Heroes for a New Age: On "The 'S' Word" by John Nichols

When I was in college, a friend let me borrow a copy of Zinn’s people’s history. In those pages I learned about Columbus treating the Arawak Indians worse than his dogs, but I also learned hope in the words of Eugene Debs and the millions that voted for him over several years.

It was part of history that just wasn’t part of the history they teach, the gloss over where in high school I wrote dates of things in my notebooks from sheets on the wall, or projections on the overhead. There was less about history as a dynamic process but a procession of dates that led to the end of history about 1993. Of course, I graduated high school in 2000 so there was triumphalism – the only global conflicts were based on figuring how to break apart the Soviet Bloc.

There is another history, and they have been deliberately forgotten from the pages of the history books that we use to teach the kids in school. Books like Zinn’s and Nichols’ are remedies for the History of the Victors. This book is for all the kids who look around and see injustice and inequality and ask what they can do to make it better. This book gives heroes that you may have read about on one line of text. Or you may even have spent a week with Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” in school, but you never knew he was a true revolutionary and his influence has ebbed and flowed, waxed and waned, and been misappropriated by those who want to grab his name and hide behind it. This book also gives you new heroes Like Victor Berger standing up for real free speech in times of fear when dissent was punishable by imprisonment. It also shines new light on heroes like Lincoln, and we can trace how his party went from a radical party of the people to receding to being a party of the powerful.

The only real drawback is that the book feels as if it was written for a time of socialism in ascendancy – Bernie Sanders gets positive notice here, but it predates the 2016 election and Bernie’s ultimately unsuccessful run for the presidency and Trump’s eventual election. This puts the movement on a different, more defensive footing reacting to the whims of the Tweeter-in-Chief. No matter. For every dusk there is dawn. We can look for hope in the rise of the DSA and leftists in real opposition and not quited by uncomfortable support of the capitalist party that is closer to the ideals of the left.

On Tyranny: The Threat Isn't Symmetric

I picked this up at the book store after having previously picked it up and put it down on a different visit.

It reminds me of the books that the right was talking about in the aftermath of the 2008 election, looking at the Rules for Radicals and The Road to Serfdom and totems that need to be held tightly to avoid the bad and turn the way to the good. I don’t know if we’re more politicized or not, but on this trip, I couldn’t help but think the Trump election had to be good for booksellers. Or maybe not. Perhaps most of these political books are more bought than read so as to claim allegiance to a tribe.

This book does show allegiance, but in a nice turn, it never directly addresses just what or whose tyranny we need to be on the lookout for, and how to avoid it, but it does just hover there ever so slightly. It is a small book both in terms of pages and the physical dimensions – making it a bit hard to hold in your hands but meaning that it is a quick read. It does feel timely, giving advice on twenty specific ways to avoid and be vigilant for and against. The hope is that we never have to use it, but the point is that tyranny creeps in but doesn’t announce itself. My only criticism is that it warns of oppression from the left and the right, but we know which side prompted him to write.

Mieville's October: What is to be Done?

This is the year we look back.

It’s a nice round number, and long enough ago that we have some distance.

The state that sprung up from the revolution is long enough ago that we can have discussions of what it meant without the baiting of the reds. Or we can for the most part.

Mieville does a good job here as a storyteller. I myself only knew the broad strokes of the timeline, not realizing how much time passed from the initial phases of the revolution to the place where the Bolsheviks took power. 

What really struck me was how much Lenin was in the background – hiding but providing the argument and not really at the physical front. 

Structurally, I like that the story doesn’t end at the storming of the palace, and there is the list of the major figures. We can see both the promise of the revolution and how much was lost in the purges.

It just forces the questions – can it happen again? Can it happen here?