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Books read in July

Published on August 1, 2008

It’s August 1st, so time for a new list of books read. Lots of history at the start of the month, as I had just bought a pile of them in June. Also a lot of Sayers novels, as I’m in the process of rereading them in order. Little in the way of science fiction this time, as I just haven’t been in the mood
for it.

Europe: Privilege and Protest 1730-1789 — Olwen Hufton
A look at European history in the decades before the French revolution would decisively end the world of the Ancien Regime, showing how interlocking systems of privilege ruled this world, both priviledges enjoyed by the leite, but also by more humbler folk. A much more modern history of the same period as covered by Europe of the Ancien Regime 1715-1783 I read at the end of June.

The World Turned Upside Down — Christopher Hill
During the English civil war of parliament against king, there were people who wanted to go much further than parliament was willing to go, to revolutionise class relations in England. Diggers, Levelers and others for a few precious years created a glimpse of a more just, more equal society, a “World Turned Upside Down”.

Europe Between Revolutions 1815-1848 — Jacques Droz
After the French revolution had been finally repressed in 1815, a deliberate attempt was made to restore the stability of the Ancien Regime as well as the authority of the old ruling classes. Jacques Droz is excellent in making clear the stresses and contradictions between the ideal and reality that would ultimately lead to the failure of this.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club — Dorothy L. Sayers
The fourth Wimsey novel, again a novel in which the detective story is used as a lens through which to look at contemporary British society. In this case it’s the impact the First World War had on the lives of an entire generation of veterans, coming to terms with their experiences as well as their difficulties adjusting to civilian life.

The Structures of Everyday Life — Fernand Braudel
The first installment in Braudel’s three part examination of the roots of capitalism, it’s a much easier read than his earlier books on the Mediterranean I read a few years ago. This part examines how ordinary people lived, how they interacted with the wider economy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, when our current capitalist societies were being formed.

Strong Poison — Dorothy L. Sayers
The novel that introduces Harriet Vane to the Lord Peter Wimsey series and Wimsey falls in love with her immediately. Some may think her somewhat of a Mary Sue, and there certainly may be hints of Mary Sueness here, but in the end she’s strong enough to be more than that. In the context of reading the entire Wimsey series in order, it’s clear this is a hinge point for it, where you can see the mood of the series shift.

Five Red Herrings — Dorothy L. Sayers
Reading this for the first time I liked it, but was still unfamiliar enough with Sayers to realise how much this not just a traditional detective novel of a kind Sayers never attempts anywhere else, but a critique of them. It’s quite jarring in tone with the rest of the series, not fitting in with either the pre or the post-Strong Poison novels. In fact, it reads like Sayers meant it as an example of how not to write a detective novel, with all its fuzzing about train tables and such.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City — Rajiv Chandrasekaran
A good but limited critique of the United States occupation of Iraq, which concentrates on the blunders made by the CPA, but which doesn’t question the fundamental right of America to actually be in the country.

New Skies — Patrick Nielsen Hayden (editor)
A collection of science fiction stories from the past two decades, aimed at younger readers new to science fiction. Some duds, but on the whole it does give a good oversight of what you can expect from the genre.

Last van de Oorlog — Stef Scaliola
A history thesis turned into a book, this looks at the ways in which the debate about the wars fought by the Netherlands to hold on to Indonesia in 1946-1949, in particular the warcrimes committed during it and how these have been covered up or revealed. Scaliola looks at the roles journalists, historians, politicians and the veterans themselves played in this process of remembrance.

Britain’s Gulag — Caroline Elkins
Incredibly depressing, this is the history of Britain’s attempt to quash the Kenyan struggle for independence, largely by emulating the way the nazis behaved in Poland. Pogroms, a massive concentration camp system in which almost the neitre Kikuyu population of Kenya was held as slave labour, roaming death squads and institutionalised torture of the worst kind were all part of this attempt to crush the Mau Mau rebellion and make the Kikuyu into obedient, loyal subjects of the white settler population. All this seven years after World War 2.

Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side — Clive Stafford Smith
Clive Stafford Smith is one of the volunteer lawyers respresenting the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. This is his personally informed account of America’s Gulag Archipelo and its absurdities. Remarkable funny in places.

Still no justice for Jean

Published on July 30, 2008

It’s been three years since Jean Charles de Menezes was brutally murdered by the Metropolitian Police and still nobody has been punished for it. Commissioner “sir” Ian Blair is still in power, Cressida Dick, the officer in charge of the operation that murdered de Menezes was actually promoted and we still don’t know the names of the police agents that actually shot him. Sure, the Metropolitian Police as a whole was found guilty of his murder last year and had to pay some insultingly low fine for it, but as I noted then we still didn’t know the exact details of what lead to Jean’s murder. One year on, and a new report says we still don’t know:

It finds officers involved are yet to be fully debriefed about the events and says legal constraints, due to the inquest to be held in September, may be partly to blame. But it lambasts senior officers it interviewed for accepting the lack of a full explanation from those under their command.

“We were presented with a paradox during our evidence sessions: on the one hand a recognition that undertaking a comprehensive debrief is important and that lessons need to be learnt, and on the other hand a complacent acceptance that, in this case, it has not happened and is unlikely to in the future.

“The scrutiny panel also wishes to emphasise that it is our perception that the MPS has a cultural predisposition to adopt an overly defensive stance when asked to explain how it is responding to criticism and challenge. It is our view that the MPS needs to counter this tendency energetically.”

After the shooting, firearms officers wrote their accounts together, and presented their notes 36 hours after the shooting. The IPCC contrasted this with civilian witnesses who gave their accounts straight away and without consulting other witnesses. The MPA says officers did nothing wrong, but: “The practice of conferring … is open to misinterpretation.”

Thirtysix hours to get their statements straight? That’s not open to misinterpretation, that’s the police protecting its own. It will be interesting to see how that tendency plays out now Ian Blair has been accused of something even the dullest law ‘n order, trust-the-police freak will admit is a crime. It’s telling of the priorities of British politics if “improper financial dealings” were what finally got Blair sacked instead of the murder of an innocent man.

Let them eat mud cake

Published on July 29, 2008

I’m sure I’ve read about this recently in another context, but in Haiti mud cakes have become a staple diet of the poor:

At first sight the business resembles a thriving pottery. In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun.

The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products are uneven. But customers do not object. This is Cité Soleil, Haiti’s most notorious slum, and these platters are not to hold food. They are food.

Brittle and gritty – and as revolting as they sound – these are “mud cakes”. For years they have been consumed by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a risky and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire families.

It is not for the taste and nutrition – smidgins of salt and margarine do not disguise what is essentially dirt, and the Guardian can testify that the aftertaste lingers – but because they are the cheapest and increasingly only way to fill bellies.

“It stops the hunger,” said Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal. “You eat them when you have to.”

These days many people have to. The global food and fuel crisis has hit Haiti harder than perhaps any other country, pushing a population mired in extreme poverty towards starvation and revolt. Hunger burns are called “swallowing Clorox”, a brand of bleach.

I’ve been reading a fair few history books this year and I remember reading about this exact same practise, perhaps in Braudel’s The Structures of Everyday Life, but this was in the context of a pre-industrial, agricultural society still tightly bound to the vagracies of nature. It’s impressive how modern capitalism has enabled us to repeat the experiences of the most primitive of societies. Because while The Guardian article might give you the impression that all this is just the unfortunate result of the rise in food and fuel prices worldwide, much of the Haitian crisis is actually due to years and decades of capitalist profitering by the richest 1 percent of Haiti’s population, as they systematically dismantled most of Haiti’s domestic food production in order to have a monopoly on food imports, as explained back in May on Prog Gold.

And of course it has not been just domestic profiteers who’ve caused the crisis. Haiti started its existence as one of France’s most profitable slave colonies, succesfully rebelled against them in 1803 after a long and brutal war, but had to pay its former masters 150 million francs as compensation. Since then it has been a semi-colony of the United States, with American companies working hand in glove with the succession of dictators and their cronies to exploit its natural wealth and people. In recent decades IMF restructuring programmes have worsened the situation even further, by privatising and hence destroying the state sector, opening up the country to the free market and tying its government to strict spending controls. But the democratically elected Aristide government refused to privatise public utilities and actually increased the tacx burden on the wealthiest, which meant that sooner or later it would have to go. Under Clinton Haiti was put under pressure to chose the right government by slashing development aid to the country, under Bush the solution was more simple: a UN sponsored invasion and occupation. See Peter Hallward’s excellent article in The New Left Review for more information.

Haiti is the best example, because it’s the most blatant example, of how capitalism causes starvation and mass deprivation around the globe, usually hidden from view because it’s built into the system, with no clear bad guy to put the blame on. Blood and Treasure, comparing Haiti to China during the Great Leap Forward, put it best:

Slash and burn in the GLF was down to the rural industrialization programme. Hillsides were denuded by people creating charcoal for backyard furnaces, when they should have been, say, growing food. That policy could be traced neatly and accurately back to Mao. Distributed authorship of mass starvation has always been a structural political advantage of capitalism. Who, specifically, was responsible for the Irish or Bengal famines? And how about the IMF? Did it really just “applaud” or did it have a bit less of a spectator’s role in helping destroy Haitian farming?

Imperial Life in the Emerald City — Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Published on July 27, 2008Leave a comment

Cover of Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
365 pages including index
published in 2006

The Emerald City was what its inhabitants called the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2003-2004: a pleasant bubble of transplanted America, cut off from the everyday reality of Iraq, the ultimate ivory tower where the Coalition Provisional Authority that was in power in that year made its plans for the future of Iraq, unhindered by much knowledge of the world outside their bubble. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an eyewitness account of that first year of the American occupation of Iraq, as seen from inside the bubble. It’s a story of how wide eyed innocents and well intentioned ideologues came to Iraq to remake the country into a model of Jeffersonian freemarket democracy, with little more to recommend them for the job than their personal loyalty to Bush and the Republican party and how they were cruelly disappointed by the reality of post-war Iraq and its missed opportunities.

In short, this is a whitewash, though perhaps not a conscious whitewash. It’s true the New York Times quote on the back calls this a “A visceral –sometimes sickening– picture of how the administration and the handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq” and that every other page or so has you slapping your face at yet another incredibly obvious stupidity, but in the end it’s still a whitewash. The clue is in that word bungled. As if the Bush administration and their lackeys in Iraq started the war and subsequent occupation with the best of intentions, but lacked the competence to fulfill them, or took the wrong decisions for Iraq not to further their own ends, but because they were a bit naive about the realities of the country. The book is steeped in the assumption that, while the people in charge may have made the wrong decisions, they had every right to attempt to make those decisions. It’s like reading a book on British rule in India that only tells of the problems the British had in establishing their rule and in the day to day running of their empire, without ever questioning the presence of
the British there.

Bad Monkeys — Matt Ruff

Published on July 25, 2008Leave a comment

Bad Monkeys — Matt Ruff

Cover of Bad Monkeys

Bad Monkeys
Matt Ruff
230 pages
published in 2007

When your local library’s automated lending system refuses to recognise a book you’re attempting to borrow when it’s clearly there in front of you, it’s enough to make you a little bit paranoid, but when that book is Bad Monkeys, an example of American Paranoia at its finest, with a Christopher Moore quote on the cover saying “Buy it, read it, memorise then destroy it. There are eyes everywhere.“, you become more than a bit paranoid. Little did I know then how appropriate that little incident was. Bad Monkeys is one of those books that makes you look twice at every CCTV camera on your daily commute, not to mention much more innocent examples of street furniture for signs of hidden cameras.

You might know Matt Ruff from Sewer, Gas & Electric, his brilliant and hilarious parody-slash-update-slash-mixup of the stoner paranoia classic Illuminantus! trilogy, not to mention that bible of teenage libertarianism, Atlas Shrugged. If that novel showed Ruff’s absurdistic, bombastic side, Bad Monkeys is toned down, sleek and effortlessly cool. It still taps into that vein of essential American paranoia that also drove Sewer, Gas & Electric, but this time it’s more refined, less consciously wacky.