Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship by Noam Chomsky (Black & Red, POB 02374, Detroit, MI 48202, 1997) 142pp. no price listed, paper.
Noam Chomsky needs little introduction these days, with his essays, books and public appearances proliferating throughout the world—or at least that part of the world with the least bit of critical social consciousness. However, Chomsky’s prolific output also means that even the most diligent of readers have often encountered only a portion of his published works. Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship is a new book-length edition of the seminal, lead essay from Chomsky’s first important (and now out-of-print) work of social criticism, American Power and the New Mandarins, which originally appeared in 1969.
Unmasking the lies of liberal scholarship, which continue unabated—though not unopposed—in our own time, in this essay Chomsky demolishes the self-serving accounts of the U.S.-Indochina War and the Spanish Civil War by the “new mandarins” in the U.S. universities of the 1960s. Chomsky notes that these university academics weren’t always in agreement with every detail of the near genocidal American policies in Southeast Asia that they served. But, all the same, they quite willingly turned their scholarship into one more set of weapons that eventually helped kill millions who stood in the way of American corporate and state power.
And, though liberal historian Hugh Thomas was not a direct sympathizer with Francisco Franco’s military/fascist takeover in the Spanish Civil War, Chomsky also details how his account of the complex struggle in Spain serves to obscure the heroic self-activity of the revolutionary masses of workers, both Marxist and anarchist.
For liberal academia the popular self-activity of common people counts for nothing. Always focusing on the activities and interests of political, military and economic elites, liberals can only interpret the world in terms of hierarchical power. And as such they always remain complicit with that power—and the mass death, social destruction and alienation which accompany it. -J.M.
Little Tenement on the Volga by C.S. Walton (Claudia Press, BM Claudia, London WC1N 3XX, U.K., 1995) 120pp. £5.99 paper ($10.00 postpaid from the publisher).
Little Tenement on the Volga is a witty, entertaining and relentlessly demystifying look at the realities of post-Soviet life in the formerly closed military city of Samara. If you read the selections from C.S. Walton’s previous books reprinted in the Spring/Summer & Fall 1994 issues of this magazine, you’ll already know that Claudia has an acute eye for important details and isn’t afraid to point them out even when it hurts. Unfortunately, in an out-of-the-way provincial city like Samara (despite being the sixth largest in Russia), this requires an at times exhausting listing of the deadening humiliations and indignities suffered by people (especially women) living in this miserable everyday reality. In Claudia’s ultimately pessimistic judgment, the tenement in which she lived “was a microcosm of provincial Russia. The inhabitants of both tenement and country are depressed and impoverished. Their fear kindles racist and authoritarian beliefs...When they can no longer find refuge in the bottle or the stars, they will seek it under the centuries-old heel of despotism.” -J.M.
Guy Debord is Really Dead by Luther Blissett (Sabotage Editions, BM Senior, London WC1N 3XX, U.K.) 40pp. £3.00 booklet.
Luther Blissett (a neoist multiple-identity) has written a semi-tribute to and semi-denunciation of the French situationist and would-be revolutionary Guy Debord who recently killed himself while suffering from ill health. Like his infamous colleague Stewart Home (although seemingly—in this incarnation—with a bit more knowledge of radical history), Blissett pursues something of a vendetta against the sins of the better known Situationist International group based in Paris, writing in defense of the less well-known group of situationist aesthetes based in Scandinavia (who had been ejected by their former comrades). Basically Blissett thinks that Debord might have been OK if he’d only have gotten along better with the less radical artists his faction ejected from the Situationist International. However, while it certainly appears that Debord was somewhat arbitrary if not dictatorial in his organizational behavior, it’s by no means obvious that the S.I. would have accomplished more had the artists of the German SPUR group or members of the Dutch S.I. section not been excluded. The subject of this booklet will be rather arcane for all but those with an extreme interest in obscure—but strategically important—radical history. -J.M.
Trips: How Hallucinogens Work in Your Brain by Cheryl Pellerin (Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts Street, New York, NY 10013, 1998) 262pp. $23.95 softcover
It has often been said that the first casualty in war is the truth. The same can be said about the ongoing war on drugs. A great avalanche of poorly written anti-drug propaganda has been published—I should know because I cataloged it at one time. What is really needed are some fresh materials on drugs, which clearly explain how drugs work and cut through all of the politics. Fortunately, Trips is a step in the right direction.
First off, it should be noted that Trips is lavishly illustrated with comics from the 60s and 70s, including comics by artists S. Clay Wilson, R. Crumb,Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Spain Rodriguez and many others. These old undergound comics greatly add to the book and evoke an era when hallucinogens were becoming widely popular. Ellen Seefelt contributes some excellent science illustrations, which are very helpful when the author explains the chemical processes behind hallucinogens.
One of the helpful things about Trips is how Pellerin explains the scientific process in layperson’s terms. She narrates several stories about scientists and research, such as Albert Hoffman, who discovered various synthetic hallucinogens, including the notable accidental discovery of LSD. Science is also a highly political process and it and research often gets swept away by public hysteria. Lots of bad policies are made based on misunderstandings of scientific discoveries and the research process. One example detailed in Trips is the process in the late 60s when LSD was demonized in the media, which led to it becoming a scheduled (illegal or controlled) substance. Scientists throughout the 60s had been performing thousands of studies on LSD and other hallucinogens, including research on using the drugs to treat alcoholism and mental diseases. A few published studies were taken out of context by the media and this was compounded by hysterical journalistic accounts that spread misinformation about drug-crazed hippies. The end result was that a useful, pleasurable drug was banned and almost all medical research on hallucinogens was stopped.
Trips also covers lesser known hallucinogens such as ayahuasca, DMT, psilocybin, igobaine, and many others. She explains how these substances work in the body, with lengthy explanations on neurochemistry and how the brain works. Pellerin gives us a tour through government agencies and their policies on drug use and abuse. This tour includes questions and answers from the author’s interviews with various officials. This tour is followed by a summary of current research and possible directions in the 21st century for hallucinogen research.
The book concludes with an excellent bibliography and a resource guide to Internet sites. The resource guide includes resources from all points of view—it’s encouraging that the author encourages readers to be skeptical about all information they come across, including “authoritative” websites.
It looks like the façade of Drug War lies is starting to crumble. One of the positive signs that people want accurate information and research into the effects of scheduled drugs is the widespread success in recent years of medical marijuana referenda. There is a great deal of misinformation out there about hallucinogenic drugs, most of it concocted by government agencies and spread by mainstream media and opportunistic politicians. Thankfully, Trips is an excellent antidote to the avalanche of Drug War misinformation. -C.M.
Dark Alliance: the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb (Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts Street, New York, NY 10013, 1998) 548pp. $24.95 hardcover.
If you read the alternative press on a regular basis, by now you’ve probably heard about Gary Webb’s explosive report on the CIA/Crack Cocaine connection that he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News. You may also be familiar with how pro-government newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post dismissed his series as old news and the stuff of African-American conspiracy theorists. They failed to mention that they never covered the CIA/Contra drug angle in the first place. After Webb had been dissed by the major newspapers, the Mercury News, in a cowardly move all too common these days at major newspapers, took Webb’s series off their website, and transferred Webb to a less desirable reporting post. Dark Alliance is an excellent attempt to tell the rest of the story about CIA and U.S. government complicity in the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Dark Alliance spins a riveting tale of political intrigue, drug smuggling, murder, betrayal—it’s too bad it really happened. The human toll from U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s was immense, not just in the hundred of thousands of lives lost in wars and by death squads. Cocaine and the hypocritical drug war fought against drug users, who are mostly poor, ruined millions of lives in the U.S. While there is no smoking gun that the U.S. government conspired to bring tons and tons of cocaine into African American communities, there is plenty of evidence that they knew about it and could have stopped it, but did nothing for political reasons. After all, the Contras were shipping planeloads of cocaine into the United States to make money to buy arms for their revolution against those evil communists. There were even DEA agents, government prosecutors and many others who attempted to halt the drug shipments, but were met by thunderous silence from the CIA.
The cast of characters in Dark Alliance is so numerous that it’s easy to lose count: DEA agents, drug smugglers, Contras, cocaine dealers, government officials, lawyers, and many more. Such is the nature of operations and events that spanned dozens of countries and spanned a decade.
The events behind Dark Alliance also include what happened to all of the imported cocaine. A fascinating character in the Contra cocaine pipeline, at least the part that funneled cocaine into California, is “Freeway” Ricky Ross, who started out as a small time dealer and ended up as one of the principal cocaine wholesalers in southern California. Of interest here is how he capitalized on the creation of crack cocaine and perfected the franchising and fast food-like marketing of crack to African Americans. The crack cocaine epidemic of the 80s and 90s is really a tale of capitalism run amuck. If anything shows what true free market capitalism would look like, sans government regulation or community roadblocks, the crack cocaine industry is a pure success story.
One of the underlying themes of Dark Alliance is the failure of mainstream journalism to cover this subject matter, either now or back in the 1980s when this information was being divulged in the Iran/Contra hearings. It’s not like the facts were hidden in classified government files. Any journalist reading the transcripts from government hearings or from numerous drug trafficker trials should have been able to piece together the bigger picture. It’s more frightening that journalists have been largely silent in the wake of the San Jose Mercury series and resultant backlash. This timidity doesn’t bode well for the future of corporate newspapers or the ability of the journalism profession to maintain any crticial indepedence.
Dark Alliance is probably one of the most important books on government wrongdoing in recent memory. It demonstrates that a government’s policies, and the illegal covert actions of those who purport to uphold those policies, can have terrible effects throughout the hemisphere and even boomerang back to harm the citizens of the provoking nation. -C.M.
Green Apocalypse by Luther Blissett & Stewart Home (Sabotage Editions, BM Senior, London, WC1N 3XX, U.K.) no price listed, booklet.
In Green Apocalypse Neoists Luther Blissett and Stuart Home attack the activists who publish the English magazine Green Anarchist, which has an ecological, primitivist slant not unlike a significant segment of the North American anarchist milieu. This particular booklet is part of an ongoing feud in which charges and counter-charges have been flying and in which both sides are doing their best to label the other fascist despite the fact that the label fits neither very well. Blissett and Home have the advantage in radical scholarship, (unscrupulous) sarcasm and subtlety of argument, while the Green Anarchist crew have more raw enthusiasm, a more traditionally left activist approach—in which theory takes second place to activism, and a conspiratorial interpretation of state intervention which allows them to believe that there may be more than meets the eye to those who attack and make fun of them like the Neoists. Although there are some important questions discussed here, this is unfortunately an insiders diatribe which will make little sense to those unfamiliar with the players. -J.M.
Thank You for Sharing: 20 Years of Quotes from Hollywood Foreign Press Interviews by Philip Berk (Brownell & Carroll, 3901 Mac Arthur Blvd., Suite 200, Newport Beach, CA 92660, 1996) 253pp. $12.95 paper.
Thank You for Sharing is a quintessential book for waiting rooms, bathrooms, or when your attention span is short and you’re not in the mood to think too much. All the same, even an extreme critic of cinema like myself—who believes that most movies should never have been made—will find a few short gems from the famous stars and directors in these pages, if you want to sift through the rest to find them. -J.M.
Conversations With Durito by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (Accion Zapatista, 707 Highland Ave. #C, Austin, TX 78703) 94pp. booklet, no price listed.
Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista indigenous insurgents (EZLN) of the Lancandon forest of southern Mexico often spends his free time creating unusual stories—besides issuing the predictable communiques one expects from radical military organizations. In this case he has created a beetle called Don Durito who models himself after Don Quixote while giving philosophical and strategic advice to Marcos, his Sancho Panza. These popular stories, available worldwide through the internet on the Chiapas95 list, have been collected in this pirate edition for the many Norte Americanos on this side of the Mexican border who would like to get a more intimate feel for one of the major personalities otherwise obscured by the extremely biased mainstream media coverage available in the U.S. and Canada. -J.M.
Arshile: A Magazine of the Arts (96 Tears Press, Los Angeles, CA, 1996) double issue $18.00 paper.
Here we have a fine example of arteriosclerosis on the fringes of academe. Arts council funding gets you a glossy cover and presto! Yoko Ono does a poem with holes that must have cost a pretty penny to produce. Arshile is billed as a magazine of the arts but actually its filled with poetry and not much else. Which brings me to the subject of arteriosclerosis. Once upon a time literature wasn’t shut up in its own “department”: it worked alongside politics, painting, philosophy, police raids, sexuality, insults, praise, and cultural dissidence in journals that offered things to do and places to go do it. Transformative action was the order of the day. But then along came academe and ways of doing that channeled the arts into specializations well divorced from the world. There they thickened and coagulated. Arshile is a very very very boring case in point. -Allan Antliff
The Umbrella of U.S. Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradictions of U.S. Policy by Noam Chomsky (Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts St., New York NY 10013, 1999) 78pp. $5.95 paper
The U.S. likes to quote from international laws and humanitarian principles such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD), but only when it serves U.S. foreign policy goals. In this new pamphlet from the Open Media Pamphlet Series, Noam Chomsky closely examines the Universal Declaration and how the U.S. has selectively used it or ignored it. What’s ironic is that the U.S. was the primary sponsor of the UD, which was unanimously adopted by the U.N. right after WW II. One of the key aspects of the Universal Declaration that the U.S. prefers to ignore is the language about economic rights. An example of this is how U.S. officials make a stink about goods made by prison labor in China, yet remain silent about the same practice in the United States. Prison labor is a violation of the UD. While the Universal Declaration has some noble principles, they aren’t much good if the “leader of the free world” consistently ignores them.
Acts of Aggression: Policing “Rogue” States with essays by Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, and Edward W. Said (Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts St., New York NY 10013, 1999) 62pp. $6.95 paper
What exactly constitutes a “rogue” state? If you a regular consumer of mainstream media, you are probably familiar with the usual suspects the U.S. regularly trots out: Libya, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Cuba. It looks like they can cross North Korea off the list, now that their nuclear missile “program” turns out to be an empty tunnel. As the authors of this wonderful, concise pamphlet point out, if the concept of “rogue state” is to be of any use, we have to examine how such concepts further American racist policies around the world, and how hypocritical the U.S. is in pointing fingers everywhere but at itself. Edward Said looks at American attitudes toward the Arab world and the tendency for the U.S. to puritanically punish any state or group that dares to interfere with U.S. interests. Noam Chomsky weighs in with an analysis on how the U.S. constructs the notion of “rogue states” and at the same time deflects attention away from its own wrongdoing. Special attention is paid to U.S. aggression against Iraq. Ramsey Clark examines how the U.S. continues to violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A great pocket guide to foreign policy.
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