Book Review: Voice Of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba by Ivor L. Miller

Voice Of the Leopard:

African Secret Societies and Cuba

by Ivor L. Miller

     The general public is familiar with African diaspora religions in the Caribbean and South America via popular culture. Most of what people think of in association with Voudou (voodoo) or Lukumi (Santeria) involves skulls, drums, zombies, and black magic. It isn’t hard to see how film makers, artists, writers, and musicians have appropriated elements from these religions since mystical and sometimes dark imagery can easily capture the imagination. But not so many people realize that African diaspora religions are complex social systems that exist within broader historical, socio-political, and economic systems and thereby have function and meaning as groups within those larger systems. One of the lesser acknowledged African diaspora religions is Abakua, a secret society that began in Cuba in the 19^th century and continues to thrive today. Voice Of the Leopard, by the American anthropologist Ivor L. Miller, gives a broad overview of this group and the role they played in Cuban history.

When West African people were brought to Cuba as slaves, their religious practices accompanied them. While these religions were mostly forbidden in the United States, slave owners in places like Brazil, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Cuba allowed them to flourish, mostly because they relieved some psychological pressure that built up under the living conditions of slavery. This may have worked to some degree, but the number of slaves who escaped to live in isolated communities in the Sierra Maestra mountains, called “cimmanrones” or “maroons”, proves their situation was not one to envy. Nonetheless, Cuba was unique in that the colonialists allowed slaves to earn and save money which they could use to buy their way to freedom. That is one reason for Cuba having a small population of free African criollos who survived by working as craftsmen. According to members of Abakua societies, there was even a smaller number of West African immigrants who voluntarily came to Cuba to give slaves guidance on how to safeguard their religion in the new land. The accuracy of that belief is of no importance in this book because that is what the Abakua believe and it influences how they see the world.

Using linguistics and cross-cultural comparisons along with historical records, Miller has traced the origins of Abakua back to the Cross Rivers region along the border of Nigeria and Cameroon. In that part of Africa, fraternal societies called Ekpe have existed since times long before colonialism. The language, rituals, and mythologies of Abakua and Ekpe bear too many similarities to be coincidental. This is especially true because Abakua initiates have their own language that is only spoken with Abakua members and, although time and distance have caused morphological changes, it is essentially the same language spoken by Ekpe initiates. A similar linguistic analysis has been used to trace the origins of Roma (Gypsy) people to Rajastan in northern India, a significant discovery since that ethnic group existed for centuries without knowing precisely where they originated. The mapping of the human genome has recently justified these ancestral histories.

Miller gives some brief explanations about what Abakua members do. He starts by analyzing what kind of a group they are. He prefers the term “initiate society” over “secret society” since membership in the group is not kept secret, only their beliefs and practices are. Readers hoping for a detailed explanation of those beliefs and practices will inevitably be disappointed since such information is only transmitted to initiates who have risen through s series of degrees and offices to widen their scope of Abakua. Some basic information is shared with the public though, for example various motifs from the Ekpe/Abakua mythology, their transmission of historical narratives through call and response chanting done to the accompaniment of drumming and dancing, and the presence of the fundamento in every juego (lodge). The fundamento is the ceremonial centerpiece, or omphalos, of each juego. The original is said to have been brought over from Africa by the aforementioned voluntary immigrants from the Cross Rivers region who taught the slaves how to practice Abakua in Cuba. The Abakua juegos are open to men only. There is no discussion as to whether Abakua is actually a religion or not. From my limited knowledge of the society, I prefer to think it doesn’t fit easily into any category, containing elements of religion, magic, political secret societies, social clubs, and mutual aid fraternities.

Abakua juegos serve various functions. One is that of a mutual aid society. Dues collected by each juego can be used as health or life insurance for each member. Money is also collected for charity or educational funding. During the 19^th century, illiterate slaves who joined Abakua could receive some education they wouldn’t get elsewhere. At a local level, lodges provided a means for upward social mobility in a colony where such mobility was limited for free Afro-Cubans and usually unobtainable for slaves. Membership in a lodge required the mastery of knowledge, commitment, and responsibility. Money could also be raised in an Abakua society to help a slave buy their own freedom. Plus, the hierarchical nature of the juegos gave motivated individuals a means for moving up a social ladder thereby growing and maturing as people.

Abakua was also important for historical reasons. Since juego activities were secret and only accessible to initiates, they served as near-perfect places for clandestine political activity. Afro-Cubans who sought for an end to slavery were deeply committed to the two Cuban Wars of Independence and used their gathering places for planning military and political strategies. The Independence leader and national hero Antonio Maceo was a member of Abakua for this reason. Freemasonry also had a strong presence in 19^th century Cuba and pro-Independence Masons collaborated with Abakua to fight against the Spanish crown. The Wars of Independence also led to the establishment of Abakua juegos for both white and Chinese members who were dedicated to the Cuban nationhood cause.

Other topics covered by Miller include the reasons why Abakua has not spread further geographically than it already has and the influence Abakua has had on Cuban music and art. In the latter case, Abakua drum rhythms have a strong presence in the syncretistic styles of mambo and son. The chapter covering music is not highly detailed so deeper insights into the subject should be looked for elsewhere. In the former topic, the explanation is that strict and complicated protocols for establishing new lodges has made it nearly impossible for Abakua to spread much farther than the regions surrounding Havana and and the nearby city of Matanzas. If you want to join, your only option would be to move to Cuba. Miller also writes about recent contact and collaboration between Ekpe initiates in Nigeria and Abakua members in Cuba who have traveled to Nigeria recently with assistance from the author who is an Ekpe initiate himself aside from being an anthropologist.

Since the practice of Abakua is kept secret and only accessible to members, this book is mostly historical in nature. However, some of their ceremonies, including dances, drumming, and call and response chanting, are publicly accessible since some ceremonies are done in the yards of juegos were neighbors can observe them or hear them from a distance. I speculate that this is done as a means of proselytizing and arousing the curiosity of potential recruits. Despite not providing much information about the inner workings of this society, its influence on Cuban history is a fascinating story to learn about, especially because mainstream historians have given so little space to Abakua’s role in achieving independence and building national identity. Unfortunately, there is nothing said about Abakua in their relation to the Cuban Revolution of 1958 and Fidel Castro’s subsequent dictatorship. Abakua survived throughout all of that so there must be something to be said about them during those times.

Voice Of the Leopard gives a good overview of Abakua and its history. It serves the purpose of demonstrating how such a secret society can maintain social stability and mental health in the midst of a chaotic and ever-changing world. By giving members a sense of participation in history and having roots in an antiquarian culture, a direct line between past and present is maintained which contributes stability to the community. In this way, Abakua has acted as a positive force in Cuban society. Up until recent times, America had societies based around common interests in much the same way that the Cubans have Abakua. In 2025, fraternal orders like the Masons or the Elks, hobbyist groups, bowling leagues, labor unions, social clubs, and other societies in which people create social bonds and a sense of belonging are mostly on life support if they still exist at all. As a result of the internet, people spend more time looking at screens on laptops and cell phones then they do in the presence of others. As a result, the rates of loneliness, depression, mental illness, and suicide have spiked, especially among young people. It would be interesting to research what the rate of these ailments are in African diaspora religions. My educated guess is that they would be far less frequent than in American society. Maybe a few more groups like the Abakua could save us from ourselves.

 

Book Review: Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico by Samuel Brunk

Emiliano Zapata:

Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico

by Samuel Brunk

      Here in Los Estados Unidos we don’t hear much about the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. Most of what we get are Hollywood caricatures of bandits with moustaches on horses wearing sombreros and bandoliers over their serapes, riding around in the desert, shooting rifles and pistols into the air while swearing in broken English. Of course, when people learn about history through movies they are bound to get a few wrongheaded ideas about life in other countries. (Don’t even get me started on how idiotic the movie Braveheart is) But then there are a few academic works of history in print that attempt to untangle the knots of that seminal time period in Mexican history. The quality varies widely. Pancho Villa has emerged as the most discussed leader of the Mexican Revolution, at least in the writings of American authors. Emiliano Zapata has gotten less attention despite his status as a folk hero in Mexico, a symbol of inspiration for the lower classes, and the guy who used to be on the ten peso Mexican banknote. Samuel Brunk’s Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico serves the two purposes of telling the story from the angle of Zapata and dispelling the conventional interpretation that the Zapatista movement was strong because of its socially collective nature.

Initially the Mexican Revolution began as a reaction to the dictator Porfirio Diaz’s refusal to step down at the end of his term. The highly educated ideologue Francisco Madero started a rebellion in the northern state of Chihuahua with the intention of restoring democracy and enacting rule by constitutional law. The revolutionaries were subsequently called the Constitutionalists in opposition to the conservative, authoritarian Federalists or Federales in Spanish. Of course, Madero needed troops to fight the Federalist army, so volunteers from the peasantry were called up and led by Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa. These troops had a separate agenda from Madero though. They were concerned with land reform since the hacienda system allowed for the stealing and selling of both public and private lands, thereby disinheriting many farmers from their livelihood and forcing them to survive as indentured servants. While Diaz rightfully deserves credit for bringing Mexico into the industrial age, his economic system led to the displacement and downward economic mobility of the lower classes. Through the leadership of Orozco and Villa, they believed that Madero would enact a program of land reform after seizing power in exchange for their support of his revolutionary movement.

The peasantry in the southern states had suffered a similar fate and when news of the rebellion in Chihuahua reached Morelos, a rebellion started independently there too. It was led by Emiliano Zapata, a leader who turned out to be a legitimate man of the people. He drew up his Plan of Ayala, a program for land reform that called for the return of stolen lands and the redistribution of hacienda property to ensure that farmers were allowed to own their own farms and the products of their own labor. The revolution started in the guise of guerilla warfare and the haciendas were seized along with the state of Morelos. Eventually they also seized the city of Puebla and marched on Mexico City to attack the National Palace.

After so much military success, Zapata realized that his revolution was too localized and had its limitations. One was that his army was made up of uneducated laborers and in order to pitch his revolution to people outside his sphere, he needed the attention of the educated classes. The first to be attracted to Zapata was Manuel Palafox, an engineering student who acted as spokesman and advocate for the Zapatistas. Later, a group of urban intellectuals, mainly communist and anarchist in orientation, became allies of the movement and worked to expose the revolutionaries to the wider society, mostly through the media. This is a point where Brunk’s version differs from those previously published. In earlier works on Zapata, the collective and egalitarian nature of the movement were emphasized, but Brunk points out that it was actually a made up of individuals, many with cross purposes to it and their own personal preoccupations. In fact, Brunk’s main argument is that ultimately Zapata’s revolution failed because it was ridden with conflicts. At the heart of all this was the intellectuals who eventually abandoned Zapata. They tried to use him for their own ends and he tried to use them for his own ends and eventually everything fell apart. One problem is that Zapata was actually a capitalist and the intellectuals weren’t. They tried to hijack the Zapatista movement which led to them being unable to coordinate their fighting with the Villistas in the north.

Other identifiable conflicts occurred between Zapata and his generals. Long range communications were difficult in that time and place, so commanders of guerilla bands located far from the center of command were largely on their own, only receiving sporadic communications by courier. There was a lot of competition for promotion in the ranks and conflicts were often solved with brutal violence rather than negotiation. Zapata’s revolution was made up of some rough people and some of them didn’t like taking orders from anybody. The chaotic nature of the organization didn’t help to sustain the revolution. Zapata also had trouble raising funds for weaponry and food for his troops. When they got desperate enough, some of them resorted to banditry, preying on the peasants they had sworn to defend. Eventually all these conflicts caused most supporters to abandon Zapata and the movement died.

Brunk identifies one other big problem. Emiliano Zapata, unlike most other leaders of the Mexican Revolution, was not motivated by personal ambition. He did not seek political office. His goal was to have the Plan of Ayala ratified by the government. After that he wished to return to a quiet life as a farmer. The problem is that the government had no interest in agrarian land reform so Zapata would have needed either to hold political office or work closely with someone who could push his program through congress. Unfortunately, you can’t win a revolution with an idea alone.

Despite giving an interesting counter-narrative to other existing literature on Emiliano Zapata, Brunk’s writing isn’t so great. He writes in long sentences that are loopy and vapid, sometimes being hard to follow. You could also criticize him for not going deeply enough into the life and character of Zapata. But if you want to get hung up on categories, it’s best to think of this as more of a history book than a biography. As far as his thesis goes, he supports his argument about the disharmony of the Zapatistas with abundant evidence so we can say that much of it is good. Really, the best part is the “Epilogue and Conclusion” chapter in which Brunk summarizes his argument and explains it all succinctly and clearly just in case you didn’t draw the right conclusions from the rest of the text. This is possibly one of the best conclusions I have ever read. It makes up for all the messy writing that comes before it.

Samuel Brunk’s account of Emiliano Zapata is interesting for its content even though his ability as a writer isn’t so great. History writers are notoriously bad at writing anyhow, although they are usually not nearly as bad as scientists when it comes to explicatory writing. If you’re interested in this aspect of Mexican history, this one is worth reading once. Otherwise keep in mind why Emiliano Zapata is important. He might have failed in his mission, but he remains a hero because he challenged the government in the name of uplifting the poorest laborers of his country. He brought awareness of the struggles suffered by farm workers into the national dialogue. These are the people who grow our food. Most people, including me, are too dumb to survive from subsistence farming alone. Without the farm workers we would mostly all die. They don’t deserve the contempt they get from the upper classes; they deserve to live good lives just like everybody else. The least you could do is say thanks. And then forget about Marlon Brando wearing brownface in the disappointing biopic Viva Zapata. 

 

Book Review: Revolution! Mexico 1910-20 by Ronald Atkin

Revolution!

Mexico 1910-20

by Ronald Atkin

      Mexico exploded right after the turn of the twentieth century. Political change looked impossible and life for the poor was stagnant and increasingly looking more and more hopeless. Ronald Atkin’s Revolution! Mexico 1910-20 gives an account of this most turbulent decade from multiple points of view.

This history starts with an explanation of the social, economic, and political circumstances that made the Mexican Revolution almost inevitable. The president Porfirio Diaz had stayed in power through dictatorial means for several decades. He had close relations with international businessmen and cientificos, educated members of the upper class who played a similar role to what conservative think tanks do in the USA. Diaz centralized his power through influence over the governors of each state in Mexico. Also of importance was the hacienda system of agricultural production. Led by wealthy hacendados, each hacienda was like a medieval kingdom in miniature with a feudal class structure. The haciendas were like villages where the villagers, campesinos and peons of mostly mestizo and indio ethnicity, lived and worked as sharecroppers and subsistence farmers with most of what they produced being taken to market by the hacendados who enriched themselves on it without giving anything back to the farmers. Outside the haciendas, the peons lived in villages with ejidos or communally owned land where they grew their crops. Since the land was not legally owned by anybody, the hacendados were seizing the ejidos and incorporating it into their haciendas, forcing the peons to work for starvation wages on the haciendas to survive.

Atkin begins by addressing the political structure from the top down. He gives a history of Porfirio Diaz’s regime and how he worked through corruption, nepotism, the media, and fake elections to remain in his place. Despite his old age and growing unpopularity with the Mexican masses, he refused to step down. As we should know by now, the most likely way of ending a dictatorship is through political violence or revolution. That is exactly what happened in Mexico.

From another angle, Atkins writes about the Mexican Revolution and how foreign governments and businessmen were either responsible or influential over it. Those businessmen, mostly American and British, though some were also French and German, were extracting natural resources in Mexico and paying little more for them than shipping costs. This was made possible through a loose network of diplomats and journalists who had access to the president, advising him that relations between their countries would remain strong as long as he allowed the businessmen to do as they pleased. This was not popular in a nation struggling to modernize itself at the end of the Industrial Revolution. Many believed that those resources belonged to the Mexican people and not to wealthy foreigners who cared nothing for their country. When the Mexican Revolution started, however, American president Woodrow Wilson took sides with the rebellion because of his commitment to democracy and political stability. Some of the weapons used by the revolutionaries were purchased from the nortenos and the US actually invaded Mexico twice during the revolution, once in Veracruz and once at the border in Ciudad Juarez.

Ronald Atkin also identifies the significant leaders of the Mexican Revolution. Francisco Madero was the ideologue who sparked the upheavals. After some battles in Sonora and Chihuaha, his forces moved on Mexico City and seized the National Palace. Porfirio Diaz fled the country, and Madero got elected president. Unfortunately he was naive and politically inept. His military general Victoriano Huerta overthrew his government, seized the presidential office, had Madero murdered, and returned Mexico to a dictatorship. This caused another round of battles in the northern states and the Constitutionalist Vensutiano Carranza chased Huerta out of the country. Carranza was an hacendado and even though he sided with the Mexican Revolution, he ultimately used it as a vehicle for seizing the presideny and then throwing the lower class revolutionaries under the bus once he took office.

The alliance between the democratic Constitutionalists and the revolutionaries was never that strong. Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were concerned with land reform and economics while the Constitutionalists were more concerned with gaining and maintaining power, mostly for their own benefit. Pancho Villa was the strongest of the agrarian revolutionary leaders. His populist revolt took place in northern Mexico and sometimes it even spilled over the border into the USA. He was the first to see the value of using the newly built railroads to transport troops and war materiels throughout the country. He also saw the value of sabotaging train tracks as a strategy to prevent the movement of the Mexican military.

The other leader of importance was the charismatic Emiliano Zapata. His initial rebellions in Morelia and Puebla started without any imput from the northern revolutionaries. It wasn’t until the Conference in Aguascalientes, in which Zapata’s representatives were in attendance, that the forces agreed to join. Their alliance was not a strong one though. Even though Villa and Zapata eventually did meet once, the two never succeeded in coordinating their military assaults on the government.

Ronald Atkin gives a thorough, fact based account of the Mexican Revolution. He clearly identifies the important people involved, the issues at stake, and the events that impacted the course of the revolution the most. His inclusion of the foreign influences on the Mexican Revolution is also unique in its execution, even if it makes the narrative a little biased towards the American and European point of view. He does capture a lot of nuance though and the minute details are written with clarity despite their complexity. The writing is a little dry though and sometimes lacks the spark it needs to be interesting. It is a history book and historians are not known for being great authors. The biggest disappointment about this book is the overemphasis on the Villistas in the north and the underwhelming account of the Zapatistas in the south. Atkin writes like he has no interest in Zapata’s guerilla warfare campaigns and mentions him only because he feels like he has to. There is so little detail about that aspect of the Mexican Revolution that you have to wonder why Atkin left so much of it out.

If you want a good introduction to the Mexican Revolution, then this is a good place to start. It might be a little dull at times, but it does point you in the right direction if you want to pursue this subject in more depth. It may not be of great interest to experts in Mexican history, but for the general reader it serves its purpose well.

 

Book Reiew & Analysis: The Infernal Machine by Matthew Carr

The Infernal Machine:

A History of Terrorism

by Matthew Carr

We’ve heard a lot about terrorism in our times. The 21st century started out with a bang when Al Qaeda hijacked airplanes on September 11, committing the worst atrocities on American soil since the attempted Native American genocides of the 17th and 18th centuries. Following that attack, Western countries were subjected to a long string of smaller acts of violence and Israel had to put up with sporadic suicide bombings that prevented anybody from feeling a sense of safety or security. Since Islamic terrorist campaigns have run their course, a new problem has arisen in America in the form of right-wing domestic terrorism that went on the rise after Barack Obama got elected president. But as Matthew Carr demonstrates in The Infernal Machine, terrorism is nothing new and, if sticking to its standard definition, might be caused by similar environmental factors in most cases.

The opening chapter establishes a definition of terrorism. Generally speaking, it is an act of violence that is committed with the intent to force political change. There are a couple key concepts for the book. One is that of “asymmetrical warfare” or the revolt of the powerless against their perceived oppressors, a matter of punching up at those above. The other is “propaganda by deed”, meaning that terrorists don’t literally commit acts of violence in the belief that they will have an immediate impact on political policy. Rather their actions are symbolic and meant to be disruptive of an abstract idea. Not all terrorist attacks deliberately target people, sometimes being limited to property destruction or sabotage. Other times, an attack may be accompanies by a press release or the publication of a manifesto. In more extreme cases, they are meant to provoke a sense of unease and paranoia throughout society, sometimes in hope of a long-range destabilization of the political order. Terrorism is a form of unconventional warfare and, from the author’s point of view, and not necessarily that of others, it is a strictly modern phenomenon. It is also a common misconception that terrorist organizations are formed by poor or downtrodden people; most often they are led by ideologues coming from the educated middle or upper classes who elect themselves to be the vanguards of revolutionary change. Matthew Carr ends the first chapter by claiming he intends to examine the root causes of terrorism.

From there he launches into a fairly comprehensive history. It all started in 19th century Russia when a group of upper class activists, some of which worked in the medical profession, set off a series of bombings. These people were anarchists and called themselves People’s Will. They set a precedent for a style of rebellion that has lasted until the current day despite the fact that most terrorists are unaware of its placement on a historical continuum. Other prominent terrorist groups rose up out of the anti-colonialist and nationalist struggles in the early modern era. Carr covers the Mau Mau in Kenya, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Algerian revolutionary war, and the 1948 Israeli bombing of the British colonial headquarters in Jerusalem. At the peak of early modern terrorism is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo by the Serbian nationalist teenager Gavrilo Princip, an act of violence that resulted in World War I. These chapters on the early to mid 20th century are the best in the book. While Carr does a spotty job of analyzing the causes and dynamics of these conflicts, he does a good job of laying out the historical events and the impact they had on contemporary politics.

As the narrative moves along in the later 20th century, his study of urban guerilla movements and Left wing radicalism gets a little bit weak. He brings up the IRA, the Basque separatist group ETA, and the rise of Islamic terrorism, mostly in relation to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat’s push for Palestinian liberation from Israel. But most of this section gives accounts of First World activist groups like the Weather Underground in America, the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany, and the communist inspired RAF in Italy; all of these groups were involved in hijackings, bombings, robberies, kidnappings, and murder. Obviously none of them were successful.

While telling the stories of bumbling Left wing ideologues, he also delves into the extreme reactions of the dominant cultures. Sometimes he indulges so much in the retaliatory violence of the oppressors that the terrorists get overshadowed and it becomes easy to forget what the book is actually about. Carr might be trying to show that the dominating governments are often more cruel and brutal than the terrorists themselves, but he goes a bit too far and overstates his case. The idea emerges that even though the terrorists commit deplorable crimes in the name of freedom fighting, they ultimately have legitimate grievances and are therefore partially justified in what they do since they have no other way of fighting injustice. That assertion rests on thin ice as Carr’s narrative approaches the 1990s and 2000s.

There were several prominent terrorist incidents in the 1990s that get brought into the discussion, but two of them merit special consideration. One is the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways. Technically this shouldn’t even be considered a terrorist attacks in the strict definition of the word since the group was a religious cult led by a blind yoga teacher who claimed to be Jesus. They believed they were taking the people who died of gas poisoning to Heaven, saving them from the imminent apocalypse. They made no political demands and appeared to be acting solely out of a bizarre millenarian conviction. Despite the atrocity, it is a bad choice of events to include this book as it doesn’t relate to the stated subject matter which is political in nature.

The other major event was the Oklahoma City bombing done by Timothy McVeigh, a Second Amendment fundamentalist and right wing extremist who declared war on the American government by blowing up an office building, killing hundreds of children in its daycare center and a bunch of office workers too. While Carr, rightly condemns the actual bombing, he writes about McVeigh with sympathy, saying he was so overcome with fury that he felt like he could do nothing else. His sympathetic treatment of McVeigh is quite off-putting since you can assume that most Americans, to some degree, feel that the American government is unjust, but most of them are sensible enough not to commit an act of terrorism to express their frustration. McVeigh was not the ordinary, angry citizen that Carr makes him out to be since something is obviously lacking in the mind of someone who could commit such an atrocity. There is more to this than simple political anger. But as Carr continues on in his analysis, another pattern to his thinking emerges: he blames just about every terrorist attack on governmental injustice and never on the psychological shortcomings of the terrorists themselves. He almost exclusively links every terrorist attack from the 1960s onward to the governments of America and Israel. Carr’s hidden political agenda comes out into the light of day in his defense of McVeigh and the right wing militia movement that has grown ever since.

Carr’s bias becomes even more evident in his analysis of the attacks of 9/11. Again, he condemns the actual violence while lending an ounce of sympathy to the idea that Al Qaeda were targeting America solely because they disagreed with the American presence in the Middle East and their support for Israel. He never mentions Al Qaeda’s stated intention of establishing a new caliphate to rule over the Muslim world, nor does he bring up the fact that American intelligence forces had tried several times to assassinate Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. Certainly America’s presence in the region had something to do with it, but it isn’t the complete story. If Carr had done more research he would have known that.

Carr’s case is weakened also as he tries to make a tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) logically fallacious argument by stating that 9/11 was somewhat justified because what America has done in the Middle East is far worse than the hijacking of the airplanes and the mass murder of thousands of people in a single day. The committing of one crime does not justify another. Taking an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, as Gandhi said. Of course, if you are an Islamic fundamentalist or an apologist for Islamic fascism, ordinary logic doesn’t apply since power acquired with violence is the ultimate goal. Even worse, the author from there degenerates into entertaining conspiracy theories, accusing the government of hiring the terrorist to attack America in a plot that involved the CIA in secret American training bases and supposedly teaching them to fly in an aviation school in Florida that he says doesn’t actually exist. Carr claims the group’s leader, Mohammad Atta could not have been an Islamic fundamentalist because he liked cocaine, vodka, nightclubs, and prostitutes, but then again it is easy to see how this lifestyle could make a man so psychologically divided against himself that he could want to commit suicide in the worst possible way. Straight out of Alex Jones’s Infowars, he claims the hijackers weren’t even on the planes that day. These are some of the easier to understand conspiracy theories proposed by Carr. Others are too nonsensical to even follow. At least he does admit that the official version of the event could be possible, but his descent into this conspiracy theory maelstrom just makes him look naive and dumb by the end of the book.

The strongest part of Carr’s writing is the historical overview of terrorist movements and their impact on the wider society. The weakest part is his analysis and causal explanation. He uses the injustice of America and Israel as a one-size-fits-all explanation and tries to fit everything into this tiny little box, restricting his ability to see nuances that might be obvious to others. It is entirely true in some cases that terrorists might have legitimate grievances and it might be true that some of them feel so overcome with anger at the world situation that they feel they need to do something drastic to initiate change, but using that as a foundation for all analysis of terrorist activities is amateurish and overly simplistic. To say that Mau Mau, the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, Yaser Arafat, Timothy McVeigh, and Al Qaeda all start from the same place ignores the individual circumstances of each case and dismisses by default a lot of important details that would contribute to a fuller understanding of what happened each time. Carr’s stated intention of explaining why terrorists do what they do ultimately fails, mostly because his analysis is predicated by a weak, inaccurate premise that also completely leaves psycho-sociological explanations untouched. Finally another big weakness of this book is his constant references to the depiction of terrorism in literature, movies, and popular culture as if that would have anything to do with the causes of terrorism.

So The Infernal Machine has some big flaws when it comes to actually explaining terrorism. It does have some merits though in how it provides a narrative timeline and overview of this political problem. It serves as a good introduction to the subject matter, but otherwise is poorly thought out in its analysis. It is commendable to stand up in defense of the underdogs at times, but it is a mistake to think that all underdogs are equally worth defending. It is also fallacious to attribute their status as underdogs to only one cause as well. Sometimes it is their own fault that they are underdogs, sometimes it isn’t. It has to be looked at on a case by case basis. Matthew Carr’s constant gratuitous references to movies and popular culture make me wonder if he spends too much time watching TV. If he had spent less time doing that and more time researching his subject matter, he could have come up with a more convincing argument in his favor and a book that is less hastily thrown together.

 

Book Review & Analysis The Shadow World by Andrew Feinstein

The Shadow World:

Inside the Global Arms Trade

by Andrew Feinstein

Just after World War II, big business, the military, and the trans-Atlantc governments began working together to rebuild their militaries. It became obvious that the industrial production of war materiel is profitable and more profits results in more power. Within a decade, America had entered the Korean War and, soon after that, the war in Vietnam. In the latter of those two invasions, the public became aware of the relation between capitalism and military conquest and the term Military Industrial Complex emerged into common usage. After all, businesses manufacture arms with the intention of selling them for profit, but the arms have no inherent value unless they get used and so they either get rolled over to another buyer or used on the battlefield. Some weapons also fall into the hands of grey or black marketeer brokers or dealers, finding their way into the Third World and put used to commit all manner of atrocities and human rights violations. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union also put a lot of guns into circulation worldwide since organized crime gangs with easy access to unguarded military bases, mostly in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics in Central Asia, grew rich by selling guns on the black market. All of this is documented in The Shadow World by the South African, former ANC parliamentarian and human rights advocate Andrew Feinstein.

The whole story in this book really starts after World War II when an ex-Nazi military officer used his contacts with the network of war criminals in South Africa to form the Merex corporation. Merex emerged from the dust of the great war as a semi-legal company that grew in stature due to their willingness to ship arms to militaries in troubled regions of the world. By the 1990s, they were doing business with dictators in Africa and all sides of the Yugoslavian civil war out of an office in Virginia. With help and protection from Western governments, they brokered and sold weaponry in deals involving intelligence agencies, terrorist groups, organized crime gangs, logging companies, and legitimate businesses. Sometimes American manufactured arms ended up in the hands of enemy nations in places like Iran and Afghanistan.

Then on the more legally sanctioned side, Feinstein explores the Al Yamamah arms deal made between BAE Systems of the U.K. and Saudi Arabia in which state of the art air force defense systems were sold to the latter nation at cut rate prices. BAE initially scoffed at the transaction but after copious kickbacks were paid and the Saudis agreed to dramatically lower the price of crude oil, the deal went through. BAE and other weapons manufacturing companies saw the potential for reaping massive profits by budgeting bribery into their expense accounts and Al Yamamah became a template for maximizing business deals in the nations of the Global South.

The importance of Al Yamamah becomes easier to understand as Feinstein explains how American weapon dealers pressured South Africa and Tanzania into purchasing anti-missile defense systems that they ultimately had no use for. This was done by funneling money into the bank accounts of corrupt politicians, all done through slush funds, overcharges, and hidden charges in legitimate banking transactions. Then sometimes it was simply a matter of handing over a suitcase full of money to the right person. The author shows how damaging this kind of corruption can be to a developing nation since in the case of Tanzania, the government cut money out of their budgets for education, infrastructure development, and job creation programs in order to purchase military technology they couldn’t even use. You also have to wonder what effect this corruption can have on a population of people who are trying to build their nation and uplift themselves out of poverty. It either sends the message that corruption is the way to get things done or else you might as well give up trying in life since if you have no access to influential people or lack any kind of service you can offer in exchange for large sums of money, you are hopelessly doomed to poverty. When people feel like they’ve got nothing to lose, it shouldn’t surprise you if they turn to crime, terrorism, or religious extremism in order to get by.

The middle passages of this book are dull. The author goes into extensive detail about the economics and legality of international arms dealing. Everything written here is relevant and important to his case, not to mention well-supported with extensive citations, but it is the kind of dry writing that slows the whole book down.

It picks up again when Feinstein gets into the role of the U.S.A. in the arns trade be it legal, illegal, or some combination of the two. One major topic covered is the Reagan era involvement in the Iran – Iraq War. Even though America was supporting Saddam Hussein at that time, they were also profiting from the war by selling arms illegally to Iran in what became known as the Iran – Contra Scandal. To add an even sleazier layer onto the story, the arms America sold to Iran were Soviet manufactured weapons purchased from Poland, considered and enemy Eastern Bloc nation at the time, in order to fund a fascist dictatorship in Nicaragua that overthrew a democratically elected government. So America bought arms from communists, sold them to an Islamic fundamentalist enemy state in order to pay for a Latin American dictatorship in order to stop communism. Brilliant.

But the dealings of the George W. Bush administration make Ronald Reagan’s senile international buggery look moral in comparison. Long before the election in 2000 and the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were drawing up plans for the invasion of Iraq. All three men had deep ties to the oil and arms industry, being former board members and executives of companies like Haliburton and Lockheed Martin, and they filled the Bush cabinet almost entirely with executives from the arms industry. Feinstein points out how the Bush – Cheney team were little more than war profiteers whose personal fortunes increased from millions to billions during the Iraq War against former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein. American soldiers got killed, maimed, and psychologically scarred for that. And the fact that, aside from war profiteers, there were no winners in the Iraq War, only losers.

Along with that, the author explains the menage-a-tois between the arms industry, congress, and the American military. Congressional spending on war materiel is grossly exaggerated beyond any practical needs and members of all three institutions pass through the revolving doors between them as many corporate executives become lobbyists, politicians, or military bureaucrats. Massive amounts of money pass through hands in the form of earmarking and pork barrel spending, two terms that serve as euphemisms for legalized bribery. There are a massive number of pigs feeding off the arms industry trough and most, but not all of them, have deep ties in the Republican party. Those are the same Republicans who make millions by doing nothing more than licking the grease off their own palms while whining about the loafers on welfare who get nothing but crumbs from public assistance. Is this the projection of a guilty conscience? A mean-spirited mockery of the American lower classes? A cynical ploy to polarize American society by humiliating and scapegoating America’s most downtrodden citizens? A professional psychologist could answer that question providing they aren’t being given the squeeze by some conservative funding organization.

So how can a book like this be evaluated? It can’t really be approached from a literary perspective since that isn’t its purpose though it can be said that, despite a couple parts that drag, most of it is engaging and well-written. It is hard to evaluate the content as well unless you have the means to fact check this dense mass of information, all of which is extensively documented with legitimate citations. For the most part, it all sounds plausible as hell even though most of the information is far beyond our abilities to verify. It can be a frustrating read too because most of us don’t have the ability to do anything about the issues raised in this study.

The Shadow World is an outstanding work of quality muckraking. It hits hard and clearly presents a dilemma that needs to be addressed. We live in a world of complex societies that interact in complex ways. Militaries are necessary as are the war materiel they need to function. But like anything else, the military can be misused and abused, sometimes resulting in unnecessary wars, genocides, mass murder, and terrorist attacks. On top of all this, there are corporate profiteers who value bloated profit margins over quality of life like an aristocratic class of psychopaths. All the while, their greed is satisfied under the guise of providing a legitimate and necessary service. As a reader you may not be able to don anything to fix this absurd situation that is utterly devoid of heroes, but this book does feel as though it contains important information and gives you a chance to evaluate your moral stance in relation to politics, economics, corruption, and violence. Maybe that is all a narrative like this can do until the human race finds a saner way to live.

 

Book Review

Secret Societies

edited by Norman MacKenzie

It is possible that some degree of secrecy is necessary for the survival of a society. That is a view put forth by Norman MacKenzie, the editor of Secret Societies, a collection of scholarly essays on the titular subject. This statement is less of an argument in favor of anything and more of an introductory idea to lead into a history of secretive organizations, what they do, and what they have done.

In the introduction and conclusion by MacKenzie, he starts with a Freudian explanation as to why secrecy develops in an individual. In order for society to function, some things need to be done out of the public eye. For this reason, we have private bathrooms, clothing, and bedrooms with locks on the doors. Governments and militaries also need to keep secrets, and sometimes groups that oppose them form in secrecy to protect their members’ identities. In the latter case, secrecy can be used as a motivational force or as a means of social bonding. Some people even fetishize secrecy and go to great lengths to maintain a private life strongly guarded from their public persona. MacKenzie’s introductory remarks lead to the question of what kind of a man joins a secret society (historically, secret societies have been primarily open to male membership only). Maybe the question “What kind of a man reads Playboy would yield a similar answer. (That is an obscure joke. If you want me to explain it you will have to go through an initiation ceremony after paying a $100 entrance fee. Feel free to contact me if you are interested.) MacKenzie actually leaves this question unanswered by the end of the book.

From there, we get a series of chapters written by historians and social scientists, none of which are people I have ever heard of. The first examines secret societies in pre-modern, tribal cultures. Even though the author uses the outdated word “primitive”, the essay still stands up as a good introduction to the subject. It is written from a functional perspective to show how secret societies connect members to their group, transmit knowledge across generations, preserve specialized skills, and maintain structure in society. Some of these societies maintain legalistic codes and shamanistic traditions that are necessary for cultural survival. None of this was new information to me, but I can see how it might be eye-opening information for someone unfamiliar with the social sciences. And I’m not referring to opening the eye in the triangle, so don’t even go there.

From there, essays cover the Mau Mau movement which happened in Kenya when members of the Kikuyu tribe rebelled against British colonialists. The Thugees of India were also a troublesome group of Muslim highwaymen who secretly worshiped the Hindu goddess Kali similar to the way Santa Muerte is prayed to by members of the Mexican underworld today. We also learn about medieval societies like the Assassins, led by Hassan-i Sabbah and the Knights Templar. By this point, you might notice that there is a political dimension to some, if not all, of these secret societies. The Carbonari, for example, were a group of Italian nationalists and the Assassins were formed because Hassan-i Sabbah had ambitions of becoming a prominent imam in the Islamic caliphate. The Chinese triad societies also originated as Buddhist monks who fought to restore the Ming Dynasty after the Mongol Manchus invaded and conquered them from the north. (Lesson for the MAGA people who don’t know about history: the Great Wall of China failed)

The Enlightenment saw a different kind of secret society emerge. The Order Of the Rose Cross formed to push the newfound interests in science, philosophy, medicine, alchemy, and mysticism, serving as inspiration for later modern groups like The Hermetic Order Of the Golden Dawn which was little more than a bunch of men wearing costumes and pretending to be wizards. Those types might have insisted on secrecy simply because they knew people would laugh at them. The author isn’t sure if the Rose Cross actually existed, but there are better texts out there that give a more complete picture like The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Frances A. Yates. Then came the Freemasons and the Illuminati, two groups that have had more conspiracy theory crap written about them than any other organization. The Illuminati were little more than a book club for anarchist and atheist college students.

In modern times, nationalist and terrorist groups operated as secret societies like the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the forerunner of the IRA. Meanwhile, the Northern Irish Order of Orangemen grew to maintain Protestant dominance, resisting the revolution to unite Ireland under one government at the expense of the British colonialists. The Orangemen might bear some semblance to the Ku Klux Klan, addressed in the final chapter, since both secret societies intended to maintain and preserve a way of life they saw slipping away from them as the rest of the world progressed and changed. The Sicilian-American Mafia also get an informative chapter describing their history and complex relationship with legal institutions. The Mafia also originated as a means of maintaining social stability through family loyalty on the island of Sicily which kept getting conquered and re-conquered by foreign invaders with little interest in the impoverished peasant farmers of that Mediterranean island.

These chapters are all good works of scholarship, written mostly from a historical perspective with not so much sociology. Given how old most of these secret societies are, that shouldn’t be a surprise since sociologcal data would be hard to come by. Most are also written from a neutral standpoint, but this academic distance is broken in the chapters on Mau Mau, who the author brands as terrorists, and the Ku Klux Klan, who the author rightfully expresses a healthy degree of disgust over. The quality of the writing is a little dense, a little dry, but mostly consistent in detail. The issue of conspiracy theories is never approached. Several of these groups, along with the Jews, the New World Order, the Bilderbergs, and so on have been targeted by all kinds of kooks and loonies as part of a mythical world-dominating cabal. This paranoid tendency has its roots in the politics of the Habsburg Empire and the Russian aristocracy before the Bolshevik Revolution. Consideration of these conspiracy theories is well beyond the scope of this book. However, most of these secret societies written about here have been involved in conspiracies in one form or another. The difference is, these conspiracies are bottom-up plots forged by groups that seek to gain power or preserve power they once had. They are not top-down conspiracies coming from powerful elites who want control.

Overall, Secret Societies is a good book, if a little dull at times, about groups that use secrecy as a tool for social or political purposes. If you want sensationalism or wild speculation, you will only be disappointed here. There are no false flags, smoking guns, occult rituals, or lizard people included. Thank whatever non-existent god you might believe in for that. If you’re serious about history from a realistic standpoint, this might be an interesting book for you. If you’re looking for rabbit hole full of delusional nonsense, you’ll do better looking for it on the internet. I guarantee you, there’s no shortage of garbage there.

 

Book Review

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia

by Alfred McCoy

with Catherine B. Read & Leonard P. Adams II

     In the 1970s, Gene Hackman starred in a movie called The French Connection. It tells the story of how undercover American narcotics agents intercept a massive shipment of heroin being smuggled into the U.S. inside a sports car. I can’t remember if the movie ever says exactly where the drugs came from , but it’s likely they originated in Asia’s Golden Triangle and got shipped to New York City via Marseilles, France. The movie was based on a true story and I’m sure the film’s producer was aware of Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. It shows how there is an impossibly complex history of corruption, politics, greed, and Western intervention that has always facilitated the drug trade and probably alwayw will.

This book combines historical research with muckraking investigative journalism contemporary to the time of its publication in the early 1970s. Of course, that was a time when the drug culture and the Vietnam War were in full swing so it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the two are linked. It starts with a crash course in the history of poppy cultivation, the opium trade, the invention of morphine and heroin, their legal medicinal use in the Western world, and how all of this relates to Asia. Then we get to World Warr II when the OSS, the prototype of the CIA, collaborated with the Mafia to ensure Mussolini didn’t gain power in Sicily. The American government turned a blind eye to the heroin trade in the name of fighting fascism. As the Sicilian gangsters declined in power, the Corsican Mafia stepped in and partially took over. This overlapped with the French-Indochina Wars in the 11950s when Vietnam tried to decolonize and kick the French out. The Corsican Mafia remained in Vietnam though and continued doing business as the Americans took over where France left off. Meanwhile the Viet Minh, who later became the Comunist party, funded their war of anti-colonialism by selling poppies grown by Meo hill tribe farmers in North Vietnam and Laos. At this point you can guess that the story has nowhere to go but down.

There is also a detailed analysis of the Golden Triangle, a region of Southeast Asia including northeast Myanmar, Western Laos, and northeast Thailand. This is where poppy cultivation flourished and heroin manufacturing did too, especially because heroin at every level of production, distribution, and use was 100 percent legal in Laos. And why wouldn’t it be? Every political party and branch of the military had a hand in the narcotics trade. Like in North Vietnam, poppies were being farmed and sold to support the separatist revolutionaries of the Shan state in Myanmar, the anti-communist militias of the Chinese Kuomintang, and intelligence gathering agents of the CIA all in the same region. Drugs coming from the Golden Triangle were smuggled, with help from the Thai military and police, to Bangkok, Hong Kong, and, most importantly, Saigon. These were the major distribution points for the rest of the world.

What’s really interesting about this book is that it accounts for the context of the heroin trade in great detail. To understand how and why it flourished at that time, you need to understand the political and military structures of the countries involved. The two countries that get the most detailed analyses are South Vietnam and Laos. Both countries had trouble establishing democratic rule because politicians and military officials work with supporters and constituents that function more like tribes. Among the supporters are religious sects and criminal gangs along with varieties of other individuals, most of which are corrupt and greedy. These factions work by competing with each other. The conflicts often escalate to territorial disputes, violence, and assassinations so when America was supporting the government of South Vietnam in an effort to cleans the country of communists and nationalists, stability could never be established. Democracy could never function in a place where gangsterism overrode consensus as a method of governing. The result was that America got defeated because they were supporting a government that lacked competency and will, caring about nothing but accumulating riches while thinking of the American military as nothing but a national guard doing their duty of protecting them from the North Vietnamese. The author makes a good point by stating that the blockheads in the America were blinded to the reality of the heroin trade because they single-mindedly fought against the communists rather than taking the whole picture into account. Even worse, they had no understanding of the culture they were trying to dominate. In the end, most of the drugs produced in the Golden Triangle wound up in either US military bases or being shipped overseas to America and Europe while the US allies and enemies in Southeast Asia laughed all the way to the bank. Rampant heroin addicted among US soldiers in Vietnam became a problem and the tribal poppy farmers were stuck in a cycle of impoverishment because other forms of agriculture did not yield enough profits for them to survive. Also, the drug cartels often used Meo tribal people as pawns in proxy wars to fight for different drug running factions managed by politicians and military leaders. As usual, the CIA and American government turned a blind eye to all this just so long as the these drug merchants didn’t support the communists. But then again, some of those merchants did clandestinely support the communists because dealing with them in the drug trade brought them profits and profits meant more than principles. Don’t even try to imagine that much has really changed since the 1970s.

McCoy’s account of the heroin business is a real accomplishment. The details and intricacies are thoroughly explained in a way that makes a challenging read, but is consistently comprehensible if you make the effort to keep track of small details. He doesn’t just focus on the corruption of the authorities and organized crime syndicates either; this book contains a sympathetic understanding of how the poppy farmers are impoverished and trapped by their crops and how devastating opium and heroin are to people who are unfortunate enough to get sucked into the black hole of addiction. This is no work of journalistic entertainment. The complexities of the writing and subject matter make it almost forbidding reading. It is a great work of writing though and also a real eye-opener for anyone who wants to know about the darker side of Southeast Asia, U.S. involvement in the region, and how our government is enabling the drug problems they claim to be legislating against.

In conclusion, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is probably more valuable as a historical document since a few things have changed since America’s disastrous and foolhardy invasion of Vietnam in the 1960s. Those changes have probably been minor ones though. Poppy cultivation has since moved to Afghanistan and the pipeline of drugs coming from South and Central America up through Mexico and into the U.S. continues to flow unchecked. It just makes you wonder what the CIA is doing these days to keep the supply coming whether its by accident or not. Otherwise, I have spent some time in Southeast Asia and the three countries of the Golden Triangle so I need to say that it has a gorgeous landscape populated by beautiful and kindhearted people with a rich culture; don’t let a book like this ruin your perceptions of this truly amazing part of the world. And finally, don’t EVER try heroin. I’ve seen it wreck people’s lives. Don’t be stupid enough to think you can use it for a weekend recreational high. You can’t. I’ve known several people who have died, one of which was a talented code writer working for Google who overdosed two months after he got married to a woman he fell madly in love with. Please don’t make that same mistake. Do whatever you want with your own body, but don’t ever shoot up junk. 

 

Book Review

The Brilliant Disaster:

JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion 

of Cuba's Bay of Pigs

by Jim Rasenberger

     It’s not always easy deciding how to review a history book. You can’t give the author credit for creating a good story because they are simply telling us about something that already happened, presumably in the real world. You wouldn’t ordinarily compliment a history writer’s writing skills either; usually people who are creative with word-smithing pursue careers as authors of fiction or poetry. In fact history writers are often not very good at crafting language since what they say is supposed to be more important than how they say it. I guess you have to consider how well they bring history to life and demonstrate the importance and relevance of that history. Jim Rasenberger does just that in The Brilliant Disaster. He shows us how John F. Kennedy bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion and the effects it had on his presidency and the reputation that America had in the world as time went on as a result.

In his writing, Rasenberger knows how to introduce important elements into the story he tells without going too deeply down side roads that are relevant only up to a certain point. His handling of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution is important to this history, but he doesn’t go into an overwhelming amount of detail regarding them. Castro himself is a fascinating enough figure and the story of the Revolution is well-worth reading about, but the author here introduces just enough information to suit the story. The same can be said about the 1960 Presidential election between Nixon and Kennedy. Rasenberger shows how Kennedy, by putting the problem of Castro and Cuba in front and center stage, dealt a master blow to Nixon, ensuring his victory at the polls. Kennedy’s campaign was a small work of genius for a number of reasons, but the author sticks to the important parts.

The remainder of the first half of this book is mostly relevant, but it has a tendency to drag at times, plus the things he did right that I mentioned in the previous paragraph turn into problems later in the narrative. Lots of detail is given regarding the committee set up to plan the Bay of Pigs invasion, although in this part the author goes a little too far. He writes as if the life stories of people like Allan Dulles, Richard Bissell, and Arthur Schlesinger are central to understanding what happened, and to a certain extent they are, but the over-abundance of detail about their pasts, their personalities, and their lifestyles makes for a few slow passages along the way.

Then there is the planning itself. High-ranking members of the CIA did a poor job of planning the invasion. Their intelligence gathering was haphazard, their strategy was not well-thought out, and their expectations were misguided. They really were a team of over-confident amateurs. While Kennedy met with them and advisers from his cabinet, most of which were not shy about drawing attention to the flaws in the plan, they hemmed and hawed about what to do then they hemmed and hawed some more. After that they hemmed and hawed about the hemming and hawing until the story becomes frustratingly dull and you just want the action to begin.

Then it does. An army of Cuban exiles were trained by the CIA in Guatemala then launched an attack on Cuba from an airbase in Nicaragua. They tried to establish three beachhead landings in southern Cuba’s Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. Murphy’s Law went into effect and everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The Americans left the Cuban soldiers stranded while Castro’s superior forces proceeded to slaughter them. Meanwhile back in Washington, Kennedy and company did what they did best...hemming and hawing. Some of the soldiers were rescued, but a lot of them got caught and imprisoned by Castro’s military.

The details of the invasion are the strongest part of this book. Other books on the Cuban Revolution, Castro, Kennedy, and relations between America and the island nation to the south of Florida, tend to analyze the role that the Bay of Pigs played in other developments, but so far this is the most detailed account of the actual combat that happened at sea and on the ground that I have encountered so far.

The rest of the book explains how the failed invasion affected Kennedy’s self-confidence within the first year of his presidency. It also examines how the Bay of Pigs influenced American foreign policy in the years to come, especially regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis and later Cold War politics. Most significantly, the last section tells the story of how the USA, after being humiliated by Castro and the Cubans, were able to negotiate with them to get the Cuban exiles returned to American soil.

Overall, this is a book about John F. Kennedy and the CIA. Without delving into any kind of political or ideological muckraking, Rasenberger explains how CIA incompetence condemned the Bay of Pigs invasion before it began. He lays most of the blame for the operation on them while reserving a proper amount of disdain for John F. Kennedy too. But his analysis of Kennedy’s thinking is nuanced. This isn’t a work of character assassination; he shows how some of the dilemmas posed by the Cuban Revolution put Kennedy between a rock and a hard place, but he also shows how Kennedy shot himself in the foot a few times by getting himself into such dangerously tight situations to begin with. Interestingly, Rasenberger comes to the enlightening conclusion that Kennedy’s legacy will always be tethered to Fidel Castro. You just can’t understand JFK if you can’t see how closely Castro and Cuba shaped almost everything he did during his term in office. Even his assassination was tied to Cuban politics because Lee Harvey Oswald believed himself to be acting on Castro’s behalf when he pulled the trigger. Finally, Rasenberger does a great job of demonstrating cause and effect in the chain of events. Early in the book, he shows how Kennedy’s dismissive attitude pushed Castro into the arms of Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, forgetting the dictum that you should keep your fiends close but keep your enemies closer. This is sad because Castro was open to the idea of maintaining peaceful relations with America after he seized power. He eventually embraced communism because the Americans didn’t take him seriously. Contemporary Cuba is just as much America’s tragedy as it is Castro’s. The author also makes a good case for saying that, while Kennedy has often been hailed as a hero for his management of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was also his disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that resulted in the Cuban Missile Crisis to begin with. This fact is something that Kennedy supporters are often unwilling to acknowledge.

So while The Brilliant Disaster has its setbacks, especially in reference to the painfully slow first half of the book, it succeeds in giving a uniquely vivid picture of this historical moment, analyzing the importance of the Bay of Pigs, and using a cause-and-effect methodology to demonstrate how the historic events unfolded. Now I think it would be interesting to read about the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis from a Cuban point of view. In the end, I must say that the more I read about the Kennedy presidency, the less impressed I am by his political skills. For all the charm and intelligence he brought to the White House, there was something seriously lacking when it came to decision making. Maybe America’s first television president should have gone into acting instead. Maybe he could have even done our country a great favor by convincing Ronald Reagan to forget about politics and further his career in Hollywood instead. 

 

Book Review

Rats, Lice and History

by Hans Zinsser

     Warfare has always been a part of human existence. So has disease. What if I were to tell you that the two are inextricably linked? That is the point that science historian Hans Zinsser attempts to prove in his semi-classic study Rats, Lice and History. While he makes a sweeping and somewhat superficial survey of Western civilization, he does have enough scientific credibility to prove his point.

This book does not get off to a great start. Although written in the 1930s, the author writes with a prose that resembles Victorian era essays using baroque sentences that meander on for a bit too long with elaborate detailing and excessive description. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I happen to like some 19^th century literature, but it feels a little out of place in the context of this mid-modern text. The first two chapters also left me wondering where the book would be going since they had almost nothing to do with rats, lice, or history. The second chapter, in particular, was a rant against modernist styles in literature where the author makes it clear that he has no appreciation for the likes of T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, or James Joyce.

Moving on from there, Zinsser gives a lengthy overview of trade practices, disease, and warfare as they occurred in ancient times. We hear about the usual Greeks, Romans, and Christians up through the Middle Ages to the voyages of Columbus. By this point in my life I’m getting a little bored of every history scholar writing as if the world outside of Europe didn’t exist before World War II, but I just have to accept that that is how history used to be studied. In any case, the author points out that the use of ships for trade and war did a lot to spread disease since stowaway rats carried infected fleas that regarded the sailors as nothing more than food. Yes, like it or not, people are food.

One of the strongest points of the book’s first half is that diseases often weakened and killed more soldiers than combat actually did. He even goes so far as to make the point that disease could have been a more decisive factor in fighting than military strategy, skill, or execution. Now that is an idea that should deflate the myth of the courageous warrior. The science of the matter is that having large groups of people, be they confined on boats or engaging in military campaigns, in close proximity to each other make it easy for fleas and lice to spread sicknesses throughout the population at a rapid pace. Soldiers returning home or mingling with the people they conquer spread the diseases into the civilian population and then we have epidemics like the Black Death. You have to admit the idea is plausible and with Zinsser’s background in biology, he uses his knowledge of entomology to support the point.

After about one hundred pages of what eventually sounds like a bunch of babbling about wars, the narrative really takes off as Zinsser examines historical writings to locate the first mention of typhus. There isn’t much in the historical record that corresponds with the modern understanding of typhus symptoms and its origins are murky at best, but he develops a theory, one that he admits is not strong, that typhus originated in Asia and was spread by sea merchants to Western Europe via Cyprus during the Renaissance.

From there, Zinsser takes a big leap into the subject of human-animal relationships with chapters describing lice, mice, rats, and fleas which, along with humans, form a pentangonal track for typhus to travel along. His opinion of lice is surprisingly sympathetic while his take on rats is not so hot. Lice, he claims, are actually neutral vectors that catch typhus from humans. When they reproduce, they pass the typhus on to their offspring which spread among the human population and spread the disease further amongst humans. Typhus actually kills the host lice so spreading the disease does not benefit them in any way. They are innocent vermin that just happened to get caught in the crossfire of a war between humans and a disease. Rats, on the other hand, are nothing but pests according to the author. He thinks they serve no purpose in the world other than to cause problems. They are, in fact, part of the food chain and being the scavengers that they are, their ecological function in the world is to clean up the messes left by other creature like us. That is why they thrive in places that are full of human-made garbage. Useless? I hardly think so. But regardless of what you believe, the truth is that mice carry the fleas that transmit typhus to rats and those fleas transmit typhus to humans. The humans transmit it to lice and the lice transmit it to other humans. It’s a grim way of looking at people, but we do have to be reminded from time to time that we are not the magnificent species we claim to be. We might actually be little more than a dangerous parasite if looked at from Planet Earth’s point of view. In any case, this portion of the book is fascinating and brilliant; you can really see Zinsser at his best in these passages.

The rest of the book is all about typhus and he gets around to pointing out how bad of a problem it was during World War I. This brings up an interesting dilemma. If this book was inspired by the aftermath of World War I, is it fair to say that the event overly influenced the author in his analysis and conclusions? Or did the post-war realities shine a light onto a previously unexplored matter of human history, medical science, and entomology? I can’t say for myself because I know absolutely nothing about typhus or the science of epidemics. But I can say this book made me look at humanity in a new light which is saying a lot considering the thousands of books I have read in my lifetime.

Since the 1930s, scientists have learned a lot about typhus and other illnesses so it is fair to assume that some of the information in this book is dated. But Rats, Lice and History poses a significant question about human nature and our history. If wars are the primary way in which diseases spread and become epidemics or pandemics, wouldn’t it make sense to fight less of them or even eliminate them altogether? I have no idea how we could accomplish that, but if that question is the biggest takeaway you can get from this book, then the message transcends any dated scientific ideas it may contain. I’d say that the way Hans Zinsser presented just enough evidence to make that question stick in my mind is reason enough for it to be worth reading, even almost one hundred years after its initial publication. 

 

Book Review

Six-Legged Soldiers

Using Insects as Weapons of War

by Jeffrey A. Lockwood

     If insects make you nervous, Jeffrey A. Lockwood’s Six-Legged Soldiers isn’t going to do anything to ease your anxieties. That is why you might want to read it; things that make you uncomfortable must be inherently interesting, right? Even if you love bugs, there still might be something interesting here. (Did I just make an error of judgment? “Bugs” is a pejorative term for insects so I guess it is extremely offensive to oppressed animals. I can hear the raging horde of woke wasps coming after me on Twitter to make sure I get canceled. The joke’s on you because I don’t have a Twitter account.) But despite the interesting subject matter, the realized product of Lockwood’s research is less than stellar.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that insects were being used as weapons of war in ancient times. What could be more detrimental to an army’s morale than being splattered with honey then having a beehive launched into the middle of your battalion? Or how about being routed into a swampy area where malaria-carrying mosquitoes live in abundance? How well can an army fight after some digestive parasite gives them migraine headaches, dizzying fever, double visions, and explosive diarrhea? Those annoying little critters are sometimes deadly, they exist in abundance, and are free for the taking. Why not use them as weapons? It sure beats hand to hand combat where soldier risk getting skewered on a sword, beheaded, or dismembered. Don’t take it too deeply into consideration though because all manner of vermin are hard to control; they don’t obey orders, they don’t go where you want them to, and they are just as likely to attack your own army as they are to attack the enemy’s. A little human ingenuity is necessary here.

So this is where Lockwood starts. From prehistoric times to our own age, people have attempted to use insects as weapons, some more successfully than others. As any broad-scoped popular history book would, this one starts out with the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the predecessors. It draws on the Old Testament as a source, and then looks at a few examples from the Middle Ages. Most of these attempts at militarizing insects are bumbling, awkward failures. Some of the passages are simply conjectural guesswork as to whether or not insects were militarized or what kinds of them were actually used. The author uses science to guess what really happened in these battles, drawing on the symptoms of illnesses and his expertise in entomology to draw some shaky conclusions. The writing is just as awkward, uneven, and bumbling as the historical attempts at fighting enemies with swarms of unruly pests were. I really take issue with the way he dwells so much on the Bible in an attempt to engage the reader. He writes as if he doesn’t have any real interest in Biblical studies, but he wants to throw this stuff in there on the assumption that a lot of religious people without any interest in science might want to read this. This kind of pandering doesn’t do the subject matter justice.

The following sections on World War II and the Cold War are much more interesting and well-written. Lockwood writes about Japan’s infamous Unit 731, the biological warfare laboratory that used living humans as subjects for experimentation. Shiro Ishii, the Japanese equivalent of Nazi Germany’s Josef Mengele, oversaw a project to develop bombs that would spread vector fleas infected with bubonic plague all over China. This is the most chilling part of the book and what makes it even worse is that Ishii was never brought to trial for war crimes; instead America let him off the hook in exchange for the extensive experimental records that were kept in the facility.

Meanwhile, the Americans began running their own biological and insectan warfare program in Maryland’s Fort Detrick. The scientists there went as far as dropping mosquito bombs in Arkansas, as if that state needs any more mosquitoes than they already have, to see how fast a plague could potentially develop. Also of interest during the Cold War were accusations against America during the Korean War of spreading disease-carrying swarms of fleas in China and North Korea. Fidel Castro also became obsessive about accusing America of launching crop-killing potato bugs into Cuba. Maybe that was a result of Operation Mongoose where the CIA tried spiking his drinks with LSD. Lockwood does an interesting job of analyzing whether or not these charges, broughght against the U.S.A. at the United Nations, were based on fact or if they were merely propaganda campaigns.

The final section of the book covers present and future uses of insects as agents of military use.

The author’s writing is uneven. As mentioned before, the chapters on ancient uses of vermin for war were clumsy. The book really takes off in the twentieth century chapters, but even there it is a bit of a letdown. It turns out that insects in the Cold War era were used more as symbolic weapons in propaganda campaigns then they were in actual combat. Experiments with insects as biological warfare tools have also been inefficient and ineffective. So while this section of the book is more interesting and better-written, the subject matter wears a little thin. It also seems like the proof-reader stopped paying attention towards the end of the book because the last chapters are so full of spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors that it becomes difficult to read at times.

Six-Legged Soldiers has potential to be a more interesting read than it is. If Jeffrey Lockwood spent more time on the actual writing, it would be better. Still, the subject matter is interesting enough to make it worth reading once. Plus the thought of the Japanese and American militaries mass-breeding insects, infecting them with diseases, and using them in warfare against civilian populations is scary enough to make you keep you awake at night. I’m not an advocate of insomnia, but I fear if we become too comfortable we will also become too complacent and that is not a good thing.