A diffuse but sharp argument against the countless dangers of too much belief in the unproven and unseen.
Political analyst Sexton traces the current wave of know-nothing radicalization over centuries of world history.
By this occasionally wandering account, there’s a straight line between QAnon beliefs and the book of Revelation. One tenet of apocalypticism, writes the author, is that when they were in control of the narrative, “Christians believed they were engaged in an active and dire war against the literal personification of evil,” as opposed to the Jewish view of Satan as a metaphor. As such, evil people had to be dispatched, as when Charlemagne ordered the beheading of 4,500 Saxons who refused to convert to Christianity. The differences multiplied: Antisemitism flourished, Protestants hated Catholics and vice versa, and bizarre ideas became mainstream. For example, during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, updated to blame the communist revolution on a partnership between Bolsheviks and a ‘secret Jewish society’ working to ‘have the whole world…in their grip’ and destroy Christianity,” enjoyed broad circulation. Later, Henry Ford’s version of that strange screed became must reading for right-wingers, with the added layer that changes in baseball rules and jazz broadcast on the radio were instruments of Jewish mind control. It’s a small stretch to get from there to the belief that the basement of a pizza parlor was the locus for a pedophilia ring that only a Bible-worthy savior could oust given that “many Americans were primed to believe in anything, no matter how ridiculous or supernatural.” Thus Trump, Bannon, Orbán, and the like are ascendant or waiting for a new moment. “Forces are hard at work to try to rewind time and reinstall theocratic, authoritarian rule based on weaponized faiths that once ruled the world,” writes Sexton. Against this, he urges, it’s up to the reality-based community to combat the big lie and its many tentacles.
A diffuse but sharp argument against the countless dangers of too much belief in the unproven and unseen.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-18523-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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