Review of "Post-Internet Far Right" by 12 Rules for What

The far right has changed, the authors of this excellent and timely book argue. Conventional fascist style political parties and street movements are only one component, and perhaps a small one at that. Responding as if these "classic" fascists are the main event means that anti-fascist strategy is mis-directed. The contemporary far right uses different organisational forms and styles, and has lots of different themes, some of which conflict with each other.  

But despite the differences, there are some common themes, all present to varying degrees. These include:

• Racism and ethno-nationalism
• Misognyny, homophobia and a sense of aggrieved and beleagured masculinity
• Antisemitism - not just as one more "flavour" of racism, but as an organising theory of the world, entwined with conspiracist fantasies.

The book has a lot of description of things that are utterly unfamiliar to me, about internet platforms and tools that I hadn't heard of, memes and symbols and codes that suddenly appear...Pepe the Frog as a far right identifier, and triple brackets around the names of (((Jews))). This is part of the way that the far right can signal to each other that an apparently innoccuous bit of content has a deeper significance. 

As the authors explain, this is not something that's entirely of the far right - it's part of the way that lots of online life is lived now, including the life of the far right.

The book distinguishes between a far right "swarm" of online participants ("activist" seems too strong a word and implies a level of consistent focus that may not be warranted), and "influencers" who direct and are amplified by the swarm - some of whom are deriving both social and financial capital from their online presence. There are the would-be intellectuals of the far right, and the conventional street and electoral organisations.

The book is mainly concerned with the US and UK, so there's not much discussion of the successful "mainstream" parties of the far right...like Fidesz in Hungary, or Law and Justice in Poland, or even the National Front in France. I think that these parties, like Ukip and Brexit in the UK and United Australia in Oz, have successfully driven the centre-right conservative parties further rightwards, and this deserves to be situated in the overall anatomy of the far right.

On the other hand, it does explain well that the organised fascist parties, and even their militarized wings like National Action and Combat-18, are not the far end of the right spectrum. Beyond lies what they call the Blackpilled, the lone wolves of anomised rightist terrorism like Anders Brevik and the Christchurch shooter, and all the shooters in the US. These aren't part of organised groups but do aim to inspire followers, and have had the effect of getting more "moderate" far rightists considerable airtime.

There are two more important aspects to the book. Firstly, the far right is situated in the context of "ecofascism" - the multifarious ways in which it is going to respond to climate breakdown and the turmoil that will create. As yet it's mainly concentrated on being anti-green, promoting climate change denial and crying crocodile tears for the poor people that will be affected by the cost of mitigation and adaption measures. I think there was a strong dimension of this in the Yellow Vest protests in France, and even more so in their imitators elsewhere. But it's perfectly possible for the far right to switch tracks, and to organise in favour of strong militarised measures needed to protect "our people" from climate change, especially in terms of calling on the state to be even harder on refugees. Or even to do both tracks at once.

Second, there's a critique of anti-fascist "culture", which sometimes becomes an identity in itself, abstracted from where the important developments are happening on the far right, and concentrating on street fights and/or re-enactment activities like Spanish Civil War commemoration. Not that those things aren't important, but they're not sufficient.

This is a great book. Sometimes I found the language a bit impenetrable, and I am a one-time social science academic. Sometimes the references are a bit obscure and unexplained - I had to read the book with my phone constantly to hand, to look things up. But these are quibbles. This book will inform and motivate those of us who struggle against the far right for years to come.

Review of "How I Grew" by Mary McCarthy

I picked this up for something to read at night, when I couldn't face reading "Post-Internet Far Right" as a I fell asleep. The idea was to find something interesting but not emotionally demanding, and it mainly did not disappoint in that respect. I'm not a fan of Mary McCarthy - so far I have not read any of her other books, though I may now. It's written from the perspective of an old person reflecting on childhood and youth, and the most interesting parts are where she engages with the fragmentary and unreliable nature of memories...where she admits that her memories can't possibly be right, because of other things that she knows or remembers. 

Some other aspects of the book are dull...her descriptions of her teachers at Vassar, who all seem old and dessicated (they were probably much younger than I am now), the books she read, how bad she was in the various am-dram things she did. But some depictions are really gripping - her accounts of 1920s sexuality, and her relationship to her own Jewish heritage and that of some friends. She's mildly antisemitic - it's a bit like the song in Cabaret, as she worries as to whether her grandmother really is unmistakeably Jewish in her looks, or is surprised that some of her pretty friends turn out to be Jewish even though they don't look it.

Strange afternote...I saved a picture of the cover design, but every time I touched it my laptop crashed. So this review is posted without a picture.

Review of "A Call to Spy"

 

It feels mean to be negative about this film, which is after all a tribute to some very brave women. But despite some graphic violence and some scenes of wartime courage, it has - as Rotten Tomatoes says "a surprising lack of tension". It's a bit dull. I checked my phone quite often as it went on.

Watched on Amazon Prime - we don't have it any more, but Louis does and he was visiting, so he cast it to our Chromecast.

Review of "The Fall of Roman Britain: and Why We Speak English" by John Lambshead

This is a really good work of popular history and science, bringing together scholarship from ancient history and modern population genetics, in an accessible form. And it makes sense of the some of the things in the conventional account of the history of Britain that have always been a bit hazy...in particular how did Roman and post-Roman Britain turn into Anglo-Saxon England? I won't attempt to summarize the argument here, but I found it convincing and well stated. I learned lots about the history of the Roman Empire too, even though I've read stuff in that area before. I can't recommend this strongly enough.

Review of "Ergot. The fungi that ate medieval Europe" by Theophrastus von Oberstockstall

I'd always thought of ergotism as slightly amusing - all those medieval peasants going on a mass acid trip and seeing hallucinations that inspired art and religious movements. Well, I won't think that any more. Ergotism is really ghastly, and the consequences for medieval Europe were horrible. Lots in the short book (more of a pamphlet really) about the impact on culture and medieval institutions. At 99p it's almost free - if you are at all interested in medieval history, or the relationship between humans and plants, then buy it and read it.

One small concern though - the author appears to have no online existence apart from this pamphlet, which makes me a little cautious. 

Review of "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson

This is sort of a sequel to Stephenson's Reamde, but only a little bit - some overlapping characters with back-stories from that book, and one or two from Cryptonomicon too. But it's a very different kind of book. Ream.de was very much an action thriller, whereas this is philosophical science fiction. Where Reamde is taut, this is a bit flabby, and sometimes I skimmed or had to force myself to keep reading. A shame, because the subject matter - uploading minds into a virtual world so that we can live after our physical-body death - is interesting and engaging. 

The virtual world here is more or less created, ex nihilo, by the eponymous Dodge (Richard Forthrast from the first book) after his mind is uploaded, and he then loses control over it as other minds join him there. Somehow the minds end up recapitulating the myths of ancient Mesopotamia (more or less) - remember that Stephenson was keen on that as far back as Snow Crash - and sometimes that just drags a bit. I lost track of some of the too-many characters at this point, and the way in which the virtual world was and was not constrained by the principles of physics started to get on my nerves. Glad I read it, and worth reading, but I do wish an editor had cut it by at least a third.

Review of "The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History" by David F Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson

Well, first of all, I loved this book. I don't always like graphic novels, but it seems to work well for this subject. It's a good way to convey all the different people (with little comic-style portraits) and threads and factions.

And I also have a big soft spot for the Black Panthers, not least because I have the impression that they were more socialist than Black Nationalist. This comes across really strongly in the films "Judas and The Black Messiah" and "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution", both of which I also liked.

But this is more of a warts-and-all portrait than either of those, and there's quite a lot to not like so much about the Panthers, honestly depicted here. The factionalism, which sometimes turned murderous. The gun thing - now I know that Black people with guns has a liberatory dimension, but it's hard to feel comfortable with how comfortable the Panthers seem to have been around guns. 

And this rather does raise questions about the meaning of "armed struggle" for revolutionary organisations. Proper armed struggle requires a military wing, and military wings attract people who like military stuff. If you are fortunate they are actually good at it, but either way it's really hard to subordinate them to an overall political strategy...I think that comes over in the story of the Panthers' ultimate failure. The same things seem to have consumed the white radical left too, as the history of the Weather Underground illustrates.

There were also factional disputes about the role of "the working class" and "lumpenproletariat" and criminal elements in bringing about the revolution. Some Panthers favoured the latter, and that clearly didn't work out well. Other Marxists have generally tended to view the lumpenproletariat as usually reactionary. In the context of American Black communities where workers have been generally excluded from the better working-class jobs, appealing to a simplistic idea of working-classness is not going to work. Micro-entrepreneurship is one of the routes to a livelihood for some, both legal and otherwise...the same thing happens in the cities of the Global South, where the formal "working class" is something of a privileged stratum. So I think the Panthers who wanted to recruit from criminals were ultimately wrong, but not obviously so.

It doesn't pull its punches or hide the details of where some of the Panthers ended up - Elridge Cleaver becoming a conservative Republican, for example, and Huey P Newton consumed by drug addiction. It's also really good on Cointelpro, J Edgar Hoover's anti-radical counterintelligence and infiltration program.

The book starts with a quick survey of pre-Panther Black political figures, and it's a shame to see Marcus Garvey and Wallace Fard (both reactionaries to the core) listed alongside W E B Du Bois (not a reactionary at all) with not even a hint of a critical distinction. Still, that is just one page - much of the rest, about SNCC and SCLC and so on is great, and very informative.

Review of "Regenesis" by George Monbiot

 

One of those rare occasions where I came to scoff and ended up being convinced. I went to hear him speak in Stroud as part of a promo tour for the book and wasn't so impressed, but I read the book anyway, and was simply overwhelmed by the quality and detail of the analysis. I wish I could still believe in regenerative grazing and low-impact animal agriculture, but I can't. I'm not a dogmatic vegan...not really a vegan at all. I could live without meat - I did for about twenty years, but I am really fond of dairy and quite like eggs. But sadly Monbiot has convinced me that animal agriculture is an ecological and planetary disaster, so I am going to have live without them.

There's an interesting section at the end on synthetic foods. During the talk this reminded me of Soylent Green, and of Simon Fairlie's account of James Lovelock's scenario in which much of the planet is rewilded but we are all shut out of it and fed a load of factory-produced food. In the book it's better...though I think if he's serious there should be some proper engagement with how this is going to happen without becoming the patented intellectual property of a few multinationals.

I guess that's the overall shortcoming of George...he's really great on pointing out in overwhelming detail why and how things are bad, and he's quite good at sketching out how they could be better. How to get from here to there isn't his thing.

Review of "The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies" by Jason Fagone

Nice enjoyable book about Elizebeth Smith Freedman, a cryptoanalyst women with an interesting life history, largely ignored by history in favour of her more famous husband William. Her career spans both World Wars as well as Prohibition, and she seems to have been a really nice woman, with a great professional and work ethic, nice interests and values, and a charming personality. I have to admit that I skipped over some of the more technical crypto bits - I'm sure others wouldn't even have found them very tricky, but it's never been my thing.

Review of Drumline

A film about the world of American college marching bands - specifically the bands of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. These are wonderful and terrible at the same time - amazing to look at, but part of a culture of dedication and discipline that is utterly alien to any British sensibility, even the British brass band sensibility, which has its own different culture of dedication, discipline and competitiveness. The band members are athletes as much as they are musicians, and the training is quasi-military and very physical. In the film at least they seem to spend more time doing physical exercise than practicing either their music or their moves.

Watching this was very much part of my covid experience - when I couldn't be bothered to do much else I could watch lots of American college marching band videos, which were sort of inspiring but also very very weird.

This is as much a sport movie as a music film...will the main character make the team? How will the rivalries between competing band be resolved, and who will win the title? 

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of Drumline: A New Beat

 

Surely enough with the American college marching bands now. This is a sequel to Drumline, set years later, but surprisingly little has changed in the world of the A and T marching band, or in the plot. Again someone (this time a young woman) joins the band's drummers, and there's a lot of will-she/won't-she be picked for the all important P1 grade that gets her to play at public perfomances. And the rivalries within and between bands, and so on. I liked the actual perfomance scenes, the rest of it was a bit dull for me.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "The Donation of Constantine" by Simon LeVay

This is not great literature, but it's an enjoyable historical novel about an unfashionable and murky episode in the history of the Roman Catholic church. The Donation of Constantine was (is?) a document forged in the early Middle Ages which appeared to underwrite the temporal power of the Pope. Even at the time some people thought it was dodgy, but it became accepted as a genuine document because it was so convenient. The book is not, to my mind, absolutely clear where it stands on this - some of the characters clearly think that the end justifies the means, and I think that's pretty much church doctrine.

There is quite a lot about miracles, saints and relics, and it reminded me firstly of Gibbon, who is absolutely scathing about this; and secondly, in a weird way, of the novel "Unquenchable Fire" (recently read), which is set in a future America after the advent of a new-age pagan religion...because it was obvious to me how awful and loathsome the superstitions of that religion were, though not to the characters in the book or perhaps even to the author - and because it's only the longevity of Christianity that makes its doctrines and narrative seem less absurd. 

Review of Reamde by Neal Stephenson

The perfect book to read during my covid experience...engaging and exciting but not at all emotionally demanding. This is a multi-threaded action thriller, with lots of characters and fantastic settings. It's huge, and I had a hardback that I had bought years ago but never got round to reading, partly because it always seemed so daunting to put in a backpack. But it was a fantastic bedside read. 

It's set against a background of cod-medieval MMPRGs like World of Warcraft, Russian cybercriminals, Chinese game farmers, smugglers, American gun nuts, jihadis...really, lots. And it's done so deftly, so that the characters don't feel like caricatures but are easy to keep track of - there are really lots, so that's important. I particularly like the wisecracking Afro-Welsh jihadi bad guy Abdallah Jones.

No need to elaborate more. There's a lot of guns and violence, and by the end it was all getting a bit much for me, but it's a very enjoyable read. I've just discovered there's a sequel, with some of the same characters and others crossing over from his other book Cryptonomicon, and I know that it's inevitable that I'll read it.

Review of One Halal of a Story by Sam Dastryadi

My dear friend Steve Norden gave us this book on his final visit to the UK from Australia, so I want to find things about it to like. The early chapters, about his parents' lives as radicals and revolutionaries in Iran, are interesting and enjoyable, and so are some of the bits about growing up as a foreign-born kid and wanting to fit in...it's a familiar tale, but he does it nicely. 

But suddenly he emerges as a fully-formed Austalian Labor Party right-wing backroom fixer. There's no intervening story, no account of how he went from the awkward foreign kid to the machine-politics operator. He doesn't seem to have any particular political passions, other than a vague desire that things not be quite so unfair for 'the little people'. He doesn't like backwoods racists like Pauline Hanson, and he's against banks doing bad things. His apparent surprise that big corporates wield a lot of political power would be laughable were it not for the fact that so many right-wing Labor (and Labour) types have probably never given this a minutes thought.

It's also not clear what his achievements are that allow him to rise so rapidly, and so young, through the ranks of the NSW and national Labor Party. So I searched for him, and found that his political career had ended under something of a cloud, with the suspicion that he had been an agent of influence for China within Australian politics, or that there had been petitions calling for him to be charged with treason. To be scruplously fair he does mention this in the book, rather in the way one would a failure of etiquette. 

Probably to be read as a piece of evidence in political history rather than as a way of learning much about the man or the politics of the period.

Review of Only Good Things (Solo Cose Belle)

An Italian film with potential that's not realised. In a beautiful small town an old lady leaves the family mansion to a charity that fills it with a foster family who take in refugees, disabled people and an ex-criminal youth. The good-looking but mildly corrupt local mayor has other plans for the mansion, but his daughter accidentally gets involved with the foster family (while spray-painting nasty slogans on the mansion wall) and falls for the ex-criminal young man.

Some nice moments but it never really takes off, and everyone's a bit too nice, even the rascally mayor and his social-climbing wife.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Love and Gelato

Not very interesting American YA romcom, in which a young nervous nerdy girl fulfills her mother's dying wish by making a trip to Rome, where she picks up the threads of her mother's life as a young woman - her fun-loving cousin-friend, her best bloke-buddy who she should have loved, the not-very-nice professor who was her lover, etc etc. And our young protagonist is wooed by two beautiful Italian young men, each eligible and ineligible in different ways.

Despite all this plot, and lovely settings, it's a bit dull.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "The School Teacher of St Michel" by Sarah Steele

First, to declare an interest. Sarah Steele is a friend and fellow Red Band member, and I had a tiny bit of input into the book - Sarah asked me some questions about some of the Jewish stuff, and I was able to save her from a few errors and also provide some details for Jewish remembrance customs; and I am thanked very kindly in the afterword acknowledgements for this.

Second, to provide a context. I don't think that I am in the target market for this book, which is a historical wartime novel with more than a touch of chick-lit in it...there's too much detail on the outfits that the women wear, and though I like cooking and anything to do with food, the way that it's introduced in the book didn't work for me.

And perhaps because of this, and the split narrative structure with some of the action in the present and some in the past, it felt like it took too long to get going. But when it did I found myself drawn in, and caring about the characters and what happened to them, and utterly gripped by the last third of the book. I even had to choke back a few tears at the end.

Nerdily I spotted at least one error that I had missed the first time round - French Easter does not in any way involve rabbits, chocolate or otherwise; that's just an Anglo thing. And I wondered a little about the extent to which the Vichy regime in unoccupied France would have felt like a safe or welcoming destination for Jews smuggled from the north...Vichy had its own racial laws and managed to deport 75,000 Jews to the camps for extermination. 

But these are quibbles really. I enjoyed the book and I'm looking forward to Sarah's next one.

Review of "Darling Lili"

Quite a bad film, but sort of enjoyable nonetheless. It's a WW1 spy film, with Julie Andrews as a singer entertaining the British and French troops behind the lines and in the field hospitals, but also being a German spy. I want to say that I can't remember a film in which Julie Andrews plays a villain, but there isn't really any sense that she is a baddie in this...she is in a relationship with top flyer Major Larrabee and trying to wheedle secrets out of him to pass (over the phone, implausibly) to her German handler, but there isn't really any sense that this is villainous or that it puts soldiers' lives in jeopardy. 

Much of the time it has the feeling of a Carry On film, particularly with the two comic French army intelligence characters, who spend much of their time falling off roofs and into ponds. In fact almost all of the French characters are played for laughs, though the Germans are to be taken seriously - some of them are sinister, some are quite likeable, especially the handler, played by Jeremy Kemp. 

The plot is mainly terrible, the acting pretty awful, but I am a bit of a Julie Andrews fan, and the songs and singing scenes are enjoyable. Afterwards I read the Wikipedia article, and saw that this had a huge budget - and you can see where it went, with really big crowd scenes and some quite good dogfight footage - but made very little money, though it won one award (for a Henry Mancini song) and was nominated for others. Perhaps they should have spent some of the huge budget on the writers, though I know that's not very Hollywood.

Unusually watched as hard disc recording at my mother-in-law.

Review of 'This Is Your Mind on Plants' by Michael Pollan

I read Michael Pollan's book on psychedelics and really liked it - this is a sort of companion volume, though rather slighter. It only covers a few psychoactive plant derivatives really - opium, caffeine and mescaline. But I enjoyed all three chapters. The one on opium mainly focuses on some of the weirdness of drug policy, which in the US resulted in the authorities deciding to ban the growing of freely available poppies (though not the seeds, because they had a culinary use) and the possession of freely available dried poppies, popular with flower arrangers - but then not to tell anyone, for fear of encouraging the use of the poppies to make opium, which is apparently quite easy. 

The chapter on caffeine has some interesting stuff, especially the personal account of an attempt at abstinence and the chemistry of how caffeine works, but it feels a bit padded with historical stuff that I knew already and I think is widely written about.

The mescaline one was shorter, less padded, and took on some interesting issues about the relationship between drug reform advocates who want to 'decriminalize plants', and Native Americans who want to preserve their own privileged and restricted access to the mescaline-bearing cacti, which is culturally and spiritually significant to them (but as part of a relatively recent made-up religion). Again, a great read, and of course he writes brilliantly about his own mescaline and peyote experiences, while acknowledging the difficulty of writing about such things.

Review of "The History of The Countryside" by Oliver Rackham

A magnificent book - I learned something on each page, and often in each sentence. Although this is an academic text rather than a 'popular' book he writes really well, and the text is full of beautiful anecdotes - some historical, some personal (like the fact that his college has a drinking vessel probably made from the horn of an auroch). It's organised thematically rather than chronologically, so there are chapters on woodlands, grasslands, heaths, and so on. 

I probably need to read it again to collect my thoughts on the main themes...but I certainly got that not much of the woodland in the UK is anything to do with the wildwood that once covered more of the island/s, and that there are other types of landscape of historical value worth preserving as well as woodland - not all forestation is a good thing. I'm going to look to see if there are any videos of him speaking - I'd vote for a TV series based on this any day!