Issue 266 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published September 2002 Copyright © Socialist Review
Books |
Review |
Six Days of War
Michael B Oren
Oxford University Press £25
The Arab governments referred to the Six Day War, with tragicomic understatement, as 'the setback'. In reality the conflict, in June 1967, was a shattering example of Israel's military superiority over its Arab neighbours which left it in illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
In stark contrast to Iraq, which became a pariah following its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Israel has suffered no UN bombing or sanctions as a consequence of its failure to implement resolutions demanding it return the territory it occupied in the war. Israel was allowed to freely develop weapons of mass destruction in the years which followed.
The 200 Israeli nuclear warheads currently deployed in the Negev desert are a legacy of the 1967 conflict. As Michael B Oren concedes in his Six Days of War, 'Israel's fear for the [nuclear] reactor [at Dimona]--rather than Egypt's of it--was the greatest catalyst for war.'
To describe Oren's acknowledgement of Israeli responsibility for the start of the war as a concession is to question his claims to academic objectivity. His book is unarguably the most thorough account of the conflict. Nevertheless, his claim to have set aside his own political prejudices should not be taken at face value.
The author is currently a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem, and has served time both as a member of the government of the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and as an adviser to the Israeli delegation to the UN. In the early chapters of the book, in which he explores the origins of the war, the words 'Zionists' and 'Jews' become all but interchangeable. The cross-border battles of the 1950s are put down to Arab 'terrorism' on the one hand and Israeli 'activism' on the other.
Oren makes numerous references to the manipulation of the masses in the 'Arab street' by their political leadership, never once asking himself if those leaders, including the militarily reluctant Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, would have been compelled into conflict with Israel by the immense sympathy for the Palestinians among their people.
Nevertheless, the book's fast-paced, thriller-style narration of the events puts meat on the bones of the established knowledge that Nasser found himself involved in a war for which he knew Egypt was unprepared. Syria, whose unity pact with Egypt had broken down six years earlier, had already suffered numerous defeats in skirmishes with the Israeli Air Force, and it was Israel's air power (made up almost entirely of French and US hardware) which proved decisive. By the end of day one, 5 June, 90 percent of Egypt's fighter aircraft had been obliterated without even leaving the ground.
Israel sent full details, including maps, to its allies in Washington. In a premonition of comments by US pilots returning from raids over Baghdad 24 years later, US Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow sent a note to President Johnson celebrating 'the first day's turkey shoot'. The war was effectively over hours after it had begun. In the end, 25 Arab soldiers died for every Israeli combatant killed, with, perhaps, the greatest symbol of Israel's military superiority being the flight of 95,000 Syrian civilians from the Golan Heights amid rumours that the Israelis were attacking with nuclear weapons.
For the founders of Israel, the Six Day War was unfinished business, creating living room for an expanded Zionist state. Notice had been served on the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees that the Arab leaders lacked the wherewithal, militarily or politically, to overturn their dispossession.
From there the conflicts of the following 35 years were all but inevitable. If one seeks an explanation for Israel's illegal settlement building, two mass Palestinian uprisings, despairing suicide attacks in Israeli towns or Ariel Sharon's emasculation of the Palestinian bantustan brokered at Oslo, it is there in the conquest of 1967. If one seeks the key facts of that war, jaundiced though they are by the author's Zionism, they are there in Oren's book.
Mark Brown
The Pig and the Skyscraper
Marco d'Eramo
Verso £20
First published (in Italian) in 1999, two years before four hijacked planes shattered American illusions of invulnerability and changed our world, this book explores capitalism in the US--the land where it stands exposed in 'all its naked force'. The author, an Italian journalist and writer, uses Chicago as a prism through which to track, analyse and comment on the history of US capitalism in all its complexity.
Chicago, argues the author, lies at the epicentre of America's supersonic, 'red in tooth and claw' capitalist development. In the 19th century the city came roaring into existence in just 30 years. Built on the grain trade, railroads, lumber and mass animal slaughter, it forced forward the frontiers of production for profit, achieving in its early 20th century stockyards the 'acme of centralisation and capitalist-style rationalisation' (not a scrap of pig or cow was wasted). This city not only invented futures trading but also began 'buying and selling the future before it existed'. Aided by a trolley car system whose growth was more rapid than in any other US city, Chicago's better placed residents moved out to the suburbs, seeking the quintessential US capitalist ideal: the single family dwelling, set among lawns and trees, yet never too far from urban amenities.
In Chicago's centre, skyscrapers soared upwards, 'costly monuments to the overinflated egos of their patrons'. Into its maelstrom of industrial turmoil poured wave upon wave of immigrant labour: the Irish, the Germans, the Poles, later great inflows of blacks from the post Civil War south, fuelled by hope while frequently deployed as scab labour in the Chicago bosses' savage all-out war on the unions. For this city, too, was the crucible of the US labour movement--the place where the battle for the eight-hour working day was waged with spectacular bloodshed in the 1880s, where the Haymarket massacre of 4 May 1886 became the impulse for establishing May Day as a holiday for workers around the globe.
The challenge before the author lies not only in capturing the dense texture of this story but also in relating it to his central theme: Chicago as a metaphor for US capitalism, as an unrivalled distillation of a larger experience, as a window on the future.
The book is structured on the deliberate use of contrast and variety: descriptive passages that carry the reader into the physical reality of the city are juxtaposed with philosophical musings, economic analysis yields to explorations of music or architecture. At times this style can distract from the overall purpose. But just when you think all might be unravelling, d'Eramo gives a tug and pulls the threads taut to his central theme. In his introduction to the book, the Marxist political ecologist Mike Davis salutes the ambition and audacity of this attempt to 'grasp the whole in world historical perspective'.
Occasionally, the author appears to overreach his material to draw premature conclusions. An example is his statement that 'the union movement in Europe appears to be in its death throes', a view challenged by 2002's experience of ascendant union militancy and mass strikes across the continent. Overall, however, this kaleidoscope of a book is strongly recommended. For anyone concerned to gain a full-frontal view of 'capitalism without a G-string', this is compelling reading.
Susan Ram
The Edge
Alan Gibbons
Orion Books £4.99
Children's books are making the headlines. This isn't new, as any book that deals with sex, drugs or rock and roll is worth a scream from the Daily Mail. What seems to be new is that some children's books are being read by adults. Philip Pullman, author of the Dark Materials trilogy, won an adult prize, the Whitbread Award, and the Harry Potter books are published with more serious 'adult' covers. Meanwhile Terry Pratchett has always written books that have been read by anyone over the age of eight. It's interesting that Pullman, Rowling and Pratchett (and we can throw Tolkien in here too) all write fantasy. It seems, for the moment, as if this is the only kind of literature that will be read by child and adult. Social and historical realism, the two kinds of children's book that have dominated the booklists for the last 20 years, tends to stay firmly fixed to specific age groups.
Alan Gibbons, long time member of the NUT and the SWP, a regular speaker at Marxism, has produced a raft of novels for children. They mostly focus on the lives of the working class children and teenagers he knows from his native Liverpool, though in Street of Tall People he looked at London kids caught up in the Cable Street march of 1936. In Which Side Are You On? he time-travelled to slavery times. His style is direct, the stories move quickly on and they frequently hit moments in which the protagonists have to make what we might call personal socio-political choices. There are very few novelists for children who try to do this: we might include Robert Cormier, Robert Swindells, Beverley Naidoo and Benjamin Zephaniah.
In The Edge Danny and his mother, Cathy, are running away from her boyfriend Chris. He has been violent with both of them and so they run to Cathy's old home on an estate north of London nicknamed the 'Edge'. Cathy's mother and father (Joan and Harry) have a very different attitude to their daughter and grandson coming home. Cathy, Joan and Harry are all white, but Danny is the result of Cathy's affair with Des, who is black. Harry is a racist and brought about the breakup of Cathy's relationship with Des and it's why she's been away in London for 15 years.
The Edge is a nearly all white estate and on it live a gang of white racists who we come to learn almost certainly burnt out the local mini-market, owned by Asians. They don't like 'half-caste' Danny turning up and they like it even less when he strikes up a relationship with Nikki, a white girl who once went out with the gang leader.
The focal point of the book is Danny but, through a series of mini-chapters within the main chapters, we get to see what everyone in the story is thinking as the drama unfolds. Review readers will be familiar with Gibbons's agenda--there are soft racists who can be reminded that we are all human beings, and there are hardline racists and fascists who have to be confronted where they live--otherwise they end up dominating the neighbourhood. Even so, soft racism has the power of 'lighting the match' for the racists' fire.
The way this is dramatised is through the character of Harry, the grandfather, who has to make up his mind whether Danny is a human being or not. Under attack from the racist gang next door, he takes up arms (well, a baseball bat, actually) against them. All this is tense enough, but we also have the other story of the violent ex-lover, Chris, bubbling along through the book. He's a psychopath who thinks that his brutal domination of Cathy is love and so he spends the whole book working out how he can track her down. Meanwhile, Danny's father, Des, is still around and is wondering if he can or should make contact with Danny and Cathy.
The three stories--the racist punch-up between Danny and the gang, Des's reunion with Danny and Chris's arrival on the scene--all happen at the same time. The result is a good few pages of punching and whacking. I was reminded of the ends of James Cagney movies, where outsider, bad guy Cagney makes sure that justice prevails from his fisticuffs. Though this is conventional enough in movies, it's almost completely missing from children's literature, which from the 1960s onwards has been dominated by a dislike of all violence and war.
Another break with convention is to be found in the character of Chris. Just as Macbeth comes over as rather fascinating, Chris, sustained throughout the book by his scheming monologues (addressed to himself), is similarly lurid. We, as adults, might say that he's a classic case of society's violence turned in on itself, coming out as repressed and denied violence on women and children. There's a bit of a mismatch in the book between the racist violence that works its way through in the social/personal politics of Danny and Harry, and the sexual violence of Chris that ends up being quite literally brushed to one side with him being banged up in prison.
As always, Alan has taken on the kind of issue that is not only going on on our doorsteps but is also one that is rarely tackled by writers for children. He avoids moralising and hectoring his readers, going instead for strong uncomplicated identification with his leading character. Danny is no postmodern ambiguous hero. In that sense, the book is a marriage between an old style of writing and a most modern theme. It's an excellent, challenging, rough-tough read for anyone over about eight years old.
Michael Rosen
The Moro Affair
Leonardo Sciascia
Granta £7.99
Leonardo Sciascia was one of Italy's greatest modern artists. He was also a member of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry set up in March 1978 to investigate the kidnapping and subsequent killing by the Red Brigades of the former prime minister and president of the ruling Christian Democratic Party, Aldo Moro. He produced a report that raised questions that the Italian state did not want asked. This book contains his report and also his analysis of the Moro affair. Sciascia uses all his skill as a novelist to produce a powerful indictment of the Italian state and of the Christian Democrats in particular. They effectively signed Moro's death warrant.
Moro himself was a crucial fixer in the faction-ridden Christian Democrats who had run Italy since the war. Moro was kidnapped, and his escort killed, as he left his flat in central Rome to 'consecrate' a new government which would have the external support of the Communist Party. The Communists would not join the government, but would be consulted, and in exchange vote in its support.
The Italian Communist Party was the biggest of the Western Communist Parties and by 1978, having considerably loosened its ties to Moscow, was well down the road towards becoming another social democratic party. Yet even this limited involvement of the Communists in the governance of Italy created consternation among the secret services, the right wing of the Christian Democrats and in Washington.
Sciascia notes that after years of self advancement and corruption the leaders of the Christian Democracts were suddenly affected by 'state idolatry' when Moro began asking if there could be an exchange of prisoners or some other concessions which might save his life. His key rival in the party, Andreotti, ruled out any concessions, arguing that they would harm the Italian state. In this he was backed by the Communist Party and the Vatican.
Sciascia quotes a former Socialist leader as saying, 'The Italian state is strong with the weak and weak with the strong.' His friends and enemies alike now rushed to declare that 'the Moro who speaks from the "People's Prison" is not the Moro we knew'. When his letters got too embarrassing they suppressed them.
The minority report reproduced here is a powerful indictment of the Italian state. Moro's police escort believed they had been tailed and had repeatedly requested an armour-plated high speed car to no avail. The kidnapping was carried out in an area that would normally be bristling with police. Afterwards the police mounted a huge operation the length and breadth of the country but, as one senior officer admitted, it was 'for show'. Mass arrests were made of leftists including Communist Party members who backed the 'war on terrorism'. All were released. The police did get to the door of a crucial Red Brigades hideout but did not enter (unlike virtually everywhere else) because the neighbours assured them that the absent occupants were 'decent people'.
Despite the huge numbers of police on the streets the Red Brigades were able to dump the kidnap car in the centre of Rome, issue numerous statements and deliver Moro's letters to high profile figures and newspapers. One key suspect was picked up (no attempt was made to trail him) and then released. The phone call to a close friend of Moro announcing his execution was made from Rome's main train station, where there is a police station, and lasted three minutes, but there was no attempt to trace it.
Sciascia concludes that 'Moro had been condemned to death--by the Red Brigades directly and indirectly by the Christian Democratic Party'.
All of this may sound very Machiavellian, but conspiracy theories are not so out of place in Italy. The killing of Moro was a crucial event in the unleashing of a war against terrorism that had the full backing of the Communists and the unions. A powerful, insurgent movement had engulfed Italy in the years after 1969. By 1978 it was in decline. The war on terrorism was used to isolate the left and individual militants and would allow the employers to go on the offensive after Moro' s killing.
Chris Bambery
Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States
Ed: Renato Gonzáles Mello and Diane Miliotes
WW Norton £40.00
|
| Modern migration of the Spirit by Orozco |
The Mexican Revolution, whatever else may be said about it, succeeded in producing an astonishingly rich visual art. This was the political mural, a unique form of expression, particular to the time and place of the Mexican Revolution. The three most famous and successful practitioners of this art form were Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco. This book deals with the last of the three, and as such is very welcome, as Orozco is probably the least well known of the three outside of Mexico, although this book is chiefly concerned with his work in the United States between 1927 and 1934.
Orozco's express reason for emigrating to the US was the lack of decent commissions at home. This book is a collection of essays on his work in the US written by a group of American academics, and is basically an exhibition catalogue. Sadly, as far as I could tell, the exhibition is not coming to Britain. The book has some fascinating accounts of his life and work in the north, but overall seems to lack a coherent critique. Perhaps this is inevitable with such compilations and, given that most of the work that Orozco undertook in the US was on university campuses, maybe academics are exactly the people to talk on the subject, though Orozco's mural depicting 'dead learning' certainly shows no outstanding respect for academia.
The book is full of beautifully reproduced prints of his work, both in Mexico and in the US, and like his contemporary Diego Rivera it is full of mischievous 'anti-imperialist' digs at his hosts, the North Americans. Orozco's work differs from Rivera's both in style, being much more expressively painted, and in its ideological slant. Whereas Rivera tried to paint the Mexican Revolution in Communist colours, to paraphrase Lenin, Orozco's work is full of bitter irony which does not spare the failings of Mexican society any more than he spared the Americans. Orozco was often regarded as a caricaturist, which he hated. Nevertheless his work is not a million miles away from a certain type of political cartoon, and at any rate he was an admirer of the US tradition of cartooning.
The book is unfortunately not cheap, but there aren't many opportunities to see his work in this country. Of course, however beautiful the reproductions are, they can't come close to the impact of the originals, if for no other reason than the scale of the murals, which was a defining characteristic of these giant public pieces of art.
Tim Sanders
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
Ed: Nathalie Babel
Picador £30.00
As one of the greatest writers of the early Soviet period in Russia, the first single volume edition of the works of Isaac Babel is an event. In the epoch of war and revolution Babel is an author of the first rank.
Born in the busy Russian port of Odessa on the Black Sea in 1894, Babel grew up in a shtetl, a Jewish village. The son of a small businessman of mixed fortunes, he grew up amid cultural riches and material poverty, assailed by racism from all sides.
He was pushed hard to succeed in school. But rebelling against violin lessons and the life of a scholar, he travelled to Petersburg where, in the midst of the turmoil of the First World War, he met the leading left writer of the time, Maxim Gorky, who encouraged him to write. Gorky was impressed by his sharp, realist style but told him he needed to find out more about life. This he did by signing up as a war correspondent in the bloody and ill-fated campaign against Poland which, encouraged by the western powers, had declared war on the exhausted Soviet Republic in the summer of 1920. For months the Jew Babel lived and wrote among brutalised Jew-hating Cossack fighters.
On his return Babel wrote a series of stories about characters like the gangster Benya Krik, all from the Jewish quarter of Odessa, the Moldavanka, 'crowded with suckling babies, drying rags and conjugal nights filled with big-city chic and soldierly tirelessness'. A couple of years later he published Red Cavalry. This collection of 30 short semi-autobiographical pieces, written in an uncompromising modernist style, is unflinching in its depiction of the horrors as well as the heroism of the Polish war. The book was an immediate success and established Babel's reputation. There was, however, sharp criticism from Budyonny, the legendary commander of the Red cavalry, and other senior figures, angered at the thinly veiled portraits of themselves.
Now seen as an important writer, Babel embarked on a number of projects including plays and film scripts. But his output was small and diminishing. As the Stalin dictatorship tightened, at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers he called himself 'a great master of the genre [of literary silence]'. Such implied criticism of the regime, together with the powerful enemies he had made with Red Cavalry, effectively guaranteed his arrest in May 1939. He was shot in the Lubyanka prison in early 1940.
This collection covers it all. It isn't the complete works but as much as has survived Stalin and his secret police--the Odessa stories, Red Cavalry, his astonishing war diary of the 1920 campaign, tales from Moscow, the Caucasus, and elsewhere, plays and film scripts. Here is Russia on the eve of the First World War, the Civil War, the strangled revolution in Moscow under Stalin, the Ukraine in the early stages of collectivisation.
Babel's stories, typically half a dozen pages or less, written without any attempt to show continuity, have an honesty and a vivid sharpness that is unparalleled. His style, so hard to describe, tends to be terse, almost cryptic. Babel goes everywhere, sees a great deal and relates it without flinching: the deaths, the rapes, the brutality of every kind. Sharply critical of everything he observes, he supports Soviet power without illusions.
Babel is perhaps unique in his incorruptibility, his directness. His work has an enduring quality. It remains a mirror of our times, both city and rural life, sweat, horses, alcohol, race, sex, death, violence, laughter. To face the horrors of Russia before, during and after its revolutions, horrors so close to those of our own times, there is no better place to go.
Geoff Brown
What is History Now?
Ed: David Cannadine
Macmillan £19.99
This collection was supposed to celebrate the 40th anniversary of EH Carr's seminal work What is History? Carr was a fascinating character--a Foreign Office diplomat who became a Marxist, a columnist on the Times who wrote history, a friend of Trotsky's biographer Isaac Deutscher, and a rebel in his way.
EH Carr's superb book defended certain basic ideas about writing history. He argued that long term social processes have often constrained the role of the individual. Carr suggested that Europe was not the only continent whose past was worth studying. He believed that the academic pursuit of history could connect to the interests of working class people.
The authors acknowledge the challenge of Carr's idea early on: 'Revolutions and revolutionaries, rioters and rebels, labour movements, strikes and protests, radicals and recalcitrants, fighting the encrusted orthodoxies and oppressive authoritarianism of their day, were exciting figures to rediscover and identify with in the heady atmosphere of the 1960s.' Yet having acknowledged his exuberance once they then ignore him. This is not a book about Carr.
The editors of this collection claim to 'celebrate' Carr's work by burying everything that he stood for. They have chosen the people who are at the head of the profession to write this book and asked them to explain Carr's work to a new generation. This they have done by neglecting Carr, and by boring us instead with their own hobbies.
The argument of the book is that the left is dead, and social history with it: 'Post-industrial society falsified the assumptions of Marxism.' The future belongs instead to two right wing ways of writing about the past. The first is political or diplomatic history, a 'science' that has not developed in 100 years or more.
The second is cultural history, but cultural history of a particular sort--the study of trivial processes, crankish obsessions. This is the politics of the antiques collector expressed on the historical terrain. We can see therefore why it coexists so easily with an older Tory conception of the past.
David Cannadine is the head of the Institute for Historical Research in London. His introduction is as boring and pompous as the worst after dinner speech by a Tory MP. Susan Penderson writes as if Britain's greatest historian was Maurice Cowling, a nonentity whose previous claim to fame was that he combined a day job as a history lecturer at Cambridge with evening work for the security state. He was also Michael Portillo's tutor.
Annabel Brett argues for a conception of history in which all is 'language'. Linda Colley is chiefly famous for her work on the construction of a British identity. In this book she is used to argue for the importance of imperial history. But in her hands such history seems peculiarly blanched. She speaks about the 'connexity' of peoples under imperialism--as if there was some link tying together the lives of the American bombers and the people they are preparing to kill in Iraq.
This collection is the product of dull historians without the interest in the living struggles which breathe through Carr's book. The worst thing of all is to think that this book will be forced down the throats of history students, who will be told that it represents a consensus in the field. Such a seeming consensus has been achieved by stripping out the work of the labour, socialist and social historians, the socialist feminists, the advocates of black or African history. The historical left is not mentioned in this book. Nor are the members of our own tradition.
Again and again the authors return to their central argument--trade unions are a thing of the past, all forms of protest are invisible, socialism is dead. The future belongs to the bourgeoisie. Therefore new histories must be written which support the endless victory of the rich.
Yet history is a curious thing. It has a habit of unsettling all orthodoxies. If these really are the brightest and best servants of the bourgeoisie, then they are a very unimpressive bunch. Maybe we don't have so much to fear after all.
Dave Renton
Private Planet
David Cromwell
Jon Carpenter Publishing £12.99
This book is full of shocking figures. According to the United Nations the gap between the richest fifth of the world's population and the poorest grew from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1997. Three fifths of the population in developing countries--that's almost 3 billion people--lack basic sanitation. In Mozambique, the IMF-imposed measures mean that patients at Maputo Central Hospital have to pay $4 to see a doctor--this is the equivalent of the average person in Britain paying £160. Facts like this are the best response to Tony Blair when he tells us that Africa needs more trade liberalisation.
One of the book's strengths is that it shows that 'free trade' is in fact far from free--it is actually 'forced trade' in which governments pour funds into, and throw their political weight behind, major industries which destroy communities and the planet while enriching those who inhabit the boardrooms. One such government-backed concern, the fossil fuel industry, is one of the world's chief environmental criminals. Cromwell shows how, behind their new mask of environmental responsibility ('green' logos and some half-hearted research into renewable energy) the 'carbon club' of companies such as BP, Shell and Texaco have gone to great lengths to try to discredit scientific studies which have shown the threat of environmental destruction posed by continual reliance on fossil fuels. Other chapters focus on how corporate agriculture is destroying the countryside and producing an ever increasing number of food safety scandals, and how the mainstream media squeezes out oppositional voices and reinforces the notion that the system can't be taken on.
Cromwell favours an approach which combines stronger international regulatory frameworks for business, along with a move towards 'localisation'--the development of greater self sufficiency among local communities which would lessen the need for environmentally and socially destructive global trade. Both of these options are only really sketched out. It is never explained exactly how political and economic power might be transferred from the multinationals to local communities. And for international regulation, Cromwell ends up looking to bodies such as the European Union. This is particularly frustrating as he shows very well how EU policy is itself driven by corporate lobby groups such as the European Round Table of Industrialists.
In the end, the fightback against globalisation is in danger of being reduced to a call for greater 'political will' from policy makers. This is a shame because Cromwell's conclusions don't match up to the problems that he outlines.
Andy Jones