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CONTENTS: Book
Excerpt: By Fred Jerome Albert Einstein, whose theories of relativity transformed modern science—and perhaps the world—was also a passionate pacifist who was honorary Chair of the War Resisters League in the early 1930s. Following are two excerpts from Fred Jerome’s forthcoming book that looks at the FBI’s view of this 20th-century giant: part of a 1932 memo to the FBI, and Jerome’s account of Einstein’s friendship with two African-American leftists.
For nearly a quarter century, from Einstein’s arrival in the United States in 1933 until his death in 1955, Hoover’s FBI, in cooperation with six other federal agencies, conducted an investigation into Einstein’s political ideas and activities, collecting more than 1,850 pages of “derogatory information” in a campaign to undermine his credibility and influence. (The file contains nothing at all about Einstein’s science.) The FBI’s most intensive anti-Einstein effort came between 1950 and 1955 at the height of this country’s Red-scare hysteria. The Feb. 23 dinner for [African-American activist and scholar W.E.B.] DuBois was more than a birthday party: Two weeks earlier, he and four other officials of the Peace Information Center had been indicted by a federal grand jury for failure to register with the Justice Department as Soviet agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. While Einstein’s sponsorship of the dinner/protest for DuBois was recorded in the FBI’s catalog of “derogatory information,” the scientist committed another act Hoover would have considered even more un-American had he known about it: Einstein offered to testify at DuBois’ trial. The DuBois case was dismissed nine months later, before it came to trial, but images of this internationally venerated Black scholar, at 83, in handcuffs at his court hearing, became—along with the denial of a passport to Paul Robeson—a focal point for anti-American protests around the world. Indeed, more noteworthy than Einstein’s affiliation with any particular civil rights group was his solidarity with these two outstanding figures in the face of the double-barreled assault against them for having the audacity to be both Black and red. Yet hens have more teeth than Einstein’s biographies have references to his friendship with Paul Robeson. Also absent is any reference to W.E.B. DuBois. Fred Jerome is a New York City-based journalist and journalism teacher. These excerpts from The Einstein File are published with permission of the author. Knowing the ‘Enemy’ Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives by Cynthia Enloe University of California Press, 2000; 418 pp.; paperback, $17.95 By Gwyn Kirk For
more than 20 years Cynthia Enloe, a feminist scholar and Professor
of Government at Clark University in Worcester, MA, has been researching and writing
about “the complicated militarized experiences of women.” In Maneuvers: The International
Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, she explores, for example, the circumstances
under which women work around U.S. bases in South Korea, the meaning of rape when
perpetrated by occupying forces or as a weapon of war, assumptions about motherhood
and marriage that support militarism, and what it means to “still-masculinized
militaries” that women are increasingly permitted to enter them, albeit in limited
numbers. Enloe argues that ideas about feminine respectability, duty, sexuality and skills are all grist to the military mill. She notes the profound contradictions of militarism for women—that it offers opportunities (to be truck drivers in World War I or combat-ready in the mid-1990s), while at the same time relying on and reinforcing inequalities between women and men. She emphasizes the myriad purposeful decisions that make up military policy and practice, including memos that set out criteria for being a good military wife, the design specifications for military women’s uniforms and the decision to route U.S. troops home after the Persian Gulf War via Thailand, the world’s sex tourism capital (developed as a site for U.S. military rest and recreation during the Vietnam War). Enloe’s focus on the details of how militaries work serves as a reminder that those decisions, from the seemingly trivial to the obviously unconscionable, are all made by people—and will need to be un-made in the process of demilitarization. Enloe defines militarization as “the step-by-step process by which something becomes controlled by, dependent on, or derives its value from the military as an institution or militaristic criteria.” The central place of militaries worldwide means that much outside the military is also militarized. Enloe cites the seemingly mundane example of a can of Heinz tomato and noodle soup she bought during a trip to London. Instead of putting in alphabet noodles, “the soup designers had cut their pastas into the shape of Star Wars satellites,” presumably to appeal to mothers who might imagine that Star Wars soup would appeal to their kids. The proliferation of war toys, video games, military-chic fashions, war movies and militaristic advertising images means that everyone employed in producing, advertising, selling or buying such goods is also militarized. Enloe’s groundbreaking scholarship has redefined the academic field of international politics, bringing a feminist lens to an area of study that was previously gender-blind. Her first book, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies (Penguin Books, 1980), also raised significant questions concerning race and ethnicity. Enloe’s impressive body of work has become required reading for feminist students of political science, international relations, women’s studies and sociology. It is much quoted, reprinted in anthologies and photocopied for classes. Enloe’s most important tool may be what she calls her “feminist curiosity”—her commitment to asking, “Where are the women?” Her example has provided the stimulus and the groundwork for the next generation of feminist graduate students to take up research questions that are still not common and were virtually unheard of two decades ago when Enloe worked on her first book about the militarization of women’s lives, Does Khaki become You? (Pandora Press, 1983; HarperCollins, 1988). Her two other books should also be mentioned here: Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (University of California Press, 1990) and The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1993). All of Enloe’s books are a skillful blend of narrative and analysis, written in an accessible, conversational style. She intertwines personal experiences and anecdotes, interview material and a critical reading of official documents and news reports. She is a fund of information sent by friends and colleagues around the world. As she says at the beginning of Maneuvers, her fax machine never sleeps. Maneuvers enlarges on the theme of the militarization of women’s lives first developed in Does Khaki Become You? This is altogether a bigger book, authoritative, expansive and international in scope. Some of its themes will be much more familiar to readers of the Nonviolent Activist than to a mainstream, academic or even feminist audience. War resisters and our allies know that militarism suffuses every aspect of life in this country, as in most others. Some of us have been campaigning against its many manifestations for years. What this book offers us is a powerful gender analysis, particularly concerning the way military planners and policy-makers co-opt and rely upon assumptions about women’s responsibilities, women’s sexuality and wifely duties. Knowing more about the institution we oppose may give us more reasons to oppose it. These aspects of human life must also be on our list of everything that needs demilitarizing. Enloe notes a number of puzzles for activists. One that caught my attention concerns motherhood. Enloe asks, “How can feminists who draw upon maternal consciousness to politically activate women do so without reducing women to mothers and without making motherhood the sole legitimate space in which women can take political action?” Many women who were active in the Greenham Common women’s peace movement in England in the 1980s said, “I’m doing this for my children.” That perspective was invariably picked up in the more positive media accounts. It irritated, even angered, some participants—with and without children—who had other motivations; it also alienated support from feminists who saw Greenham as conventional women’s stuff and not feminist enough by half. Enloe shows how inequalities of race, class and nation are enlisted to keep militarized women separate from each other. She notes that prostituted women, military nurses and wives “do not see themselves as bound together by their shared womanhood or even their shared militarization.” Analytically, this is an interesting idea, but I don’t find it very helpful for antimilitarist organizing. In the United States, women in the military are campaigning against sexual harassment and military wives are dealing with family violence—what a 60 Minutes broadcast called, “The War at Home.” Their goal is to enhance women’s status in the military by challenging its sexism and urging that the policy of “zero tolerance” for sexual harassment and domestic violence be enforced. Okinawan women activists, on the other hand, see military violence against women as a continuum rooted in dehumanizing military training and culture and a patriarchal capitalist system. This includes violence against Filipinas working in bars near U.S. bases in Okinawa, a lack of economic alternatives for poor women and the rape of Okinawan women and girls who are only a chain-link fence away from the bases, as well as violence against U.S. servicewomen and within military families. For them, the goal is to rid Okinawa of U.S. military bases and to demilitarize their society. Okinawan women have found it very useful to know more about sexual harassment in the military and violence in military families because it supports their argument that military violence against women is systemic. But despite some shared understandings, these groups have very different political goals and cannot be allies in a fundamental way. Speaking from the academic side of my life, I find Cynthia Enloe’s research invaluable and have relied on it in my teaching and writing. Speaking as an activist, I find it rather frustrating. Intellectual understanding, like feminist curiosity, can only get you so far. Enloe notes that what has been militarized can be demilitarized, but warns that what has been demilitarized can be remilitarized as circumstances shift. This calls for astute understandings of military systems, cultures and economies in our ongoing search for effective antimilitarist strategies. Maneuvers is a significant contribution to this understanding. We need to supply the anti-militarist politics. Gwyn Kirk is Jane Watson Irwin Co-chair in Women’s Studies at Hamilton College, in Clinton, NY, for 1999-2001. She is a founding member of the East Asia-US Women’s Network Against Militarism. She was also an early participant in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Encampment in England and co-authored Greenham Women Everywhere (South End Press, 1983) with Alice Cook. Solidarity
Forever! By Matt Meyer “North
Americans,” concludes activist-journalist Bill Weinberg in Homage to
Chiapas, “can learn much about themselves from how they are viewed by their southern
neighbors.” This apparently simple assertion, the basis for all principled solidarity
work, is all too often lost in the attempts of the peace and justice movements
to do “outreach” rather than to listen carefully to our colleagues from liberation
movements of color. Homage to Chiapas is a stunning and challenging example of
careful listening, relating a partisan—but never sectarian—account of the Mexican
peasant campaigns full of the subtleties and meticulous story-telling that can
make skillful contemporary history a pleasure to read. In chronicling the history of Mexico and Mexican-U.S. relations and providing the best overview of modern Mexican resistance movements in print in English, Weinberg has taken his passion for justice “south of the border” and turned it into a poetic and insightful testimony. From its uniquely regionalized understanding of the insurgent Zapatistas to its cutting critiques of the computerized dehumanization of life in these United States, Homage manages to provide readers with both the virtually unknown background of events that have hit our headlines and also the connections between those events and circumstances that hit our own environment and our own pocketbooks. Enough!
The scene quickly shifts to Chiapas in southern Mexico in 1999 and the first of many stories of Mayan Indians, often unarmed, protecting their communities from those officially elected or paid to be their “protectors.” Figuring prominently in most of these stories and struggles is the Zapatista National Liberation Army, known as the EZLN, which Weinberg introduces as “the armed, clandestine, yet paradoxically democratic avant garde of the militant peasant movement.” (Weinberg makes a nice distinction in calling the Zapatistas avant-garde and not vanguard, as more simplistic leftists might.) The introduction ends with a tale of the “Zapatista Air Force,” Indians who showered Mexican troops with appeals for solidarity folded into paper airplanes, reaching out to the young conscripts who had more in common with the indigenous peoples of the South than with the generals of the North. The creativity, good humor and populist mass appeal of the EZLN is not only described in Homage to Chiapas; it is mirrored in Weinberg’s writing itself. The first section (of five) of the book ambitiously attempts to survey 500 years of indigenous rebellion, spinning a thread that begins with the earliest days of European conquest. Included in this rapid-fire (and occasionally hard-to-follow) historical overview is an account of Marx and Engels’ “rejoicing” at the conquest of Mexico in their time. Though realizing that U.S. capitalists would be the real winners, their fundamental distrust of peasantry and indigenous “primitive” movements led them to turn away from the resistance movements of the mid-1800s. Weinberg’s history continues with the early 20th-century “revolution before Stalin, Lenin and Bolshevism—of the Mexican Robin Hood” Pancho Villa and Flores Magon and Emiliano Zapata. Weinberg’s commentary becomes most illuminating when he writes of the more recent period, the Central American revolutions and counterrevolutions of the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan’s own position, that the Communists were coming to get us and the “road to victory goes through Mexico,” used as a rationale against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, takes on new significance here. As the struggles in Central America began to see greater defeats and require deeper compromises, the movement in Mexico geared up for a new round of militancy, becoming the first fighting force to “declare war not only on a government, but on an international trade agreement.” With that, the history reaches the contemporary warriors who draw their name and inspiration from those older independentistas. Weinberg skillfully describes how the EZLN “emerged from the jungle” on the day of the signing of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, battling not only a dictatorship, but the systems making true economic democracy impossible. A new form and methodology, rooted in ancient disparities and on basic communal values, was maturing. Shadow
Dances & Alphabet Soup The next two sections, “The Flame Catches,” and “Shadow Dances,” detail the spread of militancy beyond the EZLN and its liberated areas to other parts and peoples of Mexico. A short chapter on “alphabet soup in the Sierra Madre” accurately describes the confusing and sometimes conflicting groups of armed progressives or revolutionaries vying for popular support over the last several years. Weinberg resists the temptation to dismiss or denigrate these multi-acronymed groups, writing about them with respect if not agreement. The Popular Revolutionary Army and others, including a guerrilla alliance made up almost exclusively of indigenous peoples and utilizing Aztec mythology and symbols for their main propaganda, criticize the EZLN for being overly reformist and willing to negotiate with the Mexican government. The Zapatistas, for their part, suggest that they prefer a strategy that will bring better conditions sooner and a methodology that will put democracy into everyday practice, rather than training an elite force to attempt a governmental takeover. The saddest development in this period is not the squabbles within the resistance, but rather the increased violence and corruption of the state. Weinberg has dubbed the political culture of current mainstream Mexico as “Assassin Nation.” Radical
Democrats Appropriately, Weinberg concludes his powerful book with a section on intervention and solidarity in the “free trade”—not the “new world”—order. The trajectory of the Mexico-U.S. “border war” is strikingly dealt with in the story of Redford, TX, population 107, and the murder of a young boy shot to death by a small battalion of U.S. Marines while out walking his family’s goats. In the name of the drug wars and the war against “illegal aliens,” Chicanos on the U.S. side of the border appear still to be targets of the never-ending Mexican-American War. The book includes accounts of the fights between ultra-right John Birchers of the U.S. Southwest and Mexican-American activists empowered by the actions of our neighbors to the South to push for greater land recovery, for the Guadelupe-Hidalgo Treaty Land Claims Act, or even (in some cases) for reunification. The prospects for transnational resistance become Weinberg’s final concern. Solidarity, he suggests, is in no way related to charity work or one-way assistance programs, but is in fact one of the few ways to keep this country from shifting even further to the right. “A radical populism which is rooted in solidarity,” Weinberg insightfully comments, “is the only possible antidote to the recuperable populism of ethnic scapegoating.” Homage to Chiapas is a wonderful act of self-reflective solidarity. In addition to providing essential information for those seeking to understand Mexico and the Zapatistas, it also puts forth a perspective necessary for anyone seeking to understand our North American hemisphere—and how a people-to-people peace may be built here. Former WRL Chair Matt Meyer, who first traveled to Chiapas in 1987 as a guest of the Servicio Paz y Justicia, has written extensively on contemporary Latin American and African affairs, including the recently published Guns and Gandhi in Africa, co-authored with Bill Sutherland. Long Shadows in Latin America Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-1954 By Nick Cullather Stanford University Press 1999; 123 pp.; $14.95, paperback When
the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 By Chris Ney As
memories of the Cold War fade and the American empire enters a new
century unrivaled, two recent books discuss the history and consequences of covert
interventions by the United States in two Latin American countries: Guatemala
and Chile. The books are as different as the countries they describe, yet both
contain lessons for activists and historians. The 1954 CIA intervention in Guatemala to topple the reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz became a model for the agency. President Eisenhower praised the CIA’s success in ousting Arbenz and installing right-wing Col. Castillo Armas without using U.S. troops. In later decades, the CIA used the model many times around the world; one of those times was in Chile. By the same token, the continuing U.S. intervention in Guatemala—which included support for subsequent military regimes—became a symbol of imperial arrogance for people of conscience. The intervention, triggered by U.S. fears of Communism and, specifically, by Arbenz’ land reform policies that infringed on the United Fruit Company’s immunity from civic responsibility, led to more than four decades of bloodshed—its primary victims, the nation’s indigenous communities. While not directly condemning any U.S. interventions, Nick Cullather’s Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-1954 starts from the premise that CIA action in Guatemala is a model only for what not to do. A quarter-century later, in 1970, the election of the socialist Salvador Allende in Chile offered the world another kind of model—that of a democratic, constitutional, nonviolent road to socialism. To the Nixon administration and its multi-national corporate allies, that model represented a worse threat, even, than the Arbenz government: that of an example that might spread, even to western Europe. Cold War empire-building policies led Nixon (who was Eisenhower’s vice-president in 1954) to impose an economic embargo on Chile and authorize any activity short of invasion to topple Allende. Economic destabilization and propaganda succeeded in September, 1973, when Chile’s armed forces broke with the country’s democratic tradition, overthrowing Allende and bombing the national palace. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, thousands were imprisoned, tortured, disappeared and killed. As many as one million were forced into exile. The destruction of Allende’s Popular Unity government sent shock waves around the world, its lessons still widely debated among leftists. When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 offers a sampling of that debate’s many flavors. From very different perspectives, both books use previously unavailable material to describe these landmark events, not offering comprehensive histories, but shedding light by examining specific details. A
Short-Lived Openness In the early 1990s, with a recent PhD in history, Cullather responded to a CIA ad for staff historians. The agency’s chief historian explained that the history staff would be the center of the openness work; eight historians would have access to all CIA documents. Cullather’s description of the process is almost as intriguing as the history he writes: “They [CIA historians] would locate documents, rank the papers in order of importance, and then pass them to the review group for declassifying. Major covert operations had first priority, and agency historians would research and write secret, internal histories of operations in Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia …” Sadly, the CIA’s commitment to openness was short-lived. Cullather worked for the agency for a year and a day, turning in his completed history one week before his departure. “It would be classified ‘secret’ and published internally by the CIA under the title Operation PBSUCCESS: The United States and Guatemala, 1952-1954,” he writes. “Several thousand copies, in hard- and soft-cover editions were distributed throughout the agency in 1994.” Cullather believes that the CIA released his book in response to criticism of the openness initiative’s failures, but he claims it was not meant to stand alone or be an official history of covert CIA actions in Guatemala, except perhaps “as a training manual, a cautionary tale for future covert operators.” To that end, he uses previously classified and public documents to good effect. The opening of a chapter ironically titled “The Sweet Smell of Success” quotes a U.S. State Department official in 1981: “What we’d give to have an Arbenz now. We are going to have to invent one, but all the candidates are dead.” In a less chilling example of irony, Secret History was subjected to CIA censors before it was released to the public. Cullather attempts to preserve the integrity of the original project by leaving bracketed blank spaces to indicate censored passages, the spaces corresponding roughly to the length of the censored text. On a few occasions he restores censored information in footnotes that cite publicly available sources of the deleted information. At times, the effect is almost comical:
At other times, Cullather’s work reveals the CIA’s tragic misunderstanding of Guatemala. Cullather cites a careful analysis of records—taken from Guatemala by the CIA—of Arbenz’ Guatemalan Worker’s Party (known as the PGT). The records reveal only one contact between Arbenz’ government and the Soviet Union—a USSR attempt to buy bananas. It ended quickly when Guatemala could not transport the produce without aid from the United Fruit Company. More to the point, Cullather shows that CIA agents had no framework within which to understand Guatemala except Soviet history:
Although employed by the CIA as he wrote this history, Cullather clearly describes the authoritarian and violent consequences of its actions, making it important reading for anyone who cares about human rights:
Poignant
Profiles Hite uses political autobiography as a method for political science and historical analysis. Analyzing these individuals—and their relationship to the ideals and institutions that inspired them—she develops a typology of “cognitive frameworks” for political activists, identifying four specific types. “Political party loyalists” identify with a party and seek to be effective organizers and recruiters. “Personal loyalists” are affiliated with an individual—in this case, Salvador Allende; the personal loyalists in this book derive their affirmation from memories of their association with the slain president. “Political thinkers” focus on ideas, which they value more than party affiliation; for many in this group, exile led to fascinating ideological changes. Finally, “political entrepreneurs” are natural organizers who emphasize pragmatism over ideology and work both within a political party and representatives of other parties; today, many in this group lead Chile’s government, where they emphasize consensus, coalition and gradualism. Although developed from an examination of Chilean activists, the types may be found in movements and among activists in other parts of the world. (I enjoyed applying Hite’s typology to various personalities within the U.S. peace movement, specifically within the War Resisters League.) Hite’s profiles of the leaders are poignant, their discussions thoroughly engaging. Because the book comes decades after Allende and the dictatorship and years after the restoration of Chilean democracy, the leaders can reflect with some distance on political parties, ideologies and strategies and the experience of several governments, including the current center-left coalition in which a few hold office. The experience of exile figures prominently in all the profiles. Not only did exile force the Chileans to live in another cultural context and grapple with questions of ghettoization and assimilation, it also forced Chilean leftists to encounter Eurocommunism, social democracy and “actually existing socialism” in eastern Europe. The leaders’ evaluations of those currents makes the book a great read for anyone interested in Marxism and left politics. Their reflections on Chile make it indispensable for anyone interested in Latin America. Of particular interest are the descriptions of the tensions within the left during both the Allende government and the military dictatorship. One of my favorite profiles is that of Patricio Rivas, a leader of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (a Guevarist-style movement that did not officially support Allende, although many of its members did). His profile opens with sorrow: “My closest friends are in the Rettig report,” referring to the transition government’s Truth Commission that documented human rights abuses that led to death or disappearance. He continues, like all of the leaders profiled, undeterred in his commitment to progressive struggle, ending with humor: Why am I still a leftist?
I will tell you in the most simple terms in the world. Because it is not at all
certain that what exists today is the best possible world it can be. And because
it is not the best it can be, I try to do two things: I try to think about the
maximum possible change that will cause the minimal human damage. This is one
theme, almost an epistemological one. How to accomplish the most change with the
least suffering, when what in fact has been happening is maximum suffering with
the least change. And the second theme is to think absolutely collectively, with
everyone. People of different religions, skin colors, identities, how everyone
can feel part of the same humanity. That is my aesthetic understanding of what
it means to be on the left. Hite’s work is creative and engaging. Some will find the cognitive typology excessively academic. You want her to allow the leaders to tell their own stories completely and without interpretation. The selected fragments—so rich in detail—seem only a tease of what the author has to offer from each individual. If we’re lucky, Hite will produce another volume in which the leaders speak for themselves. Until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with the many insights offered by the current book. Chris Ney, WRL’s Disarmament Coordinator, has visited Latin America nine times. Activist ChatBook A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigns By Jan Barry Rutgers University Press, 2000; 225 pp.; $19.00, paperback By Tom H. Hastings Journalist-activist
Jan Barry started his own grassroots organizing as a disenchanted vet of the war
in Vietnam, co-founding Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It is not entirely clear
from his book whether he was so badly burned by that experience that he chose
more mainstream activism after that, or whether his analysis about the effectiveness
of radical action drove his shift. In any event, this book does not draw much
on or extrapolate from Barry’s antiwar work during the Vietnam War era, but rather
on some campaigns that primarily relate to very local civic initiatives in New
Jersey, where he lives. Barry boldly calls people projects the best that we are as humans and then bluntly states that many campaigns will fizzle and fail. That’s realistic advice. Get ready, for example, to be called names. That’s a good pragmatic caveat (e.g., I was just compared to the Unabomber in the local press for my nonviolent activism, a confused but pungent charge that didn’t quite manage to rise to the level of response). He backs up his assertions with some good accounts, and he’s clear about nonviolence:
The book’s weaknesses mostly involve the absence of theoretical analysis. Barry’s anecdotes are reportage, which is what he does professionally, and the reader is left to interpret. For example, in his account of a city park repainted by volunteers, he mentions that some local graffiti convicts helped and later mentions that the formerly graffiti-covered park hasn’t been defaced by graffiti for two years—clearly a success in urban New Jersey. It would have been a good time to propose a principle of “buying in”—(involving a constituency by making them stakeholders—or something similar. Barry relies on quotes from the participants to provide the connecting analysis, which works when a journalist needs to maintain standards of objectivity, but we could use a bit more systemic and analytical approach in this work meant to instruct would-be community organizers. There’s not much differentiation between antiwar work and planting flowers in a vacant lot. The “organizing tips” found at the end of a few chapters contain succinct and useful advice, probably the best place to turn for the pith of the book’s instructional value. Barry is a journalist; his chapter on using the news media is his best, emphasizing the basics and the interpersonal over the slick and technical. For that chapter alone, this quickly read book is worth your while if you are an activist looking to improve your effectiveness, if you are looking for some stories of success, or if you just like to compare what you’ve tried with what others have done. It’s a folksy but functional collection. Writer, WRL National Committee member, and direct-disarmament activist Tom H. Hastings teaches Peace Studies at Wisconsin’s Northland College. Treed
By Geov Parrish Frankly, my expectations of this book were not very high. After all, it was produced—okay, written—in three months by a 25-year-old minor media celebrity seeking to cash in before we all forget her. And just because you can live in a tree doesn’t mean you can write. To be fair, Hill is not cashing in directly—proceeds from her book are going to the Circle of Life foundation (www.circleoflifefoundation.org/luna.html), the pseudo-mystic non-profit she’s set up to help save redwoods (by what means remains unclear). And the book, like her story itself, is in places quite compelling. In case you missed it, Hill is the unseasoned environmental activist who, in late 1997, climbed into a 200-foot-tall redwood (christened “Luna,” hence the book title) near Stafford, CA. Remarkably, she wound up staying there for more than two years, defying foul weather, timber company harassment and her own crises of faith. But there’s only so much narrative glory one can extract from sitting for months on end in a 6'x8' space, even if it is 180 feet off the ground. (There’s talk of making a movie out of Hill’s stunt, too. How?) To fill the gaps, Hill turns, much as she did herself during her lonely perch, to a most cloying sort of eco-mysticism, sincerely felt but bound to alienate all but the tree- worshipers, stereotypes whose images some environmental activists have worked decades to erase. It’s difficult to imagine ecology pioneer Aldo Leopald, to pick one random example, giving himself a “forest name” (that’s where “Butterfly” comes from), naming his favorite tree, and then unleashing a patronizing passage like the following:
Pronouncements like these are why the more credulous among forest activists, as the sit wore on, started referring to the “teachings” of Butterfly—as though sitting in a tree for two years gives a person special insight into the human condition. A little of this goes a long way. Curiously, Hill doesn’t spend much time laying out the case for why the redwoods should be saved—why, for example, they constitute a unique and invaluable ecosystem—or how saving them could be accomplished. What we get instead is a poorly written but heartfelt People Magazine-level account of two years in a tree. And aside from her remarkable tenacity and physical accomplishment, it’s clear that she doesn’t have much to offer this debate beyond the catch phrases she learned after she started her tree sit. “Not until months later [after the tree-sit began] would I educate myself on every matter relating to sustainable forestry.” In that one phrase, Hill acknowledges that she started out knowing little beyond her new-found love of the redwoods—and implies that one can “educate [one]self on every matter” while sitting in a tree, something of an insult to timber workers who spend their lives in pursuit of such education. She notes, “On my very first day in Luna … I didn’t really know the difference between old growth and ancient growth.” Five pages later, she uses the two as synonyms. Hill also deals glancingly with the controversy surrounding her $50,000 agreement with Pacific Lumber to “save” Luna after her descent. Pacific Lumber agreed to not to log within a 250-foot buffer zone around Luna—except in the case of so-called “salvage logging,” the exception rendering the agreement virtually meaningless. Butterfly, on her part, agreed to pay $50,000 to the Forestry Department of Humboldt State University in Eureka, CA, a notoriously pro-timber department. The Circle of Life Foundation’s press release after the agreement, which echoes Hill’s own statements, concluded: “The Luna Preservation agreement symbolizes hope that a new era of peace and cooperation has begun and that bridges can be built between the timber industry and environmentalists, between corporations and communities.” Maybe. But to others the agreement represented a skilled corporate negotiator taking advantage of a naive tree-sitter. So what’s left is the story. In it is a valuable lesson—that any one person can make a difference with her or his actions. Also in it are sketches and bad poetry, like “Still Up Here”:
That mind will accomplish lots more in her life. But based on this book, she’s not the most gifted political spokeswoman for her cause. It’s not surprising—it’s more than sufficient to do what she’s done. Geov Parrish is the staff person for the WRL Seattle local, the Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia, a member of WRL’s National Committee and a political columnist for the Seattle Weekly. A version of this review was published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Revisiting the Classics The Breakdown of Nations By Leopold Kohr Routledge 1986 (first edition 1957), out of print By Bill Weinberg In
the renewed Cold War of the 1980s, some U.S. leftists and peace activists
were so caught up in the East-West polarization that they failed to recognize
the horrific realities of the Soviet superpower. In response, other alienated
progressives called for a “third camp” opposed to all centralized power and recognizing
scale as the fundamental question. The authors of that movement’s manifestos, such as E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful, 1973) and Kirkpatrick Sale (Human Scale, 1980), all found their mentor in Leopold Kohr, a rogue academic who began his crusade with a 1941 article in The Commonweal, “Disunion Now!,” a lonely dissent against moves towards a postwar United Nations. This was later expanded into the founding decentralist manifesto, The Breakdown of Nations, which warned against the Utopianism of “ending war” and called for a Europe (and a world) of small states, with the power to wage only small wars. Ironically, the revised European map that Kohr envisioned has now partially been realized—but through a resurgence of ethnic nationalism and intolerance, and, in the cases of Yugoslavia and the Caucasus, explosions of hatred and violence that have shocked the world. It was after the end of the Cold War that the contradictions of the radical decentralists became evident. When Schumacher’s U.K.-based journal Resurgence started moving toward the mainstream after his death, another Kohr protégé, John Papworth, split to form his own small Fourth World Review. Its motto was, “For Small Nations, Small Communities and the Human Spirit,” and Kohr continued to contribute to it until his own death in 1994. Papworth and his followers bitterly protested the United Kingdom’s entrance into the European Union. But their rhetoric invoked the sovereignty of the English crown and even nostalgia for former Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher—as if Britain were not holding Ulster, Scotland and Wales captive, and as if Thatcher’s beloved NATO were not as much an exponent of the “Cult of Giganticism” as the European Union. One 1992 Fourth World Review editorial warned that rather than unifying, Europe should “take exactly the opposite road; toward a deliberate fragmentation of the larger nation states, such as is now in progress in the former USSR, in Yugoslavia and in Czechoslovakia”—seemingly blind to the human disaster in the post-Communist world. Admittedly, in 1992 the worst was yet to come—but Croatia had been in flames for a year, and the Bosnian bloodbath had already begun. That was to be one of the final issues of Fourth World Review. Those contradictions are evident in The Breakdown of Nations, which invokes the tenacious ethnic nationalism of “Macedonians, Sicilians, Basques, Catalans, Scots, Bavarians, Welsh, Slovaks or Normans” on page 57, while on page 173 applauding Switzerland (which Kohr hailed, along with the United States, as a “successful federal state”) for not dividing cantons along ethnic lines. The book’s fatal flaw is that it presents its “size theory of social misery” not as a useful and vital insight, but as the single, hegemonic explanation for poverty and oppression. Kohr hailed his “law of diminishing sensitivity” (by which the scale of atrocities reduces the perpetrator’s sense of guilt), as the “cause of war.” Therefore, he committed the exact same error as the orthodox Marxists, with their economistic prescriptions, when he wrote that “everything works on the small scale, capitalism as well as socialism.” Writing in the era of the New Deal and anti-trust, Kohr could not have anticipated how the multinational corporation, with its global bodies such as GATT and the WTO, would supersede the nation-state as the real arbiter of power. The contraction of state power we now witness actually facilitates an even greater centralization of planetary power in the hands of private-sector bosses—with no accountability to the public. Meanwhile, entities such as Radovan Karadzic’s brutal Serb Republic have made a mockery of Kohr’s contention that “the small state is by nature internally democratic.” As a partisan of Kohr in the 1980s, I was warned by one friend that the corporations could become “the zookeepers of a re-tribalized planet.” When I echoed Kohr’s call for breaking up the imperialist powers in the conclusion of my 1991 book War on the Land: Ecology & Politics in Central America, one reviewer (Jim Glassman in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism) protested that “sovereignty struggles need to be combined with … a commitment to socialism (or some other non-capitalist social order) before they can pose alternatives to the reigning world system.” Ten years later, I have to conclude that he was correct. A new model for radical localist movements is southern Mexico’s Zapatistas, who resist local wealth inequities while disavowing “separatism” in favor of “pluri-ethnic autonomy.” The entire text of Chapter 11 of Kohr’s book, “But Will It Be Done?,” consists of a single word: “No!” But it is being done—and in precisely the ways Kohr outlined in his conclusion. He posited that either a European Union would erode the old nationalisms of (for instance) the United Kingdom and Spain, allowing greater autonomy for Scotland and Catalonia—or that after a new World War, the victorious superpower would divide the great nations of Europe as Napoleon and Hitler had. We see something like this as well, in the re-balkanization of the Balkans into ever-smaller fragments under the auspices of NATO occupation. But Kohr’s very successors resist Euro-unification as the emergence of a new imperialist bloc, and the new Balkan mini-states substitute ethnic extremism for any real control over local resources. If orthodox leftists need to grapple with issues of scale, so do the decentralists need to grapple with issues of class and capital. And if the nightmare of the actually-existing “breakdown of nations” can spark this kind of reckoning in both camps, the opportunities represented by the end of the Cold War may not be lost after all Bill Weinberg’s newest book is Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico, Verso, 2000. |
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his
alien, more extensively and more potently than any other revolutionist on earth,
promotes confusion and disorder, doubt and disbelief and … has promoted lawless
confusion to shatter the Church as well as the State—and to leave, if possible,
even the laws of nature and the principles of science in confusion and disorder.
… He is affiliated with more anarchist and communist groups than Joseph Stalin
himself. ... [He] apparently cannot talk English. 
