"Ian Rankin once explained to an interviewer (the head of the Indian Communist Party!) that crime fiction is a way of talking about social inequality. Ron Jacobs applies that same maxim to the Sixties... in his wonderfully noir trilogy of those exhilarating and troubled times. And what Rankin does for Edinburgh, Jacobs amply illuminates for the Movement. Much much more than ripping yarns (though they are that too), from a master who's been there, done that, and lived to tell a tale or two."
--Ramsey Kanaan, Publisher PM Press/noir enthusiast
2 comments:
I have not read Nick Turse's book and therefor am mainly commenting on this one portion of your review of it.
'Two examples of the aforementioned arrogance and its consequences that come forth in this book revolve around the recently formed country called South Sudan. Despite helping to create the this new nation and installing its government, Washington is now supporting a rebel force trying to overthrow that entity.'
This formulation is quite wrong and tends to camouflage the real role that the US government played in dismembering the country of Sudan. Further, it glosses over the role of the US Left in actually supporting its own imperialist government's activities in demanding the dismemberment of Sudan, and by much of the Left's active call for the US to go to war with Khartoum!
The US and Israeli governments actively encouraged the growth of a cancerous appendage to the Western Left of something that called itself the 'Save Darfur' movement. It became quite the 'In Thing' for most liberals to call for 'intervention' by their governments (Canadian, US, and British most especially) against Sudan, which was actually a call for active US military bombing, invasion, and regime change in that country. Further, as was seen by the success at dismembering South Sudan away from the country of Sudan, it was a call for separatism in what was, and still is, a multiethnic Third World country. The Western Left was again coaxed into supporting active US imperialism in Africa and Asia by calls to be 'humanitarian'.
Nothing has changed from then to now for Darfur really, despite the once crescenting hysteria that it must be 'saved', but the movement calling for US interventionism there against Sudan's government has now been effectively dismantled and silenced. Why? The answer can be seen in that an evident deal was made by the US government with the Sudanese government, for Sudan to cede a huge portion of its former territory to rather direct US control in exchange for DC ending its threats to go to war with Khartoum. The 'Left' then went mum, as if on precise command by the US government!
How does the Western Left get so confused into actively supporting the US war machine? Much of the confusion flows from the Libertarian Left and assorted ex Trotskyist Lefties, who pictured Sudan as an imperialist society and the tribes that lived in the South as exploited minorities who must be granted self determination from that society, even though super imperialist Washington DC was the principal forcible actor behind the demand actually coming to occur.
To this day, I have yet to see any Western Leftists stating the obvious, that the US and its imperialist allies violated the self determination of all the African peoples living inside Sudan/ and now South Sudan's borders. My efforts to raise this issue on Louis Proyect's so called 'marxism list' simply led to me be thrown off the list shortly afterwards, and Sudan and South Sudan are not to be discussed elsewhere in Left or liberal circles elsewhere either. It is too incriminating as it tends to expose openly how the former antiwar forces in the US have been eroded into becoming now pro war Pentagon cheerleaders, from their active inactivity in working to build an anti militarism movement in the US.
This element of the Left was not left. It was liberal, as in Hilary and Bill Clinton, who can only be considered left by people who think the US Republican Party is moderate.
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