Book Reviews: Demonstrated Ideals

By Naomi Klein, AlterNet. Posted April 25, 2003.

Two years ago, I was invited to the South Australian desert to meet a group of Aboriginal elders who were fighting a radioactive waste dump on their land. I went to Coober Pedy expecting to be bombarded with alarming facts about toxic waste leaking into groundwater, cancer risks and the half-life of radium. Something else happened instead. Immediately upon my arrival, I was scooped up by a group of young environmentalists who dressed like "Mad Max" characters and took me camping.

For five nights we slept by a bonfire on the cracked red earth under the stars. During the days they showed me secret sources of fresh water, plants used for bush medicines, hidden eucalyptus-lined rivers where the kangaroos come to drink. It was amazingly beautiful, but by the third day I started getting restless. When, I asked 22-year-old Nina Brown, were we going to get down to work? She replied that the senior Aboriginal women, who called themselves the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, had taught her that before you can fight, you have to know what you are fighting for.

I learned two lessons from that experience. The first was the one Nina intended for me to learn: We activists, whether grass-roots organizers, researchers or theorists, tend to hop from one atrocity to the next -- sweatshops, poisons, sickness, war -- until we are pickled in horrors. Gradually, our beliefs, rather than flowing from love for what we are protecting or building, start to flow from more dangerous sources: rage and bitterness.

The second lesson had to do with the importance of mentoring. Effective political activism may not be a science, but it is a skill, one that needs to be shared among generations and cultures. Here I was, absorbing ancient wisdom from a woman eight years younger than I. She learned it because she found herself in a culture that had a powerful oral tradition, and a group of women in their 80s had patiently taken the time to pass it on to her.

I thought about Nina when the bombs started falling on Baghdad. On the day the war began, I found myself in another red desert, this one in Patagonia, in southern Argentina. We were there filming a documentary, and our hotel didn't have Internet access or English-language news. For two bleak days, I alternated between watching Wolf Blitzer dubbed into Spanish on CNN en Espanol and reading the only book I had with me, a review copy of Todd Gitlin's "Letters to a Young Activist."

I turned to the book in desperation, not only as a reprieve from el Blitzer but also in the hope that the author, a wonderful media critic and accomplished historian, would provide some clue as to how those of us who are opposed to this war might confront the deadly explosions on TV. In the '60s, as president of Students for a Democratic Society, Gitlin was part of a movement that played a role in ending the Vietnam War. Now, with "Letters to a Young Activist," he promises to pass on those lessons to the generation that is fighting new wars, and the economic agendas behind them, on the streets of New York and San Francisco.

And we activists, the young and not so, certainly do need advice, both practical and philosophical, not just about how to stop future attacks like the one we just witnessed in Iraq, but about how to build genuinely broad-based, effective movements. How, for instance, do we balance the need to fight global atrocities with the need to build hopeful alternatives? How do we offer meaningful international solidarity without ending up supporting either religious or nationalist extremism? How do we deal with escalating attacks on our right to dissent, from mass arrests of activists to infiltration of our organizations?

Gitlin, sadly, has little interest in tackling the big questions facing activists today. His letters amount to little more than mushy Sixties 101 nostalgia and nasty, one-sided attacks on everyone who has ever disagreed with him. The Black Panthers and the Weathermen get blamed for the collapse of public support for the civil rights and antiwar movements. Ralph Nader and the Greens couldn't possibly have had any principled reasons for not working to elect Al Gore. And Noam Chomsky's insistence on connecting the Sept. 11 attacks to past U.S. foreign policy is nothing more than pathological anti-Americanism. And on and on. Familiar stuff. In fact, it is the very same stuff anyone who has read Gitlin's op-eds in the New York Times, the Washington Post and this newspaper will have already read. Some decent rants, but timeless wisdom this is not.

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