Book Review: Sundown Towns

Book: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

Author: James W. Loewen

An interesting dimension of racism, and American racism in particular, is that when whites are confronted with it, their reaction is often to blame the victims of its injustice for creating racism in the first place. To them, blacks create the racism merely by protesting or highlighting that racism. I have found this to be particularly true with reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement and the counterprotests against the recent ugly resurgence of blatant white supremacy. In fact, I recently heard one conservative activist, Sandy Rios, claim that celebrities raising money for hurricane victims are “stoking the fires of racism.” Perhaps it is racism provoking the fires of racism?  Racists have become emboldened by a president whose racism is well-documented and whose dog-whistles provide ample cover for him to retreat from accusations of support for white supremacy.

While I was reading this book, Trump launched into one of his rambling monologues, this time in front of the Boy Scouts of America, and talked at length and with great admiration about William Levitt, the founder of Levittown (including the infamous “he had a very interesting life. I won’t go any more than that . . . Should I tell you?” lines). It was interesting for me to read about Levittown’s segregation while at the same time hearing Trump express admiration for the man who forbade the resale of properties to blacks and Jews. Trump’s family also famously refused to sell to blacks, something which the man has never expressed regret or shame for. In short, Trump is one manifestation of the de facto segregation that Loewen documents in this book.

While I did learn a great deal from this book, the most interesting thing that I learned was that Sundown Towns were far more common in the north than in the south. That shook up and rearranged a lot of what I thought I knew about this topic. I was fascinated by this book, and its importance cannot be minimized. The links between the nadir, lynching, segregated housing policies, and racism should not be denied.  The continued impact these events have had on black/white relations should not be ignored.

The narrative that is told by many whites to justify or ignore casual racism is one that tells a story of lazy entitled blacks who lack the drive or knowledge to get themselves out of poverty. This is why they are often heard commenting about how long ago slavery was, implying or stating the need for blacks to “get over it.” Reading a book like this could do a great deal to upend that narrative and allow an open-minded reader to see that black Americans are doing amazingly well despite the barriers they have faced and continue to face.

Clearly, and Loewen admits this, more research needs to be dedicated to this area of history. It is a challenging thing to research, given that most towns tend to bury such history and written documentation is scarcer than is ideal. However, honestly and bravely exploring this history could do a lot to move forward in healing the wounds that American racism continues to inflict on that country.

 

Book Review: The War in 2020

The War in 2020

by Ralph Peters

3 stars out of 5

This book is horrible. It has it all: a flimsy plot, racist stereotypes, hackneyed dialogue, flag-waving jingoism, gaping plot holes, and flat characterization. I’m forgetting something. Oh yeah, dumbassery. There is a whole lot of dumbassery in this book.

I know what you’re doing right now. You are looking from this review to the number of stars I gave the book and back again.

“How in tarnation can he give this pap a three star rating if it’s such a terrible book?” you’re saying as you stroke your chin.

If you’re not stroking your chin at this point, it would be a good time to start.

Anyway, to answer the question, I can give this pap a three star rating because for some stupid reason I enjoyed it. There, I said it. I enjoyed this racist chest-thumping nationalistic excuse for a book.

Other bad things that I enjoy:

– Pizza pockets (generic brand).

– Steven Seagal movies. Really? Yes. Really.

– Chad Kroeger’s beard.

– The music of Maxi Priest.

– Microwaved hot dogs.

– Reading youtube comments despite the oft-heard and wise advice to avoid them.

– Cheetos.

– King of Queens.

– The music of Kenny Rogers.

– Chick flicks.

– Reading craigslist’s missed connections.

– Roast pheasant . . . oh wait, how’d that get on the list? *laughs snootily*

Ralph Peters has some admirable skills as a writer, a flare for engaging drama, and some rather interesting ideas about how the future circa 1991 would unfold. It is worth the read just for the joy of seeing just how bizarre and beautiful his speculation was.

Anyway, this book sucks and I like it.

Book Review: Invisible Armies

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

I was excited to read this book, the praise it had garnered and the subject matter it deals with are enough to increase the heart rate of any popular history enthusiast.

Alas, it did not take long for Mr. Max Boot to disappoint. *aside* – even the author’s name is cool: Max Boot – I had such high hopes! *aside complete* Max Boot gives a cursory examination of each period in history and deals with each area with such superficial care that I was left knitting my brows at the end of each chapter, surprised that I had reached the end of a chapter when nothing substantial had really been said. Moreover, I am by no means an historian, so the idea that I was able to discover embarrassing errors in his book is shameful. For example, in his chapter on highland warfare, Boot claims that kilts were useful for Medieval Scottish warriors who engaged in guerilla warfare. This is quite the claim, since kilts were not invented at that time. I checked his source, and it was a book about Rob Roy (you know, the late 17th early 18th century outlaw). Terrible. It seems like Mr. Boot was inspired more by the notoriously inaccurate depiction of Scots in Braveheart than by anything resembling good scholarship. His chapter on the tribes of the steppes was abysmal. Again he applied specifics of one time period to the entirety. Not only that, but he talks about the slave-soldiers employed in the Middle East as something entirely separate from the Mamluks, whose origins he is clearly unfamiliar with (hint: they were slave-soldiers). How much else has Boot gotten wrong? I would be curious to see the results of a thorough fact-check, although I would not wish that unenviable task on my worst enemy (who also somehow turned out to be a fact-checker? Weird, I know).

When it comes to modern history, Max Boot’s ideological leanings become readily apparent. He is a conservative, a shill for the US Military, and a man who is decidedly uncritical of American interventionism and imperialism. I would have had no problem reading history from this perspective if Mr. Boot offered any kind of nuanced view that offered more when it came to explanations of resistance. Unfortunately, the author is not equipped to do this. It seems to me that Mr. Boot reads his sources as lists of facts that it is his job to draw conclusions from, whereas proper historiography would recognize that the “facts”themselves can biased or constructed badly. How did this man obtain two history degrees? Why on earth is he considered an expert on anything? I realize it would be way too much to ask that the author work with a definition of terrorism that includes state terror, so I won’t even go there.

Awful.

If forced to say something positive about the book, I will concede that Max Boot is just about the coolest name this side of the Atlantic. Max Boot. The name sounds like the protagonist in some pulp fiction novel about a hard-boiled detective. Unfortunately, Max Boot is not the author of his name, just the author of this amateurish work. So props to Max Boot’s parents and none to Max Boot himself.

Book Review: Inside the Third Reich

Albert Speer was an actual, literal, piece of shit.

And, yes, I am aware I have abused the word “literal” here. But my point stands. Albert Speer was a literal walking piece of fecal matter.

I probably shouldn’t lead with my amateur armchair psychological evaluation, but what the heck? I’ll give it a try. Speer was a sociopath who entered into a mutually beneficial relationship with a psychopath.

Is it worse to do evil without recognizing it as evil or to do evil, recognize it at evil, and still do it? Ideologues consistently do evil, and they are shitty people for doing so. But a man who knows what is right and wrong and still does what is wrong is that much shittier.

Here he is, this master of details, this genius with numbers and memory and documentation, and somehow the murder of six million Jews escapes his notice? Speer was one of Hitler’s intimates. He met regularly with Goebbels, Himmler, and the rest of their Nazi ilk and somehow we’re supposed to believe that the pervading atmosphere of bloodthirsty Anti-Semitism escaped him? The sinking feeling that I got while reading Speer’s self-absorbed ramblings was that this book only serves as further fodder for Holocaust deniers. Speer never tires of explaining his genius for outmanoeuvring his political opponents, and yet it is the reader whom he is attempting to outmanoeuvre in this book.

Speer has a few things going for him: he is charming, cultured, intelligent, and detail-oriented. He uses his charm to dress up his lies with enough truth, enough detail, that the reader is lulled into a false sense of security. Speer is a genius here – he knew that no one would believe that he reached such a high level in the Nazi government without some dirt and blood on his hands. So, rather than claiming complete ignorance or feigning innocence, he confesses a sort of limited responsibility. He, the good Nazi, had tried to reason with Hitler, he had tried to stop abuses against the prisoners in the factories, but he had not done enough. He had circumvented Hitler’s orders to save German infrastructure and factories. He was astounded when he finally learned the extent of the abuses against the Jews, if only he had done more to educate himself. His mistake was to be willfully blind. Now he is the contrite criminal, bowing and scraping to please the reader just as fervently as he bowed and scraped for Hitler. He comes out as a sort of tragic anti-hero, the man who did too little, the Nazi with a conscience who got lost in details, the criminal with a tear in his eye. He is none of these things. The entire book is a testament to his ability to manipulate.

Speer extended the war by two to three years, if his testimony about his own role as Minister of Armaments is to believed. In extending the war, he also extended the number of murders in the death camps. What a piece of shit.

Speer knew. He had heard Hitler’s speeches. He had read the newspapers. He regularly talked with Goebbels and he worked closely with Himmler. He dined with Hitler and spent a significant amount of time with him. He clearly liked Hitler. Furthermore, despite his protestations, it is abundant from his writing that he still likes him. Speer, a man who could account for every single ball bearing, could not account for what would happen to the Jews he evicted from Berlin? He could, and he did. A personal correspondence revealed in 2004 reveals that he knew what was happening. Documentation found in 2005 by Berlin historian, Susanne Williams, shows that far from being the “good Nazi”, Speer was a driving force behind the Final Solution. The May 1943 report, with extensive notes from Speer in its margins, refers to a “Prof Speer special programme.” The intent of this programme was to expand the capabilities of Auschwitz to become a death camp.

It is clear that Speer killed the Jews twice. Once he killed them in the concentration camps with a few strokes of his pen, his indifference, and his own active participation. Then the arrogant Speer killed them again by denying what he had done in a cowardly attempt to save his own life and legacy. These lies he told only serve as fodder for other Germans to claim ignorance. After all, if Hitler’s second didn’t know, then how could the average citizen? These lies also serve those who would seek to exculpate Nazism from its crimes, the Holocaust deniers.

Martin Kitchen put it very well in his biography of Speer:

It was [Speer] who evicted and expropriated the Jews of Berlin—an audacious crime that had no basis in law and which made thousands of Jewish families homeless—and he who engineered their deportation—of which he later disclaimed all knowledge. It was he who, working closely with [Heinrich] Himmler’s SS, played a key role in the creation of the Nazi concentration-camp system, initially to provide stone for his building projects, later to make arms. The building of crematoria at Auschwitz was “Professor Speer’s special program.” Not only did Speer know what lay in store for the Jews in the camps: he was one of the key individuals who made the genocide possible.

His own anti-Semitic outbursts may have been less crude than [those of] other leading Nazis, but his empire employed millions of slave laborers, thousands of whom were deliberately worked to death. Speer lied about almost every aspect of his role in the Third Reich. But the biggest lie was that he had tried to prevent its worst excesses. Speer had been closer to Hitler, and had more opportunities to stop him, than anybody else. He never even tried.

So what kind of rating do you give a book that has fed the propagation of such a big lie, the idea that so many Germans readily latched onto, that they had no idea what was going on?

I give it 4 stars for readability and interest.

I give it 3 stars as a book of historical importance, with the caveat that any reader should triple check anything that Speer claims.

And I give it 1 star because Speer was a shithead who loved Hitler and murdered Jews. The 1 star wins here, because historical truth and ethics and all that.

Book Review: Best Served Cold

Book Review: Best Served Cold

The First Law Series #4

By Joe Abercrombie

Once in a while, I like to read fantasy. They are the jelly beans, nay, the potato chips of my literature consumption. Delicious, addictive, and not all that good for me. Joe Abercrombie is the author of a subgenre of fantasy known as scoundrel lit or unheroic fantasy. Basically, there are a lot more gritty antiheroes with ugly faces and skewed moral compasses than you might find in your traditional fantasy title. Actually, there are 100 per cent more gritty antiheroes with ugly faces and skewed moral compasses.

In my typically clumsy way, I randomly selected one of Abercrombie’s books from the shelf at the bookstore. After flipping it over several times uselessly, I came to the conclusion that it was a standalone book and not part of some trilogy that would involve the investment of hours and hours of reading. Now, if I had spent more time reading the cover, I would have realized that the particular book I had selected was the fifth in the series. So, I started with book five before going back to books 1-4. Now that I have done it, I do recommend reading a series out of order. It makes everything that much more postmodern as later reading fills in gaps, connections are made, and you basically create your own flashbacks.

Joe Abercrombie does a few things very well: writing interesting characters and creating vivid action scenes. He switches from character to character, changing voices throughout. Some readers mistake his rougher, less grammatical sequences for poor writing when in actuality it’s the voice of that particular character coming through.

There are moments, however, that I’ve read a few things that made me think that the editor should have been a little more meticulous. For example, in this particular book, Abercrombie refers to someone receiving their “just deserts.” I had to read the passage several times and then my mind wandered off into what exactly a just desert might look like.

My mind almost immediately went to Dante’s Inferno. I have been commissioned by a friend of mine to do an artwork based on the Inferno section of Dante’s Divine Comedy. For me, one of the most interesting things about Dante’s Inferno is how each level of hell has a punishment tailored to a particular sin. Those who were lustful, for example, are blown about violently by strong winds in the same way that they allowed their passions to rule their lives. A just desert, then, would be the desert that someone justly deserved. This led me to the question of what Donald Trump’s desert might look like. What kind of desert would a bloviating narcissist and overall turd be presented with?

There would have to be a lot of walls for him to climb over. It would be a healthcare desert, of course. It would also be completely barren of women. In fact, there would only be other fat greedy men competing for the same sparse resources. All the other fat greedy men would be slightly fitter, smarter, and stronger than Trump, making it exceedingly difficult for him to obtain anything. He could do work for them, but they would not pay him. When he complained, they would just tell him how much smarter they are than him while they violently shook his hand and/or grabbed him by his genitals.

Wait, what was I talking about? Ah yes, the book. This particular book is probably my least favourite of the series. If you’re into revenge you might like it. I did enjoy parts of it, just not quite at the same level that I enjoyed the previous books. I think my favourite part was thinking about “just deserts.” I do hope Trump gets his.

*edit* I have since learned that “desert” is also an archaic word referring to the word “deserved.” Thus, “just desert” can mean “something deserved.”