jim submits:

"Yes, Orwell Matters — But Does Christopher Hitchens?"

Bill Weinberg Reviews Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters

Basic Books, New York, 2002, 211 pp., $24

(Published in the UK as Orwell’s Victory, Penguin, London, 2002)

Here is a little exercise in historical ironies.

Few seem to remember it now, but in the 1980s, forgotten little Nicaragua
was one of the last front-lines of the Cold War. When I was there in
those years, one of many idealistic gringos who came to witness the
besieged revolution, the right-wing opposition was distributing a Spanish
translation of a classic parable of revolution betrayed. This was a
probable element of the CIA "psychological operations" campaign aimed at
subverting the revolutionary Sandinista regime, which also included
distribution of the notorious "dirty tricks" manual advocating sabotage
and assassination. The regime responded by denouncing the parable as a
counter-revolutionary polemic written by a reactionary pro-imperialist
writer. The work, of course, was Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Rob writes "Said on why "Orientalism" is as relevant now as it was 25 years ago.

 Nine years ago I wrote an afterword for Orientalism which, in trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not said, stressed not only the many discussions that had opened up since my book appeared in 1978, but the ways in which a work about representations of "the orient" lent itself to increasing misinterpretation. That I find myself feeling more ironic than irritated about that very same thing today is a sign of how much my age has crept up on me. The recent deaths of my two main intellectual, political and personal mentors, the writers and activists Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, has brought sadness and loss, as well as resignation and a certain stubborn will to go on.

In my memoir Out of Place (1999) I described the strange and contradictory worlds in which I grew up, providing for myself and my readers a detailed account of the settings that I think formed me in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. But that was a very personal account which stopped short of all the years of my own political engagement that started after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

"The Ripe Fruit of Redemption"

Toni Negri Reviews Giorgio Agamben's The State of Exception

Giorgio Agamben's latest book is dedicated to the State of Exception,
the condition that now invests each power structure and radically
empties any experience and definition of democracy. Despite being a habitual reader of Giorgio Agamben, so far I have only
reviewed one of his books, entitled Language and Death and
published in 1982 [1].

Language and Death was a proper introduction to philosophy and
proposed the method of analysis that was to mark his future work: to
critically build, digging at the margins the existential and the
linguistic, a road of redemption on the terrain of being: a fully
immanent redemption that never forgets the mortal condition.

Anonymous Kumquat submits:

Luther Blissett's Novel Q,

William Heinemann, 2003

Reviewed by McKenzie Wark

Q is a terrific read, an epic from "the bowels
of history."(517) The story follows two main
characters. One wants to overthrow the
social order. The other is a spy in the service
of the forces who want to maintain it.

Q is the spy, in the pay of Father Carafa, an
ultra conservative figure, rapidly rising up
the hierarchy of the Catholic church. The
other main character is a radical protestant,
who sets himself against both the corrupt
power of the Catholic church, and also
against Luther's Protestant reformation. For
the more radical protestants, Luther is a
political tool in the hands of a rising
mercantile class, not a friend of the peasants
and artisans. His is just a new kind of
authority, which is "putting a priest in our
souls" (353)

Anonymous Comrade submits:

Empire After Iraq"

James Heartfield

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's book Empire (Harvard, 2000)
summarised the state of the capitalism for a burgeoning
'anti-capitalist' protest movement. The veteran Italian Marxist and his
American academic acolyte drew on the ideas of the '1968' generation of
radicals to characterise a new global capitalism. Central to their
thesis was the argument that the commercial and military rivalries that
characterised the old capitalism had been superseded. Though one
military power had indeed prevailed at the end of the Cold War, the
United States was obliged to act in the universal interests of the world
capitalist class, rather than its own. Hardt and Negri characterised
this trans-global capitalist domination Empire, which they insisted took
priority over any one imperialist interest.

jim submits "How De Body? One Man's Terrifying Journey Through an African War" by Teun Voeten, St. Martins Press, 2002

Reviewed by Bill Weinberg

Belgium-based Dutch photojournalist Teun Voeten was already a veteran of the bloodbaths in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Nicaragua when he arrived in the West African nation of Sierra Leone in February 1998. A particularly brutal guerilla army, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), had been terrorizing Sierra Leone since 1991, and Voeten was there to photograph demobilized child soldiers who had been abducted and forced to fight for the rebels. At first, he is almost cynical about the whole ghastly affair, as if jaded to the point of complacency--the cliche of the hard-bitten war journalist.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Can Radicals Be Liberals, Too?"

G. William Domhoff

Reviewing Letters to a Young Activist

Todd Gitlin

Can young radicals-fired by great zeal, but often short on patience-be
convinced to channel their prodigious organizing energies into activities
that might build larger constituencies and have a greater long-term impact?
Can young activists ever learn from the experience of aging radicals with
fabled pasts?

Anonymous Comrade submits:

*Q* (English translation) is available for download at:


WuMing

rtf + zip - 489 kb

txt + zip - 445 kb

As usual, it is free of any charge. Grab it, read it, spread it (*), talk about it and, if you want to give us a reward for all our work, why not buy the book and present your friends with it? Many thanks to Shaun Whiteside, who accepted to waive the copyright of his translation.



(*) As long as its circulation is not in contrast with the book's copyleft notice:
"The partial or total reproduction of this book, in electronic form or
otherwise, is consented to for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original copyright notice and this notice are included and the publisher and source are clearly acknowledged."

jim submits:

Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of
Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xvi + 408 pp. Maps, photos,
endnotes, bibliography, index. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-300-07792-0; $18.95
(paper), ISBN 0-300-08459-5.

Reviewed by Kenneth Slepyan, Transylvania University.

Published by H-Russia (June, 2003),

Icebreaker or Titanic? Stalin's Foreign Policy, 1939-1941

In the summer of 1995, while doing research in Moscow, I lived with an
elderly Russian intelligent couple. Aleksandr Mikhailovich, an aviation
engineer, was widely read in Russian literature and history, and seemed
quite interested in my own research on the Soviet Union in World War II. In
the midst of one of our many conversations, he surprised me with the
assertion that Stalin was, of course, responsible for the rise of Adolf
Hitler, and in addition, that Hitler attacked the Soviet Union to prevent a
Soviet offensive against Germany. When pressed for evidence he pointed to
Viktor Suvorov's book Ledokol' (Icebreaker), which claimed that Stalin was
planning on attacking Hitler but that the Nazi leader surprised him with a
pre-emptive strike.

jim submits ""Socratic Apology:

A Wonderful, Horrible Life of Hans-Georg Gadamer"

Richard Wolin, Bookforum

reviewing Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography by Jean Grondin, trasnlateed by Joel Weinsheimer, New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 480 pages. 

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer was a modern Methuselah. He was born on February 11, 1900, and died on March 13, 2002. During his lifetime he witnessed two world wars, Hitler's seizure of power, the collapse of communism, and the reunification of Germany. In one of his final interviews, published in the German daily Die Welt, he even commented on the events of 9/11. Although Gadamer officially retired from the University of Heidelberg in 1968, this proved to be the beginning of a momentous second career. Thereafter, he was a frequent lecturer at North American universities, bringing the tidings of "hermeneutics" — the art of textual interpretation — to a new generation of students who felt alienated from indigenous American intellectual traditions.

As it so happens, I was one of them. My encounter with Gadamer occurred at a rather forsaken outpost of higher learning in Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University. Gadamer, then age seventy-six, still had a long and productive life ahead of him. At McMaster, he taught a weekly graduate seminar on a relatively minor Platonic dialogue, the Philebus, which we read aloud line by line. Little did I know it at the time, but in the class Gadamer had reprised the theme of his Habilitation, which he had completed nearly fifty years earlier under the supervision of University of Marburg classicist Paul Friedländer.