Review: Sophie Scholl and the White Rose by Annette Dumbach & Judd Newborn-One World publisher-ISBN-10: 1786072505.£9.99

 

"we will not be silent. We are your bad conscience" White Rose Leaflet

"Even the most dull-witted German has had his eyes opened by the terrible bloodbath, which, in the name of the freedom and honour of the German nation, they have unleashed upon Europe and unleash a new each day. The German name will remain forever tarnished unless finally the German youth stands up, pursues both revenge and atonement, smites our tormentors, and founds a new intellectual Europe. Students! The German people look to us! The responsibility is ours: just as the power of the spirit broke the Napoleonic terror in 1813, so too will it break the terror of the National Socialists in 1943."

White Rose Pamphlet

"To say to the Social Democratic workers: "Cast your leaders aside and join our 'non-party united front" means to add just one more hollow phrase to a thousand others. We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders in reality. But the reality today is the struggle against fascism. ... The overwhelming majority of the Social Democratic workers will fight against the fascists, but – for the present at least – only together with their organizations. This stage cannot be skipped".

Leon Trotsky-For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism (December 1931)

This book provides the reader with a very thorough and accessible introduction to the life of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement. The struggle of the Scholl family belies the common myth that there was no opposition to the Nazi's during the Second World War.

The book fails to address the reason why this opposition was so small and disparate. The fact that Hitler was able to rise to power and smash the worker's movement and the most progressive sections of the middle class was due to the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy who allowed him to come to power without a shot being fired.

This history was to shape the character of the opposition to Hitler. After all, the White Rose movement was a non-violent resistance group comprised of five middle-class students at Munich University. At its heart, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, their fellow students Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, and their professor Kurt Huber.

Despite knowing full well that if caught, they faced instant death, they began distributing leaflets and graffiti. They were caught in 1943 by the Gestapo and, after a brief trial, executed. Sophie Magdalena Scholl was just 21 at the time of her state murder.

It is clear from the history of Scholl and the White Rose movement that it did not have a fully worked-out political agenda that drove its activities, and some of its activities against the fascist regime were dominated by their religious leanings. Scholl was heavily influenced by the theologian Augustine of Hippo. She described that her "soul was hungry".

Not everything was guided by their religious beliefs. As this statement from a White rose Pamphlet states, "Our current 'state' is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we do not need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don't you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?"[1]They had substantial political opposition to the Nazi dictatorship.

As Tanja B. Spitzer writes, "The White Rose was a small endeavour with large consequences. Together they published and distributed six pamphlets, first typed on a typewriter, then multiplied via mimeograph. At first, they only distributed them via mail, sending them to professors, booksellers, authors, friends and others—going through phone books for addresses and hand-writing each envelope. In the end, they distributed thousands, reaching households all over Germany. Acquiring such large amounts of paper, envelopes, and stamps at a time of strict rationing without raising suspicion was problematic, but the students managed by engaging a wide-ranging network of supporters in cities and towns as far north as Hamburg and as far south as Vienna. These networks were also activated to distribute the pamphlets, attempting to trick the Gestapo into believing the White Rose had locations all across the country".[2]

They did provide a clear tactic to anyone who wanted to oppose the fascists saying "in their fifth pamphlet. "And now every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present 'state' in the most effective way….We cannot provide each man with the blueprint for his acts, we can only suggest them in general terms, and he alone will find the way of achieving this end: Sabotage in armament plants and war industries, sabotage at all gatherings, rallies, public ceremonies, and organizations of the National Socialist Party. Obstruction of the smooth functioning of the war machine….Try to convince all your acquaintances. Of the senselessness of continuing, of the hopelessness of this war; of our spiritual and economic enslavement at the hands of the National Socialists; of the destruction of all moral and religious values; and urge them to passive resistance!"

While it was very difficult for the group to act amid war and being hounded by the Nazi's secret police, a major weakness of the group is that it did not appeal to the one class that could bring down the hated Nazi dictatorship, and that was the German and international working class. The defeat of the German revolution because of the betrayal of Stalinism and Social Democracy had meant the class consciousness working class in Germany had been thrown back for decades.

It is doubtful that any of the White Rose movement had read any of the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky works, which is a shame because even a cursory read of his work would have given the group an entirely different political outlook. As Trotsky writes "When a state turns fascist, it doesn't only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini – the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role – but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism. This was precisely the situation facing the White Rose group.

To conclude, this 75^th-anniversary edition deserves a wide readership. The story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement contains an important lesson for the international working class and will inspire anyone who has a burning hatred of fascism and all forms of racism. As Sophie Scholl said, "I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best I could do for my nation. I, therefore, do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct."

 

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[1] See the http://whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk/

[2] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/contributors/tanja-b-spitzer

Review: The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History- David North & Tom Mackaman-Mehring Books-$24.95

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests.  These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truth—the honest presentation of facts and tendencies of the past.—Vadim Z. Rogovin

"Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies."

― Leon Trotsky

This groundbreaking book adds significantly to the arsenal of Marxist works that have utilised the historical materialist method in examing complex historical questions. This collection of essays and interviews represents the most consistent and sustained attack on the New York Times 1619 Project, released in August 2019. The book's publication is a significant political and intellectual event

The 1619 project denounced two seminal events in American history: the 1776 revolution that founded the United States and the Civil War of 1861–65. In its place, the New York Times put forward a completely new revisionist narrative that stipulated that the rebellion against Britain was a counterrevolution instigated to defend slavery and that the union forces in the Civil War were led by a president, Abraham Lincoln, who was a racist.

The lead writer and Project founder Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said, "Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true". For this piece of deep insight, the author was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Hannah-Jones made the preposterous claim that anti-black racism "runs in the very DNA of this country".

As you would expect from a work published by Mehring books, this collection of essays and lectures is based on meticulous research. It thoroughly discredits the 1619 Project's lies and distortions.

One question to book seeks to answer is why would the Times lie. As Leon Trotsky once pointed out the that when one lies about history, it is done to conceal real social contradictions. The Times project was released amidst truly staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. As one writer wrote, "These contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the methods of class struggle. Efforts to divert and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism".[1]

Contained in the book are interviews with the most renowned scholars and specialists in the history of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s — Gordon Wood, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., and Dolores Janiewski. Subjects examined are the "complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the twentieth century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present".

The most disturbing feature of the Times revisionist project was not so much what it contained, which was easily refuted, but the fact that it was left to the Trotskyist movement and the World Socialist Website(WSWS) to attack this abomination of historical falsehood. The Attack by the WSWS drew immediate media attention and very quickly seriously undermined the whole 1619 project. As one writer put it, it destroyed the Times "new historical narrative" and exposed it as a money-making venture.

In reading this book and its sustained attack on the 1619 project, it is not hard to understand why the stand taken by the WSWS and several leading Historians has altered the political and "intellectual terrain". It has destroyed the 1619 project. It has provided a textbook Marxist approach and has implemented a historical materialist method of historical investigation. One also has to admire the bravery of the historians that collaborated with the WSWS. These historians had "strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project" and were "dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it." It is one thing for a Marxist to launch a polemical attack. After all, it is in their DNA. It is another for world-renowned historians to put their life's work on the line by defending historical truth.

The stand taken by the WSWS and these leading historian has encouraged others to enter the field of battle. One notable book has been Peter W Wood's book 1620. Peter.W.Wood's book is a very useful critique of the New York Times 1619 Project. It has been described as historiography of the debates over the 1619 Project. The Times basic premise is to reset American history by "asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans".

To his credit, Woods does not buy into this absurd and dangerously wrong assumption. The book is an attempt, to sum up what critiques of the Project have written. While many of the most important historians who have written on the subject have published articles and letters opposing the Times, the political leadership in this fight against this travesty of historical study has fallen to the Trotskyist's at the World Socialist Website. While semi acknowledging this in the book, Wood's is not happy that it was the Trotskyists who first exposed this racialist and revisionist approach to American history. The fact that the Times project has been so discredited is down to the role played by the Marxists.

As the Marxist writer David North correctly points out, "As a business venture, the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision, it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of several distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history".

In his book, Wood opposes the 1619 project and offers a different starting point for modern American history, which is when the first pilgrims set foot in America in the 1620s. The political and historical study of the pilgrims is a worthwhile subject. To some degree, Wood's has a case in point, but American history has many such starting points. Most historians seem to stick with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as America's founding.

Wood's book is one of the better critiques of the 1619 project, but it does not probe the politics behind 1619. As David North points out, "The "financialisation" of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper's selection of issues to be publicised and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times' financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed to provide the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimised its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party's decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritising racial conflict, marginalises, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics".[2]

Given that the Trotskyists from the WSWS have led the political and historical fight against the Times deeply right-wing and revisionist historical viewpoint, it is perhaps not surprising that the WSWS has come under sustained attack from not only conservative sources but has been attacked by several Stalinist and Pseudo left individuals and organisations.

One of the more stupid and ignorant attacks came from the predictable Louis Proyect, who wrote," Indeed, nobody has published more "Trotskyist polemics" than them, as long as you are using the term Trotskyist without regard for what Trotsky stood for. An examination of the record will place Trotsky firmly in the Project 1619 camp. When Trotsky was living in Prinkipo, an island near Istanbul, in 1933, he met with Arne Swabeck (who coincidentally was one of the talking heads in Warren Beatty's "Reds"). Swabeck asked, "How must we view the position of the American Negro: As a national minority or as a racial minority?" Trotsky's reply probably would have made both Wilentz and his friends at WSWS beet-red with fury. He urged his comrades to support self-determination for Blacks even if it antagonised white workers, who were far more radical in 1933 than they are today".[3]

Proyect has a history of right-wing attacks on the WSWS. The WSWS called him a professional liar and said, "Proyect's blog—or should we call it blather—lacks all credibility. In his dishonesty, cynicism, and debased vulgarity, he epitomises all that is politically diseased in the milieu of American pseudo-left politics. His attack on the WSWS is the work of a man who has absolutely nothing to do with the politics, principles and culture of the Marxist movement. His blog were it correctly named, would be called "The Unrepentant Liar."[4]

Further attacks on the WSWS have come from the Stalinists of the USA Communist Party who wrote, "Trotskyists have traditionally attacked mainstream Communists and others who have sought to construct centre-left coalitions to defeat the right, attacks that have aided the right. Here, North, London, and the World Socialist Review have acted to support a centre-right backlash against a new history of slavery, a kind of negative United Front with the liberal and conservative celebrators of U.S. history. The author and co-signers of the protest letter, whom they defend, would never put "bourgeois" in front of "democratic" to define the American Revolution. In my experience, they would do what they usually do—reject the work of those like the scholars of the 1619 Project who challenge conventional wisdom and by their rejection prevent the article's publication in mainstream media".[5]

This duplicity has been the trademark of the Stalinists for nearly a century. It has been exposed and refuted by the Trotskyist movement and represents a desperate attempt by the Stalinist to breathe new life into the discredited Democratic party and join forces with the various other Pseudo Left groups that have backed the Project and have attacked the WSWS.

In the past, these Pseudo left organisations would have at least paid lip service to the struggles of the working class, but now this has been replaced by an open acceptance of new forms of non working class forms of struggle. James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose summarise this succinctly in this article[6] "We have moved into a new stage of history. The battles the left fought over the past half-century have largely been won. We cannot go back to focusing on miners' rights and trade unions, or on securing equal pay for women, outlawing racial discrimination, or legalising homosexuality: we have won those wars. Much of the right support these advances now too. We have new battles to fight. These include combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering cohesive multiculturalism, free from moral relativism and enforced conformity. The left now finds itself pulled in many directions at once. This is the source of its profound identity crisis".One manifestation of this right-wing shift is the support by the Pseudo Left organisations of the 1619 racialist project.

Conclusion

It is hoped that The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews will find a wide audience. Its essays and interviews will be of interest to all readers of American history.

It is an essential aid for all teachers and college professors, students and the general reading public to counter the Times' blatant historical falsifications. It will also be a valuable tool in the struggle of both black and white workers in their struggle against capitalism.

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html

[3] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/10/project-1619-and-its-detractors/

[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/08/proy-j08.html

[5] https://www.cpusa.org/article/the-1619-project-backlash-from-the-left/

[6] The Left is Having an Identity Crisis- https://areomagazine.com/2019/12/18/the-left-is-having-an-identity-crisis/

The Campaign Against Philip Roth: Another Exercise in Historical Amnesia

In recent years, a concerted effort—mainly visible in literary journals and review sections—has sought to portray Philip Roth, a key American novelist of the postwar era, as primarily defined by an alleged hostility toward women. This initiative, which predates Blake Bailey’s biography, has grown stronger, fueled by the modern tendency to view literature as a measure of the author's moral character.

Leo Robson’s review in the Literary Review exemplifies this type of critique. Instead of engaging deeply with Roth’s fiction—such as its innovative structure, candid exploration of American Jewish identity, and themes like mortality, sexuality, political hypocrisy, and the decline of postwar liberalism—Robson focuses largely on anecdotes and personal grievances. He treats a casual remark by an actress about Roth’s behaviour on a film set as if it resolves a significant literary-historical issue. This is not genuine criticism; rather, it amounts to gossip dressed up as judgment, replacing thoughtful analysis with moral certainties of the moment.

The Method Behind the Moralism

This approach is intentional. The shift away from in-depth social and historical analysis of literature toward moralising about individual writers' conduct and psychology reflects broader intellectual trends over the past forty years. As identity politics has become the main interpretive lens in many academic and media circles, serious discussion of the class structures and historical forces that influence artistic creation has declined.

In this setting, literature is often seen more as a tool for diagnosing personal flaws than as a historical artefact shaped by specific social contexts. The critic takes on the role of prosecutor; the novel serves as evidence; and the author becomes a case study. This approach significantly limits the scope of the critical imagination.

Roth as a Historical Figure, Not a Moral Allegory

Roth, despite his limitations, was shaped by a specific American context: the Cold War era, the unique pressures of postwar bourgeois culture, the internal struggles of assimilation and rebellion within American Jewish communities, the decline of mid-century liberal ideology, and the transformation of the American middle class following World War II. His fiction did not develop in isolation. It reflects the contradictions of a society that celebrated unlimited personal freedom but enforced strict ideological conformity, lauded upward mobility, yet often ignored the radical roots of many immigrant communities.

Reducing that body of work to a simple test of whether its author was sensitive to later generations' sensibilities dismisses any genuine historical perspective on literature. It turns Roth from a novelist dealing with the issues of his era into a moral symbol for our own.

Criticism Without History Is Not Criticism

Roth’s work can be critiqued, especially regarding his portrayal of female characters. However, such critique should be grounded in an understanding of the social and historical contexts that influenced both Roth and his critics. His depictions of gender, sexuality, and power reflect a specific era in American history—a time marked by the decline of the New Deal, the rise of therapeutic culture, and changes in the American family due to suburban growth and Cold War influences. Analysing Roth without considering this background risks misunderstanding his work, and judging him without acknowledging these factors risks forgetting history.

The Larger Intellectual Drift

Roth's case highlights a broader intellectual shift: moving from historical analysis to moral judgment, favouring personal anecdotes over critical analysis, and treating moral virtue as the main standard of artistic value. This trend reflects a culture that has lost confidence in interpreting literature through its historical background, instead seeking moral clarity in the here and now. As a result, critics are becoming less able to understand the social factors that influence art and more prone to blame writers for not foreseeing future sensitivities they could not have predicted.

 

Review: Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution by Selina Todd.Chatto, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5

Selina Todd is a gifted historian, and her books are well worth reading. Tastes of Honey is no exception. The book is essentially a biography of the working-class female writer Shelagh Delaney.

Delaney was 19 when she wrote her greatest work, A Taste of Honey. Todd respects and even admires Delaney. She describes Delaney as being one of the first writers to show that women "had minds and desires of their own…  She develops this point further by saying, "more than a decade before the Women's Liberation Movement emerged in Britain", her work "challenged the assumption that women found fulfilment in marriage and motherhood". They "openly longed for a taste of honey, craving love, creativity, adventure and escape".

Like the former Communist Party historian E. P Thompson, Todd would like to rescue people from the condescension of history, and she does precisely that with Delaney. Delaney, it is true, does need to have all the dead dogs cleared from on top of her. The book is extensively researched, and Todd was given access to what little papers were left to her daughter by Delaney.

Delaney was a complex figure, and despite writing some very good stuff, she found writing difficult, a point echoed by the director Lindsay Anderson, who said, "She finds it difficult to turn the stuff out".

Delaney was part of a generation of working-class writers that had to fight every inch of the way to get recognition and reach a wider audience. On a personal note, I and probably a lot of my generation were influenced by the books of Delaney and other authors Like Alan Sillitoe, who wrote among other books  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Late Night on Watling Street by Bill Naughton, The ballad of a Sad Café by Carson McCullers[1]. However, last but not least, A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow. These books were on the list of every Comprehensive school's English class when I was growing up. I shudder to think what is on there now.

Like I said in the opening to this review, Todd is a very good historian and is a very good writer. I have no qualms over her portrayal of Delaney. But Todd has an agenda and presents a distinct perspective on Delaney.

As Simon Lee put it, "Todd is particularly invested in repositioning Delaney as a paragon of feminism, specifically the second-wave feminism of the 1970s. But the question remains: to what degree is this authentic to Delaney? Todd's repositioning assumes an authoritative stance because of its biographical form. As a result, Tastes of Honey makes a strong claim about its subject, but the book's relative success or failure can be gauged by how well Delaney supports that claim".[2]

Todd's feminist agenda has been emboldened by the new Me too movement that originated in the United States and is now a Global Phenomena. As David Walsh points out the "The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign's "progressive" claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other great social and political issues of the day".[3]

While it is important to rescue figures like Delaney, whose work is still relevant and tackles issues still with us today, trying to portray Delaney as a feminist icon has more to do with Todd's politics than Delaney's actual legacy or politics.

As Lee again writes, "Todd herself has become somewhat of a lightning rod of controversy as one of the more prominent figures of "gender critical" feminism — otherwise known as "Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists," a movement that sprang from 1970s second-wave feminist politics".[4]

In the section entitled policy and politics on her website,[5] Todd outlines her political views. She writes, "If we are to create an alternative to dog-eat-dog capitalism, then we can only do so collectively through socialism.  I have written for the Guardian and other media on the need for comprehensive, non-selective, free education for everyone, at whatever stage of their lives. I am also a feminist who believes that sex and gender are different. I believe that boys and girls should be able to do exactly what they want to do and do not have an innate gendered identity, based on my historical research, which shows that as expectations of boys' and girls' behaviours change, so do their actions and ambitions. There is no innate 'feeling' that defines womanhood, as some organisations such as Stonewall suggest. My research leads me to believe that women are and have been treated as different and inferior to men on the basis of our biological sex and our potential and actual role as mothers. As such, sex needs to be taken very seriously in understanding the discrimination women face.  I also believe in the right to evidence-based debate about women's rights. As such, I am proud to be involved in the women's rights group Woman's Place UK".

Todd's socialism is, at best, a watered-down form of reformism. At worst, her support for a feminist solution to female working-class emancipation, no doubt how sincere, will lead to the pitting of female workers against their male counterparts. She does not believe in revolution, and she is certainly against a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism which is the only way female emancipation will come about.

As the great Rosa Luxemburg said, "Women's suffrage is the goal. But the mass movement to bring it about is not a job for women alone, but is a common class concern for women and men of the proletariat".[6]

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[1] See My Autobiography of Carson McCullers – 29 April 2021-by Jenn Shapland 

[2] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-progenitor-of-second-wave-feminism-on-selina-todds-tastes-of-honey/

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/19/year-o19.html

[4] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-progenitor-of-second-wave-feminism-on-selina-todds-tastes-of-honey/

[5] https://selinatodd.com/

[6] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1912/05/12.htm

The Bailey Affair and the Politics of Cancellation

Blake Bailey's situation is not an isolated case; it reflects a broader shift in the publishing industry. Historically, publishers served as guardians of literary culture, bridging writers and readers with legitimacy rooted in editorial judgment, intellectual independence, and a dedication to the longevity of printed works. Today, their role has shifted toward risk management, with a focus on safeguarding brands rather than supporting literature.

This change did not happen suddenly. Over decades, publishing houses were merged into larger corporate groups, editorial teams were reduced, margins were squeezed, and decision-making was increasingly controlled by marketing and legal departments. In this setting, the logic is clear: a book is an asset until it turns into a liability. Once it does, the book is not protected; it is sold off.

The Bailey affair exemplifies this pattern, showing how quickly a publisher can go from praising a work to condemning it, often with minimal trigger—such as a headline, a social media backlash, or the perception that protecting its reputation matters more than economic loss. This isn’t genuine accountability; it’s corporate self-interest disguised as moral certainty.

The New Mechanism of Control

What is notable is not only that Bailey’s book was withdrawn but also the speed and thoroughness of its removal. The biography wasn't merely paused; it was completely erased. This highlights how digital platforms manage literature: when controversy arises, contentious content is wiped out as if it never existed. Essentially, the book becomes an unperson—neither challenged nor discussed, just vanished.

This represents the purest form of cancellation politics. It's not centred on justice for victims or authors' moral integrity. Instead, it concerns control over the cultural record—determining who decides what content stays accessible for reading, citing, teaching, or criticising. Increasingly, these decisions are made not by editors or readers, but by corporate risk officers managing reputational risks.

The irony, as you observe, is almost too fitting. Roth spent years warning that charges of misogyny served as a form of ideological censorship — intended to silence debate instead of fostering it. Now, his biographer has fallen victim to that very tactic, and his book has been ruined by the forces Roth warned about. The biography unintentionally exemplifies Roth’s main argument.

The Collapse of Due Process into Public Relations

The fundamental problem is the merging of accusation and judgment. In a healthy civil society, claims are scrutinised, evidence is evaluated, and decisions are made through proper procedures. Today, in the publishing world, allegations are not thoroughly tested; instead, they are managed. The focus shifts from understanding "what happened" to questioning "what this will cost us." This change is not neutral; it signifies a major shift in cultural authority. When publishers treat accusations as final judgments, they delegate their editorial responsibility to the most unpredictable part of public discourse: social-media outrage. The loudest accusation often appears most credible. The most harmful claim gains the most influence. Consequently, publishers become enforcers of the prevailing moral panic.

The impact on literary culture is real and pressing. If publishers begin to pre-emptively erase content, all controversial authors become at risk. Any biography, novel, or memoir hinges on the author's reputation, turning literature into a hostage to individual morality. This environment discourages daring writing, fostering caution, conformity, and self-censorship. Consequently, the literary landscape shrinks. Topics that involve risks are avoided, complex figures go unexamined, and authors with complicated personal lives—most of them—are seen as liabilities. This thins the archive, creating a fragmented historical record. Future scholars will encounter gaps in our literary history, making it harder to fully understand our era.

What Is at Stake

The Bailey affair isn't solely about Bailey; it's about whether literature can endure in a world where publishers act like crisis managers. It's also about whether books can stand apart from their authors' reputations. It also asks whether the crucial boundary between accusation and proof—a fundamental civil society safeguard—will be maintained or discarded. If this line blurs, the impact won't be limited to a single biography but will influence the entire landscape of cultural creation. A society that views allegations as verdicts will discourage fearless writing, leading to literature that is self-censoring and fearful.

 

Charles I's Executioners -Civil War, Regicide and the Republic By James Hobson- Pen & Sword History-Published: 4th November 2020.

January 1649, a unique event in English history. For the first time, a king was killed by his people after a bloody revolution. As one reviewer of the book puts it, "a once-unfathomable act" was taken.

Hobson's book is an excellent and well put together account of this bloody deed. The book contains new research. While aimed at the educated general reader, it retains a good academic standard.James Hobson's new book is an important addition to our understanding of the motives and political positions that led to Charles Ist's regicide. The book is extremely well researched, and it is clear that Hobson has deep mined a few archives. He has brought to the wider public several English revolutionaries that historians have long forgotten. As Hobson states when he "pitched the book to his publishers, he stated that no one had produced a 59 person history of the regicides". So in that sense, it is groundbreaking work.

Another first was a historian who explained how he wrote the book and the pratfalls he encountered, which Hobson did in a blog post. Explaining that Chapter 1 "The plan was to get those who died early out of the way. But this was also an introduction, and it soon became obvious that each of these men represented a different 'aspect' of the regicide. Alured was the three-generation puritan, and I put him first because he also had most of the other qualities of the regicides. Moore as the Northern hater of Catholics; Blakiston as the anti-Bishop figure; Temple as the early military fighter for Protestantism and Pelham as the local military commander and run-of-the-mill MP. Temple was my first compromise; he did not die early but seemed to do nothing after 1650. Another early death was John Venn, a famous iconoclast in an age that was already infamous for such behaviour. However, when I researched him, he struck me far too important to go in this chapter. I debated which I wanted more; a 100% all-around watertight introduction OR Venn in the correct place".

Probably the most important regicide after Oliver Cromwell was Henry Ireton. Hobson does him justice. Hobson correctly states that Ireton was the motor force behind the regicide. Also, the restoration of Thomas Pride to his rightful place in history was long overdue. Hobson rescues a large number of regicides from the condescension of history. The book shows the varied political, economical and social makeup of the regicides. Some were lawyers, soldiers, puritans and republicans. All came from lower-middle-class or gentry backgrounds.

As Hobson shows in the book, revolution does strange things to men. Firstly it was an enormously brave thing to do, and many of the regicides would have known that if the revolution failed, it would mean their lives would have ended. Hobson recounts that even leading members of the revolution, from Thomas Fairfax to Leveller leader John Lilburne did not sign the death warrant.

None of the regicides would have believed that at the start of their revolution that at its end, they would kill a king after a long and bloody revolution. To their credit, many, even after the demise of the revolution, still held that their actions were right and did not retract their beliefs despite Charles II bloody reprisals. Nine regicides were subject to treason's full penalties, being hung, drawn and quartered., two died in custody before being executed. Despite knowing that the killing of a king would have a serious impact on their lives, they held onto their belief in the revolution's correctness.

The book has a couple of major weaknesses. The first being Hobson's failure to examine recent historiography on the regicide. Nothing is made of the recent historian's debate. Hobson says nothing of the debate between Sean Kelsey and Clive Holmes[1]. Hobson also could have commented on several recent books examining the regicide and the fate of its participants[2].

The second is a bit more serious. To Hobson's credit, he rejects current revisionist historiography and believes that a revolution took place. Despite a cursory look at many of the regicides' economic background, most came from the gentry, with some being merchants engaged in transatlantic trade. Hobson fails to put the regicides in a more objective context. This is a major flaw in the book after all, as Karl Marx so brilliantly said, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire. Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue".

To conclude, I would recommend this book. It deserves to be on every reading list at major universities and deserves a wide read. Hobson is to be congratulated for the work he has done on these important revolutionaries. His book will be a basic textbook to aid future study.

 

About the Author

Author James Hobson has written such works as ''Dark Days of Georgian Britain', 'Following in the Footsteps of Oliver Cromwell'. and 'The English Civil War Fact and Fiction'. Hobson has a website @ https://about1816.wordpress.com/

 

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[1] See Andrew Hopper’s excellent summation- https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/reluctant-regicides/

[2] Charles I's Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe 13 Jun. 2019- Matthew Jenkinson.

New Website

For the last three months, I have been transferring all my article from this blog to a new website on WordPress. It can be found at atrumpetofsedition.org. I will still post here for the time being, but the future will reside on the WordPress website.

This new website is the product of years of hard graft. It replaces the blog that I started thirteen years ago when I finished my part-time degree at Birkbeck University in 2003.

This website is dedicated to the historian Barry Coward who first piqued my interest in the English Revolution. The blog’s name comes from the book called  A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509-1688 (Socialist History of Britain) by Ellen Meiksins-Wood- Neal Wood given to me by my friend Tony Hyland.

 

Review: The Future of Seduction by Mia Levitin- 12 Nov. 2020- Unbound publishers.

Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go, it is pretty damn good". W. Allen

"The single woman... is a real, living phenomenon... who ceaselessly wages the grim struggle for existence" and fights in the ranks of the proletariat for the right to work. The "younger sister" paves the way for the truly independent "free" and "equal" woman of the future. “ Alexandra Kollontai

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” Oscar Wilde

: “sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love”

― Gabriel García Márquez

Mia Levitin's book belongs to a genre that has proliferated in recent years: cultural criticism of romance, desire, and courtship in the digital age. These works, such as Eva Illouz's Cold Intimacies and Sherry Turkle's work on technology and relationships, often offer genuinely interesting observations about how capitalist modernity has transformed intimate life. But they consistently stop short of the one conclusion that would make their analysis truly radical: that the pathologies they describe are not accidents of culture or technology but are rooted in the very structure of capitalist social relations.

Much of the book focuses on Mia's early life. She explains, "When my marriage ended, I thought I had chosen the wrong partner, but I never doubted that a relationship was essential for happiness. Determined to find Mr Right 2.0, I started dating with an Excel spreadsheet and advice from a celebrity love coach. Despite my positive attitude, success has yet to come. If someone had told me then that I would still be single after 111 first dates over about five years, I would have found it hard to believe. But honestly, I am grateful for the time spent alone." The sooner you stop seeing yourself as a victim—even in the face of a terrible ex's behaviour—the better. Take responsibility for what went wrong, even if it's just a small part. She deserves a medal for 111 dates, but perhaps it was more about research than a desire for love or sex.

Sexual Relations Under Capitalism

Levitin isn't a radical thinker; she generally holds conservative views on sexual relations within the framework of capitalism. Understanding how capitalism influences intimate relationships is essential. Engels' 'The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State' (1884) illustrates that sexual and family structures are shaped by specific historical relations of production, rather than being innate or unchanging. The nuclear, monogamous family emerged alongside private property to regulate inheritance practices. Consequently, women's oppression isn't solely rooted in male psychology or "patriarchal culture" isolated from material conditions; it is deeply linked to class society. To eliminate this oppression, dismantling capitalism is necessary.

Various forces shape intimate life in distinct ways. The commodification of human relationships, reducing everything to exchange value, penetrates sexuality just as deeply as other areas of life. Dating apps exemplify this clearly: they turn human beings into consumer products to be browsed, rated, and discarded, applying marketplace logic to the pursuit of love and companionship. This leads not to liberation, but to a new, especially disheartening form of alienation. Exhausted, financially insecure, time-starved, and atomised workers, victims of decades of capitalist social policies, do not see each other as complete human beings. Instead, they encounter each other as commodities amid artificially managed scarcity. The loneliness epidemic and the "crisis of intimacy" that authors like Levitin identify are genuine social issues. However, the key questions remain: what causes these problems, and how can we address them?

The Limits of the Liberal-Cultural Approach

Cultural criticism concerning sexuality and modern romance, from Eva Illouz's Cold Intimacies to articles in the liberal press, often accurately identifies symptoms but misdiagnoses their causes and fails to propose effective solutions. Typically, it blames the crisis of intimate life on "neoliberalism" as a cultural mindset, on technology, changing "emotional styles," or on patriarchy as a standalone system. However, this approach consistently neglects the class issue: who actually gains from the atomization and commodification of human relationships?

Capitalism depends on isolating individuals and discourages strong, lasting bonds of solidarity, which are vital for collective resistance. The loneliness, anxiety, and transactional nature of modern sexual relationships are not flaws but integral features of the system. The ruling class benefits not only from unstable jobs, unaffordable housing, and the decline of public life but also from industries that thrive on loneliness, like dating apps, therapy, and self-help sectors.

Capitalism not only shapes how people connect but also influences desire itself. Dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble are not neutral; they promote the commodification of humans. User profiles become commodities, with individuals showcasing attractive features—photos, wit, credentials—for evaluation in a swiping marketplace. The logic of exchange value governs intimate life, where relationships are judged like consumer products for utility, status, and compatibility. This is not just metaphorical; it reflects the real subsumption of personal life under capitalism. Cultural critiques that see these issues as problems of "seduction," "desire," or "emotional culture" and suggest fixing them through better individual choices or enlightened attitudes remain trapped in the very framework they criticise.

Much of today's discussion on seduction, gender, and desire is viewed through identity politics, often reducing these issues to gender power dynamics, male privilege, or heteronormativity. Although gender oppression is genuine and historically grounded in the material conditions Engels examined, the identity-politics approach causes political harm by disconnecting gender from class. It treats patriarchy as a standalone system instead of recognising how it is deeply influenced and interconnected with capitalist property relations.

The result is that the critique of alienated intimate life gets channelled into individual empowerment narratives on how to navigate the dating market as a woman, how to assert your boundaries, how to optimise your romantic self, which are perfectly compatible with capitalism and ultimately reinforce the commodified framework rather than challenge it. Genuine liberation from alienated relationships requires the overthrow of the system that produces that alienation, not better personal strategies within it.

What Genuine Liberation Requires

The Marxist position is straightforward: genuine human liberation, including the liberation of intimate life from commodification and alienation, requires the socialist transformation of society. This means abolishing the material conditions that force people into isolated competition with one another: the wage system, private property, the housing market, and all the economic pressures that deform human relationships from the outside in. Alexandra Kollontai, writing in the early Soviet period, understood this clearly. The "new woman" and "new man" she wrote about were not products of cultural attitude shifts; they were to be forged through collective struggle and the building of a new social order in which human beings could relate to one another freely, not as economic units.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Review: 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project Hardcover – November 26, 2020, by Peter W. Wood- Encounter Books

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests. … These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truth—the honest presentation of facts and tendencies of the past.—Vadim Z. Rogovin

"Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies."

― Leon Trotsky

"Lenin refused to recognise moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves; he called upon the Proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Who fawns before the precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy!"  Leon Trotsky

"I should respectfully suggest that although the oppressed may need history for identity and inspiration, they need it above all for the truth of what the world has made of them and of what they have helped make of the world. This knowledge alone can produce that sense of identity which ought to be sufficient for inspiration; and those who look to history to provide glorious moments and heroes invariably are betrayed into making catastrophic errors of political judgment.—Eugene Genovese [1]

Peter.W.Wood's book is a very useful critique of the New York Times 1619 Project. It has been described as a historiography of the debates over the 1619 Project. The Times basic premise is to reset Ameican history by "asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans".

To his credit, Woods does not buy into this absurd and dangerously wrong assumption. The book is an attempt, to sum up, what critiques of the Project have written. While many of the most important historians who have written on the subject have published articles and letters opposing the Times the political leadership in this fight against this travesty of historical study has fallen to the Trotskyist's at the World Socialist Website.

While semi acknowledging this in the book, Wood's is not happy that it was the Trotskyists who first exposed this racialist and revisionist approach to American history. The fact the Times project has been so discredited is down to the role played by the Marxists.

As the Marxist writer David North correctly points out "As a business venture the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of several distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history"[1].

In his book, Wood not only opposes the 1619 project, but also offers a different starting point for modern American history, and that is when the first pilgrims set foot in America in the 1620s. The political and historical study of the pilgrims is a worthwhile subject.

To some degree, Wood's has a case in point, but American history has many such starting points, most historians seem to stick with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as America's founding.

Wood's book is one to the better critiques of the 1619 project, but it does not probe the politics behind 1619. As North points out "The "financialisation" of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper's selection of issues to be publicised and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times' financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed to provide the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimised its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party's decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritising racial conflict, marginalises, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics".[2]

To facilitate the Times collaboration with the Democratic Party, its journalists have been given virtual impunity from normal journalist norms of accuracy and truthfulness. Wood correctly points out that the lead journalist on the Project Nikole Hannah-Jones has been given free rein to write what she wants. Jones styles herself as "the Beyoncé of journalism" who according to Wood, is "exempt from ordinary forms of accountability". Hannah-Jones has not replied to any criticism from historians or the World Socialist Website and has since closed her Twitter account.

The unprincipled stance of the many journalists and the few historians who have signed up to the Times project was summed up by historian Nell Irvin Painter, who wrote ""I felt that if I signed on to that, I would be signing on to the white guy's attack of something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way. So I support the 1619 Project as kind of a cultural event," Painter said. "For Sean and his colleagues, true history is how they would write it. And I feel like he was asking me to choose sides, and my side is 1619's side, not his side, in a world in which there are only those two sides."[3]

One of the more despicable assertions made by The Times 1619 project was that Abraham Lincoln was a racist and was only motivated by his hatred of black people. By allowing its journalists to call Lincoln racist, the Times has sanctioned a second assassination of Lincoln.

Again this viewpoint of Lincoln has not been sanctioned by any leading scholars of Lincoln as the writer and historian, Ed Achorn writes "Lincoln was also a politician running for office in Illinois. Lincoln declared during his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 that he would not support making blacks full citizens, members of juries and that sort of thing. So Lincoln said things we would deem today to be white supremacy. But he also argued that blacks deserved the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Frederick Douglass also noted that Lincoln seemed to show absolutely no racial prejudice in their meetings. That was something remarkable at the time. I write in Every Drop of Blood about the reception at the White House. Lincoln calls out, "Here comes my friend Douglass," when he sees him in line. Lincoln was not someone who disparaged other people of any race or background. He viewed people as fellow Americans, and that is how he treated them. You can target anyone from the past and cherry-pick comments. I try to look at the world in which he lived. Lincoln ended 250 years of brutal bondage. I do not think anyone else could have had the political skill and the determination to do that. Lincoln had to win this terrible war, and in doing that, he rid this nation of slavery. To dismiss that is to dismiss one of the most powerful stories of American history". [4]

While there are many aspects of the 1619 project to deal with one of the most important ones identified by Woods, is the 1619 projects assertion that slavery was the prime mover in American capitalism's development.

In an interview with the World Socialist Website, the distinguished historian James Oakes answered this attempt by the Times to re-establish the “King Cotton” theory of American capitalism. Historian Tom Mackaman asks Oakes "can you discuss some of the recent literature on slavery and capitalism, which argues that chattel slavery was, and is, the decisive feature of capitalism, especially American capitalism? I am thinking in particular of the recent books by Sven Beckert, Ed Baptist and Walter Johnson. This seems to inform the contribution to the 1619 Project by Matthew Desmond".

Oakes answers "collectively their work has prompted some very strong criticism from scholars in the field. My concern is that by avoiding some of the basic analytical questions, most of the scholars have backed into a neo-liberal economic interpretation of slavery. However, I think I would exempt Sven Beckert somewhat from that because I think he has come to do something somewhat different theoretically. What you have with this literature is a marriage of neoliberalism and liberal guilt. When you marry those two things, neo-liberal politics and liberal guilt, this is what you get. You get the New York Times, you get the literature on slavery and capitalism".[5]

Wood's raises other minor points such as The Times refusing to have its articles fact-checker by its employees. Or that it produced a special font to give the Project a gravitas it did not deserve. Wood also points out that "the Pulitzer Prize Board erred in awarding a prize to Hannah-Jones's profoundly flawed essay, and through it to a Project that, despite its worthy intentions, is disfigured by unfounded conjectures and patently false assertions".

Perhaps the most dangerous aspects of the 1619 project have been to seek to overturn centuries of the historiography of the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution and the American Civil War. As North points out that the assertion by the Times that the American revolution was not a revolution at all has serious implications he writes  "This claim—that the American Revolution was not a revolution at all, but a counterrevolution waged to defend slavery—is freighted with enormous implications for American and world history. The denunciation of the American Revolution legitimises the rejection of all historical narratives that attribute any progressive content to the overthrow of British rule over the colonies and, therefore, to the wave of democratic revolutions that it inspired throughout the world. If the establishment of the United States was a counterrevolution, the founding document of this event—the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the equality of man—merits only contempt as an exemplar of the basest hypocrisy.[6]

To conclude, Wood's book is a very good introduction to the numerous critiques of the 1619 project. I somehow doubt it will be reviewed in the Times. Alongside this book, I would recommend Mehring books publication entitled The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History[7]. Wood's is correct in his belief that the proper historical education of children is a factor in their growth as properly rounded human beings. They should not be taught that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution or the American Revolution or the Civil War were cynical plots to perpetuate slavery. I would recommend this book, and it is hoped that it is read in all schools that have taken copies of the Times 1619 project literature.

 

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html

[3] The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts-https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/

[4] An interview with Ed Achorn, author of Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/linc-j10.html

[5] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/18/oake-n18.html

[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html

[7] https://mehring.com/product/the-new-york-times-1619-project-and-the-racialist-   falsification-of-history/