You have arrived at the website associated with Namaste, Motherfucker! magazine. I describe said publication as a Benzine because, though it has featured some wonderful guest authors in the past, everything in it is usually written by yours truly, Ben Terrall. Over the years various characters suggested that I establish a web foothold for the mag. For many years I resisted that well-meant but often annoying advice. My thing has always been about putting out a print publication with snappy cover art and plenty of pages to plow through, a relic of the 20^th Century that you can treasure for life, or at least a lunchtime or two.

However since my goal of global conquest via the magazine racks of supermarkets across this fucked-up country of ours has not worked out as planned, and my friend Julie Ann has been kind enough to set this thing up, here I am in cyberspace. Exciting! Or not, you decide.

I certainly hope you enjoy at least a sentence or two of what you find here. Most of the featured essays and reviews originally appeared in CounterPunch or Noir City magazine. The letters section of my magazine, which I hope provides some of the comic relief we all need these days, owes a lot to the great Don Novello’s collections of his correspondence with various wingnuts. I’ve posted a few letters from angry readers here, and my responses to them, none of which have appeared in Namaste, Motherfucker! . Consider that a bonus teaser and incentive to read the hard copy thingamajig if you feel so inclined.

To get a peek at the print edition or even buy it, please go to https://shop.thegreenarcade.com/s/search?q=ben%20terrall (the Noir City Annual also found at that page includes one of my film pieces, though regrettably nothing by me can be found in The Walker’s Map of San Francisco). If you’d like to haggle about purchasing back issues write ben [at] benterrall [dot] com, any fawning praise or personal attacks will also be read with great attention to detail. Thank you and watch out for those pesky variants, turns out that despite most politicians in the country saying otherwise the pandemic isn’t actually over.

My boyfriend calls your magazine “middlebrow drivel,” but I disagree. Given your considerable limitations, which I see no need to waste time enumerating here, I think you’ve done a fine job with what you’ve been able to throw together. I’m sure your family is very proud of you.

Moving right along to my real reason for writing, I must confess that while skimming your infrequently-published zine-thing I’ve taken a certain guilty pleasure in the irritated rants in which you single out examples of contemporary writing that rub you the wrong way. I’m not entirely sure if my enjoyment comes more from identification with your judgmental positions or pleasure in your discomfort. No doubt they both factor into my appreciation of your squirming.

That said, do you have any choice Dwight Garner quotes this time around?

Vicariously,

Mean-Spirited in Missoula

Dear Mean-Spirited,

Given the enormity of the shitshows we are facing as I write this in late October 2020 (which we will continue to face to a lesser or much, much, much greater degree depending on which way the great electoral horrorfest goes in November), lately I have a hard time making mountains out of stylistic molehills found in magazines and newspapers, at least when it comes to most journalism. Don’t get me started on our reactionary, subliterate troglodyte (apologies to troglodytes) Shithead-in-Chief’s barely comprehensible tweets.

However I remain at heart a petty observer of other people’s shortcomings when it comes to writing, and probably much else. Though he’s a smart guy, your man Mr. Garner does tend to indulge in ridiculous excursions into deep space while sentence-slinging, so why not pick on him? Lord knows we all need some cheap laughs these days.

I have neither the time nor the focus to scour Garner’s reviews of the past year to assemble much of a collection of trainwreck word play for you. Fortuitously though, I did find one paragraph that I happened to clip and save a while back. Here you go: In a piece listing noteworthy books read by New York Times reviewers in 2019, Garner writes, “I didn’t mean to reread Samuel Pepys’s diary again, but I picked it up and inhaled it like a Popeye’s chicken sandwich.” He doesn’t mention any post-inhalation indigestion, so I assume that was a pleasurable experience.

Hope that provides a partial scratch of your Garner itch, and thanks for the kind (?) words about my mag.

With Coffee,
The Editor

When it comes to compulsively readable and wildly entertaining crime fiction, few authors can touch Westlake’s work. He was as much appreciated by his fellow writers as his readers: Westlake’s friend Lawrence Block wrote that his colleague “[has] never written a bad sentence, a clumsy paragraph, or a dull page.” Westlake won Edgar Awards in three different categories, and was voted a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Westlake also wrote numerous screenplays and teleplays, many them never produced, and he sold the rights for at least ten books that were never made into movies. While he never got rich from his Hollywood sales, he did make far more money from the film industry then he did from writing books. In the late 1990s Westlake wrote, “From time to time I’d be hired to write a screenplay about something or other. The movie industry needs writers, but ignores writers as a matter of principle; it is the perfect place for a writer who didn’t want to be noticed.” Westlake didn’t want high visibility because “I wanted to write whatever came into my head, and not worry about it.”

The Richard Stark books live up to that pen name (the first name came from Richard Widmark, a favorite of Westlake’s). They are stripped-down, high adrenaline stories that deliver pure action with plenty of satisfying plot twists. These novels are admired by other crime writers–Dennis Lehane called Parker “the greatest antihero in American noir”–as well as more rarefied types–Booker Prize winner John Banville called the Parker books “…  among the most poised and polished fictions of their time and, in fact, of any time.”

Other than in one novel in which he goes to jail, the thief Parker never gets caught, and despite complications, he usually walks off with the money. Westlake wrote that “Parker is a depression character, Dillinger mythologized into a machine.” These narratives definitely lean toward the noir end of the spectrum, though sticklers might argue that hard-boiled would be a more appropriate descriptor. Author Jack Bludis was quoted in Noir City magazine as saying, “hardboiled = tough, noir = screwed.” By that definition the Parker books could fit into either category: Parker is plenty tough, but the people who cross him are definitely screwed. Westlake himself said in a 2006 interview, “I think hard-boiled and noir are both a little past their sell-by date. Hard-boiled is what the [WW2] vets brought back with them, and noir is the world  they found when they came home. I think hard-boiled is still possible, but noir today is another word for artsy.”

In 1966 Jean-Luc Godard shot Made in the USA, which the director claimed was based on The Jugger, a 1965 Richard Stark novel the film’s producer didn’t actually have the rights to. Godard’s film was made on the fly and seems to have been mostly an excuse to show off Anna Karina playing with a gun in various brightly-colored outfits. In 1967 film critic Gilles Jacob wrote that in Made in the USA Godard “has managed to disincarnate the object,” which is slightly more comprehensible than most of the film’s dialog. Godard’s Breathless and Alphaville both worked as, among other things, an oddball aesthete’s tribute to U.S. crime novels and films. But Made in the USA is just a pretentious mess. The film does include a radiant Marianne Faithful singing “As Tears Go By,” which doesn’t particularly fit into what passes for a story but which does make a strong impression.

The first noteworthy adaptation of a Westlake book was Point Blank (1967), based on the first Parker book, The Hunter (1962). The Hunter‘s opening sentence sets the tone: “When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.” The anti-hero tough guy then lights his last cigarette and walks across the George Washington Bridge. Parker is broke, after being left for dead by his wife and an accomplice in their stickup of international arms smugglers. Scraping together a stake by pulling petty scams, Parker is driven by an all-consuming desire for revenge. After tracking down his wife, he tells her what he will do to his former partner in crime Mal: “I’m going to drink his blood. I’m going to chew up his heart and spit it into the gutter for the dogs to raise a leg at. I’m going to peel the skin off him and rip out his veins and hang him with them.”

When Parker does get his hands on Mal, though, Parker’s anger is not satisfied. “Mal wasn’t enough, he was easy, he was too easy, he was the easiest thing that ever happened.” Mal also doesn’t have the share of the robbery he stole from Parker, since he used it to pay off a debt to the Outfit, a Mafia-like organized crime network. So after dispatching Mal, Parker moves on to target Outfit operatives.

Westlake told an interviewer that he didn’t do anything to make Parker “reader-friendly.” This one-man force of nature has no use for small talk or patience with anyone he feels is wasting his time. He gets no pleasure from killing, but won’t shy away from it if he decides that it is his best option; unlike in the film adaptations of The Hunter, in the novel Parker planned to kill Mal before Mal beat him to the punch, because he saw Mal as a coward and a “weak link.” As Westlake noted, “[There is] no socially redeeming quality in this guy at all.”

In Point Blank, Parker becomes Walker, who Lee Marvin plays with unrelenting ferocity. Critic Luc Sante wrote that Point Blank “takes major liberties with the plot but brings out the latent modernism of the series. It is all noon light and harsh edges, in striking contrast to the shadows and melancholy of film noir.” The film was director John Boorman’s first major feature after helming the Dave Clark Five vehicle Having a Wild Weekend, and the British filmmaker went all out with elaborate cutting, multiple flashbacks, and a variety of striking visual touches. Cinematographer Philip Lathrop worked seamlessly with Boorman to shoot each scene in a specific color.

At Lee Marvin’s insistence, Boorman had final cut on the film. Boorman later said in a DVD commentary that Marvin agreed to do the project if they threw out the existing script, and, in Boorman’s words, “we went back to the book, of course.” But in an interview with author Michel Ciment, Boorman said, “You know, I’ve never read the book!” Certainly the original script, by David and Rafe Newhouse, was much closer to The Hunter. The final screenplay is credited to Alexander Jacobs and the Newhouses.

Point Blank changed locations from its source material and added characters, including a memorable Angie Dickinson as a quasi-love interest who moves quickly from bashing Walker on the head with a pool cue to lustily climbing all over him. But the film successfully captured Parker’s unstoppable mission, whose sole purpose can be summed up in four frequently repeated words: “I want my money.” Marvin, who Boorman called “a master of gestures” and “very intuitive,” is entirely convincing as Walker. It’s one of his best performances, one of the reasons the film still holds up well after repeated viewings.

The more recent adaptation of The Hunter is, to say the least, far more predictable. Though it follows The Hunter more closely than Point Blank, the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback (1999) is underwhelming at best. Suffice it to say that if you’re not a Mel Gibson fan, the film is quite skippable.

The Outfit (1973), based on a Stark novel of the same name, stars Robert Duvall as the Parker stand-in Earl Macklin. Macklin is released from prison in the film’s opening sequence, shot in an actual correctional facility. Bett Harrow (Karen Black) who is waiting to drive him to freedom, tells Macklin that his brother has been gunned down in retribution for the brothers robbing an Outfit-controlled bank. Macklin recruits his old buddy Jack Cody (Joe Don Baker) to wage a full-scale assault on the Outfit’s operations, starting with a card game where Macklin takes on Menner (played to perfection by the great Timothy Carey). From there the mayhem continues until the entire organization is brought to its knees.

No character like Cody appeared in Westlake’s novel; in the book Parker unleashes a network of freelance heisters instead of going at his adversaries with only Cody and Bett. There are other differences between the book and the movie, but overall director John Flynn and cinematographer Bruce Surtees manage to remain faithful to the book’s tone, with its largely rural locations providing a nice relief from run-of-the-mill urban Hollywood crime fare. The one sour note comes in an unfortunate scene where Macklin engages in stereotypical and entirely unnecessary prolonged slapping of Bett.

Westlake judged The Outfit to be “quite good,” telling an interviewer “It is a … small movie with every B-movie actor you’ve ever thought of in it.” The cast is indeed rich in veteran character actors, including Elisha Cook, Jr., Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Henry Jones, Richard Jaeckel, and, most indelibly, Robert Ryan as the mob boss Mailer. Anita O’Day even has a cameo singing in a deserted club.

Director Taylor Hackford’s 2013 film Parker, mostly based on Flashfire (2000), is a diverting entertainment which doesn’t ascend to the giddy heights of Point Blank or equal the stripped-down momentum of The Outfit. Working from a script by John McLaughlin, Hackford opens the film with a robbery at the Ohio State Fair that is exciting and visually impressive. It’s also much more of an elaborate undertaking than the opening bank robbery in Flashfire.

After the changed beginning, McLaughlin’s screenplay mostly follows the book, from the opening betrayal of Parker by his crew to the final campaign of Parker’s retribution. Though it takes a bit getting used to Parker having a British accent, Jason Statham is suitably cool and unstoppable in the title role. He’s not Lee Marvin or Robert Duvall, but then he isn’t as awful as some critics implied (especially the ever-catty Rex Reed, who wrote, “Mr. Statham is to acting what Taco Bell is to nutrition”). He’s certainly more appropriate for the part than Mel Gibson. The worst part of Statham’s performance is his unfortunate attempt at a Southern accent when Parker impersonates a wealthy Texan scouting for Florida real estate.

In Flashfire, the real estate agent Leslie Rogers is described as “a round-faced blonde” who is “one of an interchangeable half dozen of such women” in her “spacious cool office.” Not exactly the famously heart-stopping Jennifer Lopez, who plays her in the film. The sexual chemistry between Leslie and the typically-disinterested Parker is non-existent in the book, while in the movie Statham and Lopez share a mutual attraction and even kiss briefly. Statham’s Parker is also more noble than in the book; in Parker‘s opening robbery Statham announces to a roomful of civilians he is holding at gunpoint, “I don’t steal from people who can’t afford it, and I don’t hurt people who don’t deserve it.”

Flashfire is one of the Stark books in which Parker’s lover Claire appears. Claire mostly serves as a backup to help Parker out of jams, and in Flashfire she remains at a distance from the main action. She’s not a hardened moll, but a woman with her own life who doesn’t want to know too much about Parker’s work. In Parker, Claire, played by Emma Booth, is a nurturing presence who shows up to tend to Parker’s wounds while Leslie looks on enviously. Booth’s character is young and more than a little vapid, which makes Parker’s loyalty to her in spite of Ms. Lopez’s readiness for romance highly improbable.

The main difference between the film The Split (1968) and the novel The Seventh (1966) is that the movie’s protagonist is black. Though Westlake wrote few African-American characters, much of his ’60s fan mail came from young black men who enjoyed reading about the exploits of an outsider looting establishment institutions. The casting of the lead was a brilliant stroke: Jim Brown, former NFL superstar, plays Parker surrogate McClain. Who better to rob a football stadium while a game is being played than a former pro? Brown brings new meaning to the word “hulking” and box office revenue was undoubtedly increased by the extremely cool actor repeatedly taking his shirt off.

Jim Brown is joined onscreen by an impressive roster of 1960s-’70s movie actors, including Ernest Borgnine, Donald Sutherland, Warren Oates, Jack Klugman, and Gene Hackman. Gordon Flemyng isn’t an especially memorable director (he worked mostly in TV) but Burnett Guffey’s cinematography is first rate. Visually, this vehicle very much a 1968 period piece, with sharp outfits and what passed for hip dialog in Hollywood at that time. But the screenplay, aside from the actual robbery, the highlight of the movie, makes a hash of Westlake’s book. It’s easy to see why Westlake had nothing positive to say about this cinematic outing, which is probably best only viewed for cheap laughs or for Ernest Borgnine’s loud suits, not that those two things are mutually exclusive.

At the other end of the spectrum of Stark/Parker adaptations sits Mis a sac (1967; English title: Pillaged), a very faithful adaptation of The Score. This caper movie focuses on a heist Parker (here called Georges and played by Michel Constantin) helps plan wherein a crew of men lay siege to an entire town’s safety deposit boxes and vaults. In the book Parker reflects that “it was just too big and fantastic an idea to begin with, it was science fiction,” but in both book and film the size of the haul quickly lures him in.

The body count in Mis a sac is lower than in The Score. The other major difference between the two is that in the end of one crime pays, whereas in the ending of the other it doesn’t. But the film gets the feel of the book just right. The pros on the job all have the look and attitude of veteran criminals, with enough differences between them to keep things interesting. As always with Westlake’s books, the plotting of The Score is seamless, and the story hurtles along like a freight train, a force of pure narrative drive. That meticulously choreographed momentum also drives Mis a sac, and makes it a classic of French gangster cinema.

Mis a sac fully deserves to get the deluxe Criterion re-issue treatment. Unfortunately, the only version available to those requiring English subtitles is a poor dupe of a video.

Le Couperet (2005) is another great French crime film deserving of a Stateside DVD release. Adapted from the stand-alone Westlake novel The Ax (1997), it was directed by Costa-Gavras, best known for the brilliant political thrillers Z, State of Siege, and Missing, and produced by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the writers and directors of such cutting-edge European art house fare as Two Days, One Night and La Promesse.

Le Couperet is beautifully shot and edited, with compositions and camera movements that make it equal to the other work of Costa-Gavras and the Dardenne Brothers. It stars a convincing Jose Garcia as Bruno Davert (in the book this protagonist is named Burke Devore), an accomplished paper company manager who is discharged in a round of corporate downsizing, a phenomenon still in its first wave when Westlake wrote The Ax.

In Westlake’s novel, Devore observes that he is a casualty of a “… kind of business management that has never been seen in the world before, trashing productive people from productive careers in productive companies.” After several years of interminable, unsuccessful job interviews, our anti-hero decides to take desperate measures. Though Devore is well aware that his real enemies are the prosperous few far up the corporate food chain, he comes to the conclusion that the only way he will re-enter his old field is to kill off the competition for the few available jobs. Devore explains, “I’m not a killer. I’m not a murderer, I never was, I don’t want to be such a thing, soulless and ruthless and empty. That’s not me. What I’m doing now I was forced into, by the logic of events; the shareholders’ logic, and the executives’ logic, and the logic of the workforce … ” Le Couperet‘s screenplay sticks close to The Ax, the principle difference being a nicely warped final twist that is added to the movie.

Westlake’s screenplay for The Stepfather (1987) is even darker than The Ax. It is based on the true story of a man who murdered his entire family then disappeared, only to be tracked down years later.

Describing his experience on the film, Westlake told an interviewer, “ … there were some changes, but that’s about ninety percent [my script]. That’s amazing in the movies. That never happens (…) it’ll never happen again. But I got it the once.”

Given the propensity of movie stars to insist on script changes,Westlake was fortunate that no big-name actors wanted the lead role of unbalanced family man Jerry Blake. The final choice to play the title character was Terry O’Quinn, a then little-known actor who went on to success on the TV show Lost. Westlake said of O’Quinn, “Oh, God, is he good.” The film’s director Joseph Ruben also had nothing but good things to say about O’Quinn: in the DVD commentary for the film Ruben describes O’Quinn as a consummate professional who “just does it … [he] wasn’t the kind of actor who needs long conversations about his childhood.” O’Quinn handles the transitions from a corny, sentimental suburban husband and father to an unhinged psychopath with aplomb, hitting every note perfectly in a superbly nuanced performance.

Jerry Blake is a real estate salesman with a big American flag in his yard who tells a group of neighbors, “Sometimes I truly believe that what I sell is the American Dream.” He strives to be as wholesome as humanly possible, but he has trouble accommodating family members with minds of their own, especially his stepdaughter Stephanie, who senses his dark side. His obsession with creating a perfect family is clearly impossible, which makes it hard for him to maintain his equilibrium for long. Soon bad things happen, with a vengeance.

Ruben described Westlake as “a classic pro on every level.” The director appreciated how quickly Westlake agreed to delete the killer’s childhood flashbacks, which were included in an early version of the script; O’Quinn’s portrayal of the monstrous stepfather is even scarier without a detailed backstory. Jerry’s few indirect lines about surviving difficult times are enough. When his new wife Susan (Shelly Hack) asks about his past, Jerry says “it isn’t real, it’s just a dream (…) the only reality is this moment.” This line echoes countless ridiculous cliches from mainstream Hollywood love scenes, but it’s a perfect Westlake wrinkle that the person saying it is an insane lunatic who wiped out his previous family. As Ruben notes, the movie is “a very dark comedy.”

Westlake’s two best screenplays were for The Stepfather and The Grifters (1990). They were also his two best experiences in Hollywood. Stephen Frears, director of The Grifters, invited Westlake to be on the set, which the writer appreciated. Westlake later explained in an interview, “It was so nice to be in a boat in which everybody was rowing in the same direction instead of getting hit in the head with a lot of oars.”

Initially Westlake thought Jim Thompson’s novel, also titled The Grifters (1963), was too bleak and passed on Frears’s request that he write a screenplay. But once he committed himself to the project, Westlake worked hard to remain true to Thompson’s pitch-black vision. When producer Martin Scorsese asked Westlake how the writing was going, Westlake replied, “I’m doing damage on every page.” His script is extremely faithful to Thompson’s novel, including the book’s startling ending, which Westlake insisted remain intact. The three leads, Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, and Annette Benning, all fought for inclusion of Thompson’s dialog; Westlake later noted, “ … it’s nice that they were defending the writer. Everybody had this feeling that we were doing something good.

Westlake created a brilliant opening which placed the three main characters, Roy Dillon (Cusack), his mother Lily (Huston), and the seductive hustler Myra Langtry (Benning), on an equal footing. The three leads appear in a triptych, each of them walking purposefully in what Thompson biographer Robert Polito called “a dazzling bit of invention” which “I think [Thompson] would have loved.”

In addition to having a gift for very dark material, Westlake was a brilliant comic writer. Even in his darkest stories, he can be extremely funny in a wonderfully off-kilter fashion. He doesn’t go for predictable sit-com humor, but with single-talent characters trying to make a larcenous living with minimal skills, unpredictable situations build toward comic outcomes. Through a series of hilarious novels the bumbling thief John Dortmunder manages to make every mistake that Parker avoids: he misjudges people, they get the drop on him, he fumbles on his follow-through. Dortmunder rarely gets away with any proceeds from his criminal endeavors, and Murphy’s Law is a constant.

Though Robert Redford might have been an odd choice to play Dortmunder, The Hot Rock (1972), adapted from a Westlake novel of the same name, is a very entertaining caper movie. It’s full of great comic actors, primarily Ron Leibman as Murch, the gearhead driver of Dortmunder’s crew, and Zero Mostel as an uncle of one of Dortmunder’s accomplices. Aside from the addition of Mostel’s character and a change in the ending, the movie follows the book closely. Westlake liked the film and called William Goldman,who scripted The Hot Rock, “the best living screenwriter.”

Westlake’s next novel after The Hot Rock was another Dortmunder book, Bank Shot, which he sold the film rights to before the book was even published. The movie version, also called Bank Shot (1974), featured George C. Scott as the Dortmunder-like lead. Critic Terrence Rafferty spoke for many when he called the movie “absolutely dreadful.” Suffice it to say that Westlake was not a fan.

One last film worth noting is Cops and Robbers, which Westlake scripted. Westlake also wrote a book of the same name after the film was made; in the author’s words, “I did the screenplay first, so that became a kind of extended outline for the novel, and I could put into the novel what I wished the actors had done. But generally I think the writer of the book is going to try to keep in things he loved in the book that are wrong for the movie.”

Cops and Robbers has two excellent lead actors in Cliff Gorman and Joseph Bologna, playing frazzled cops who decide to pull a major heist to finance their early retirement. Bologna later described Westlake as “a super guy” who “embraced my ideas for the character.” The actor also recalled, “This movie was plain joy, it was fun every day to go to work.” John Ryan is also excellent as a mafioso who Gorman and Bologna arrange to sell millions in stolen securities. His character is all lethal arrogance, a formidable opponent whom the two protagonists almost don’t vanquish.

The other major reason to watch the movie is New York City circa 1973, where the film was shot on location. For anyone who wonders what the borough of Manhattan looked like before Wall Street and Walt Disney transformed it into the upscale, spic and span island it is today, look no further.

Westlake produced clear, concise writing that didn’t employ fancy flourishes to make points; unlike too many authors, his published work never cried out for editing. As varied as the films made from his books are, Westlake’s own work is of consistently high quality. He was a consummate professional who wrote unpretentious, wildly entertaining short stories and novels that always delivered the goods. His writing is smart without being pompous or smug, and funny without being patronizing.

It’s a shame that his dark comic mind isn’t still with us to skewer the forces behind our current national malaise. In lieu of that, we can always go back to his classic 1996 romp What’s the Worst That Could Happen, which features a sleazy billionaire real estate developer and casino owner named Max Fairbanks, who John Dortmunder subjects to repeated retaliatory robberies after Fairbanks lifts Dortmunder’s good luck ring in the book’s opening. As the crass, greedy, narcissistic Fairbanks gets his just desserts over and over, who could help imagine the same thing happening to a present-day crass, greedy, narcissistic real estate mogul who is just begging for the same treatment?

I haven’t read them all (nor would I want to) but I feel safe in saying that Masha Gessen’s latest book, Surviving Autocracy (Riverhead), is likely the best of the bunch. It is certainly the most timely entry in the Trump Studies slag pile, as it provides sharp new insights and cuts through half-baked received wisdom while also making a compelling case that voting out Trump and overcoming Trumpism should be forefront in the minds of anyone who wants a livable future in our teetering republic.

Gessen is a queer Russian journalist who fled Putin’s crackdown on LGBT parents a year after “their” (Gessen prefers they/them pronouns) book The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin was published in 2012.. Though Gessen has written on a wide variety of topics, their articles for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker in recent years have mostly focused on either Trump or Putin. Given the author’s years of in-depth reading and reporting in both Russia and the United States, Gessen is in an especially good position to compare and contrast the two kleptocrats.

Gessen sees the mainstream media’s obsessive coverage of Robert Mueller’s investigation of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin as a counter-productive, all-consuming pursuit that overshadowed other equally blatant offenses perpetrated by Team Trump, such as trashing the Environmental Protection Agency for the benefit of corporate polluters, Trump family profiteering off the presidency in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, encouragement of hate crimes against people of color, and the blatant packing of courts with underqualified right-wing ideologues, to name a few. And while Trump has a hard time containing his man crush on Putin, Gessen points out that he also greatly admires other thuggish heads of state, including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines; Trump even said that when he met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, “we fell in love.”

Alhough Gessen acknowledges that there was a covert Russian operation to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, they feel that a “xenophobic conspiracy theory” painting Trump as simply a Russian puppet did little to help fight Trumpism. Gessen also finds it problematic that many liberals deified Robert Mueller, who had been FBI director during a period when the Bureau engaged in torture of detainees, as documented by the American Civil Liberties Union. And ultimately the hoped-for deliverance from Trumpism did not arrive; though in effect Mueller called upon Congress to continue the investigation, Attorney General William Barr acted as his boss’ fixer and made sure that didn’t happen.

Gessen argues that liberal media personalities, such as Rachel Maddow, who paint Putin as a brilliant puppet master overlook that the Russian president is, like his number one American fan, a man of limited intelligence with minimal intellectual curiosity. Gessen observes, “Terrifying as it is to contemplate the catastrophes of the twentieth century, it would be even more frightening to imagine that humanity had stumbled unthinkingly into its darker moments. But a reading of contemporaneous accounts will show that both Hitler and Stalin struck many of their countrymen as men of limited ability, education, and imagination—and, indeed, as being incompetent in government and military leadership. Contrary to popular wisdom, they were not political savants, possessed of extraordinary talent that brought them to power. It was, rather, the blunt instrument of reassuring ignorance that propelled their rise in a frighteningly complex world.”

The ignoramus factor obviously looms large in the Trump administration. Betsy DeVos knows virtually nothing about education aside from how to suck profits out of schools; Ben Carson, like many Trump appointees, had zero experience in public office before becoming head of Housing and Urban Development; the now-departed Rick Perry didn’t realize that his job as Department of Energy secretary would involve managing nuclear weapons. Gessen also reminds us that “Trump’s cabinet—the wealthiest in history—produced more allegations of conflict of interest than an army of journalists could track.” Public service and expertise are not exactly core concepts for this bunch.

When it comes to incomprehensible mental processes, though, none of his underlings can compete with The Donald. Gessen writes, “A trademark Trumpian approach to attacking language is to take words and throw them into a pile that means nothing … Trump’s word piles fill public space with static, the way pollutants in an industrial city can saturate the air, making it toxic and creating a state of constant haze.” By now it is obvious to anyone with at least one foot in the real world that lies proliferate as soon as Trump begins speaking. Gessen calls the Orange One’s approach to prevarication “the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it—while denying that he took it.”

In the age of COVID-19, Trump’s “power lies” deny scientific reality, downplaying and disparaging concerns about the worsening pandemic. Gessen argues that Trump’s approach to the virus fits perfectly into his wheelhouse: blaming foreigners and stoking xenophobic paranoia about open borders. As is always the case with Trump, empathy is an unheard-of concept amidst his scattershot fabrications. Because of his unwillingness and inability to enable competent management of resources that would have stressed cooperation between federal and state governments, Trump’s smoke-and-mirrors lie factory made a bad situation worse. In Gessen’s words: “Three years of Trumpism had extinguished whatever remained in American politics of the language of solidarity or the idea of public welfare.”

In attempting to understand how Trump and his backers seized and then consolidated power, Gessen consulted the work of Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar, a writer on autocracy who spent years looking at the post-1989 history of his homeland and coined the term “mafia state.” Such a state is ruled by one all-powerful man who dispenses graft and power to his underlings like an organized crime lord. Trump’s formative experiences working with notorious mob lawyer Roy Cohn gave him an early start on filling such a role.

Magyar’s model also deals with the corruption of language. In Trump-era America, alternative reality-speak’s damage to standard discourse has left mainstream media and conventional politicians unable to adapt to the far-right’s propaganda machine. Bending over backward to be fair, stalwarts of the status quo wind up giving credence to outrageous lies. Regarding leading newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, Gessen writes, “the tone of neutrality, authority, and restraint that legacy publications adopt has a way of shifting the journalist away from the public and toward the person in power, making them act more like go-betweens than representatives of one side and one side only. That makes the media ill-equipped to resist the autocrat’s project of coming to dominate the communications sphere.”

Gessen doesn’t shy away from looking at systemic problems that have existed under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Barack Obama continued the “War on Terror” of George W. Bush, increasing extra-judicial executions by drone and overseeing the deportation of more people than any other previous president. Gessen also points out that in the United States, “Elections are decided by money … it is contributions from the private sector that allow campaigns to exist in the first place.” Trump’s deep-pocketed far-right backers were only too happy to help The Donald buy his way into office.

In Gessen’s view, “To reverse Trump’s autocratic attempt, we will have to abandon the idea of returning to an imaginary pre-Trump normalcy when American institutions functioned as they should.” Slick technocrats promising a kinder, gentler corporate status quo are not adequate to the task of true oppositional resistance politics. Instead, Gessen sees hope in the “moral aspiration” of activist legislators such as “The Squad” (left-wing Democrats Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib) and the late civil rights heroes John Lewis and Elijah Cummings.

Gessen’s conclusion rings true: “We can only heal by looking forward—perhaps to a life that will be slower, more environmentally responsible and less materially comfortable, but also more clearly rooted in mutual aid and the understanding of our fundamental equality and interdependence.”

Of course, step one is defeating Trump this coming November. That will require everyone to the left of our reality-show president to get off their couches and do whatever they can—phone or text banking; letter or postcard writing; pooling money with friends to support grassroots voting rights groups such as We Got the Vote; or even yelling from a socially-distanced street-corner soapbox.

If every despairing, defeated anti-Trumper takes a break from doom and gloom and engages in what the great World War II-era Italian dissident Antonio Gramsci called “optimism of the will,” we may just prevail. And if we don’t, at least we’ll have gone down fighting, a better option than rolling over and playing dead before the battle is half done.

Reprinted from January Magazine

Jason Stanley on How Fascism Works

In an era of successful far-right movements consolidating power around the world, we need  public intellectuals who can put the frightening politics of the present in historical context. Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them does just that.

Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale, writes brilliantly about fascist politics being used as a means to seize power, citing examples from countries including Russia, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, India, and the US. He effectively exposes the mechanisms by which demagogues succeed in mobilizing large numbers of people to embrace intolerance and strongman worship.

Stanley is a clear and insightful writer who presents his analysis in ten chapters which each look at a different fascist tactic, covering a wide spectrum of ploys.

Some of the most important, and timely, material in the book focuses on racist tactics used by the far right. In addressing white supremacy, Stanley writes, “White American stereotypes of black Americans as lazy and violent derive from the very beginning of the United States, where those attributes were regularly used to justify the enslavement of America’s black population.” Stanley cites W.E.B. DuBois’s 1935 work Black Reconstruction in America, which showed that the initial gains of post-Civil War southern reconstruction were derailed by southern whites and their allies among Northern elites who feared the potential of black and white workers joining together to develop a powerful labor movement.

In charging corruption among newly-elected black legislators, whites again demonized the oppressed black population. DuBois explained:

The south, finally, with almost complete unity, named the negroas the main cause of southern corruption. They said, and reiterated this charge, until it became history: That the cause of dishonesty during reconstruction was the fact that 4,000,000 disenfranchised black laborers, after 250 years of exploitation, had been given a legal right to have some voice in their government, in the kinds of goods they would make and the sort of work they would do, and in the distribution of the wealth they created.

Since reconstruction, as Stanley shows throughout How Fascism Works, black Americans have continued to be targets of propaganda campaigns of demonization familiar to students of world history. Indeed, as Stanley mentions, Adolph Hitler found inspiration in both the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws. Richard Nixon’s “war on crime” cleverly concealed what Stanley calls “the racist intent behind his administration’s domestic programs.” Evidence for that argument lies in April 1969 diary notes from Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, who quoted Nixon as saying, “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while appearing not to.”

In 1971, Nixon declared that drug abuse was “public enemy number one in the United States,” and his administration began rigorous enforcement of drug laws. This launched the mass incarceration of people of color that continues to plague the US body politic to this day. In effect, Stanley convincingly argues, right-wing politicians repeatedly describing black Americans as a threat to law and order have encouraged a white national identity that requires a prison-industrial complex to contain the nonwhite other.

Regarding the stifling patriarchy predominant in fascist movements, Stanley notes that right-wing groups have always attacked feminists. Stanley writes, “If the demagogue is the father of the nation, then any threat to patriarchal manhood and the family undermines the fascist vision of strength.” And the threat of libidinous males of different ethnic backgrounds is an old fascist trope, whether in the lynching-prone American south, India under the reign of the rightist BJP party, or Donald Trump’s xenophobic speeches referring to Mexican rapists and killers.

How Fascism Works is packed with examples of time-tested fascist strategies that have all too obvious parallels with the actions of the current Republican regime. Trump ridicules handicapped people, disparages women and anyone else who isn’t a right-wing white male, and attacks transgender rights. He panders to his rural base, as did Hitler, by playing up the dangers of urban centers. Stanley is astute in analyzing the antipathy to cosmopolitan urbanism which has been a constant in Trump’s never-ending campaigning: “Fascist politics aims its message at the populace outside large cities, to whom it is most flattering. It is especially resonant during times of globalization, when economic power swings to the large urban areas as centers of an emerging global economy, as occurred in the 1930s in Europe. Fascist politics highlights the wrongs of self-sufficiency supposedly at risk by the success of liberal cities culturally and economically.”

Of course, as with most things espoused by our current president, a lack of any basis in fact for attacks on urban centers need not be a hindrance. So, though crime rates in the US have declined in the past several decades and most cities are experiencing widescale gentrification, in January 2017 the president-elect fired off a warning about “burning and crime-infested cities of the US.”

Given Trump’s troubles with forming coherent sentences, it is convenient for him that one of the core concepts in fascist successes has been a dedication to anti-intellectualism. Universities come under attack, and students and faculty who do not hew rightward are denounced as being feminists or Marxists (the ultimate put-downs for right-wing internet trolls).

Attacks on educators and logical thought go hand-in-glove with the promotion of disinformation and fantasy, whether climate change denial or the claim that Hillary Clinton was running a sex slave operation out of a pizzeria. The willingness of the mass media to repeat such lies just normalizes right-wing insanity. In Stanley’s words, “Allowing every opinion into the public sphere and giving it serious time for consideration, far from resulting in a process that is conducive to knowledge formation via deliberation, destroys its very possibility.”

In How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley has done a commendable job of marshaling well-sourced historical materials on fascism that extend into our current national debacle. Academic histories tend to be much longer and drier, and it to his credit that he has made his book so accessible to lay readers. One caveat: clearly he is being accurate when he labels his subject matter “fascist politics,” but some alternative phrase to denote that concept would have been welcome. That minor gripe aside, it is impressive how much valuable insight and information Stanley packs into 200 pages.

Unlike many contemporary political books, Stanley doesn’t close with policy recommendations or an attempt at a road map out of the mess we, and many other countries, are in. He makes clear that, in his words, “stark economic inequality creates conditions richly conducive to fascist demagoguery,” but he doesn’t lay out a radical agenda for left-wing movement building (nor, unlike two other useful books on Trumpism, John Bellamy Foster’s Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce and Henry A. Giroux’s American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism, does he stress the need for a transformation to democratic socialism).

But Stanley also doesn’t pull any punches in attacking the toxic racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant xenophobia that too many middle-of-the-road Americans have been reluctant to confront. His call for practicing solidarity and fighting fascist targeting of refugees, labor unions, and racial, sexual, and religious minorities is more than welcome, as is his encouraging readers to “take comfort in the histories of progressive social movements, which against long odds and hard struggle have in the past succeeded in the project of eliciting empathy.”

This review originally appeared in January Magazine

Boog roots this excellent survey of past and present literary lives in his own experiences as a journalist, one of whose previous employers, a legal publication, went under in 2008. Suddenly without office space, security, or health insurance, Boog perched himself near the American Literature stacks at New York University’s Bobst Library and began an obsessive search for insights into how his predecessors made it through the Great Depression. This quest started with Edward Newhouse’s 1934, novel You Can’t Sleep Here, about an unemployed newspaper reporter who finds himself sleeping in a tent city along Manhattan’s East River, his only showering option in a New York Public Library bathroom. Boog recalls: “A quiet desperation permeated every line of Newhouse’s story. I couldn’t stop reading.” The novel’s protagonist is told that “Anybody who really wants to work can find a job,” an old saw which prompts Boog to note that the claim is as false in the 21 century as it was in the 20th.

Post-2008 internet job boards advertised employment opportunities, but most queries to those ads were answered with automatic e-mail programs which provided nothing concrete. While reading an article describing a thousand people applying for a minimum-wage job at an internet company, Boog was reminded of a 1930s photograph of a throng of despondent men standing listlessly outside an employment agency. The collapse of both print and online outlets for paid writing, which began in the aughts and continues to this day, has left an increasingly diminished market for anyone hoping to cobble together even the most meager living as a word-slinger.

Despite his gloomy prognosis for the future of his trade, Boog is committed to fighting back against the system that eviscerated his industry, and wants his fellow writers to do the same. He argues, “More writers fail than those who ‘succeed,’ and it is how we respond to this failure that defines us in the end.”

Boog finds inspiration to carry on in the political lives of many ’30s writers. Poet Muriel Rukeyser told a historian the way writers were perceived during the Great Depression: “The public saw them as trash … Living meant going to the office. That meant acceptance, money and the proper capitalist virtues.” Rukeyser eschewed those virtues by joining the radical Writers Union. That organization petitioned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to include writers among the three-million Americans then being given employment. Their letter to Roosevelt read in part, “800 writers have no work. One of them, in despair, has already committed suicide. We know that you do not intend, Mr. President, that a man is condemned merely because he does not work with his hands.” (The number cited is likely a serious understatement given that one historian counted 1,400 writers listed on New York City relief roles in the mid-1930s.) The Writers Union also stood up to police brutality on picket lines while marching for federal help alongside the League of American Writers, the Authors League, the Newspaper Guild, and the Yiddish Writers Union.

In 1935 Maxwell Bodenheim, whose proletarian poetry appeared in left-wing publications such as the Daily Worker, New Masses, and The Anvil, was so destitute that he appeared at the New York City welfare office with five other Writers Union members and a group of reporters to make a public plea for financial aid. The radical poet’s sit-down meeting with a relief administrator was successful, and Bodenheim’s last-ditch appeal made headlines which inspired more such actions across the country.

Pressure on the U.S. government sparked by writers such as Rukeyser and Bodenheim led to the 1935 launch of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), which was supervised by the New Deal-financed Works Project Administration (WPA). The tough one-legged poet Orrick Johns, who had survived violent physical attacks while coordinating worker strikes for the Communist Party, was a director of the New York portion of the Writers’ Project for a short time. Johns later wrote of surveying potential recruits: “They were all from the home relief rolls, and it took weeks for some of them to get the habit of clean shirts and pressed trousers. They ran the gamut of mental states, the scared and the stolid, the humble and the proud, reserved and excitable, with a scattering of plain drunks.”

As Roosevelt geared up for the 1936 presidential election, his critics seized on the FWP as an easy target for conservative ire. Right-leaning newspapers attacked a pamphlet that Johns published about New York State; Johns’s supervisor chided him that the publication was “afflicted with the cheapest sort of ballyhoo … Lurid intimations of Chinatown dens, the come-on stuff of the tourist barkers.”

In August 1936 the WPA fired 300 workers. Not all of those who were sacked gave up easily, many initially refusing to leave their workplace. A subsequent demonstration involved 35 unemployed members of the American Writers Union who staged a sit-in at Johns’ office. Johns allowed the protest to proceed without police interference, and resulting publicity forced the WPA to approve the hiring of 50 workers.

Historian David A. Taylor, who chronicled WPA support for writers, noted that the FWP “gave some of the best writers of the twentieth century their first jobs as writers at a critical time,” and “provided an unexpected incubator for talent that was otherwise idled by the Depression.” Among those nurtured by the FWP were Ralph Ellison, who went on to achieve fame with Invisible Man, Claude McKay, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and the inventive, hilarious poet Kenneth Fearing.

Fearing’s first collection of poetry, Angel Arms (1929), was a commercial flop, but put him on the literary bohemian map. That partial fame wasn’t enough to keep him out of a booze-soaked rut after the 1929 stock market crash. Emerging from that slump a few years later, he told ace journalist Joseph Mitchell about a political shift in his work: “The thing about these poems is that they express my indignation over such things as that jungle of squatters over on Abingdon Square and people I see … going around the streets at night like prehistoric animals, digging into garbage pails, a sight which epitomizes our so-called civilization.”

Boog contrasts the political engagement of writers in the 1930s with the atomized, depoliticized state of too many 21st-century wordsmiths, concluding that “writers have been surgically removed from the working class.” He notes that in 2002, 10 percent of the publishing workforce had union representation, while by 2012 that number had fallen to 4 percent. The emergence of the tech giants and their “information wants to be free” mantra gave rise to a surplus of “content providers” ready to toil for peanuts or even nothing. Boog writes, “The whole time I struggled to make it as a working writer, I was constantly aware of how many people were willing to do the same work as I was doing and how many of them would write for free.” A lack of class consciousness or solidarity with their struggling peers led aspiring novelists, poets, and journalists to give up whatever advantages they had: “By prioritizing ‘continuing to work’ over taking a stand on pay and conditions, we all contributed to this new reality … I fought bitter battles to hold on to my small corner of the publishing world while trying to ignore the ways in which we are all accountable for the state of the industry in which we work.”

In comparing this century’s tendency toward milquetoast passivity and defeatism with the political consciousness and willingness to engage in class struggle of the ’30s, Boog quotes the journalist Mark I. Pinsky, who wrote, “In the 1930s journalists considered themselves a part of the working class, largely identified with the political left, and understood the power of collective action. In the post-Watergate era, journalists became white collar, college-educated, and middle class, often upper-middle class. And so, they were unable to slow, and thus cushion, the inevitable decline of newspapers.” Boog sees the same problem in the highbrow world of literary fiction and poetry. He observes that “If writers have not identified with workers since Nixon, then we hardly have any hope of saving ourselves again with any sort of labor organization … Someday soon, the only remaining ‘working’ writers could be people who can afford to support themselves through grants, other work, or an inheritance.”

But as Boog’s narrative cuts back and forth between the Great Depression and the post-2008 recession, his book includes hopeful signs from our present era. For instance, he connects the 1930s Greenwich Village-based Raven Poetry Circle, whose members posted poems on a fence in Washington Square Park, to Occupy Wall Street’s poet-participants, who were equally enamored of free verse with an anti-capitalist bent. In 2011, Occupy started an Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, which reminds Boog of the Raven Circle’s poetry anthology. The Occupy collection included contributions from such well-known talents as Adrienne Rich, Michael McClure, and Eileen Myles. Occupy Wall Street librarians, who had built a library in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park which boasted a collection of 8,000 titles, wrote of the anthology’s importance, “Poetry illuminates the soul of Occupy Wall Street. … This occupation is about transforming consciousness and the poetry community is a major part of that process.

As he finished writing The Deep End, Boog commuted daily through Los Angeles and saw the sorts of homeless encampments now found in any big U.S. city, the sorts of “Hoovervilles” which Edward Newhouse wrote about. Boog remarks, “These encampments are symptoms of a disease we don’t want to acknowledge. We pretend they aren’t there until we can’t pretend anymore. We can feel this global economic rot creeping all around us, but things won’t change until a writer like Newhouse forces us to see things the way they really are.”

Boog begins The Deep End with an introduction praising the Green New Deal, a legislative response to the climate-change crisis which was developed via collaboration between environmental and social justice movements and progressive members of Congress including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Senator Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts). That “moon shot” project is inspired in part by the New Deal of the 1930s, which helped so many of Boog’s literary heroes survive. It provides Boog with much-needed hope for the future, and he also emphasizes the need for a Green New Deal in the book’s conclusion.

The Deep End ends with the nightmare combination of COVID-19 and the kleptocratic reign of Donald J. Trump. Although that toxic stew can feel unbearably grim, Boog sees potential for great changes with the emergence of the youth-led climate justice group the Sunrise Movement. Begun in 2017, Sunrise is now forging ahead with the sorts of online organizing that are essential in a time of shelter-in-place lockdowns. They are moving forward, as should we all, in the spirit of Boog’s exhortation that “If we only hold on to one lesson of the Crisis Generation [of the 1930s], let’s remember this one: they did not surrender.”

I am writing because my teenage son recently picked up a copy of your sleazy magazine in a dingy bookstore he frequents far too often for my liking. My son didn’t show me your publication — he only confessed to buying the damn thing when I confronted him with it after finding it hidden in a copy of Scientific American. 

The issue in question has a lengthy attack on Big Tech companies, and elsewhere in your bile-infused tirades you took issue with increasing “disparities” in income between rich and poor in the good ol’ USA. 

I don’t usually read the elitist snobfest New York Times, but my brother, who I’m proud to say is a senior aide to Senator Dianne Feinstein (my favorite Democrat — go DiFi!) sent me a column by a fellow named David Brooks. Mr. Brooks is clearly much smarter than you. The column ends with these paragraphs:

Successful executives are doing what’s best for their companies, gathering as much talent as they can. This isn’t evil. It’s not exploitation.

The job of public policy is to make it easier for everybody to do what successful people are doing. Productivity is the key to national prosperity. Every time we increase productivity for one person, we all thrive a little more, together.

I couldn’t have said it better myself! It’s time for you to join the winners and realize that you can’t stand in the way of progress! Though based on your obvious loser mentality I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Angrily,
Disgusted in Dubuque

Dear Disgusted, 

First of all, congratulations on having written the very first letter to be published in our new, though perhaps not improved, online edition! I hope you will appreciate the historical import of this brief moment (oops, almost gone!) as much as I do.

Secondly, I in turn have a paragraph for you, taken from an interview with the late great Gore Vidal. In regard to your question of me, Vidal captures my feelings exactly: 

I exist to say, “No, that isn’t the way it is,” or “what you believe to be true is not true for the following reasons.” I am a master of the obvious. I mean, if there’s a hole in the road, I will, viciously, outrageously, say there’s a hole in the road and if you don’t fill it in you’ll break the axle of your car. One is not loved for being helpful.

If I live to be, oh I don’t know, a bit older than I am now, I couldn’t come up with a better answer to your inane ravings. 

Lastly, as my mother used to say, who cares what you think?

Impatiently,
The Editor

Named after the abolitionist warrior who led guerrilla attacks against pro-slavery settlers in Kansas in the 1850s and later conducted the famous 1859 raid on the Harper’s Ferry Federal Arsenal in Virginia, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee was founded in response to an incarcerated African-American man’s appeal for help in combating Ku Klux Klan organizing within the U.S. prison system. The group organized white activists to work in solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement to combat Klan organizing both within and outside U.S. penitentiaries, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the Reagan era. Moore and Tracy meticulously document the organization’s trajectory through those years and its work in coordination with, and sometimes at a distance from, other anti-racist groups.

The Committee’s campaigning frequently involved directly challenging public activities of Klan and Nazi groups at a time when many liberals argued that the best strategy for dealing with such far-right groupings was to ignore them, thereby giving them no free publicity. The Committee had a different approach: to use any means necessary to deny Klan members the public spotlight. Klan members were calling for genocide against entire populations, thus their free speech rights were not something that Committee members had any interest in respecting.

John Brown Anti-Klan Committee activists didn’t shy away from physical confrontations at Klan events, leading to some situations which they were lucky to have made it through. One committee member told Moore and Tracy about marching in support of Klan-targeted Vietnamese fishermen in Texas, where her group of around 10 activists were menaced by five times as many Klan members. She recalled, “They marched around us and they knew our names. I was scared shitless, but we kept marching, because you cannot let fear stop you.”

The 1979 Greensboro, North Carolina, fatal shootings of five left-wing activists by heavily armed members of an organization called the United Racist Front, which included Klan members, showed how dangerous standing up to armed white supremacists could be. It was also one of many cases where law-enforcement officers did nothing to stop attacks on left-wing activists. The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms knew of Klan and Nazi plans to attack anti-racists at Greensboro. The police even had an informant within the Klan who brought Klan and Nazi members together in the United Racist Front. Moore and Tracy write, “A Federal officer with [the ATF], with active knowledge and consent of his superior officers, overtly encouraged the Klan to bring bombs and guns to the rally, while pressing leftist organizers to leave any weapons at home.” The authors also point to law enforcement conducting midnight raids on the homes of anti-Klan militants and getting Klansmen to identify anti-racist militants at Klan rallies.

One could argue that Klan activities were also abetted, albeit unintentionally, by the First Amendment absolutism of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU has repeatedly defended the Klan’s right to stage public events, including the notorious 2017 Charlottesville march—condoned by Donald Trump—that ended in paralegal/bartender Heather Heyer being killed by a white supremacist. Moore and Tracy quote a left-wing organizer based in Kentucky in the 1980s who recalls, “We started a campaign to demand the Klan not be allowed on the police force, but then the American Civil Liberties Union came in and defended them. It nearly stopped that work.”

One of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee’s more successful organizing strategies was counter-recruiting, as in ’80s punk scenes where anti-racist musicians and organizers drew in new participants and then distributed information about the toxic realities of white supremacy. In doing that, they built communities of resistance that helped provide support to young people who might otherwise have fallen prey to far-right organizing. Anti-Klan Committee members also engaged in community outreach group activities, such as painting over racist graffiti.

While giving credit to the John Brown Committee for their commitment and accomplishments, No Fascist USA!also raises questions about mistakes the group made, including being excessively self-righteous and not effectively stressing the importance of fighting anti-Semitism. Moore and Tracy also cite a veteran Committee member who felt that the group’s sole focus on fighting racism overlooked class issues, hence tending to shortchange economic injustice, in their analysis.

Moore and Tracy argue that that “changes in the alt-right’s strategies point to the idea that communities must respond to actions of the far right in ways that constantly experiment and evolve with the times.” When under attack, self-defense is an obvious choice than can save lives. The authors cite activist, professor, and theologian Cornel West’s experience in Charlottesville. West told a journalist that while attempting to maintain a peaceful presence amid that hate march, “Those twenty of us who were standing, many of them clergy, we would have been crushed like cockroaches” if anti-fascists and anarchists had not come to their rescue. In other cases, mobilizing thousands of people, as was done in Boston in response to a 2017 alt-hate rally, can effectively stop far-right marchers in their tracks.

Moore and Tracy conclude that “The challenge is to move toward ever more diversity, depth, and nuance, while winning hearts, minds, and communities with the common dream that better world is possible.” Given the rising tide of proto-fascist politics in the United States, let’s hope that many more people take that challenge. This book will remain a worthwhile tool in the struggle to reach that better world. 

Like Empire of Borders, Frey’s Sand and Blood examines U.S.-Mexico border history by placing the present brutal treatment of undocumented migrants in the context of a long history of white supremacist U.S. politics. Frey, a veteran investigative reporter, writes in clear, down-to-earth prose about the impact that U.S. immigration and border security policies have had on Latinx migrants.

Frey himself had a traumatic childhood experience with border authorities which gave him first-hand insight into the darker side of U.S. law enforcement. He was born in Mexico but his family moved to the United States when Frey was a toddler. Since his father was a U.S. citizen, Frey became naturalized but his mother remained in this country thanks to a green card. When he was about 12, Frey was taking a walk with his mother near their home in rural San Diego and briefly separated from her. When he went looking for her his mother was gone. She had been picked up by a Border Patrol agent who targeted her because of her dark skin. Though in the U.S. legally, she had not brought her ID with her. The agent did not allow her to return home for her ID; instead he took her into custody and she was deported. [See also NACLA’s review of The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez.]

Frey opens Sand and Blood by describing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, an early example anti-immigrant racism in the United States. That legislation allowed the military to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border to block Chinese workers from entering this country. By the time the Border Patrol was officially established in 1924, U.S. laws restricted entry to “Asians, illiterates, prostitutes, criminals, contract laborers, unaccompanied children, idiots, epileptics, the insane, the diseased and defective, alcoholics, beggars, polygamists, anarchists,” among others.

Large agricultural interests kept Mexicans from being added to that list because those big landowners needed underpaid laborers to maintain hefty profit margins. Mexican workers crossed the border regularly, sometimes daily, to toil on large farms in California, Texas, and Arizona. Though granted entry, these men and women were treated abysmally: for more than 40 years, the “delousing” of Mexicans crossing between Juarez and El Paso involved being sprayed with cyanogen, which is toxic to humans.

Frey describes how, in 1917, a teenager named Carmelita Torres stood up to that inhumane process by refusing to strip for the spraying ritual, then convincing 30 other women at the bridge between Juarez and El Paso to resist also. These women sparked a wave of resistance later called the “bath riots,” and Mexicans began avoiding the official checkpoint altogether. Authorities in El Paso responded by assigning patrols of mounted agents, precursors to the U.S. Border Patrol, to monitor unauthorized crossings.

Sand and Blood fast-forwards from that initial wave of illegal crossings to the Bracero (“manual laborer” in Spanish) program created by the U.S. and Mexican governments during WWII labor shortages. This program, which ran from 1942 to 1964, allowed millions of farmworkers to work in the United States. Some of the workers stayed in the United States without government permission, contributing to a much greater Latinx population in the Southwest and elsewhere. Big agribusiness was happy to continue to employ workers who overstayed the expiration of their work permits.

Frey argues that the current military enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border can be traced to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, under which employers of undocumented workers were fined and border security was tightened to lessen immigration flows. Unlike today’s approach, however, pathways to citizenship were left flexible. Reagan stated, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.”

The blueprint for a militarized approach, one that caused massive death, began in earnest under the administration of a Democrat, Bill Clinton.Such support for a path to legal permanent residency was not wildly popular among other politicians. Many focused on “lawbreakers” among immigrants and exploited nativist fears of “illegal aliens.” In his 1995 bid for reelection, California’s governor Pete Wilson turned around a losing campaign by playing on paranoia about undocumented brown people overrunning California. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton also gained political capital by sounding like a hardline Republican on immigration. While Frey notes that after the September 11, 2001 attacks George W. Bush oversaw a near doubling of the size of the Border Patrol, he writes, “The blueprint for a militarized approach, one that caused massive death, began in earnest under the administration of a Democrat, Bill Clinton.” Frey meticulously lays out a case that, in its messaging, the Clinton Administration “perpetuated a negative, anti-immigrant stereotype that remains in the political lexicon today.”

U.S. trade policies in the 1990s only exacerbated economic insecurity in Mexico, which in turn increased the influx of migrants from our Southern neighbor. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), U.S. corn flooded into Mexico, driving rural farmers from their traditional livelihoods. This and other aspects of NAFTA’s pro-business economics helped increase Mexico’s extreme poverty rate from 21 percent in 1994 to 37 percent in 1997. [2]

As more Mexicans decided to leave their homeland in the wake of NAFTA, the Clinton Administration responded with a policy called “prevention through deterrence,” which increased Border Patrol enforcement in and near El Paso, San Diego, and other urban areas. The result: Migrants began crossing in remote rural areas, and more and more died of exposure in the desert.

As part of the “War on Drugs,” George H.W. Bush committed to using the U.S. military to stop drug smuggling at the southern border. Frey notes that though 97 percent of cocaine and close to 100 percent of heroin and methamphetamine entered the U.S. by land or sea vehicles, inspections of such vehicles did not increase. Instead, as the 1990s went on, the military worked in tandem with the Border Patrol to target migrants on foot.

“War on Terror” alarmism after September 11, 2001 replaced the drug interdiction rationale for border crackdowns. Suddenly the specter of terrorist attacks from the south became a talking point for fear-mongering nativists. Congressman Silvestre Reyes, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Frey, “There was no terrorist threat coming from Mexico and there never has been…Politicians have used Mexicans and immigrants as scapegoats for so long that they believe there is a real threat so it’s not too far to go to turn them into real terrorists.” The George W. Bush Administration’s Department of Homeland Security oversaw the new agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a billion-dollar bludgeon to be wielded against undocumented immigrants. In 2003, the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was created as a sister agency to ICE. CBP, in effect the largest police force in the United States, with a budget of $13.5 billion, oversees the Border Patrol.

To quickly increase the size of the Border Patrol, the Bush administration lowered hiring standards with less thorough vetting of recruits and less training.A Border Patrol agent told Frey, “After 9/11, the gloves came off, and we were trained to see the migrants as possible terrorists.” Abuse of migrants became commonplace. To quickly increase the size of the Border Patrol, the Bush administration lowered hiring standards with less thorough vetting of recruits and less training. Frey has reported on incidents of Border Patrol agents firing at and killing Mexican nationals across the border. He has spent years investigating Border Patrol killings of migrants and, after repeated information requests, received no useful feedback on those killings from the U.S. government. But despite government stonewalling, the Southern Border Communities Coalition has documented 80 cases of immigrants killed by Border Patrol agents with no guilty verdicts for agents who were responsible.

Though Barack Obama has the reputation of being more humane than his predecessor, Frey notes: “Obama continued the legacy of all U.S. presidents and administrations since Ronald Reagan, making life more difficult for immigrants.” In his time in office, Obama deported more than 5 million people. Obama’s presidential campaigns received large contributions from defense contractors who profited greatly from border spending: Boeing, which received a billion-dollar contract for a “virtual fence” that failed on all counts, gave Obama around $191,000 in 2012. Lockheed Martin also gave generously.

Frey cultivated sources inside government agencies and doggedly peppered elected officials with questions mainstream media outlets tend to avoid. He also did more than spending time talking with people attempting to make it across the border: After making contact with a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel who oversees a large number of highly profitable illegal crossings, Frey participated in a trek of migrants across the border. After walking all day in the blazing sun, Frey woke up with blisters on his feet, a parched throat, and little remaining water. He soon told the cartel’s guide that he couldn’t go on. But unlike others attempting the journey, Frey had a satellite phone to call for help. As an air conditioned vehicle took him away, Frey reflected that if he had stayed in the desert, the smugglers would have left him to die.

Nobody cares about dead immigrants. They’re invisible when they’re alive, and they’re even more invisible when they’re dead.A forensic anthropologist told Frey, “Nobody cares about dead immigrants. They’re invisible when they’re alive, and they’re even more invisible when they’re dead.” No one knows how many thousands have perished while attempting to enter the US through desert terrain, and the U.S. government has little to no interest in tracking such deaths. And after members of the faith-based coalition No More Deaths placed gallon jugs of water in areas of migrant passage, Border Patrol agents were caught on camera kicking such jugs over, increasing the likelihood of yet more deaths from dehydration.

Such acts of wanton cruelty have been emblematic of the Trump presidency. His administration has systematically instituted “zero tolerance” policies under which young children are separated from parents without bothering to track them, children and adults die in detention camps, and asylum appeals are denied en masse.

Frey also spent time traveling with one of the Central American caravans that Trump demonized relentlessly. The large group offered safety in numbers to travelers who in isolation routinely face extortion, robbery, kidnapping, and rape while attempting to pass through Mexico. Many of the people Frey spoke to discussed leaving home because of gang violence and the grueling poverty that is endemic throughout Central America. But he also heard a climate cause rarely mentioned in U.S. media: The land itself was no longer hospitable to these poor people. A prolonged drought in the “dry corridor” of Central America—which includes parts of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua—had resulted in almost complete crop failure in many areas.

Journalist Todd Miller, who has been writing about U.S. border issues for more than two decades, including in his previous books Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (2017) and Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Homeland Security(2014), expands on the connections between climate change and illegal immigration. His most recent book, Empire of Borders, focuses on border enforcement and climate-related refugees. He opens by quoting a climate scientist who describes Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador as “ground zero” for climate change in the Americas, then looks at Washington’s world-wide heavily militarized border security apparatus.

In Storming the Wall, Miller echoes Frey when he discusses the severity of the climate crisis in Central America. Citing a 2016 report, he writes, “from 1995 to 2014 Honduras was indeed ground zero, the country most impacted by severe weather. During those 19 years, Honduras endured 73 extreme weather events and an average of 302 climate-related deaths per year.” But reflecting on his time talking to activists and agricultural workers in Honduras, Miller writes, “From the perspective of the border enforcement regime, it’s immaterial whether or not there is a drought, whether or not there is a harvest, or whether or not there is sufficient food. Droughts do not matter. Persistent storms do not matter. To the on-the-ground immigration authorities, when it comes to interdiction, incarceration, and deportation, it means nothing that a new era of climate instability has begun. All that matters is whether or not a person has the proper documents.”

Though the current occupant of the White House claims to not believe in climate change, the U.S. military has for years been making contingency plans for its future effects on immigration.Though the current occupant of the White House claims to not believe in climate change, the U.S. military has for years been making contingency plans for its future effects on immigration. In 2015, a U.S. Brigadier General told Miller, “As it gets hotter, as the catastrophic events become more frequent, it’s having an impact on how they grow their agriculture in the Latin American countries, and employment is becoming a problem, and it’s driving people up north.” U.S. military planning for wide-scale flight from climate changes includes the equivalent of war games. This is a continuation of policy leanings going back more than 20 years: In 1994, Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, “We believe that environmental degradation is not simply an irritation but a real threat to our national security.” This “threat” involves an enormous amount of people who will need new places to live: the numbers who will be fleeing extreme weather in their home countries is staggering, with estimates that go as high as one billion by 2050.

In Empire of Borders, Miller encounters soldiers familiar with BORTAC, the little-known special forces and tactical unit of the U.S. Border Patrol, at the border between Guatemala and Honduras. BORTAC, which Miller describes as Border Patrol robocops, has had a global presence in the Americas and the Caribbean, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ukraine, Kosovo, and Tajikistan. The U.S. influence on global border construction and enforcement is staggering. Miller writes, “Close your eyes and point to any land mass on a world map, and your finger will probably find a country that is building up its borders in some way with Washington’s assistance.”

Miller’s analysis of the history of punitive measures on the U.S.-Mexico border dovetails with Frey’s. Clearly Donald Trump’s brutally sadistic policies built on and worsened already existing policies from Obama’s presidency. Miller cites a 2011 report that details the permanent separation of 5,100 children from their families. He makes a convincing case that the roots of such racist policies go back to the creation of the U.S.-Mexico border—the result of a bloody war of conquest in which the U.S. seized land that today makes up much of Southern California and the southwestern states.

But it is not just at Mexico’s northern border that the United States maintains a heavily militarized presence. The American Civil Liberties Union calls the 100-mile zones around both the southern and northern borders “Constitution-free zone(s).” Miller spoke to a CBP official who pointed out that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to the Department of Homeland Security, which CBP is part of. CBP and DHS are also exempt from restrictions on racial profiling that apply to other branches of the U.S. government.

Miller’s travels to global hot spots where CBP has a profound influence leads him to quote a journalist who calls the organization “global capitalism’s bouncers.” He also cites anthropologist Jeff Halper, who argues that global border enforcement promotes “a certain social order while also ensuring the smooth flow of capital.”

Miller talks to activists from different countries who argue for military-free open borders. Despite the global siege mentality, he documents so effectively in Empire of Borders, Miller sees the possibility of radically more humane arrangements than the current state of affairs. Miller notes, “Leaders talk of border security as if it were as natural and timeless as a mountain or a river. It is not. The hardened militarized borders insisted upon by politicians are a recent phenomenon, as are political boundaries between nation-states, as are nation-states themselves.”

Against this backdrop, I found Miller’s optimism about the possibilities of a shift toward global solidarity and empathy beyond the confines of nation state provincialism the least convincing part of Empire of Borders. The lack of compassion for others in the right-wing, anti-immigrant regimes now in power in the United States and elsewhere don’t seem likely to make a leftward shift toward open borders any time soon. As Miller notes elsewhere in this excellent book, “In the climate era, coexisting worlds of luxury living and impoverished desperation will only be magnified and compounded.”

The reality of millions driven from their homes is not some dystopian future scenario: The UN High Commissioner on Refugees reported in 2015 that their were more than 65 million forcibly displaced people in the world. That number does not include migrants forced to move by global poverty.

Although the powerful countries most responsible for our climate crisis show little interest in becoming more welcoming to climate refugees, the more positive possibilities that Miller points to are worth fighting for. To mangle a riff from the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, no matter how much pessimism dominates our intellects, optimism of the will still has a chance to prevail.

From Dmitry’s podcast: Blather