For those interested in charting the currents of domestic terrorism, a well-reported if dispiriting chronicle.
In the shadow of Charlottesville, a journalistic account of some of the extreme right’s players.
Evil is not entirely banal, but it is entirely commonplace. Aided and abetted by the rise of Donald Trump, the extremist white-nationalist movement has been gaining strength, its numbers swelled by “the marginalized, disaffected, and lost [who] were the radical right’s ideal audience.” What’s in it for them? Writes journalist Tenold, who covered the Anders Breivik case in his native Norway—Breivik, “a man who believed that the white race was at war,” massacred 77 summer campers—the payoff is belonging in a movement where they no longer “feel invisible.” Does that moment ever really come? For the rank and file, perhaps not; one whom the author profiles aspires to nothing more than a double-wide, a wife and kid, and a gun. The leaders, formerly shadowy types now propelled onto the main stage, are cashing in more handily as they harp on the supposed victimization of the white race in the hands of its nonwhite enemies. Some of these leaders are comparatively polished; the star of the show, a supremacist Tenold calls Matthew, thinks himself a scholar and is impatient with unsophisticated Klan and neofascist types whose political commitment extends to shouts of “white power!” Matthew cut his teeth in a pro–Western civilization group at college, fell in with supremacists at—naturally—the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, and moved from pondering the “Jewish question,” which “boils down to whether Jews should be considered white and what their place in (white-led) society should be,” to propagandizing for a nationalist utopia. Thankfully, Tenold avoids the dangers of normalizing monsters even as he admits to liking Matthew’s “upbeat and friendly” manner. In the end, the author wonders whether the extremists are not superfluous given that “white supremacy is doing just fine without the far right.”
For those interested in charting the currents of domestic terrorism, a well-reported if dispiriting chronicle.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56858-994-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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