boooooks

To End All Wars, Adam Hothschild - About pacifists, conscientious objectors, and suffragettes in World War I. The broad outlines of the history, I imagine, will be familiar to your average B&T reader, but it's extremely well-written, gripping in its focus on the personal without forgetting the big picture, and has some cracking details. I also had no idea that in 1915, the British and Germans struck a deal [whoops, totally wrong link in first version of post] through Switzerland, to exchange German optics for British rubber; very sporting, really, and made sure everyone could keep the war going.  (Checking, there seems to be some doubt as to whether the deal actually went through; Hothschild says that the UK received 32,000 binoculars in August 1915, but that the records on what they gave the Germans in return have disappeared.)

Why Marx Was Right, Terry Eagleton- Interesting, combative and well-written, as you'd expect, but glosses over the fact that a lot of the supposed "distortions" of Marx he complains about arise from Marxists themselves. It's a little like those defences of Christianity based purely upon the Gospels; the actual movement didn't work that way.  And just plain bad when it comes to trying to find excuses for the Bolsheviks, and in the treatment of Marxism-in-power in general.  Also, as usual with Eagleton, much too given to the arch professorial joke, ideally with a celebrity reference.

The World As It is, Chris Hedges - Chris Hedges has written one all-time classic, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and three decent other books (American Fascists, I Don't Believe in Atheists, Empire of Illusion.)  Unfortunately, this collection of essays brings out all his worst qualities - for instance, the brand of American exceptionalism that sees the US as uniquely sinful, degenerate, etc - and ridiculous comparisonsab.  ("Any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police.") Andif I cared what Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader thought about anything, I'd buy their books.  Apparently the idea that Nader was in any way to blame for the election of George Bush is "an absurdity that found fertile ground among those who had abandoned rational inquiry for the thought-terminating cliches of television."

Plus there's one of those passages about how he was on a boxing team in college, and "my closest friends were construction workers and pot washers," who were so much more reliable than the effete liberals at his university. Just once I'd like to see "I spent time with ordinary, honest working men when I was young, and they were a bunch of lazy racists."

Suicide in Nazi Germany, Christian Goeschel - Useful statistical and anecdotal material, but I wish they'd been comparative work with Japan, and it suffers badly from PhD-itis, right down to the lit. review at the beginning. 

(Also The Retreat, by Michael Jones, a superior class of war-porn which makes, very oddly, no mention of the fact that the mass deaths of Russian prisoners, which he discusses, was planned pre-war by the Wehrmacht, and Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast, which was pretty good, but why is Scandinavian crime literature so obsessed with World War II?)

 

scandinavian

Comments

[Phil]

If you were Norwegian you'd be obsessed with World War II. When I studied collaborationist movements as part of my MA, the lecturer quoted some extraordinary statistic about the épuration after the War - it was in the order of twice as many people being put on trial for Fascist activity as in France, in a population one tenth the size. We asked him what had been going on there - were there books? He said there were, but they were all in Norwegian. I do know of one, by the great Nils Christie: he found that Norwegian camp guards were "quite ordinary Norwegians", and concluded that "we would have behaved as they did had we, with their age and educational background, been placed into their situation". (This was in 1952, quite a while before Christopher Browning did his research.) If Christie's findings are at all typical, you can see how that period would still smart a bit.

As for Marx and Fr Terry, I've never had a huge amount of time for Marxists en masse - or for that matter for Freudians or Darwinians - and never thought I needed to take my bearings from them. Taking a large step sideways and going back to what the man himself actually wrote seems highly advisable. Ditto Christians, clearly. (Euclideans, Copernicans and Newtonians seem sensible enough, though.)

[JamesP]

I thought that in Norway it was more to do with a willingness/eagerness to prosecute *everybody* involved with the regime than a greater proportion of collaborationists, though? But that could still leave considerable wounds.

[JamesP]

On the Marx book, the problem is that he's trying to offer an apology not just for Marx, but for Marxism - the book shifts a lot, basically.

[Alex]

Just once I'd like to see "I spent time with ordinary, honest working men when I was young, and they were a bunch of lazy racists."

This was my experience of working in a Royal Mail distribution centre.

[belle le triste]

My (admittedly somewhat aggressive feeling) about Eagleton is that he's an eel-slippery twister whose primary drive has always been to maintain his own intellectual market-share, as the establishment's pet dissident and gatekeeper. His Coles Notes on every living thinker and theorist turn out -- if you happen to know much about any given T&T -- to be full of subtle distortions and elisions; and his role (for example for the LRB) as their go-to expert on shifts in pop culture is teeth-grindingly low on actually knowing what he's talking about.

But lots of people think he's great, and I expect they're right.

[Cian]

Eagleton's a good literary critic.

Nader wasn't to blame for the election of Bush. I don't like the man, but that's true enough.

[belle le triste]

Yes, to be fair to him I haven't read much of his lit crit: it's his "bigger picture" stuff I distrust.

[Phil]

it was more to do with a willingness/eagerness to prosecute *everybody* involved with the regime

Yes, that's actually what I meant. Rule 1 of collaboration is that absolutely everybody does it, or very nearly everybody. After the liberation of France, the Gaullists in particular very rapidly took the view that it was all water under the bridge. There's a story of an old woman rushing out to greet de Gaulle, on a victory parade, with flowers and a cry of "Vive le Maréchal!"; de Gaulle's only comment was "Elle est une bonne Française". The Norwegians took what was superficially a similar situation much, much more seriously - perhaps too seriously given just how normal collaboration was. But then, when you're looking at actual collaboration with actual Nazis, can you take it too seriously? Lots of partially-healed wounds, lots of people with an interest in letting them heal, and not all for bad reasons.

[Phil]

This was my experience of working in a Royal Mail distribution centre.

Snap. I'd add a distinct anal obsession - the punchline of every single joke seemed to be a variant on "told him he could stick it up his arse".

On Eagleton (going for the triple), yes, he is a slippery bugger, and deceptively superficial. More fun than Zizek, though.

[Richard J]

I suppose with Norway, there's the interesting distinguishing factor that it had become truly independent only 40 years previously - there would have been, I'd guess, concern in the air about perceived collaboration with foreign powers to a much larger extent than in France.

W.r.t. Eagleton, his LRB essays, which is where I know his work best, are always rhetorical wonders, but there always seems to be a lack of a substantive positivie argument at the centre. He's good at appearing to knock down the position he's arguing against through sly jabs, but the counter-arguments he advances always seem remarkably banal - his Dawkins article is a handy example of this, it seems.

[skidmarx]

According to Harry Harrison in The Daleth Effect, there was so little collaboration in Denmark that every single Jew was able to escape the Nazis' clutches.

It shouldn't be that hard for Eagleton to come up with some decent excuses for the Bolsheviks, so I guess that is bad, though I'm not sure how much other Marxism-in-power in general there's been.

I did work with a guy a couple of years ago who expressed the view that if a tranny seduced him, he'd feel a need to kill him/her.

[Richard J]

Phil/Alex - snap, but with a print works in Idle, near Bradford. Also with the anal obsession too. Knowing what 'felching' was helped me fit in.

[JamesP]

THE INBETWEENERS has a cracking bit where the work experience is mixed up, and the ex-public schoolboy is sent to work in a garage, which is more or less along these lines.

[Seeds]

Just once I'd like to see "I spent time with ordinary, honest working men when I was young, and they were a bunch of lazy racists."

Though would this count as double inverse snobbery, or just plain old vanilla snobbery?

[Alex]

To be more comprehensive, it was really only the post office that was like that. This was the Consignia era so you could perhaps have been forgiven for being demoralised.

[Barry Freed]

Same here with the racism, on Long Island, after my first undergraduate college experience didn’t take, in the mid 80’s doing construction work, some of it was shocking. (There’s a North Shore/South Shore socio-economic divide, North Shore you went to college and became a professional, South Shore you went into construction or other blue collar fields, I grew up on the North Shore.) I still remember being told a story by my boss’s son, Charlie, that he thought was the funniest thing he’d ever seen: the crew was coming back from a job in a pick-up truck that was a real banger with the father/boss at the wheel; at a stoplight they were adjacent to a school bus when what Charlie described to me as a 7 year old black kid hung out the window of the bus and said to the father “nice truck, mister,” the father just looked at the kid and said, “Fuck you, n****r!” I was stunned when I heard that and I just blurted out something like: Your father said that? To a seven year old kid?! Charlie just stammered something about maybe he was really 12 or 13 as if that would make it more acceptable. Shit like that was commonplace but that one story always stayed with me.

Also, constantly with the ass obsession, which was overtly homoerotic in tone; usually referred to as the “brown-eye” and much banter consisted of asking if your colleague was winking it at you as he bent over in performing his work duties.

[ejh]

I'll ditto Cian re: Nader and Bush. Blaming Nader for Bush is lazy, and doing so avoids a very large number of questions about the Democrats. (Which, of course, it's generally intended to do.)

[CharlieMcMenmain]

"Just once I'd like to see "I spent time with ordinary, honest working men when I was young, and they were a bunch of lazy racists."

Welcome to the immediate and extended family in which I grew up. (Well, not quite: the women were racist as well, and neither gender were lazy.)

But, actually, and not matter how hackneyed it sounds, the experience of meeting the organised Labour Movement convinced a teenager made be realise that things needn't be like this.

The problem, perhaps, is the perspective from which such passages about working class life are written, and the fact that the authors really don't bother to acquire the basic anthropological theory to allow them to understand the dual and confusing nature of making judgements whilst being simultaneously close and distant from their subject.

[CharlieMcMenmain]

Er: let's try that second sentence once more, this time in English:

But, actually, and no matter how hackneyed it sounds, the experience of meeting the organised Labour Movement as a teenager made me realise that things needn't be like this.

[Cian]

I've spent time with ordinary middle class working folk and had a similar experience. Sometimes people just suck.

[ejh]

It's not an uncommon experience: there's an awful lot of it about, and young white men in manual occupations have at least their fair share, certainly when they're working in all-white (or nearly all-white) envitronments.

And at the same time, you'll always find somebody there who hates all that stuff. But they don't say anything, because it won't do any good.

[Richard J]

Cian> True, but it's the difference between a man admitting, in a private conversation, that he wouldn't hire a woman because she might get pregnant, and someone calling a black co-worker (with surprising good humour) a fucking n****r cunt.

[ejh]

Mmm, it's a bit more than that. The prejudices are just the same, but some people are more careful about what they say. (Or rather, who they say it to.)

[Cian]

I've known a fair few of working class people who would say all kinds of racist stuff, and yet also had several good friends who were black. Not in the sense of "some of my best friends are...", but as in really. One of them was married to a black woman.

On the other hand I've also known plenty of PC middle class people who just, probably coincidentally, don't have any black friends despite existing in places/situations/jobs where you'd think that would be quite hard to achieve in practice...

People are complicated. Though I agree, anyone who glorifies the working class to attack the middle classes probably hasn't spent an awful lot of time among the former.

[Richard J]

I know what you mean, cian. In the printworks scenario, despite the abuse, it seemed to be genuinely free of animosity. OTOH, despite being a low-skilled job three miles from the centre of Bradford, it was noticeable that there weren't any workers with backgrouns from the Sub-Continent.

[Cian]

Yeah I should have been clearer that I wasn't defending it. I'm amazed at some of the stuff women are supposed to put up with even now. Just after having seen a fair bit of it over the years I've come to realise it tends to be a bit more complex that it seems at first glance. Middle class people tend to have a better sense of what is and isn't acceptable behaviour. So they're more hypocritical, but then again it does make for a better work atmosphere.