A sobering analysis of geopolitics and current events.
“To be hated is a consequence of being great and powerful. It can be remedied not by becoming gentler, only by becoming weaker.”
So writes Laqueur (Center for Strategic and International Studies; The New Terrorism, 1999, etc.), a longtime, and prescient, student of terrorist movements through history. In this survey, he ranges over some of those movements—the IRA and the Irgun against the British, Algerian independence fighters against French pieds-noirs, anarchists against capitalists—to discern the patterns of organization and action that define what strategists term the “asymmetric warfare” of terrorism. Real wars, writes Laqueur, are expensive, but terrorism is relatively cheap and open to all comers, which means that terrorism as we now know it “will be with us for as long as anyone can envision, even if not always at the same frequency and intensity” as it raged in September 2001. That month brought to America a horrendous fact that much of the rest of the world has known for a long time: citing the Indian subcontinent as a likely flashpoint for terrorist movements in the coming years, Laqueur observes that the number of victims of terrorism in the single Indian state of Tripura “was larger in the 1990s than that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a fact that few world media or governmental figures have bothered to explore. Laqueur explores this imbalance while calmly insisting that terrorism is an ineradicable fact of modern life—and calmly reassuring American readers than there is no good evidence to suggest that we’re any more hated than any other imperial power of the past or present. Even so, that will come as small comfort to those who envision happier times ahead, for, Laqueur argues, “there is a huge reservoir of aggression” out there, thanks to which “the combination of paranoia, fanaticism, and extremist political (or religious) doctrine” on which terrorism feeds will only blossom in the years to come.
A sobering analysis of geopolitics and current events.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8264-1435-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Continuum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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