Fool
The obsession with status, honor, and the games played between lovers all seems very distant, as a novel from this period ought to do.
I was impressed with the penetrating anger of the young Julien at the society he enters, preserved throughout despite the kindness shown to him. It feels so real, in comparison to the more typical character of a fully coopted figure we might expect whose nobility and compassion prevail. The key word in reviews is “hypocrisy” and there is plenty of it, but I would say bitterness is the powerful emotion found dripping on each page.
Favorite quotes:
15 (Everyman edition): ‘I like shade, I have my trees cut so as to give shade, and I do not consider that a tree is made for any other purpose, unless, like the useful walnut, it yields a return' There you have the great phrase that decides everything at Verrières: YIELD A RETURN; it by itself represents the habitual thought of more than three fourths of the inhabitants.
295 ‘I am independent, myself' ... ‘Why should I be expected to hold the same opinion today that I held six weeks ago? If I did, I should be a slave to my opinion.”
This book, with a title she didn't approve of, is written by fascinating and unique anarchist Emma Goldman. It is part of a genre of works by anarchists, socialists, and former Communists who went to Russia full of optimism for the revolution and had their hopes dashed when faced by the terror, corruption, and incompetence of what they saw.
I recently read Memoirs of a Revolutionary by another anarchist, Victor Serge, which also offers a view of despair from the early days of the revolution but Goldman's account is a much different sort of book. While Serge gives us one terrifying scene and anecdote after another, Goldman's memoir is more like a methodical collection of evidence. He was given amazing access to a large range of important political figures, early Soviet institutions, and different geographical areas, and in this work she gives voice to not only her many fellow anarchists trying to find a place in the revolution, but to a wide range of different characters. She is increasingly harsh in her criticism but always separates her final condemnation of the Communists with her evaluation of the many diverse characters who worked among them.
It does the job. There are lots of great anecdotes, the major periods are covered, and it is an easy, fun read that is written well. There is a habit, throughout, however, of treating Venice as an organic, living body, with a relatively undifferentiated populace (despite the recurring theme of shifts in power relations between doge, elites, etc.). Adjectives are attributed to the whole, and its history told in the style of a national history of the rise and fall of some great monumental creature. While Madden occasionally points out where one should be skeptical of popular tales, in other places, he doesn't see any trouble in describing events, speeches, and individual acts with a confident voice that we cannot possibly know with any certainty.
The aspect I found most frustrating however, is the book's habit of constantly acting as an apologist for Venice. We are constantly told how everyone has misunderstood poor Venice. Its surveillance institutions like the bucche were not oppressive, its justice system fair, its political institutions were really republican, its benevolent elites acted on behalf of the people, its plucky capitalists so progressive in comparison to those tired old landed elites in the rest of Italy, and so on. Madden writes with little reference or comparison with other republican experiments in the world (indeed sometimes you are left with the impression there were none). It is a story which would make the historical elites of Venice proud.
The period following the coming of Napoleon, naturally, is really a sad afternote. Now that the great lion has fallen, the rest of the book seems to merely go through the motions.
It is a horrifying book, written beautifully.
Of course, you say, it is the story of an SS officer who happens to find himself in all the most violent areas under German occupation, seeing and often participating in some of worst aspects of the holocaust. Of course it is horrifying. But that is not all, it is also a horrifying character who is morally repugnant most of the time, but then sympathetic just long enough for us to become repelled by our own sympathy for him. The work drifts seamlessly and thus frighteningly from intellectual journeys into contemporary debates over race and ethnicity, to the depths of the scatological, psychotic, and incestuous.
I am impressed with the research and I recognize relatively recent scholarship on the Third Reich in this work. It is not repetitive in showing off its knowledge, but the author seems to have enjoyed exploring the background of a whole range of issues from the war in this work of fiction. Only in a section towards the end does the author seem to realize that he has slipped too far from his story towards a sort of historian narrator. He sometimes has his character correct himself when he notices it.
Interesting, if relatively straightforward work on the history of malaria in Italy. Begins with debates over the origins of the disease, on the shortcomings of quinine as an all-in-one solution, the interconnection between the battle against malaria and social/gender/education history as well as the impact of war on fighting the disease. Chapter on fascism and malaria, with the holistic approach taken then. Follows with chapter on wartime biological warfare of Germans using malaria, and questions narrative of DDT as almost solely responsible for eliminating the disease in the early postwar. Ends with caution for current policy makers who attempt a single-solution approach (nets, for example) and emphasizes the success in history of an approach which combines social reforms with a range of other approaches.
Taruc was the former head of the Huk rebellion, both during WWII and as one of its key military leaders during its uprising in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Taruc gave himself up after being expelled from the party for his refusal to completely submit to party discipline, his willingness to consider peace terms to end the uprising, and if he is to be believed, its increasingly dogmatic Communism. Following his capture, he was denied the pardon he was promised by Pres. Magsaysay and was still languishing in prison while he wrote this work.
In some ways it is a classic anti-Communist text, written by a former Communist (at least formally, Taruc was a Socialist Party member before it merged with the Communists in 38) who decries Communist excesses and dogma from the perspective of someone who was at the very center of its leadership. He goes into considerable depth in describing the violence and atrocities of the Huks, especially in its last phase and also provides an interesting analysis of its final failures after it peaked around 1950.
However, Taruc was never the former true-believer who turned against the party, in the form of Koestler, for example. Taruc was somewhat religious, stubbornly undogmatic, and of a different form of pragmatism than that of the party. As a charismatic populist leader not well versed in Marxism, he was known to have frequently clashed with the party leadership long before he was expelled by it for his treasonous peace overtures. He was an agrarian reformist who believed deeply in the cause of Socialism with a nationalist character and, at least in this work, gives the impression of having remained closer to the military and economic realities of the flagging cause of the Huks in its last years.
This is a collection of Serge's writings from the time of the Russian revolution - long before he turned against Stalinism and was expelled from the Communist party. On almost every page you feel the discomfort of a former (libertarian) anarchist trying to come to terms with the “necessity” of terror and violence in the service of a revolution he believed would begin the final step towards the eradication of the state. His dream failed completely and his justifications are the universal ones of total civil war, but he is an interesting and unusual critical witness to a revolution he committed himself completely to.
I looked for a biography of Harrington after joining the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA is an unusual party on the socialist left since it balances its proud socialist tendencies with its anti-Communism, its political realism (it doesn't put forward its own candidates but works within the progressive wing of the Democratic party) and its strong partnership with the far stronger European socialist parties (the DSA is the US sister party in the Socialist International).
This book is very helpful in understanding how a party like the DSA came about. It traces the life of Harrington through the complicated history of socialist and Catholic progressive movements he was involved in through the mid-century and the conflicts of the 60s-80s between anti-Stalinist socialist parties and their new challengers among a New Left enamored with national liberation movements, whatever their totalitarian tendencies might be.
Isserman has a strong leftist background but doesn't pull any punches. His bio of Harrington contains plenty of material on Harrington's failures, the pathetic sectarian conflicts that destroyed so many of the movements he was a part of, and the failures of both the radicals and conservatives within the socialist and Democratic left of the United States.
The book is well written and researched but ends rather suddenly with Harrington's death, not taking the opportunity to reflect on his legacy or the developments of the DSA he founded in the years afterwards.
China Miéville loves to play with fantastic ideas and is one of the great writers of highly political sci-fi. His books are dotted with passages of pure genius. He seems to delight in practicing vocabulary words no one uses anymore which some of us find fun, though some will find it pretentious - like a little boy who has discovered a dictionary published a century ago.
In this case, he plays with ideas of language and the limits of communication when the traditional relationships between signs and their signified don't follow for an alien race. There are moments that this works and provokes thought, and there are other times where he doesn't follow through on how limited a world really would be if his radical propositions were followed consistently through to their impossible end.
It was an entertaining read, and always hope the next will live up to its potential.
Focuses in on a dozen or two American POWs taken in North Korea and follows them through their experiences in the camps, and the court martials that followed their return for crimes of collaboration with the enemy. Discusses the huge level of early mortality (over 40% died in first 6 months) followed by far fewer deaths and fewer cases of beatings and overt killings after the Chinese take over the camps and especially after the list of POWs turned over the UN forces.
Makes great use of transcripts but left me feeling uneasy about a number of things:
1) The anecdotes that he builds more than half the book on come from transcripts and records that he then shows to be deeply problematic when used in the context of court martial trials. How much can we believe? There needs to be a similar work which hopefully can find some other Chinese or Korean sources.
2) Would love to have seen even some slight discussion of the conditions of ROK prisoners in the North or of Chinese/DPRK soldiers in Koje (very brief mention of latter)
3) Because the book focuses almost entirely on some of the court martialled troops, there isn't much discussion of those who never came under suspicion for collaboration - instead this larger mass are merely referred to as a majority who mostly did similar things to those who were put on trial. I suspect the picture is more complex.
4) The transition from high-coercion, torture, beatings, killings, and completely inhumane conditions in the earliest stage to still problematic and underfed prisoners in camps after the first half year is really important - whenever Lech wants to emphasize the evil of the Chinese/Koreans he keeps referring back to this first stage - seeing the transition as one of strategy, rather than explained by availability of supplies, better organization, and correction of excesses. I think this is deeply unfair to the PRC/DPRK side which, though clearly guilty of atrocities I doubt are quite the monsters throughout that are described.
This book came as a disappointment. I read it immediately after completing an incredibly well written and balanced history of the 1948 war by the same author. By contrast, this work was far more of a polemic. It begins with a summary of new supporters of the one state solution, beginning with the famous essay by Tony Judt and following up with dismissive critiques of several other supporters.
What follows is an occasional summary of Israeli-Palestinian relations, with an emphasis on showing how horrifying the “one state” solution proposed by Palestinians is and how deceptive their calls for a secular single state are. He also portrays as completely marginal and radical the few figures on both the Israeli and Palestinian side who actually hope for an equal and democratic single state.
While I was willing to be persuaded by his more pragmatic arguments, I found myself increasingly revolting at his dismissiveness and myopic analyses that never addresses some of the core arguments in support of the single state (or binational as he calls it) proposals that have gained favor in recent years. The argument seemed to lose focus gradually, get more sloppy, and his final proposed solution: having Palestinian territories become part of Jordan etc. not as terribly helpful or realistic.
Although the exhaustive details of battles and minor skirmishes can get tiring, the chapters on the lead up to the conflict, the depth of coverage on atrocities on both sides (but especially on the Israeli side, which he argues were larger and more frequent primarily due to lack of opportunity of the other side to carry out similar massacres), and the long term consequences for even minor events was truly impressive.
Transitional Justice in Balance: Comparing Processes, Weighing Efficacy
Summarizes the findings of analysis done on a large “transnational justice database” testing various hypotheses often seen in the literature on transitional justice, including comparisons between general efficacy of trials, amnesties, lustrations and truth commissions (maximalist, minimalists, moderates, etc.) and concluding, with reservations in general favor of a combined holistic approach.
It also attempts to evaluate the importance and impact of economic factors (cost of holding trials etc.), transition factors, the backgrounds of leaders in the new regime, etc.
I'm generally skeptical of this kind of raw statistical analysis based on large data sets that categorize and generalize upon highly complex phenomena. There are significant risks of ignoring the judgment calls made in order to simplify these various processes down to data entries in a database. It is common in the social sciences these days and at odds with the approaches favored by many historians, for example. I don't think such work is completely without value, however, and found much of its discussion and its summary of a lot of existing research on the topic of interest.
A survey history of criminal justice from the late imperial period through the cultural revolution. With so much to cover, it is difficult for him to cover any single issue with much depth and it must have been extraordinarily challenging to decide what to focus on.
I was a bit surprised to see so much discussion on prisons and punishment, and relatively little on criminal law and legal proceedings even though these were often subordinated to the political exigencies of the GMD and CCP, I was really hoping to read more on in the work. The introduction suggests that the book will fill in a gap through providing the survey but I found that much of the discussion on prisons, policing, and punishment have been covered in other survey works by Dikötter and Dutton, among others.
Fantastic work which focuses much on the moral issues related to restorative or transitional justice: especially the question of the moral consequences of aiming primarily at extracting truth - in order to promote social reconciliation in transitional states, or alternatively focusing on retributive justice.
