Book Review - Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask by Nick Henck

Subcommander Marcos:

The Man and the Mask

by Nick Henck

It was the night of New Year’s Eve, 1994 in San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city in the Mexican state of Chiapas. An army of guerilla warriors blocked off all roads to the city and seized the town square. Their spokesman emerged, wearing a green army uniform and a black ski mask. He smoked a pipe. He called himself Subcomandante Marcos and his image would soon spread around the world. Marcos’s army was called the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional or the EZLN, though they commonly came to known as the Zapatistas. Since it was the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, Subcomandante Marcos declared this to be an uprising against the establishment, one that would put the rights of Mexico’s Indios in the spotlight in a bid for higher living standards and greater political autonomy. Nick Henck’s Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask gives a comprehensive history of the EZLN movement and the most in depth biography of its leader to this day.

After the uprising in 1994, and a few years into the 2000s, Subcomandante Marcos’s identity remained a mystery even though his image and message spread rapidly around the world due to media coverage. Nick Henck did a bit of digging around to find out who he was and where he came from. The first third of the book gives as much biographical information as he could find. Marcos’s true identity was that of Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente. He came from a middle class background, got a college education at a liberal arts university, worked as a philosophy professor at another university, and got drawn into left wing politics. Initially he was a Marxist and joined a radical activist organization called the FLN. Their plan was to overthrow the Mexican government and establish a new socialist state. This section on the early life and radicalization of Marcos wears a little thin at times. The author gets sidetracked into some long discussions about the political climate of Mexico and its history that don’t help to clarify or add much to the overall story of Marcos and the EZLN. The narrative picks up again in the second section.

By the mid-1980s, Marcos had had enough of revolutionary theory and decided he wanted action. The FLN assigned him to the jungle highlands of Chiapas to prepare for guerilla warfare. He attracted a loyal army of Mayan Indios and landless agricultural workers. Marcos learned to speak their language, lived according to their lifestyle, and ate only the food that they ate. Critics of Marcos have accused him of exploiting the Indios and luring them into a political conflict they otherwise would not have engaged in. His supporters have countered this accusation by pointing out that he completely integrated into their society and became one of them. He still lives a humble existence with the Mayan people to this day. In any case, he spent ten years preparing the EZLN army for the uprising of 1994.

One interesting problem Marcos encountered along the way was related to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of communism. Marcos had been teaching Marxist and Maoist political theory to his followers for some time when the Iron Curtain came down and suddenly the politics of the Left looked irrelevant. The FLN realized they had to change their message or else they would never be taken seriously so Marcos eventually phased out the Marxist jargon and began emphasizing the need for stronger representation of Indigenous people in the Mexican government. He came to advocate for the Mayan people to have their own semi-autonomous government, acting as a sub-nation within the nation of Mexico.

The third section of the book explains what happened after the initial uprising of 1994. After some minor skirmishes that resulted in a small number of Zapatista deaths, Marcos realized his guerilla army was outgunned. The uprising caught the media’s attention and he seized on the opportunity to bring the cause to the public. The Mexican middle classes came out in strong support for the Zapatistas and as long as they stayed in the eye of the press, the EZLN maintained their support. Subcomandante Marcos also pioneered the use of the internet as a tool of revolution. He reached a worldwide audience by writing communiques that were witty, imaginative, and a bit fantastical. Some of his supporters even claim they had valid literary merit though only time will tell if that is true. Pro-Zapatista activist groups sprung up on every continent and suddenly the subject of post-colonialism and the rights of Indigenous people around the world filtered into a new Leftist reorientation, carrying over into the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 2000 and Occupy Wall Street a few years later.

Subcomandante Marcos was winning a war of wits with the Mexican government. This probably was aided by the widespread opposition to Mexico’s PRI party that had been ruling the country since the 1930s. With minimal violence, a high profile media campaign, massive street demonstrations and conferences of varying success, the Zapatistas managed to establish their own alternative government based on traditional Mayan principles in Chiapas and also got their cause brought up in a Mexican congressional hearing. Finally they succeeded in striking a deal with the government that was beneficial to the Indios of Mexico. In the end, Marcos hed led a semi-successful political movement with minimal bloodshed. Subcomandante Marcos has since remained reclusive, living with his people in the highlands of Chiapas. He remains a mysterious figure and actually sounds like a pretty decent guy. One thing you can say after reading this biography is that he was authentic and sincere.

There isn’t much to critisize in this book. There are some slow parts in the beginning that border on irrelevancy, but everything else is clearly written and sufficiently explained. There are some missing pieces that could have been included though. A brief description of Mayan culture would have enhanced the context and a little more description of the jungles and mountains would give it an added depth. It would also be helpful to hear more from the Mayan people themselves about the EZLN; it would be interesting to hear what they thought of the outsider Marcos considering he was a middle class mestizo who came to them from Mexico City. Although it is beyond the scope of this book, it would also be interesting to learn about the long term effects of the EZLN uprising and whether or not it continues to make a difference in the lives of Mexico’s Indigenous people.

This is the best book about Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas, and the January 1, 1994 uprising I know of so far. It’s also inspirational. Marcos spent a decade preparing for a guerilla war. Once it started he realized that bloodshed would lead to nothing but mass suicide for his followers. He was quick-witted and pragmatic enough to see how he could influence public opinion without having to resort to further violence. More than ten years after the initial siege of San Cristobal de las Casas, the EZLN were able to get something they wanted. Patience, adaptability, and communication were their greatest allies. They proved that change doesn’t have to be immediate or even grandiose. There is a lot for future activists to learn here. The fact that this political movement happened fairly recently in Mexico makes it all that much more interesting.

 

Book Review: Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico by Bill Weinberg

Homage to Chiapas:

The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico

by Bill Weinberg

On New Year’s Eve 1994, a ragged army of soldiers seized San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city in Mexico’s poorest state Chiapas. Wearing ski masks and homemade army uniforms, the rebels carried rifles and pistols, though many of them were actually carrying wooden sticks made to look like guns. The rebel army was the EZLN, also known as the Zapatistas, and they were primarily made up of Mayan Indians. Some people took them to be a low-level threat and some tourists weren’t happy about the uprising disrupting their travel plans. Some might have even said the EZLN were quaint. But the Zapatista uprising shook Mexican society to its core, sparked a few other insurrections, and brought attention to the problems faced by the poorest people in the country. Although incomplete in ts scope, Bill Weinberg’s Homage to Chiapas puts the rebellion into context and looks at its short term consequences.

The book starts off with a whirlwind tour through Mexican history going back to pre-colonial times, detailing the relations between the indigenous Mayans and the Uto-Aztecan empire that conquered and assimilated them. By Weinberg’s account, rebellion has been a part of Mayan heritage from the beginning. After the Spanish Conquistadors and the Catholic church arrived to do the dirty deeds of the Castilian empire, the tradition of Mayan uprisings continued. Some elements in the church had humanitarian sympathies and defended the Mayans against the excessive cruelties of the colonialists and this alliance between Catholic activists and the indigenous people of Mexico continues to this day. Weinberg’s history of Mexico is brief and serves the purpose of setting a historical context for Mayan and Indian political resistance in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. He strongly emphasizes the history of the Mayan people. If you’re familiar with Mexican history, this part of the book might feel incomplete. If you’re not, it might feel a little muddled and confusing. But this book isn’t about the grand scope of Mexican history and the opening chapters do serve their purpose of drawing a connecting line from the Mayan past to the present.

The same can be said for the chapters on modern Mexico. The Mexican Revolution gets explained, especially the cause of land reform heralded by Emiliano Zapata, the guerilla fighter that inspired the EZLN in the 1990s. A lot of attention is also drawn to the domination of Mexico by the American government and multinational corporations during the industrialization and modernization process. Weinberg goes into great detail about how outside interference in Mexico’s culture and economy led to the widespread environmental damage, economic displacement, and loss of ancestral lands for Indians and campesinos. He brings us up into the 1990s when the corruption of Mexico’s dominant PRI political party and American free trade agreements under Reagan and Bush, like GATT and NAFTA, were ratified and exacerbated the unresolved problems the Mexican Revolution was meant to correct. These chapters are heavily detailed and the reader may feel lost in the weeds, especially in sections detailing environmental sciences and economics. Weinberg overdoes his explanations in a way that could alienate his audience.

Then we come up to New Year’s Day of 1994, the day that the NAFTA treaty went into effect, giving oil companies and other multinational corporations sweeping rights over Mexican natural resources, manufacturing in the maquiladoras along the border, and industrialized agriculture that killed off varieties of traditionally grown produce and further disinherited Mexicans from privately and publicly held land all for the sake of making money for American businessmen.

A decade previous, in the mountains of Chiapas and the Lacandon jungle along the border of Guatemala, a mysterious figure arose and began preparing armies of Mayan people to fight the Mexican government. His name was Subcomandante Marcos and no one knew who he was at first since he hid his identity behind a black ski mask. The New Year’s uprising of 1994 led to some small skirmishes with a small amount of casualties, mostly EZLN fighters. The Zapatistas realized they could not fight Mexico with arms so instead they captured the media’s attention and Marcos reached a global audience by posting dispatches on the internet that gained worldwide sympathy. The Mexican middle classes took sides with Marcos and the Zapatistas and their message caught on in all continents and regions of the world. Their message was simple: they wanted land, they wanted self-governance, and they wanted all the material benefits of modernity. They wanted political participation in the Mexican government and desired to be like a semi-autonomous nation within the nation. They eventually built a parallel government in rural Chiapas and refused to recognize the official governments run in the urban municipalities of the state. The conflict between the EZLN and the government was unresolved at the time this book was published. Weinberg is successful in defining the goals of the EZLN, but falls short on writing about their history. A lot of his account is bogged down with descriptions of his travels into Zapatista territories, hidden in the mountains and jungles, and his attempt at getting an interview with Subcomandante Marcos himself, which eventually happens but doesn’t lead to any great insights.

The next section of the book looks at other indigenous uprisings that happened parallel to or after the EZLN uprising of Subcomandante Marcos. The most interesting chapter gives an account of indigenous people rebelling against oil companies in the state of Tabasco who wrecked the environment and contaminated their drinking water making farming almost impossible and causing a wave of health problems. The author again bogs the reader down with excessive details. You might need to be an expert in chemistry or biology to fully understand everything he writes. He could easily make the point abut environmental destruction and its impact on the agricultural economy without going into such fine, technical details. But it is a good section because it documents some attempts at revolutionary activism that probably will otherwise be forgotten due to lack of attention from other writers.

The rest of the book moves sideways into accounts of the intersection between the Mexican government, landowners, the military, law enforcement, and the drug cartels in the North, especially in Sonora. The Tarahumara or Raramuri Indians get caught up in this mess due to poverty and lack of political power. These chapters get to be frustrating because the author introduces a lot of government officials, law enforcement officers, military generals, and hacendados who made the mistake of involving themselves in drug trafficking. Most of these people get assassinated soon after they enter the narrative and a lot of this just reads like lists of people you know close to nothing about getting murdered. It barely has any connection to the EZLN, indigenous people, or the state of Chiapas. It should probably have been left out of the book altogether.

Bill Weinberg gives us an interesting glimpse into the world of indigenous political activism in Mexico. As mentioned before, the main issues of the narratives get somewhat obscured by too much extraneous information. A lot of the information gathered by Weinberg is incomplete which isn’t entirely his fault. The historical roots of these indigenous uprisings, especially those of the Zapatistas, was not well known at the time of writing. Furthermore, he also wrote this too close to the time of the events themselves. There isn’t enough historical distance on his part to give these uprisings the clarity they deserve. But still it’s good to read about how indigenous people can organize and challenge the injustices of the Mexican political and economic system.

Despite all its many flaws, including sloppy writing and a thick jungle of arcane details that is hard to see through, Homage to Chiapas is worth reading once just because it draws attention to struggles that are not well-documented elsewhere. On a final note, the title should probably be changed as very little of what takes place in these pages happens in Chiapas. Besides, it is more of an homage to Mayan people and the EZLN than it is to Mexico’s poorest, but also one of the most fascinating, states. The dense jungle, the highlands, its ancient temples, its history, and the culture of its peoples make it a place worth visiting and learning about all on its own. 

 

Book Review: Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

by Margot Harry

      By the 1980s, the number of radical political activist groups in America had begun to dwindle. Those who were most serious about change got more involved in things like lobbying, holding public office, and working in the educational system. Urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground might have been exciting to other radicals, but they largely scared mainstream America away from the Revolution. As African American people moved into the middle class and the mainstream, the Black Panthers and other Civil Rights and Black Power organizations began falling by the wayside. But there were some diehard, holdout groups that refused to go away. One was MOVE, a predominantly African American anarchist faction based in Philadelphia with several communal houses around the city. MOVE did not get along with their neighbors and the conflict ended in deadly violence, perpetrated by the police and the city government. Activist journalist Margot Harry in Attention, MOVE! This Is America! gives an account of the police’s acts against MOVE in a style that is both analytical and incendiary.

In Harry’s book, not much is said about MOVE’s history, beliefs, or practices. They started in the 1970s as a Black Power group, practiced communal living, vegetarianism, organic farming, and preached an ordinary message of ending racial inequality. They wore their hair in dreadlocks, each member changed their last name to “Africa”, and were led by an obscure man named John Africa. They had the outward appearance of a political cult, a perception reinforced by their unwillingness to socially engage with people outside their group. Although they had communal houses in several locations around Philadelphia, it was the one on the south side, located in an upwardly mobile African American middle class neighborhood, where the violent confrontation with the police occurred. Neighbors complained about them to the police because their yard was messy and vermin-infested due to the compost heaps the kept for growing their own organic food. Some neighbors made accusations of child abuse and neglect against MOVE because the four children living in the house were often seen wearing ragged clothes. The worst of it was that MOVE boarded up their windows, built a barracks on top of their roof, and set up a loudspeaker so they could give obnoxious sounding speeches, loaded with profanity, about armed revolution that the whole neighborhood could hear. Sometimes these amplified rants went on all night long. In short, they were bad neighbors and many feared they were planning some kind of violent confrontation with the government.

The conflict ended with the police fire bombing the MOVE house, killing all its members except for one child who escaped.

There are no spoilers in this story. Harry starts her book with the bombing of the MOVE house and most of the story isn’t linear. Most of this book is her investigation into how the government planned the attack, what happened during the day of the attack, and how the government responded to the public outcry that resulted. The whole issue started in 1978 when police raided a MOVE house in another part of the city. The result of the raid was humiliating to the police and Harry’s unproven claim is that the bombing, which happened in 1985, was a retaliatory attack for that humiliation. The whole story is complicated by the fact that the mayor of Philadelphia at that time was Wilson Goode, the city’s first Black mayor who also organized the military-style assault on the MOVE house. The author tests Goode’s claims that the operation was poorly executed, the bombing was a mistake, he had no knowledge of the bombing when it happened, and he had not worked with the police in any way to plan an attack the group. She digs deeply into publicly accessible records to disprove all of these claims. Not only had the mayor lied about his role in organizing the action, but he had also been planning and preparing it with the police for over a year before the killings took place. She also digs deeply into why the local police force had access to military grade weapons, including bomb making materials, that were heavily restricted to anybody outside the armed forces.

Harry’s account of the police attack is just as harrowing as you can imagine. They raided the house before sunrise with snipers located all over the neighborhood. They used water hoses, tear gas, and explosives to drive MOVE out of their home. It is impossible to know why they decided to hide in the basement rather than come out, but one can conjecture that since the house was surrounded by cops with rifles pointed at them, they were probably afraid of getting killed. Such fears could later be justified since after the bombing, the house caught fire and the four children ran out the back door to escape, only to be shot dead by police in the back yard. Fortunately, one boy did survive the shooting and ultimately was the only survivor of the massacre. The fire then spread from the MOVE house, burning down 66 other homes in the neighborhood. And all this happened while the fire department was on the scene with firehoses ready to be used. The police later claimed that they were afraid of an armed confrontation with MOVE, but after looking through the wreckage, investigators found only four guns, not the arsenal they claimed would be there and certainly not enough fire power for eleven adults and four children to use against an army of police using military tactics and weapons.

Margot Harry can’t be accused of not taking her opponents’ positions into account. In fact, almost this whole book is an examination of their accounts and her dismantling of their excuses for the onslaught. If anything, Harry can be accused of not taking her own side into account, at least not to the extent that she could have. She says very little about MOVE as an organization. She doesn’t say much about who they are, their history, their beliefs, or their practices. That’s not to say she portrays them in a positive light either since she never holds back in saying that they were not the kind of people you would want to live next door to. A more complete explanation of MOVE would have done more to make this book more rounded and probably would have made it more gripping as a story too. But her intention in writing this was to prove the government’s role in the injustice and that is something she accomplishes with ease.

So MOVE were bad neighbors. There is no death penalty for being a bad neighbor. Even if there was, the members of MOVE still have a Constitutional right to due process of law. Their neighbors should not have had their houses burned down. And no matter what crimes the adults in MOVE might have committed, there is no justifiable reason for murdering three of their children when they tried to escape the burning house. Even worse, there are so many other non-violent ways the police could have gotten MOVE to vacate their home. Negotiation with them was never even considered. In the end, nobody from the police or the government who were involved in the attack were found guilty of any crimes and many of them even claimed to be proud of what they did. If you can read Attention, MOVE! This Is America! Without getting angry, then obviously there is something wrong with you.

 

Book Review: Micronations by Mohammad Bahareth

Micronations 

by Mohammad Bahareth

      It’s not widely known that Ernest Hemingway’s brother Les once built a bamboo raft off the coast of Jamaica and declared it a nation called New Atlantis. Actually only half the raft was New Atlantis because the other half, he believed, was a territory of the United States, Under the raft was a sandbar which Les Hemingway thought to have bat guano on it. Based on an obscure American law from the 19^th century, any uninhabited island in international waters with bat guano could be claimed as American property. If that law isn’t batshit crazy than Les Hemingway certainly was for coming up with this scheme in the first place. It’s a good thing he didn’t try to liberate the American half in a war of independence because I don’t think that would have gone in his favor. He didn’t need to do that anyways because his raft and the nation of New Atalntis got blown away in a hurricane and ceased to exist.

Now if Les Hemingway was anything like his more famous brother, he might have been a lush. This is significant because I’ve nursed enough pints of Guiness in to know that if you hang around enough bars over the years, you will inevitably meet dozens of drunks on benders who will tell you what could be done to fix the country if only the right people would listen to them. Stoners aren’t any different only they’re more likely to lay around listening to Grateful Dead tapes while watching nature shows on TV with the sound turned down while they tell you what they’d do differently if they had their own country to run. Usually the legalization of drugs is the first and only idea they have If you’re getting doing bong hits with them, you probably aren’t listening anyway. What I’m really getting around to saying here is that every so often one of these guys gets up enough gumption to literally try to start their own micronation. Sometimes they succeed. Most of them fail. These days they mostly just end up on the internet. Mohammed Bahareth’s Micronations chronicles some of these attempts.

Like any good book of this sort, the author starts out by defining the concept of a micronation. There are people who declare themselves to be the king or leader of their own mini-state. Up until recently, many of them have laid claim to small pieces of land, empty islands, abandoned military towers, or boats anchored in international waters. Some of them don’t exist anywhere except in people’s heads or on websites. Some issue currencies, stamps, or passports and even go so far as composing their own national anthems, writing constitutions, and inventing their own languages. Most of them seek international recognition from other countries or the United Nations. It’s probably safe to say that most, if not all of them, are run by people who are completely nuts. The author would likely not agree with that last charge since he appears to be interested in founding his own micronation, although he doesn’t give any specific details in this book,

After Bahareth explains what micronations are, he explains what micronations are. Again. Nobody would argue that he isn’t an amateurish author. Then he proceeds to list and describe real micronations. Reading this is a trial at first since some of the entries at the beginning have nothing but geographical facts which were probably copied from Wikipedia. But the book gets more engaging in later chapters when he gives information about the history and ideologies that some micronations were founded on. The organization of the chapters is a little weird. One is about the strangest micronations and the following chapter is about the most famous micronations. But the two most famous micronations, The Principality of Sealand and The Republic of Minerva, are in the former chapter and I’ve never heard of the ones listed in the latter chapter so maybe the titles are out of order. I’ll give credit where it’s due though, because my favorite micronation of all, The Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland, gets one paragraph. Those guys claim their country exists in your mind and you enter their kingdom every time you fall asleep and dream. Now that’s some real psychedelia for you. I’d love to see how their parliament works.

While the beginning of the book is all about the shrimp sized sovereignties that exist, did exist, or tried to exist usually somewhere in the three dimensions of our physical universes, the ending of the book covers the tiny countries, bringing new meaning to the term “petit bourgeoisie”, that own no land and exist only as ideas or internet pages. This is where the meat of the matter really enters your mouth. I have no idea what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I thought I’d throw it in there anyways. You see, a lot of these new micronations want to become officially recognized states. Some have claimed territories on Mars or distant comets, a few have laid claim to territories on Antarctica. Some want to build massive platforms on the ocean surfaces for seasteading ventures. Some wish to inhabit places where nobody in their right mind would want to live like New Jersey for instance. Also somebody has put together a United Nations for micronations and many of them seek recognition there as a first step to petitioning the real UN for acceptance. They even send mini-diplomats to micronation conventions. The next one is being held in 2025. For some of these people, this is all a big joke or an art project (same thing), but some take it quite seriously. At least, I think they take it as seriously as an internet role playing game can be taken and that’s what I think this latter grouping of tiny intentional communities mostly is. It seems like a hobby for those at the geekiest end of the nerd spectrum. On a more down to earth level, even if none of these people ever succeed in starting their own countries, I can see how this type of role playing game might inspire a political science scholar to come up with a plan or theory for improving the practice of governance in the real world. They say that when young children play house or cops and robbers they are actually preparing themselves for roles they might play when they get older (the kids who pretended to be robbers will probably go on to be businessmen and the kids who played doctor probably became perverts) and this micronation trip might just be a more sophisticated version of that.

This is not a well-written book. It’s published by a vanity press which is usually a good enough excuse to avoid reading something, but I am an aficionado of all things odd and obscure so I thought I’d give it a chance. The writing can be redundant to say the least. Sometimes one paragraph is repeated word for word following its first iteration. The layout is confusing and the organization of information doesn’t always make sense. It’s full of typos, misspellings, and bad grammar. But the author’s first language isn’t English and, according to his online biography, he is also dyslexic so I’ll cut him as much slack here as I possibly can. Besides he obviously has a passion for his subject matter and that enthusiasm shines through. If this isn’t a great book, at least it is unique and interesting. It may be best as a work of bathroom literature, but many people have to admit that they have some of their most philosophical inner dialogues while sitting solitary, taking a dump in the porcelain Republican party cranium (otherwise known as the toilet).

Mohammed Bahareth’s Micronations isn’t a widely read book and it isn’t destined to be. That’s why I’m happy to have read it and why it has a prominent place on my bookshelf which gets more crowded by the week. And to all you barflies, boozehounds, lounge lizards, saloon swillers, and barroom political scientists whose livers are pickled in gin and tonics who have had a few and start spilling out over the sides to whatever schmuck in unlucky enough to be occupying the stool next to you, if your topic of conversation is how great it would be if you could run your own country, or even just be king for a day, I propose a toast in your honor. Let’s all do a shot of hooch and a round of rotgut for everyone chased with a bottle of mad dog. You’re all invited when I take the oath of office as the first president of The People’s Republic of Mike Hunt, population of one.

 

Book Review & Analysis: It Came from Something Awful by Dale Beran

It Came from Something Awful:

How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

by Dale Beran

      I once heard somebody, I forget who, say that the internet is like a city having good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, the latter should only be approached with caution or avoided altogether. Although it’s an overly simplified simile, it does contain some truth as there are some websites that just aren’t good places to visit. I’d like to extend the simile further by saying that aside from good and bad neighborhoods, all cities have sewers too. The sewers of the internet are the chan message board websites, most especially the /r/ thread on 4chan and just about everything on 8chan. `Dale Beran’s It Came from Something Awful details the development and history of these internet sewers and the role they played in the rise of Donald Trump and the alt.right.

To begin with Beran gives a brief history of American counter-cultures from the 1960s to the 2000s. He brings up the hippies, the punks, and what he claims to be the nihilist zeitgeist of the 1990s, mostly in relation to grunge music and the overlap with the growing incursion of the internet into American life. His explication of these counter-cultures is flimsy and he doesn’t seem to know much about them. His declaration of the 1990s as being a decade of nihilism is a strange way to define a counter-culture too; he seems to be confusing the concepts of a youth subculture with a counter-culture, the former simply being whatever trends the sub-class of young people are following and the latter being a cultural group that forms in direct opposition to the beliefs and practices of the dominant host culture. But so be it. This book isn’t really about those social movements anyways. The most legitimate aspect of this book’s opening is the tie almost imperceptible ties between the hippies and two prominent aspects of the later internet culture. One connection is the creation of usenet groups in the 1970s, something developed by nerdy hippies with a fascination for computers. The other is the practice of hacking developed by phone phreaks who invented ways of using digital technology to steal phone services from AT&T.

Beran makes the connection between the original usenet groups, newsreaders, and the chan sites which originally developed in Japan. Then a message board website called Something Awful came on the scene. Young American computer nerds with a fascination for Japanese manga and anime began to use it and eventually left due to content restrictions established by the moderators. They started their own site called 4chan and everything went to hell from there. Considering that Something Awful is mentioned in the title, that pioneering discussion forum doesn’t play a prominent role in this historical narrative; maybe this book could have had a better title.

Most of 4chan’s users were teenagers, some as young as twelve, who had maximal computer skills and minimal social skills. The worst of these kids congregated on the sub-forum /r/, which stands for “random”, becoming a free for all where anything gross, offensive, or darkly humorous was posted. These geeky, socially awkward, sometimes autistic gamers and socially challenged digital jerks were originally apolitical, but something brewed to the surface of their clique. A group of hacktivists developed, organized a protest against the Church of Scientology, helped coordinate the Arab Spring, and initiated the Occupy Wall Street movement which turned out to be a revolutionary dud. These hacktivists grew to become the anarchist-libertarian hacker collective that came to be known as Anonymous.

Not everybody on 4chan went along with this move towards the radical activist Left. Some of them took their offensive racist and sexist humor to a new level, turning into politics and embracing white supremacy. Another subgroup known as incels began to form. These were boys who spent too much time watching porn and developing neurotic complexes because they reached the age of eighteen without losing their virginity. One of them joked that if you reach the age of thirty without losing your virginity, you become a wizard, and eventually a community of wizards grew around that concept. I’d say that’s a pretty cool joke despite it all. If the incels ever came up with anything clever, that was it. They branched off into what is now known as the manosphere, a sector of the internet that is inherently misogynist, prurient, traditionalist, and extremely right wing. The better of these incels started working on self-improvement to make themselves more attractive while others formed the Pick Up Artist community. Even worse, some became chronic whiners and women-haters, sometimes even turning to murder to vent their frustrations. Out of this toxic milieu of masculine stupidity came things like the Pepe the Frog cartoons, a contemporary symbol of inadequacy similar to what Charlie Brown was in previous generations, and other practices like shitposting, bullying, and trolling. Trolling itself turned into a type of right wing online activism.

So far so good, at least in terms of the narrative thrust of this book. This first half is well-detailed and interesting to those of us who had no knowledge of these chan websites when they were in full swing. The second half of the book is a little less exciting, mostly because the subject of the 4chan trolls falls into the background and the politics of MAGA , the alt.right, and the alt-light take over the story.

The connecting thread between the 4chan trolls and Donald Trump runs along two lines, according to Beran. One line runs from the trolls to Steve Bannon, publisher of Breitbart News, and white supremacist trust-fund baby with a ridiculous haircut Richard Spencer. Remember him? He’s the one whose video went viral after an antifa activist punched him in the face, setting off a flurry of Punch a Nazi GiFs and memes. These jerks were lurking on 4chan while the GamerGate scandal hit and saw these loser trolls as fodder for a right wing uprising. And they were right. The other thread involved Pepe the Frog whose meme got appropriated by white supremacists. When Dumb Donald Trump posted a Pepe the Frog meme on Twitter, the alt.right felt vindicated. This army of autistic internet losers, who previously saw themselves as the biggest nobodies in America, had caught the attention of the then-presidential candidate.

Then Douschebag Don got elected and it felt like America had been blasted with a nuclear powered stink bomb. Paramilitary militias, street gangs, and fraternities began popping up, looking a little too much like an American version of the Nazi brownshirts. The 4chan trolls, once acknowledged by Trump, were forgotten by him and began to fade from view. When they showed up at the Charlottesville white trash Unite the Right rally as pranksters wearing bizarre, inside-joke costumes, the fascists and the media ignored them.

Meanwhile, aging adolescent activist geeks were entering universities and behaving there the way they did online: the clique of stuck up juveniles with an overly-inflated sense of self-importance that they were. Without any awareness of how their actions were affecting others, they would shout down anyone, be it professors, guest speakers, or other students who they didn’t agree with. Rather than following the liberal educational tradition of examine an issue from all sides before forming an opinion, they sought to control all discussions and indoctrinate people with their ideologies. They had grown up blocking or deleting anybody on social media who they didn’t want to hear from and tried to apply the same method in the offline world. Unwittingly, they pushed a lot of people away from the Left and some of them went straight into the welcoming arms of the right. Cancel culture didn’t defeat sexism, racism, and homophobia; it exacerbated them and led to the election of the worst president in American history.

Most of the second half of the book is less about the online troll and activist cultures and more about the disastrous practices of the alt.right and the failed Trump presidency. This part is clearly written and true to what was reported during those shameful four years. But if you have been following the news all along, there is nothing here you wouldn’t already know. It will be valuable as a historical document in the future, but so soon after this happened the memories are too fresh for this to be of great interest. Anyways, I really don’t want to remember the Trump presidency but I feel like we have to because as the 2024 election approaches, we are faced with a second term with this senile wannabe autocrat and we aren’t out of the danger zone yet.

Dale Beran doesn’t go into much detail about political theory in this book, but there is one passage that is key to explaining a lot of what happened. Based on the works of Hannah Arendt, he explains that liberals believe in maintaining the political system while making constant adjustments in a move towards a better and more just society. Left wing extremists want to tear down the whole system and replace it with something else. Fascists are those who wish to maintain the political system, but feel they have been robbed of their rightful status in it so they seek to purge it of the unwanted elements of society who they feel are cheating them out of their entitled privileges. This is where we stand now with MAGA and the alt.right who want to purge America of immigrants, liberals, non-Christians, and people who aren’t white. Beran doesn’t attempt to define fascism so much as he attempts to explain the social conditions that make it appeal to conservatives on the right. He also opens the possibility that Leftist identity politics could lean towards fascism if the cause of purging white heterosexual men from the power structure takes hold. Whether this threat of identity politics is real or imagined is not relevant because a large portion of white people perceive it as real and perceptions count more than truth in their consequences. The mean-spirited, Nurse Ratched-style of scolding, shaming, guilt tripping, and preaching is only throwing fuel on the fire. We are at a point where Leftists need to re-evaluate their approach and tactics if they don’t want to be marginalized and buried for a long time to come.

For a long time I’ve been saying that the internet brings out the worst in humanity. In a small way, It Came from Something Awful partially justifies that view. It has allowed the worst elements in society to meet up in chat rooms where they indulge in vile ideas. These people strive to be the filthiest pieces of feces in the sewer and their ideas can spread rapidly around the world, faster than at any time before. The internet is so vast that these diseases can go unchecked since it is impossible to monitor everything happening on the net. Dale Beran shows how the internet has amplified the voices of the most rotten elements of society to a volume where so few voices of reason can ever be heard. And yet some of these chan trolls are lonely, scared teenagers, suffering from depression or other problems, who turned to these online spaces because they felt they had nowhere else to go. Adults need to do a better job of listening to young people. They can be listened to and understood without being elevated by technology to a position of power they shouldn’t be in. Until that starts happening, I fear things will only get worse, Welcome to the future.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:

The Fight For a Human Future In the New Frontier of Power

by Shoshana Zuboff

      The postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote about the Panopticon, a prison designed for maximum surveillance, control and domination over its prisoners. This prison makes it possible for the officials running it to see everything the inmates do yet also makes it impossible for the inmates to see what the officials do or even who they are. How such a facility can be achieved using the simple structures of architecture is immaterial to this discussion. Such a prison, presumably intended solely for criminals, may be unnecessary in these days because we have technology that does the same job and does it more effectively. This technology is called the internet and instead of being inhabited by individuals incarcerated against their wills, it is inhabited by voluntary participants. Some might argue that comparing the internet to a maximum security prison is a false dichotomy, but Shoshana Zuboff lays out a strong case for this argument in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The concept behind surveillance capitalism is that digital technology is used to harvest data from its users. This data, which is extracted from the internet and SMART technologies like smart phones and smart cars, is sold in bulk to data processing companies which then sell it to big corporations who re-insert it into advertisements on internet websites or else use it to micromanage things like car or health insurance rates, mortgage interest rates, and access to employment or education. The ultimate goal of big tech companies is behavior modification as internet targeted advertising is used to push and pull people in the direction of spending more money to the benefit of the technocrats holding the whips and reins of digital power over us.

Zuboff effectively uses comparisons to historical turning points, specifically the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, to contextualize the present time as a later, third stage of capitalist development. The top echelons of Silicon Valley are rightfully likened to the robber barons of old but with one major difference: where industrialists like Edison and Ford sought to make money by manufacturing products for public consumption that would be useful for the consumers, the current tech industry offers little in return for the massive amounts of data they collect. While it is true that we get a lot of free benefits from search engines like Google and social media sites like Facebook, the price is that these firms are used to watch and monitor us to mine as much data as they possible can about all aspects of our lives. This isn’t just a matter of what content we look at online. Cellphones track our locations using GPS, data is collected on the amount of time we spend online and what times we use the internet, data is collected on the length of sentences we write and how effectively we use punctuation, and things like the like buttons and emojis on Facebook are used to track our moods and interests. Internet data miners seek out information about what motivates us unconsciously, what manipulates our emotions, and what could be going on in the deepest recesses of our own consciousness. If you’ve ever wondered why your toaster or your vacuum cleaner needs to have a microchip, the reason is that SMART technologies of all varieties are transmitting information about your behavioral patterns to household items like cell phones and WiFi routers which then get scraped for as much data on you and everyone else as can possibly be collected. Data is extracted from our lives the way oil is extracted from the ground and our individual best interests are not a part of the equation. All this is being done for the profit and power of giant corporations.

Of course there are obvious ethical problems with this whole structure of surveillance capitalism. The most obvious one is the invasion of your privacy. Tech companies are not only monitoring our outward behavior, but also digging deeply into our minds with internet technology to monitor our psyches and use the information to control us. The author falls back on the existentialist philosophy of Sartre and Beauvois to say we have a human right to the inner sanctuary of our private thoughts and also the right to make choices about our individual futures. She doesn’t go into a deep analysis of existentialism, but she does use it as a theoretical basis for resistance to surveillance capitalism.

On the other hand, while tech companies are invading our privacy, it is impossible for us to access information about them. She uses the medieval citadel as a metaphor to describe how big tech has isolated themselves from our scrutiny by building defensive walls, both legal and digital, to ensure that we never know exactly what they are up to. This asymmetrical political and economic structure has returned us to a type of medieval society divided between an inaccessible, all powerful aristocracy and a class of peasants and serfs with diminishing abilities for class mobility.

Another ethical issue mentioned by Zuboff is that of behavior modification. She relies heavily on the radical behaviorist program of psychologist B.F. Skinner to make her case. Skinner was a determinist whose core idea is that people have no free will. Choice is an illusion and human behavior is simply a matter of responding to stimuli in the surrounding environment. Skinner believed that thoughts and emotions, the things that make us human, are unnecessary and that human societies can reach perfection by setting the right environmental parameters, turning humans into little more than machines, albeit machines without negative things like wars or poverty. Whether humans are happy or not was irrelevant to him. Zuboff argues that Skinner’s radical behaviorism is the theoretical starting point for surveillance capitalism as the purpose of targeted advertising is the use of environmental stimuli for the purpose of behavior modification, all for the benefit of the leaders of the tech industry whose goal is to maximize profits by making us spend money without thinking.

Zuboff’s passages on behavior modification are the weakest parts of her argument. Not only does she spend far too much time describing the program of Skinner for the purposes of the narrative, but she also never sufficiently sites specific instances of tech industry leaders referring to Skinner or behaviorist psychology. While she acknowledges that the motivations and activities of big tech are inscrutable, she also has to take a major leap of faith to make the case that behavior modification is the main purpose of data extraction from internet usage. Being opaque and inaccessible, the motivations and theories of big tech leaders is impossible to verify so she inserts Skinner’s radical behaviorism to fill in this gap in her knowledge. Admittedly it does fit all too well. Given this absence of certainty, it might be tempting to use it as grounds for dismissal of this part of her argument, however if you further research this subject, there is reason to take her word seriously. There are a lot of videos of lectures and conferences involving engineers and code writers from major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, video game designers, and others who confirm that websites and cell phones are designed to be addictive because the longer users spend on these sites, the more data they can collect and that translates into higher profits for tech billionaires and advertisers. If Skinner is not speficially the godfather of surveillance capitalism, there is a lot in his theories that justify and support it.

The author does give some examples of how the internet has been used for coercive purposes. Since information about the Pokemon Go game has been leaked, it is known that the app was designed for the purposes of behavioral control. The game’s players are led to public spaces to collect characters on their phones and yet Pokemon Go players may not be directly aware that these public locations are often near businesses that collude with the game’s creators to expand their customer bases.

Other experiments mentioned were conducted by Facebook. One posted the names of users who voted in an election to motivate more people to vote; comparisons with geographical areas used as control groups shows that rates of voter participation were higher in places where people saw the pro-voting information than in places where they didn’t. Another experiment involved manipulating the Facebook algorithm to boost stories with positive emotional content to the top of newsfeeds in an attempt to make people more happy in what they post. Facebook metrics showed that they had a 2 percent success rate. The former Facebook experiment was obviously more successful than the latter, yet Zuboff insists that the latter still proves Facebook can manipulate people’s moods. I’m no great statistician, but I know that two percent is within the margin of error and otherwise is too small a percentage to be regarded as anything other than random chance so maybe this isn’t the best evidence that could have been used. This leads to two more problems. The ethical issue that Zuboff raises is that since the end of World War II, experimentation on humans is considered, under international law, to be illegal without the informed consent of the participants. Therefore, behavior modification experiments conducted clandestinely by big tech might be a violation of human rights. Second is that Zuboff does not provide an abundance of compelling evidence that big tech behavior modification is in any effective. With such paltry evidence it could be written off as tin foil hat paranoia and yet there is abundant testimony from big tech insiders that behavior modification is the goal of digital technology. Zuboff’s argument has some shortcomings that should not be there.

In conclusion. Shoshana Zuboff has written a compelling argument detailing what surveillance capitalism is and why it needs to be resisted. Some of the support she offers to defend her argument is not strong, but with easily gathered information coming from outside her writing, it remains intact. Then, it is important to remember that her grievance is not with the technology of the internet itself, but how it is being used by the ideological leadership of Silicon Valley. While they are motivated by a philosophy of libertarianism, radical individualism, and anarcho-capitalism, we should note that ultimate freedom for those at the top of society’s hierarchy means totalitarian oppression for the rest of us. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism details an aberration from the original intent of the internet and resistance to big tech is necessary for us to maintain our rights, our freedom, and our dignity. The fact that things like VPNs, ad blocking apps, and the dark web are widely used indicate that massive amounts of people are resistant to internet surveillance and the nightmarish visions of the future promoted by Silicon Valley. Of course, the masses will most likely continue on their path blindly as unthinking cell phone zombies, but others like hackers, luddites, and various strains of progressive thinkers will continues to eat away at the barriers to our freedom. Only time will tell if our future will be one of the internet’s Panopticon prison or one of freedom for all. 

 

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 Reviews

The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats:

A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness

by G. William Domhoff

     Towards the end of the 19^th century, a social club called the Bohemian Club was founded. They bought a small piece of land in the Redwood Forest of California as a place of retreat and it was named Bohemian Grove. The club opened its doors to a limited number of people, only artists and writers, to provide social support for each other. However, being the starving artists they were, they soon had trouble paying rent. Reluctantly they began admitting wealthier businessmen into their ranks for the purpose of facilitating art sales. Soon enough, the businessmen took over and the true bohemians were out although the wealthier members maintained an appreciation for the arts and entertainment as the central purpose of the club. Fast forward about one hundred years and the summer retreat of Bohemian Grove has become an annual gathering for the wealthiest, most powerful businessmen and politicians in America and, by logical extension, the entire world.

Written in the 1970s, The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats, written G. William Domhoff, is a sober-minded analysis of what the Bohemian Grove is and how it fits in with the power structure of American society. It is written from a structural-functional point of view and covers such topics as who is allowed to belong, what they do during the time spent at the retreat, spin-off clubs that serve a similar purpose, and how it works as a part of the networking system of corporate and government power.

The first half of this brief book is the most compelling as it gives as much detail about the two weeks each summer when the elite gather for rest and relaxation. The environs are nothing short of majestic, suggesting some sort of Elysian Fields or a heavenly forest. It kicks off with a staged ritual pageant to banish worry from the world, a spectacle that Sir James George Frazer would classify as a scapegoating ritual. Richard Nixon famously said that it was the gayest thing he had ever seen. The rest of the time is spent being entertained with music, comedy, and theater, drinking lots of alcohol, socializing, partying, attending lectures, and letting go of all the cares in the world. Domhoff then gives a detailed analysis of how the camp is structured and how its members interact with each other.

The other significant part of the book’s beginning is an examination of who is allowed to join and attend the summer retreat. Attendees of the Bohemian Grove are entirely male. Most are heads of the biggest corporations in America. Other smaller groups are politicians, presidents of prestigious universities, and entertainers. A waiting list of 800 applicants is kept, though few of them ever get accepted. Prospects with literary, artistic, musical, or acting talent get jettisoned to the top of the list, although only those with conservative styles are allowed in; Frank Zappa or William S. Burroughs would never make it, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope would and actually did. 95% of Grove members belong to the most conservative wing of the Republican party.

The author goes on to describe two other similar private social clubs that exist for similar reasons, the Rancheros and the Roundup Riders. These outfits, rather than being art and entertainment oriented, have cowboy themes. The members dress up like Hollywood cattle ranchers and go on extended rides through the forests and deserts of Colorado. Yes, there is something a little bit childish about all this. Although less prestigious then the Bohemian Grove, they have attracted some big names of the corporate and political elite as well; Ronald Reagan belonged to the Rancheros, for example.

The final section of the book is a brief overview of how the Bohemian Grove and the other two clubs function as networking centers for those who rule America. The members insist that these clubs are simply places for them to unwind and escape from the stresses of life at the top echelons of society, but Domhoff says they also use these events to field new ideas off the record while making connections with others who can further their careers in the ranks of power. To Domhoff this is a crucial function because by relaxing, enjoying themselves, and getting to know each other as people, the members form emotional bonds that make them more comfortable and well-established in their pursuit of wealth and power.

Being written in 1971, this is a dated text, although it is safe to assume that there haven’t been any dramatic changes in the Bohemian Grove over the last fifty years except in some of the details. Based on information collected from unnamed informants, it gives a clear picture of what the Bohemian Grove really is and what goes on there. Domhoff’s work has since come under fire, mostly from Marxist sociologists who claim he is not radical or incendiary enough, but you have to consider the possibility that dealing with political and economic inequalities might be more effective if we understand the nature of the monster we are fighting. Otherwise you might end up doing little more than shooting in the dark and changing nothing. (Notice how little left-wing radicals have accomplished in tearing down the capitalist system over the last 100 years) Besides, not everything in academia has to be about blind devotion to revolutionary politics.

In recent times, the Bohemian Grove has drawn attention from all kinds of kooks, conspiracy theorists, and right wing hucksters like Alex Jones who once sneaked into Bohemian Grove and filmed it. His immediate impulse was to commercially produce videotapes of it and sell it to the suckers who follow him. What Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats accomplishes is bringing to light what this group really is, a combination of a summer camp, a spa resort, and a private club with some elements of a fraternal order. It could possibly be considered a secret society because, for no other reason, its membership is so elitist and closed off to the likes of you and me. It certainly is not a satanic cult like the MAGA morons insist it is. That does not mean that Domhoff dismisses the Bohemian Grove as a harmless party for the corporate business rulers of the world; if anything, he insists this makes it even more dangerous for the functioning of a government that is meant to be by the people for the people when in reality it is being run by the corporate elite for the corporate elite. Like George Carlin said, “It’s all one big club and you and I ain’t invited.”