Summer Reading for the Activist in You

By Geov Parrish, WorkingForChange.com. Posted May 12, 2003.

While you've been out protesting the Bush Administration's abominable, unprovoked invasion of Iraq, a number of new books have come out that deserve consideration by the literate (or simply new) activist. This weekend, here are three of the better ones -- and one really bad one.

Having done the same for nuclear weapons in 1982's "Fate of the Earth", Jonathan Schell sets out to write the definitive narrative of the past and potential of nonviolent people power in "The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People". As any cursory reading of this feature's daily history notes might guess, it's an enormous task -- analogous to writing the history of warfare. But while any attempt to take a Howard Zinn "People's History of the United States" approach to the history of the world is by definition spotty, Schell's greatest contribution is in also examining where such approaches could lead us.

For Schell, the utility of drawing lessons from non-military solutions to conflict, from the Greeks to (especially) Gandhi and MLK, is in contrasting them with civilization's development of increasingly deadly military strategies -- and their inherent drawbacks in the 21st Century. Schell believes Americans have shortchanged the power demonstrated in the nearly bloodless fall of dozens of despotic regimes, from communist to military to fascist, since 1985 -- including several installed by the United States and, most spectacularly, the entire Soviet bloc. In the dangers of brute force, he very much has American Empire in mind: "The danger, now as in other times, is that democracy's basic nonviolent principles, so promising for the peace of the world, can be undermined by the very power the system generates, bringing itself as well as its neighbors to ruin."

Schell emerged, with Fate, as a global leader of the nuclear abolitionist movement, and he continues to have weapons of mass destruction very much on his mind. He credits Bush, in casting about for post-9/11 rationales, for correctly pegging WMDs as a serious problem, but thinks Bush's Pax Americana solution is ludicrous. Only cooperative approaches can solve it: "The days when humanity can hope to save itself from force with force are over." And he credits "cooperative power" and the nonviolent activism it suggests as being not only morally powerful, but being the only practical and effective way to counter overwhelming brute force.

Schell is after Big Questions and Big Answers here; the result can sometimes be astonishing overgeneralizations. But his concise, lucid prose and his exploration of both the history and potential of nonviolent, cooperative politics are welcome contributions to the far too small collection of books in this genre. People despairing for an alternative to George Bush's militarism will find it invaluable.

Two other fine new books I've read of late deserve a plug in this space. Now that Iraq has been liberated and the neocons are busy deciding who's next -- rather than whether there should be a next -- it's hard to imagine a more important book to read than Chris Hedges' new, devastating critique of war's addictiveness, "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning". This book will do the impossible: change how you think about war. Hedges, a New York Times reporter who spent nearly two decades in war zones from El Salvador to Kosovo, calls himself a recovering war addict, and he describes in riveting detail the horror and seductiveness of combat, both at an immediate personal level and for whole societies.

Hedges is not a pacifist; he avers that war is sometimes necessary, and his devastating description of the civilian impact of the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo before international forces got around to intervening makes his point compellingly. But his is a cautionary tale that war be not only a last resort, but a very, very, very last resort. The chicken hawks now running our country should step away from the photo ops, give back their borrowed uniforms, and be forced to recite whole chapters of Hedges' book, from memory, at the next ten National Security Council meetings. As for the rest of us, if you want to understand the fever and the disease that has overtaken Bush's America, read this book.

"Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor" is hard for me to review with total objectivity, because of its two editors; I've edited the writing of one, Tara Herivel, and corresponded for years with the other, the invaluable Prison Legal News co-publisher (and lifer Washington state inmate) Paul Wright. So take my somewhat slanted word for it: "Prison Nation" is chock-full of outstanding essays, by authors you'll know and authors you'll want to know, that span the range of prison issues and activism. It's as good an overview of Gulag America as has come out since, well, Wright's "The Celling of America, with the difference that in the years since "Celling" prison populations have continued to increase (despite dropping crime rates), civil liberties have continued to be trashed, and, with the budget crises and social safety net destruction afoot in all 50 states, the nature of America's prisons as a vicious form of class warfare has never been clearer.

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