs misjudged the popular mood. They were surprised
by the backlash against their proposals—reflecting the growing anger against
the parasitic billionaire oligarchy and the capitalist system that sustains it.
But they remain determined to press ahead. Perez declared on Thursday, after
nine of the 12 founding teams had withdrawn, “We're going to continue working…
the project is on standby.”Plans for a Super League are not an aberration. It,
or something like it, is the logical next step in a sport increasingly
dominated by giant corporate and financial interests. The conflict between UEFA
and FIFA on the one hand and the ESL founder owners on the other is a
competition between two business models, each designed to ensure the lion’s
share of revenues for the top clubs.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Charles%20Watt/Revolution3.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Watts's book is one of
the better footballing books. A must for any Arsenal fan and a very good
Christmas present. As Watts writes: “Arsenal’s rise back towards the summit of
English football under Mikel Arteta has been a journey that has captivated the
fanbase and brought an energy to Emirates Stadium that hasn’t been seen since
the move from Highbury in 2006. Arteta has made some difficult decisions and
faced some massive challenges during his short time in north London, but in
doing so, he has changed the culture of a club that just a few years ago seemed
to have totally lost its way.“Whatever happens between now and the end of the
season, Arsenal are back on track and in Arteta, they have one of the sharpest
minds in European football pushing the club forwards. I’m excited and
privileged to tell this story.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p><p>
</p><div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Charles%20Watt/Revolution3.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_F.C.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Charles%20Watt/Revolution3.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> www.amazon.co.uk/89-How-Arsenal-did-impossible/dp/B075G6J28L<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Charles%20Watt/Revolution3.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">www.justarsenal.com<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Charles%20Watt/Revolution3.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> Billionaires’ European Super
League proposal shelved amid mass opposition from football fans<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">Robert
Stevens-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/24/supe-a24.html<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-9807147995478467692023-10-17T13:13:00.005-07:002023-10-20T09:25:18.123-07:00Comment sent to the WSWS.ORG<p>I strongly condemn the imperialist-backed Zionist onslaught
against Gaza! The deliberate blockade of basic resources such as water and
electricity is a war crime. In a densely populated area of 2.3 million people, the prospect of mass
deaths is only a few days away. The deliberate targeting of health workers in
Gaza hospitals and the murder of Gazan health personnel.is an unspeakable act
of barbarism. I call on all workers, including postal workers in Britain and worldwide,
to oppose this slaughter and demand that Israel and its partner in crime, the
United States, end this brutal war and keep its greedy hands off the Middle
East.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-21247857152391368552023-10-07T10:31:00.000-07:002023-10-07T10:31:18.880-07:00Comment by David Unger<p> <span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">I very much enjoyed
reading your essay, Keith Livesey and you certainly summarized MVL drift to the
right. Still, it was surprising to hear MVL characterize Arbenz as a great
democratic leader whose agrarian reform included compensation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> I do want to say that Bernardo Arevalo might
not be willing to undertake the economic and social reforms you feel are
necessary to even the playing field, but given the depth of corruption in
Guatemala his election, if it comes to fruition, bodes well for the future of
the country. He is honest, thoughtful, talented and knows how he got to this
place. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">It's heartening that the
indigenous population of Guatemala, 60%, believe he can make a difference. If
only.... Thanks for this.<o:p></o:p></span></p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-75627358635971651982023-10-05T12:34:00.004-07:002023-10-05T12:38:27.850-07:00Harsh Times: A Novel, Mario Vargas Llosa; translated by Adrian Nathan West, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $28.00, November 2021<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioq1d5uWEwmlXRN0OyWOkGPDdH-jcx4r9muHYb1Y6zAt7Ip9O9IfSNYAMpTfNDOvh8R7fz_0flixKr2PsYYcwLZ0HMA1A1RR9ZP1HV20sHMYcL-OTOLnvrgaxM3brD1fCMZI4C-gxAUonLMalenmlpDUwM83qZ5HNcEK6LumwXxBNmoMoQE6Ts_5CJJc34/s1000/A1KJiHNRHRL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="663" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioq1d5uWEwmlXRN0OyWOkGPDdH-jcx4r9muHYb1Y6zAt7Ip9O9IfSNYAMpTfNDOvh8R7fz_0flixKr2PsYYcwLZ0HMA1A1RR9ZP1HV20sHMYcL-OTOLnvrgaxM3brD1fCMZI4C-gxAUonLMalenmlpDUwM83qZ5HNcEK6LumwXxBNmoMoQE6Ts_5CJJc34/w133-h200/A1KJiHNRHRL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>The ability to persuade
us of ‘truth,’ ‘authenticity,’ and ‘sincerity’ never comes from the novel’s
resemblance to or association with the real world we readers inhabit. It comes
exclusively from the novel’s own being, from the words in which it is written
and from the writer’s manipulation of space, time, and level of reality.<o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Mario Vargas Llosa<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">What is Art? First of
all, Art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy,
feelings and moods; Art is not the expression of merely the subjective
sensations and experiences of the poet; Art is not assigned the goal of
primarily awakening in the reader 'good feelings.' Like science, Art cognises
life. Both Art and science have the same subject: life reality. But science
analyses, Art synthesises; science is abstract, Art is concrete; science turns
to the mind of man, Art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the
help of concepts, Art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual
contemplation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">A.Voronsky-Art is the
Cognition of Life<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“Truth is found neither
in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles
the two.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">― Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“The owl of Minerva
begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">― Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Whether or not you agree
with Noble<b> </b>laureate <a name="_Hlk147335855">Mario Vargas Llosa’s </a>political
outlook, his novel Harsh Times about the Coup in 1950s Guatemala is a cracking
read. According to Edward Docx, “It speaks
to our times”. However, the general reader would do well to delve into the
history books of this period, especially Guatemala's history, to fully
appreciate the novel's power.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As Docx correctly
states, “In many ways, he is the embodiment of what a great novelist should be:
unafraid to write panoptic political novels about the fate of nations and the clash
of political ideologies; intellectually capable of encompassing such scope;
artistically skilful enough to suffuse it with resonance, torque and drama; and
all of this without losing the immersive kinesis of individual stories taken
from all points on the compass of the human character.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Vargas Llosa stays very
close to some facts, but not all of them. However, he manages to weave a path
to the lives of real and fictional characters. Vargas is not a stranger to writing
novels that include historical events in Latin America. His tendency to reduce
the ideological battles of the Cold War to little more than a minor deviation of
“a democratic ideal” is a dangerous simplification of complex historical
processes and tends to downplay the role of U.S. imperialism in the tragic
events in Guatemala. Perhaps more damaging is Vargas’s insistence that the novelist
has no obligation to represent historical facts. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As Ivan Kenneally writes,
“ In a lecture he delivered on his own, <i>The Real Life of Alexandro Mayta</i>,
Vargas Llosa maintained that the novelist bears no responsibility to represent
historical facts at all faithfully. The events as they truly transpired—to the
extent that this can be objectively determined—furnish only the “raw materials”
for the construction of a novel, the initial “point of departure,” a contention
he emphatically espouses discussing another of his works, <i>The War of the End
of the World.</i> The singular obligation of the novelist is to be persuasive,
to imaginatively materialise a world that does not reproduce but rather negates
the one normally inhabited by the reader, a substitution of such force it can
induce joy, despair, and revelation. This “sleight of hand replacement of the
concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral
world of fiction” is the fulcrum of the novelistic enterprise. Its
believability has nothing to do with a humble obeisance to fact. Still, it is a
function of the “ponderous and complicated machinery that enables a fiction to
create the illusion that it is true, to pretend to be alive”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Llosa’s playing fast and
loose with historical truth is dangerous and has political and historical
consequences. His viewpoint is opposed by Kenneally who writes again “If the
authoritative power of literature is disconnected from its relation to reality,
then why write a historical novel at all? Why should the novelist not manumit
himself from the “raw material” supplied by documented history? If the point is
to enact the “illusion of autonomy,” the “impression of self-sufficiency, of
being freed from real life,” why choose a genre that insistently invokes the
irrepressibility of extra-literary existence?<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Harsh%20Times%20LLosa/Harsh%20Times%20by%20Mario%20Vargas%20Llosa%20reviewdraft5.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Like many of his
generation Llosa began his early career somewhat sympathetic to the
revolutionary left’s ideals. The glorification of revolutions such as the Cuban
was not confined to a generation of Latin American intellectuals such as Llosa.
Several petty-bourgeois radical groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party (U.K.)
complemented them. Bert Deck writing in the International Socialist Review said
“The Cuban revolution has shattered the
old structure of radical politics in Latin America by providing a new example
to follow. New currents and tendencies are emerging. Two roads present
themselves to the Latin American revolutionists: “The Guatemalan Way” or “The
Cuban Way.” Fidelismo, a more revolutionary alternative to the Communist
parties, already exists. The possibility of avoiding the trap of popular front politics
has been improved immeasurably. In this new, open situation, the Marxists have
an unprecedented opportunity to win support for a consistent revolutionary
program. In the complex process of political realignment within the workers
movement lies the hope of avoiding future Guatemalas – the hope for a Socialist
United States of Latin America.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Harsh%20Times%20LLosa/Harsh%20Times%20by%20Mario%20Vargas%20Llosa%20reviewdraft5.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The British Trotskyists
from the Socialist Labour League opposed this political line saying “Even if
Castro and his cadre were “converted” would that make the revolution a
proletarian revolution? … If the Bolsheviks could not lead the revolution
without a conscious working class support, can Castro do this? Quite apart from
this, we have to evaluate political tendencies on a class basis, on the way
they develop in struggle in relation to the movement of classes over long
periods. A proletarian party, let alone a proletarian revolution, will not be
born in any backward country by the conversion of petit-bourgeois nationalists
who stumble “naturally” or “accidentally” upon the importance of the workers
and peasants. The dominant imperialist policy-makers both in the USA and
Britain recognise full well that only by handing over political “independence”
to leaders of this kind, or accepting their victory over feudal elements like
Farouk and Nuries-Said, can the stakes of international capital and the
strategic alliances be preserved in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Harsh%20Times%20LLosa/Harsh%20Times%20by%20Mario%20Vargas%20Llosa%20reviewdraft5.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Over time, politically, Llosa
began shifting further to the right. During the 1980s, he became a champion of
free markets and political liberalism, standing as a centre-right presidential
candidate in the Peruvian presidential election in 1990. More recently, his
rightward drift has become more open. In 2014, he joined the Mont Pelerin
Society, the organisation founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 that has become
famous for neoliberalism.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Harsh%20Times%20LLosa/Harsh%20Times%20by%20Mario%20Vargas%20Llosa%20reviewdraft5.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Llosa’s sharp shift to
the right coloured his analysis of the early Cold War period. He lamented that
the C.I.A.-sponsored Coup against Arbenz had caused too many young people in
Latin America to turn towards communism and that the United States had crushed “the
liberal democratic aspirations” of the people.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">His book faithfully
reconstructs the events in Guatemala that began with the 1944 October
Revolution and ended with the Coup in 1954. The election of Jacob Arbenz. Welcomed
by many left-leaning media outlets who hoped that the election of the liberal
Arbenz would bring about a new “democratic spring,” Arbenz’s election was met with
uncontrollable rage by American Imperialism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Even the so-called
“democratic spring” under J.J. Arévalo and his successor Jacobo Arbenz, who,
unlike Bernardo, came to power based upon a program of democratic, agricultural
and social reforms, proved most fundamentally that there is no peaceful or
reformist road for the masses in Guatemala and other semi-colonial countries to
secure their democratic and social rights.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">In 1954, the United
States carried out a coup d’état to remove Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz
from power, cancelling land reforms. The elected government of Arbenz by introducing a limited agrarian reform that
infringed upon the vast holdings of the politically influential United Fruit
Company drew the wrath of U.S. Imperialism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Dwight Eisenhower would
later acknowledge, “We had to get rid of a Communist Government which had taken
over.” Llosa, the book stops at the 1954 coup. The Coup led to decades of
dictatorships, The subsequent Guatemalan elites murdered over 200,000
Guatemalans, most of whom came from the indigenous Mayans.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Eduardo Galeano
characterised the decades of dictatorship that followed in his book <i>Open
Veins of Latin America</i>: “The World Turned its Back while Guatemala
underwent a long Saint Bartholomew’s night. [In 1967,] all the men of the
village of Cajón del Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their
intestines gouged out with knives; in Piedra Parada they were flayed alive; in
Agua Blanca de Ipala they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A
rebellious peasant’s head was stuck on a pole in the centre of San Jorge’s
plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins… In the
cities, the doors of the doomed were marked with black crosses. Occupants were
machine-gunned as they emerged, their bodies thrown into ravines.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As Hegel said, “An idea
is always a generalisation, and generalisation is a property of thinking. To
generalise means to think”. Whatever its faults and many, Llosa’s new book
certainly makes you think, and it does “ speak to our times”. It is perhaps an
irony of history when the latest election occurred in Guatemala this year.</span>
<span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Bernardo
Arévalo, a candidate promoted by the pseudo-left and U.S. imperialism, won the
election. Juan José Averalo's son Arevalo was president after the 1944 October Revolution.</span>
<span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">There
is absolutely no basis for describing Arévalo as a left, democratic or
progressive alternative to the clientelism of Guatemala’s ruling elite, whose
subordination to foreign capital and U.S. imperialism is the main cause of the
rampant poverty, inequality, authoritarianism and corruption that characterise
Guatemalan social life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Harsh%20Times%20LLosa/Harsh%20Times%20by%20Mario%20Vargas%20Llosa%20reviewdraft5.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">Mario Vargas Llosa: Harsh Times
and the “Fantastical Repudiation of Reality”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">March
10, 2022 Ivan Kenneally-https://openlettersreview.com/posts/mario-vargas-llosa-harsh-times-and-the-fantastical-repudiation-of-reality<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Harsh%20Times%20LLosa/Harsh%20Times%20by%20Mario%20Vargas%20Llosa%20reviewdraft5.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> Guatemala 1954 – The Lesson Cuba
Learned: International Socialist Review, Vol.22 No.2, Spring 1961, pp.53-56.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Harsh%20Times%20LLosa/Harsh%20Times%20by%20Mario%20Vargas%20Llosa%20reviewdraft5.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> Letter of the NEC of the Socialist
Labour League to the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, May 8,
1961 – Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume 3.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div><p><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/Harsh%20Times%20LLosa/Harsh%20Times%20by%20Mario%20Vargas%20Llosa%20reviewdraft5.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society</span> </p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-31915207141818697202023-09-17T05:17:00.005-07:002023-09-25T08:30:06.389-07:00Wifedom by Anna Funder-Penguin Books Ltd, £20<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkbaigYI1FLVhYENmRnKAoiRIKE-NVlbl08aLPsuckLv3X0tGZItAMNc2t1YMzIKMZG2jy9LgvT2mnh0M7mahlh84aR1B4aEOarXiIiG3kPNCM9WC1HpjBxCCh63WA0oOUrtP1acWUHcJW6xastl-vSmV105vlcrKwn6GWX0bRfY9UQyz1ZxWKzEDypaiE/s400/62802741.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="262" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkbaigYI1FLVhYENmRnKAoiRIKE-NVlbl08aLPsuckLv3X0tGZItAMNc2t1YMzIKMZG2jy9LgvT2mnh0M7mahlh84aR1B4aEOarXiIiG3kPNCM9WC1HpjBxCCh63WA0oOUrtP1acWUHcJW6xastl-vSmV105vlcrKwn6GWX0bRfY9UQyz1ZxWKzEDypaiE/s320/62802741.jpg" width="210" /></a></p><span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">“It is absurd to divide
people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">― Oscar Wilde, Lady
Windermere's Fan<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“There is no such thing
as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">— Oscar Wilde From the
Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> “Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest you be like him yourself.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“ Answer a fool
according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Proverbs 26:4-5<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">This is a very bad book.
It is both tedious and confusing, which takes some doing. Funder’s main aim
seems to be to destroy the reputation of one of the greatest writers of the 20<sup>th</sup>
Century. The book is neither a biography nor a novel. Large swathes of the book
are completely made up, and her conclusions are predicated on using just six
letters written by Eileen O'Shaughnessy to a friend.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">While stating Orwell was
her “hero," Funder uses him as a conduit for her attack on “the
Patriarchy, " which she does not define or offer any objective or
scientific evaluation of the term. Far from “fixing sexual relations”, Funder
and her allies in the #MeToo movement are out to destroy any progress made over
the last 100 years and further muddle one of the most complex relationships
among humans.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">If this was not bad
enough, the book has encouraged an avalanche of articles<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> that
labelled Owell a sexual predator who preyed on vulnerable women, stole their
ideas and used them to write books.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Despite the tedious and
confusing nature of the book, Funder does, on a limited basis, rescue George
Orwell’s wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, from the condescension of history.</span> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">O'Shaughnessy
was a highly intelligent and complex woman who has been largely airbrushed out
of history. Her relationship with Orwell, both sexually and politically, was complicated.
Their marriage was an “open “one, and both had affairs. According to Guardian
journalist Rachel Cooke, “When she (O'Shaughnessy) followed him to Spain in
1937, where he was fighting the fascists during the civil war, she had a fling
with his commander, George Kopp, while he was away at the front. Other affairs
would follow.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></p><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Funder has an unhealthy
interest in the sex life of both Orwell and, to a lesser extent, O'Shaughnessy,
much to the detriment of the complex political relationship between the two. It
is no accident that Funder started her book in 2017, which was the beginning of
the right-wing MeToo# movement. One of the primary roles of the book seems to
be, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, “to shout down the truth,<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> to
prevent a more objective account of Orwell’s work and his relationship with O'Shaughnessy
from being heard. Funder and others drown the truth in a torrent of abuse and
shouts to prevent an open elucidation of the facts.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As Rebecca Solnit points
out, “Being a moralist is a particularly fun and easy pursuit when it comes to
the past because pretty much everyone from the past comes up short when
measured by present-day standards. Virtually no one in 1973, let alone 1923,
had 2023 values about race, gender, sexuality and the rest, any more than they
had search engines or Twitter accounts. It’s not our individual virtue, but our
collective receipt of humane and egalitarian ideas worked out in recent decades
that gives us our presumably splendid present-day beliefs.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">It seems clear that
Eileen shared a significant amount of Orwell’s political beliefs. Travelling to
Spain with him as both wife and comrade took enormous courage and political
agreement. In some respects, she seemed far more alert to the dangers of the
Fascists and the Stalinists when it came to their attempts to kill them both.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">One of the more
outlandish accusations supported in the book and made by a few other writers is
that Orwell “stole” the ideas for his two major works, Animal Farm and 1984,
from Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Although you do not see this in the book, it would
appear that Orwell had a dialectical relationship with his wife. Like all great
writers, if someone has a better idea, you turn it into a piece of art or, in
this case, two of the greatest books of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century. If
anything, Orwell’s 1984 was heavily influenced by the novel We, written by the
Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1934, which Funder does not care to mention in case
it interferes with her hatchet job on Orwell.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">In other words, it has
been standard practice for authors the “steal” from others. As Sir Isaac Newton
said, If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Orwell saw further than O'Shaughnessy and, for that matter, Yevgeny Zamyatin<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">One of the more
disturbing aspects of this slandering of Orwell is that it has gone largely
unanswered. Oliver Lewis from St Catherine's College, Oxford, is the only brave
soul to stick his head above the parapet. Writing on the Times Literary
Supplement’s (TLS) letter page, Lewis wrote, “Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s school
poem about an authoritarian future may have been a contribution to the concepts
in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it is not possible to argue that Orwell’s most
significant work was simply the genius of others. I am concerned that, by
assuming that the sum of Orwell’s work is ascribable to other people – who all
happen, in the view of Eileen M. Hunt (August 11), to be women – some observers
are depriving the author of the right to respect that he and his work deserve.
Hunt makes a plea for “argument and significance” in newly published works
about Orwell, but seemingly only when they comply with her theory-driven
narrative of the world. This is clearly one based on gender, namely her belief
in the “patriarchy” (of which, as a male, she accuses me of being a part, as
the author of one of the books under review, The Orwell Tour: Travels through
the life and work of George Orwell).<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Another disturbing
aspect of this book is the absence of any analysis by Funder of any of Orwerll’s
major works. Take, for instance, one of Orwell’s most important works, Homage
Catalonia. Aside from Funder intimating that Orwell had homosexual tendencies,
she says nothing of worth about this great book. As the Marxist writer Vicky
Short points out, “ George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an inspiring book by
a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth. Written in 1937, it
is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Spanish people
against fascism and Socialism. Above all, it provides irrefutable proof by an
independent living witness to the crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy
in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish Revolution. Orwell’s account was a
vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon Trotsky and the
International Left Opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by
then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Reading this book left a
bad taste in my mouth. Aside from it being both tedious and confusing, Funder's
main purpose seems to lead a right-wing attack on the work and character of George
Orwell using the cover of a biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She has merely
made a literary fool of herself and all those who have written glowing reviews
of a very bad book.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span><span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> See-The biography that destroys
George Orwell: from thief of ideas to sexual predator</span> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">www.tellerreport.com/life <o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> Eileen: The Making of George
Orwell by Sylvia Topp – review-</span> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">A Partnership of Lies- www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/13c.htm<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> George Orwell in an age of
moralists- Should we stop measuring the great English writer by today’s
standards?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> </span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/categories/regular-features/letters-to-the-editor/<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Wifedomdraft5.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">George Orwell’s Homage to
Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">April
11 2002<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-40217234401282778802023-09-10T12:31:00.001-07:002023-09-10T12:59:02.236-07:00David North-Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century.Mehring Books -2023<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3JPB26taTMxLkGMo64zEc16Wc6icmsGnfTg3BbfAvA6J9ot_wCU3SHRQ9YUOlecjy0tRc9keX5I2Pjx3g-AqIVJI7foygWIcvMWlo8C4eJljRExzhKpBI_WuFWSyvv7LhcKbMhxIR5YhQV5_A-h2DJdiX2vNE1d6aNewnbmsw5MTUd2UdyVYKh0nxgkmu/s724/182830831.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="724" data-original-width="487" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3JPB26taTMxLkGMo64zEc16Wc6icmsGnfTg3BbfAvA6J9ot_wCU3SHRQ9YUOlecjy0tRc9keX5I2Pjx3g-AqIVJI7foygWIcvMWlo8C4eJljRExzhKpBI_WuFWSyvv7LhcKbMhxIR5YhQV5_A-h2DJdiX2vNE1d6aNewnbmsw5MTUd2UdyVYKh0nxgkmu/w134-h200/182830831.jpg" width="134" /></a></div> <span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif">I
firmly believe that Leon Trotsky remains a colossal figure in the history of
revolutionary socialism in the twentieth century. It beholds anyone interested
in this revolutionary giant to carefully study this collection of writings on
the great man by David North.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">North
believes Trotsky’s greatest achievement was founding the Fourth International
(FI) in 1938 after the Third International under Stalin facilitated the coming
to power of Hitler in Germany without a fight by the multi-millioned working
class. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">Trotsky
opposed Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” he wrote in the founding document
of the FI that “the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of
the revolutionary leadership.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">North’s
book covers forty years of revolutionary struggles. This collection of essays is
designed to remind the older reader of Trotsky’s rich heritage and “bring the
rich historical lessons to a new generation of workers and young people, to
resolve the “historical crisis of mankind.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">My
favourite essay is Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism, published in 1982.
It was written during the months when the sick Stalinist leader Leonid Brezhnev
passed power to Yuri Andropov, who died. Power was then transferred to Konstantin Chernenko—who, within two years,
joined their predecessor alongside the Kremlin Wall— and, finally, in March
1985, to Mikhail Gorbachev.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">Reading
that essay was one of the reasons for my joining the Workers Revolutionary
Party in 1983. It had a profound effect on my political development. The essay is
written as a tribute to Tom Henehan, who was assassinated on October 16, 1977. The
four articles by David North, originally published in 1982 on the fifth
anniversary of the assassination of Tom Henehan, provide a remarkably concise
introduction to Trotskyism, the Marxism of today.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">The
essay "Trotsky's Last Year" is extraordinarily good. Trotsky was at
the height of his powers before a Stalinist Agent murdered him. It contains an
appreciation of one of my favourite essays, “Trotsky’s Place in History,” by C.L.R.
James, the Caribbean socialist intellectual and historian, who wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">“During
his last decade he [Trotsky] was an exile, apparently powerless. During those
same ten years, Stalin, his rival, assumed power like no man in Europe since
Napoleon wielded. Hitler has shaken the world and bids fair to bestride it like
a colossus while he lasts. Roosevelt is the most powerful president who has
ever ruled in America, and America is the most powerful nation in the world.
Yet the Marxist judgment of Trotsky is as confident as Engels’s judgment of
Marx. Before his period of power, during it, and after his fall, Trotsky stood
second only to Lenin among contemporary men, and after Lenin died was the
greatest head of our times. That judgment we leave to history.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">Workers
and youth should carefully study this book to prepare for future struggles. It is
a vital guide and provides the strategy and tactics necessary for a successful
fight against capitalism. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> </span></p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-70636207724889311992023-09-01T12:16:00.001-07:002023-09-01T12:16:21.598-07:00Comment: Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present-James H. Sweet | August 17, 2022<p>The historian David Motadel recently wrote an article for
the BBC History Magazine called Should historians interpret the past through
the prism of the present? His article somewhat tamely examined one of the
fiercest and one-sided debates to explode last year.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The historical controversy arose over an essay entitled ‘Is
History History? Written by James H Sweet, then president of the
influential American Historical Association, it was printed in that
organisation’s magazine in August 2022. Sweet’s article was intended to open up
a discussion on the relationship between the present and the past. This is an important
and complicated subject. It raises questions about both methods—the way sources
are used and interpreted—and philosophy. Sweet raised legitimate concerns and
should not have offered an apology or retraction when he was heavily critiqued.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Sweet said little new in the article that had not been
written about over the last two decades. He noted that looking at history
“through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender,
sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” has diminished “the values and mores of
people in their times”.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Historian Lynn Hunt made similar points as Sweet in 2002,<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/IS%20HISTORY%20HISTORYdraft5.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
with little fuss being made about it. But today, Sweet’s article caused a
“global social media backlash”. It was branded
“crap”, and he had a “smug condescension”. He was even called a “white
supremacist,” and as a “white man,” he had no right to comment on black or
African history. The New York Times called it “one of the confusing messes that
pop up from time to time in the highest reaches of academia”, while The
Washington Post called it “academia’s most recent pratfall”. The AHA was forced
to take its Twitter account private.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Instead of challenging this witchhunt, Sweet issued a
grovelling apology, saying, “My September Perspectives on History column has
generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take
full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm
that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history
in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this
conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and
the Association. A president’s monthly column, one of the privileges of the
elected office, provides a megaphone to the membership and the discipline. The
views and opinions expressed in that column are not those of the Association.
If my ham-fisted attempt at provocation has proven anything, the AHA membership
is as vocal and robust as ever. If anyone has criticisms that they have been
reluctant or unable to post publicly, please feel free to contact me directly.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/IS%20HISTORY%20HISTORYdraft5.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">However, as the Marxist writer Tom Mackaman points out, “Sweet
did not explain what it was, concretely, that had caused all the “damage” and
“harm” he now confesses to have inflicted. If he were to explain, he would have
to admit that his column hurt no one, that there was nothing offensive about
it. Instead, he would have to say that his column violated the unspoken rules
of censorship that hold sway over academia and circumscribe American
intellectual life. Having stepped out of line—the president of the AHA, no
less!—Sweet needed to be brought to heel, and it was no less essential that he
flog himself before his censors. The problem for Sweet is that the embrace of
identity politics, which is a religion of the phoney “progressive wing” of the
Democratic Party (and also the main route to funding and career opportunities
for many academics), must be totally—observed in public statements as well as
private thought. He will remain suspect!<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/IS%20HISTORY%20HISTORYdraft5.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What was Sweet’s first sin? He made the cardinal error of
attacking the current fixation with Presentism. As was said above, Sweet’s
attack on Presentism was principled but not new. All Sweet did was repeat
Hunt’s warning and attack “short-termism and identity politics defined by
present concerns,” He asked, “Wouldn’t students be better served by taking
degrees in sociology, political science, or ethnic studies instead? History
suffuses everyday life in many places as Presentism; America is no exception.
We suffer from an overabundance of history, not as a method or analysis, but as
anachronistic data points for articulating competing politics. The consequences
of this new history are everywhere.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">His second sin was to critique the New York Times 1619
project, albeit very mildly. He wrote, “When I first read the newspaper series
that preceded the book, I thought of it as a synthesis of a tradition of Black
nationalist historiography dating to the 19th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s
recent call for reparations. The project spoke to the political moment, but I
never thought of it primarily as a work of history. Ironically, it was
professional historians’ engagement with the work that seemed to lend it
historical legitimacy. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Then, the Pulitzer Center, in partnership with the <i>Times</i>,
developed a secondary school curriculum around the project. Local school boards
protested the characterisations of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison as
unpatriotic owners of “forced labour camps.” Conservative lawmakers decided
that if this was the history of slavery being taught in schools, the topic
shouldn’t be taught. For them, challenging the Founders’ position as timeless
tribunes of liberty was “racially divisive.” At each of these junctures,
history was a zero-sum game of heroes and villains viewed through the prism of
contemporary racial identity. It was not an analysis of people’s ideas in their
own time, nor a process of change over time.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/IS%20HISTORY%20HISTORYdraft5.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Sweet was not the only historian to attack the 1619 project.
However, the Trotskyist movement, through the vehicle of the World Socialist
Website, examined the true class nature of this falsification of history by Nikole
Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. It said, “The 1619 Project,” published by
the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on
August 19, presents and interprets American history through the prism of race
and racial conflict.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In a Major article published both on the website and in book
form, The website wrote, “The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is
idealist (i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way
around) and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of
history is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional
impulse. Slavery is viewed and analysed not as a specific economically rooted
form of the exploitation of labour but, rather, as the manifestation of white
racism. But where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims
Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="display: none; mso-hide: all;">Bottom of Form<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Sweet’s capitulation before social media was not a pretty
sight. There has been no precedent for such an act of public contrition by the
president of the AHA, not even in 1950s America. But deeper forces are at play
than Sweet’s abject surrender. The witchhunt of Sweet indicates the advanced
level of censorship and decline in American intellectual life. As David North and
Tom Mackaman wrote in a letter published in the April 2020 issue of the
American Historical Review: “It is high time for an intense and critical
examination of the politics and social interests underlying the contemporary
fixation with the unscientific category of racial identity, and its use as a
battering ram against genuine historical scholarship. The Sweet Affair reveals
that the time for this critical examination is well past due.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Further Reading<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDzhonHz30V-pZwzSXZscX4kzgRRjhWAQmciHNwOPFuxEC3jDD4qeAOMCefyEWrr0iV9RWWAIwOzGGXuPYmEeaEoHV1ENZoJtXa9Fm2THBSBwbMfvFojQ0DisGcSPnWB9SxjStNmDK1uy7HBJc2OJJ2wn7bI5D6iEb5LpQcaV5iMy5d2-zyiBYRLdAiiIq" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="331" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDzhonHz30V-pZwzSXZscX4kzgRRjhWAQmciHNwOPFuxEC3jDD4qeAOMCefyEWrr0iV9RWWAIwOzGGXuPYmEeaEoHV1ENZoJtXa9Fm2THBSBwbMfvFojQ0DisGcSPnWB9SxjStNmDK1uy7HBJc2OJJ2wn7bI5D6iEb5LpQcaV5iMy5d2-zyiBYRLdAiiIq" width="159" /></a></div><br /><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
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<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/IS%20HISTORY%20HISTORYdraft5.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/IS%20HISTORY%20HISTORYdraft5.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Is history History<a name="_Hlk144147652">? Identity Politics and Teleologies
of the Present<o:p></o:p></a></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText">James H.
Sweet | Aug 17, 2022<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/IS%20HISTORY%20HISTORYdraft5.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
American Historical Association president issues groveling apology after
racialist social media attack-wsws.org<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/IS%20HISTORY%20HISTORYdraft5.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Is history History? Identity Politics and
Teleologies of the Present<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText">James H. Sweet | Aug 17, 2022<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-47531219256047514802023-09-01T11:19:00.000-07:002023-09-01T11:19:01.398-07:00Comment: Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World Los Angeles Review of Books. August 31, 2023<p><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Christopher Thompson</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Every now and then,
Google’s alert system turns up unexpected results. Yesterday was a case in
point when I was made aware of Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s
relatively new work, The Blazing World: Radical Ideas During the English
Revolution (1972). Echoes of that seventeenth-century world in songs and poetry
can still be heard according to Simon even though its theological disputes,
puzzling political arrangements and problematic scientific theories remain
difficult to explain to modern readers. Nonetheless, as Healey explained and
Simon agreed, this world had been transformed by 1700 by the growth of trade
and consumption, the development of political parties and the press, the
appearance of coffee houses, concert halls and theatres. But it had its obverse
side too in the spread of liberal scientific positivism and religious
pluralism, in the growth of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade and
the beginnings of a market view of the world that may yet prove apocalyptic as
the record of the start of the industrial revolution powered by coal buried in
the ice cores of the Antarctic shows. The period and the book thus have
important implications for the world in which we now live.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">For support for these
contentions, Simon appealed to Christopher Hill’s book, The World Turned Upside
Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published in 1972. Hill’s
study encompassed a range of groups like the Levellers and Diggers, the Ranters,
the Seekers and Familists, who were participants in an alternative, abortive
Revolution that never happened but with which Hill found sympathy. Even so,
Hill was inclined to regard these groups as crypto-liberals disguised as
religious sectaries whereas the truth was the other way round. But right now,
the liberal underpinnings of the state, of the sovereignty of the individual
and the need for the market are being seriously challenged from the left and
the right in our time. The seventeenth century is over but it is not yet done
with us if Ed Simon is correct.</span><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">There is no doubt that
Stuart England in 1700 was profoundly different from Tudor England in 1600. Its
economy like its trading and colonial links had been transformed: it had
reached constitutional and legal arrangements, political and religious settlements
that transcended the quarrels of the mid-seventeenth century. Its public
finances had been transformed and it had become a military and naval power
comparable to any in Europe. It was recognisably a modern society on its way to
becoming the most advanced country in the world for just over a century and a
half. That the legacy of these developments are still apparent in the modern
world is quite another matter altogether.</span><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Behind these disputable
propositions, there is another, more serious issue at stake. There is no doubt
either that the events of the 1640s, i.e. of the English Civil Wars or
Revolution or, as more recent historiography has it, the Wars of the Three
Kingdoms, appeal particularly to people with radical political convictions. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
idea of an older order being overthrown, of traditional forms of government and
rule collapsing, of novel ideas about how states should be run or economies and
societies organised , and the appearance of groups dedicated to these ends has
had an enduring attraction. Sitting in great archive depositories and libraries
- in the Huntington Library in San Marino or the Bodleian Library in Oxford or
the British Library in London - it is all too easy to forget the immense
suffering that followed from these ‘grands soulevements’: many lives, human and
animal, were lost; many thousands of people were maimed; the destruction of
property was on a huge scale; in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, old
institutions were torn down; military power supported successive regimes from
1646 until the Restoration in 1660. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">A terrible price was paid for the political
and religious speculations, the constitutional and legal quarrels of the 1640s
and 1650s which ended not as Christopher Hill would have liked in rule by tiny
groups of sectaries and radicals but in what turned out to be the victory of
the Royalists. Blair Worden’s verdict on these conflicts was fundamentally
right. Imputing responsibility to the issues that preoccupy modern societies
and current thinkers to the outcome of struggles in seventeenth-century England
is a fallacious argument. No such lessons can legitimately be drawn.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-91120557724000396522023-08-29T12:13:00.000-07:002023-08-29T12:13:07.804-07:00Notting Hill Carnival: An Opiate of the Masses, A Dance of the Oppressed or a Bonfire of Vanities<p><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">It is time to reflect as the dust settles on another
Notting Hill Carnival. On Tuesday morning, the last of the two million-strong
Carnival Occupation Army left for a destination unknown, leaving a trail of
destruction that would not look out of place in a war zone.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The orgy of violence and staggering law-breaking is
largely ignored by the powers that be. Carnival is glorified in their newspapers.
Four of the leading bourgeoisie newspapers, including the Financial Times, had
articles that were nothing more than glorified adverts for the Carnival. All
had uncritical interviews with the Carnival leader, Matthew Phillips.</span> <span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Phillip
is the CEO of the Carnival development agency Carnival Village Trust and
Notting Hill Carnival Ltd, which manages the Notting Hill Carnival.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Loud calls have been made to ban the Carnival, It is
surely a matter of time before a Hillsborough-type disaster occurs. One came
close on Monday when police withdrew people from Portobello Rd after it became
dangerously overcrowded. It will be interesting to find out in the coming weeks
how many people caught the new strain of COVID-19 that would have been spread
by over two million people in close proximity to each other.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But there is not a snowball's chance in hell of it
being stopped. Carnival is big business. It generates over £100m in revenue and
has cultivated a layer of the black middle class that has done very well out of
Carnival. One of its more greedy representatives now sits in jail after
stealing nearly three-quarters of a million pounds from the Charity wing of the
Carnival.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Happy 2024 Carnival.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-4391135036448727702023-08-21T11:19:00.003-07:002023-08-21T11:26:44.784-07:00James M. McPherson. Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xiv + 253 pp., index.<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJiMy2n0khqsAXEl6SNA9nuYrMyyH0unOUO6CPMuPLfI1ycPj-EXN73W5bf-2Mt6aNYrxGuLEY011RmbxoQgPfh8QR4QR95YfLm4hPhEiurz7yay2_QKzo65FO6IcZzszPQIcSf5aq-U79BmgWpTxvEkkrZXhUdwKA4zX37s30pglsLew5l12VvfIGT3aE/s500/9780195117967.webp" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="355" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJiMy2n0khqsAXEl6SNA9nuYrMyyH0unOUO6CPMuPLfI1ycPj-EXN73W5bf-2Mt6aNYrxGuLEY011RmbxoQgPfh8QR4QR95YfLm4hPhEiurz7yay2_QKzo65FO6IcZzszPQIcSf5aq-U79BmgWpTxvEkkrZXhUdwKA4zX37s30pglsLew5l12VvfIGT3aE/s320/9780195117967.webp" width="227" /></a></p><span face=""Verdana Pro", sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">“Yet, if God wills that
it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years
of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the
lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand
years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether.’”</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Abraham Lincoln<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“The Civil War mobilized
human resources on a scale unmatched by any other event in American history
except, perhaps, World War II. For actual combat duty the Civil War mustered a
considerably larger proportion of American manpower than did World War II.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">James Macpherson<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">"There is a big
idea which is at stake"--Corporal in the 105th Ohio, 1864<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“Lincoln's significance
lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found
to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of
a young nation.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">― Leon Trotsky, Their
Morals and Ours<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Lincoln is not the
product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from
stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without
a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average
person of goodwill, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of
universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has
never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its
political and social organization, ordinary people of good will can accomplish
feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985),<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Drawn With the Sword is
an excellent work of historical study and contemplation. It is a book of the
highest historical standard. It is not one continuous book but a collection of 15
essays on different topics. They examine various subjects ranging from the
causes of the war to how the South almost won and why the war still resonates
today. Fourteen of the essays were previously published but were revised for
this edition. The only new article is “What’s The Matter With History?” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Throughout his career,
McPherson has sought to explain complex historical issues in a way that the
general reader can understand without dumbing down the history for his more
academically minded readers. His essays in the book are a critical reexamination
of issues that are still contentious today. For the majority of his career, Professor
McPherson has argued that the American Civil War was a revolutionary struggle
for equality and democracy and still to this day defends that viewpoint. Macpherson
is a serious historian who has played an
objectively significant role in the social life of America and beyond and is
the very embodiment of historical memory.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The Marxist writer David
Walsh explains how Macpherson has maintained his historical principles. He writes,
“How has he retained his principles in the intervening years when so many have
not? This is also a complex matter. I think that in any serious figure,
historian, artist or political leader, the principle is not simply a matter of
certain intellectual formulations that rest on top, so to speak, of one's
personality. It is more a matter of the coming together of various powerful
social and cultural currents at a critical moment in one's life so that the
most positive external influences and what is best in oneself are heated in a
crucible, fuse and become one. One can retain principles across time and in the
face of all sorts of opposition and setbacks because they are embedded in some
part of consciousness that is not susceptible to shifts in the popular mood.
One knows with one's entire being certain things to be true, they are not up
for debate, much less sale.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps the best essay
of James M. McPherson's Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil
War is entitled "Historians and Their Audiences," McPherson poses the
question, "What's the matter with history?" <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">This chapter sums up
concisely Macpherson’s historical philosophy. His purpose while writing
scholarly books is to appeal to a wider reading audience while maintaining
historical standards. This complex problem is not new. The prominent historian Allen
Nevins<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> attacked
the academics who wrote for themselves, “His touch is death. He destroys the
public for historical work by convincing it that history is synonymous with
heavy, stolid prosing. Indeed, he is responsible for today a host of
intelligent and highly literate Americans who will open a history book only
with reluctant dread. It is against this entrenched pedantry that the war of
true history must be most determined and implacable.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Macpherson addresses
this theme of engaging the general public and raising their historical
consciousness throughout the book. In the chapter entitled "The Glory
Story." Thomas R Turner relates, “To
many people, books are hopelessly irrelevant because far more Americans today
get their history from watching movies than reading. However, suppose they
receive their notions about African American soldiers and the 54th
Massachusetts Regiment from the movie Glory. In that case, he believes they are
receiving information from a credible source. He calls the combat footage in
Glory the most realistic of any film dealing with the Civil War.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The legendary 54th
Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, led by abolitionist Robert Gould
Shaw, was the second all-black regiment organized in the Civil War. Reactionary
Protesters have objected that the 54th, famously depicted in the film Glory
(1989), have a monument erected to Shaw and his regiment. Because it was
commanded by a white officer, Shaw, Holland Cotter, the New York Times’s
co-chief art critic, slandered the monument and labelled Shaw a “white
supremacist”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">One of the more
remarkable essays is “The War That Never Goes Away.” Macpherson correctly believes
that the war, right or wrong has an “enduring fascination” with the American
and world public.McPherson points to what he holds to be the reason for this
fascination is that “Great issues were at stake, issues about which Americans
were willing to fight and die; issues whose resolution profoundly transformed
and redefined the United States but at the same time are still alive and
contested today.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Macpherson’s defence of Abraham
Lincoln in the book is laudable. McPherson argues convincingly that Lincoln was
the key figure in the struggle against slavery. Macpherson’s stance on Lincoln has
come under sustained attack. One hundred fifty-five years after the first assassination,
Lincoln is facing a second. Race-fixated protesters like Eleanor Holmes Norton,
Washington DC’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, have moved to introduce a bill
to remove the famous Emancipation Monument from Lincoln Park in Washington, DC.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As David North writes, “Abraham
Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics reflected
the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated, “escape
history.” Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic of the
bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. During the brutal
struggle, Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that
inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives
for a “new birth of freedom.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">In the chapter "Why
Did the Confederacy Lose?" he examines the political and economic reasons
behind the South’s devastating defeat. He writes, “Altogether nearly 4 per cent
of the Southern people, black and white, civilians and soldiers, died due to
the war. This percentage exceeded the human cost of any country in World War I
and was outstripped only by the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World
War II. The amount of property and resources destroyed in the Confederate
States is almost incalculable. It has been estimated at two-thirds of all
assessed wealth, including the market value of slaves.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As David Walsh points
out, “To establish an accurate picture of the Civil War era, he (Macpherson) has
been obliged to polemicize against various schools of historians. In Abraham Lincoln
and the Second American Revolution, for example, he argues persuasively based
on economic statistics that the conception of Louis Gerteis and others that the
Civil War and Reconstruction produced “no fundamental changes” in the forms of
economic and social organization in the South is wrong. In the same work, he
also counters the arguments of historians such as James G. Randall and T. Harry
Williams, who have asserted that Lincoln was essentially a political
conservative and an enemy of social revolution.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps James Macpherson’s
most important struggle has been to defend his historical principles against the
method that looks at history through the prism of race. Macpherson opposes the “fashionable
practice of condemning all whites as racists.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">To his eternal credit,
Macpherson collaborated with the World Socialist Website(WSWS.ORG) attack on
the falsification of history by the New York Times 1619 Project. In an interview
with Macpherson, The WSWS asked him about his initial reaction to the 1619
Project.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">He answered Well, I
didn’t know anything about it until I got my Sunday paper, with the magazine
section entirely devoted to the 1619 Project. Because this is a subject I’ve
long been interested in, I sat down and started to read some of the essays. I’d
say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very
unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the
complexity of slavery, which was clearly not an exclusively American
institution but existed throughout history. And slavery in the United States
was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many
centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also
an antislavery movement. So I thought the account emphasized American racism—a
major part of the history, no question about it—but it focused so narrowly on
that part of the story that it left most of the history out.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">According to David North
and Thomas Mackaman, The New York Times 1619 Project was a
politically-motivated falsification of history and presented the origins of the
United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict. They make this
point in their book:</span> “<span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Despite the pretence of establishing the
United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated
falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that
legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral
coalition based on prioritizing personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual
preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">There is much to admire
in the work of this outstanding Civil War historian. Macpherson writes engagingly
and explains complex historical issues in a way that the general reader can
take in, encouraging his readers to see history in a new light.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcin-m18.html<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Nevins<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> Drawn with the Sword: Reflections
on the American Civil War, by James M. McPherson<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">Thomas
R Turner Volume 18, Issue 2, Summer 1997, pp. 47-54<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> Racial-communalist politics and
the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln-</span> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<div id="ftn5">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> Drawn with the Sword: Reflections
on the American Civil War<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">By
James M. McPherson<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">An exchange with a Civil War
historian- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcp2-m19.html<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Desktop/James%20Mcphersondraft3.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif"> The New York Times’s 1619
Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history-</span> <span face=""Verdana Pro",sans-serif">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4995438334891885282.post-33474228928115149432023-08-18T12:47:00.000-07:002023-08-18T12:47:29.861-07:00In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful: A Novel-David Unger- Mosaic Press- 31/07/2023<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyGnxGst4sRLkVgOEwA9WXs3Up4xa1G09XzdECwv0IA6TNmfTAGjql0-WqrhvgLdEwE37McT0BwPQLMOGdgUpfhku2NizVcsbwkXwrUTAh4vUOeImqSgiGRjEPrM2cXFENLTR2qeHguOvRXWZ7tLtiMfm1JVy9Q5EP1s9drKmB8l9xe4iB5PmowWnYm6wv/s500/9781771617161.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyGnxGst4sRLkVgOEwA9WXs3Up4xa1G09XzdECwv0IA6TNmfTAGjql0-WqrhvgLdEwE37McT0BwPQLMOGdgUpfhku2NizVcsbwkXwrUTAh4vUOeImqSgiGRjEPrM2cXFENLTR2qeHguOvRXWZ7tLtiMfm1JVy9Q5EP1s9drKmB8l9xe4iB5PmowWnYm6wv/s320/9781771617161.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">“David Unger has created
an unforgettable female protagonist. Olivia is shy but strong: unattractive but
sensual; she feels guilty but angry at her family for abandoning her. She wants
to love and be loved, made of flesh and blood; we identify with her through the
author’s natural, fluid prose, which also has some startling images.”</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">- Monica Lavin, El
Universal, Mexico City<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">David Unger’s latest
book in English is a beautifully and intelligently crafted coming-of-age novel
about an Indigenous Guatemalan woman. After three previous publications in
Spanish as Para mi, eres divina (Random House Mondadori, Mexico, 2012, Editorial
Cultura, Guatemala, 2014, & Storytel audio, 2018, In My Eyes You Are
Beautiful is finally published in English. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In a recent interview
with the author, I asked him why it has taken so long he replied. “ Para mi,
eres divina has been published three times in Spanish translation, but my agent
couldn’t sell it to an English-language publisher. This begs the question of
why. Either the novel wasn’t up to snuff, or U.S. editors felt uneasy
publishing a novel about an indigenous Mayan girl written by a “Caucasian” man.
Howard Aster, from Canada’s Mosaic Press, loved the novel and didn’t see a P.C.
issue here. I am grateful to him for that, so after 12 years since I completed
the novel, it has finally seen print. I hope that now that it is in English, it
can be translated into other languages because I feel the story has personal
and universal appeal.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">David Unger is one of
the most widely published and well-known authors of fiction, short stories,
articles, translations, and children’s books in Spanish and English. In 2014 he
was honoured with Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias’ National Literature Prize
for Lifetime Achievement. He is one of the few internationally recognised
authors who critically examines the huge social inequality in his home country,
Guatemala. His clarity of thought regarding the problems facing the Guatemalan
indigenous and working-class people is second to none. His hostility to the
Guatemalan ruling elites and their Yankee capitalist backers is admirably
portrayed in his novels. He “explores the tensions, character and texture of
Central America as few other writers have done.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The last few years have
been a busy time for Unger. Just recently, Penguin published a new and splendid
English translation of the dictator novel “El Señor Presidente” —“Mr President”
with an introduction by Gerald Martin. The new translation has been met with
much praise. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In My Eyes, You Are
Beautiful is a coming-of-age novel that narrates the life of a young indigenous
woman. I asked David Unger if the main character was real or based on someone
he knew. He says, “Olivia Padilla Xuc was inspired by someone who isn’t
Guatemalan or indigenous. Most of my novels have had male protagonists from a
privileged class. In this novel, I wanted to write about the indigenous
population who, for the most part, have been either ignored, romanticised or
mistreated by those in power. During the Ubico dictatorship of the 30s and 40s,
the Maya were forced into labour because tending to their families and crops
meant they were idle. This was a crime! Olivia believes in herself, and because
of that, she can transform her life from one of servitude to one of
independence and achievement. In many ways, she developed in unpredictable
ways. At times, I felt I had been a kind of Geppetto and she a Pinocchio-like
figure.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Like most of Unger’s
work, In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful takes place during a particular historical
moment in Guatemala. It starts in 1970 and ends in 1990 while Olivia Padilla
Xuc is still a young woman, which begs whether Unger is planning a sequel. The
twenty-year period covered by the novel is one of Guatemala’s most brutal. The
genocide carried out by the Guatemalan ruling elite and its army is well documented.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Guatemalan history has
been dominated by the so-called “bonds” between Guatemala and Washington.
Dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American capitalism,
with help from its junior Guatemalan partners, carried out the brutal
exploitation and bloody oppression of Guatemala’s population of workers,
peasants and indigenous peoples. The First Banana Republic. The country’s economy was run by the United Fruit Company and other U.S. banks and
corporations, whose interests were defended by military dictatorships that
regularly massacred and executed workers who dared to strike or protest.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The bloody period
covered by Unger’s book is a by-product of the 1954 Central Intelligence
Agency(CIA) led coup that overthrew the democratically elected president. Jacobo
Árbenz, who was not a communist, initiated a limited land reform that included
the appropriation, with compensation, of lands controlled but unused, by United
Fruit. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The coup led to three
decades of unparalleled brutality and murder on an industrial scale. The war
claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 people, most of them indigenous
peasants wiped out in a genocidal campaign by a military that was trained and
armed to the teeth by America. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">According to Andrea Lobo,
“ In a confidential memo drafted in the wake of the coup against Árbenz, the U.S.
National Security Council stated that Washington’s aim in the region was to
compel Latin American countries “to base their economies on a system of private
enterprise, and, as essential to that, to create a political and economic
climate conducive to private investment of both domestic and foreign capital.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Ungerdraft3.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">If Unger does a sequel
to this book, it will cover important political events from 1990 onwards. On
December 4, 1996, a peace accord was signed. A top Guatemalan general and other
government members joined guerrilla leaders in signing a “definite ceasefire”
in Oslo, Norway. “With this agreement, the weapons will be silenced forever,” said
Rolando Moran, a Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union commander, a coalition
of three guerrilla movements.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">“The “truth commission,”
established as part of the peace process to investigate past human rights
violations, was denounced by human rights activists as a travesty. The
commission’s final report would not name any individuals who violated human
rights, and its findings could not be used to bring anyone to trial. The
commission had only six months to investigate the decades-long war. The
agreement left Guatemala’s social structure, the fundamental cause of the
bloodshed, untouched. Most of the population comprised poor peasants living in
rural villages and labouring in highly exploitative agricultural labour. At the
same time, a tiny elite of wealthy families ruled in Guatemala City and
maintained its monopoly of the country’s economic and political life.”<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Ungerdraft3.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Whatever David Unger
does next, his book is a significant landmark in the study of the lives of
ordinary indigenous and working-class Guatemalans. His opposition to the Guatemalan
and Yankee elites is to be commended. I wish him every success in his next
adventure. It remains to be seen if Unger has another book in him. If not, I want
to wish him a long-due retirement.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Ungerdraft3.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif;"><a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v04/d12">Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, The American Republics, Volume IV -
Office of the Historian</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/89f7a97e24a47771/Documents/Ungerdraft3.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span style="font-family: "Verdana Pro",sans-serif;">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/28/twih-n28.html<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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</div>A Trumpet of Seditionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15939277501123944811noreply@blogger.com