Flashman on the March by George MacDonald Fraser

(Book Review)

Yet another book in the Flashman series.

 (See also: Flashman, Royal Flash, Flash for Freedom, Flashman at the Charge, Flashman and the Great Game, Flashman's Lady , Flashman and the Redskins, Flashman and the Dragon, and the original source material Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes.)

“Flashman on the March” is actually the 12th book in the Flashman series. Previously I’ve only read up to book 8, which means I am now reading the books out of order. (Here in Southeast Asia, English books are in short supply and I’m reduced to reading only what I can find in used book stores. This book is the only Flashman book I could find at the moment.)
Not that it really matters, because each of these books is a stand alone story, and they’re all written out of chronological order anyway.

This adventure deals with the 1867 British invasion of Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia). The mad emperor of Abyssinia, Theodore, has taken captive several British citizens as hostages, and the British government sends in an army to rescue them.
The campaign is a logistical nightmare. The British are marching into unfamiliar territory in the middle of a mountainous desert terrain were they must forage for food and water. They have to use elephants to bring their artillery up the mountains. Many observers at the time didn’t think they would come back. All of this is well portrayed in the book.
The land of Abyssinia is also very well described, and George MacDonald Fraser brings out all the wonder of the place. It is an unconquered Christian land in the middle of the Muslim empire, and thought to be the inspiration for the legend of Prester John (the mythical Christian king who supposedly reigned on the other side of the Islamic empire (W)). In the 19th Century, it still retained an unorthodox form of Christianity (apparently an older form of Christianity than the one that existed in Europe).
The Christian Emperor Theodore had visions of driving the Muslims out of Jerusalem, and one of the reasons he became hostile to the British is because he thought he was being snubbed by his fellow Christian monarch Queen Victoria.

All of these fascinating details come through in the book.

Once again, Flashman finds himself in the middle of all of it.
As always, Flashman is a reluctant participant. A series of events (starting out with Flashman as the aide-de-camp to the doomed Emperor Maximilian of Mexico) ends up with Flashman joining the British campaign to Abyssinia, despite his every attempt to weasel out of it.
As always, Flashman ends up encountering numerous real life historical figures.
And as always, much of what Flashman sees and hears are backed up by historical footnotes from George MacDonald Fraser. For instance in his footnotes, Fraser indicates that much of what Flashman hears Emperor Theodore say actually comes verbatim from other sources.

There’s not a lot for me to add to this review that I haven’t said in any of my reviews of the previous Flashman books. And by the reader gets to the 12th book in the series, no doubt they know what to expect, and they won’t be disappointed. There are plenty of colorful descriptions of exotic lands and historical figures, and Flashman has his usual series of narrow escapes from all sorts of dangers. It’s an excellent read, even if I’m not sure I agree with the politics of the book.

Which brings me to my next point…

The Politics of the Book

The early Flashman books highlighted the more shameful or bungling episodes of the British Empire (the invasion of Afghanistan, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Sepoy Rebellion, et cetera.)
Flashman’s cowardliness served as a satire on the cult of Victorian heroism. The irony was that Flashman’s shameless sense of self-preservation made him less of a danger to society than all the honorable Victorian soldiers, whose heads were filled with notions of glory for Queen and Empire and who were likely to lead men into massacres or conduct one themselves.

However starting with Flashman’s Lady, a tonal shift seemed to be evident in these books. Instead of serving as a satire on Victorian heroism, Flashman became a foil to it. The stories focused on British soldiers and generals whose heroism author George MacDonald Fraser seemed to admire, and the fictional Flashman’s own cruelty and cowardliness served as a contrast to emphasize the honor of the British officer.

I’m not entirely sure what caused this tonal shift, but I was much more comfortable with the politics of the earlier books than with the pro-Imperial theme of the latter books.

This particular book follows that same pattern, where the British expedition is portrayed in a very positive light, and Lord Napier, who led the expedition, is repeatedly praised throughout the book.

Granted, this is one episode of imperial history where the British did seem to be in the right. They were defending their own citizens, they were provoked, and they were putting down a ruthless African tyrant.
But then, part of the interpretation of history is knowing which incidents to selectively emphasize. Fraser could have chosen to write about many other historical incidents in which the British army was not in the right. (For example at the same time that the Abyssinian expedition was happening, the Maori Wars were going on in New Zealand.)

Also the invasion of Abyssinia may have had political as well as humanitarian motivations.
I’m far from an expert myself. The only other places I’ve heard about the Abyssinian expedition is from “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire” by Piers Brendon (A) and “This Sceptred Isle: Empire” (A). Both of these sources emphasize that British army was sent not purely to rescue the hostages, but also to bolster British prestige world wide at a time when there was growing concern that the British Empire might soon be eclipsed by their European rivals. Also it was necessary that British prestige be upheld in Africa in order to discourage revolts in India.

This perspective is largely absent from Flashman on the March. Or at least, not emphasized.
Flashman does briefly acknowledge the wider political implications of the venture. (On p. 26. Being typically irreverent, racist and always politically incorrect, Flashman expresses himself in language I daren’t quote here.)

But this wider context is often forgotten in favor of rhetoric about soldiers doing what is right, and a government’s sacred duty to protect its citizens. As George MacDonald Fraser states in his introduction:


“…and it may be that along with the light he [Flashman] casts on a unique chapter of imperial history, he invites a comparison with a later and less glorious day.
For Flashman’s story is about a British army sent out in a good and honest cause by a government who knew what honour meant. It was not sent without initial follies and hesitations in high places, or until every hope of a peaceful issue was gone. It went with the fear of disaster hanging over it, but the British public in no doubt that it was right. It served no politician’s vanity or interest. It went without messianic rhetoric. There were no false excuses, no deceits, not cover-ups or lies, just a decent resolve to do a government’s first duty: to protect its people, whatever the cost. To quote Flashman again, those were the days.” (p. x)


On the other hand:
This book was published in 2005, when the Iraq War  was in full swing. The “later and less glorious day” Fraser is talking about is no doubt Britain’s participation in the Iraq War. In fact if you re-read the above paragraph, it looks like all the things Fraser is saying the Abyssinian campaign was not, he’s implying that the Iraq War was. In the Iraq War there were false excuses, deceits, and cover-ups and lies.

To which I can only add: “Hear Hear!”

Connections with Other Books I’ve Been Reading Lately
(Just for my own benefit I always like to draw connections between some of the various books I’ve been reading.)

The Abyssinian incident is sometimes described as a prelude to “The Scramble for Africa.” It takes place 10 years before the start of Thomas Pakenham’s excellent history on the Scramble, but some of the dramatis personae are the same. For example Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who played such a big part in Thomas Pakenham’s book, was one of the newspaper correspondents assigned to the Abyssinian campaign, and pops up a few times in “Flashman on the March.”

Another newspaper writer who is briefly featured as a character on this book, G.A. Henty, later went on to cover the Sudan Wars in the 1890s, and is featured in the excellent “Three Empires on the Nile” by Dominic Green.
(The British campaign to end slavery in the Suez, one of the major themes in Dominic Green’s book, also briefly features in “Flashman on the March,” when Flashman finds himself on the boat of an overly zealous anti-slavery British naval officer.)

Richard Burton’s quarrels with fellow explorer John Speke, about who discovered what on the Nile river, are also mentioned briefly in this book.

****************************************************************

I don’t know if everyone caught this, but Flashman was in the news a few months back:
Why Labour are calling David Cameron 'Flashman' [LINK HERE]

And so just for fun, here’s a few more Flashman links.

Christopher Hitchens on the subject of Flashman can be found here [LINK HERE] . (Hitchens actually has a much longer essay on Flashman in his latest book, “Arguably” (A), but I can’t find an on-line version at the moment.)

And here’s John Updike’s review of Flashman [LINK HERE].

Link of the Day
The Imperial Way: American Decline in Perspective

Flashman on the March by George MacDonald Fraser: Book Review (Scripted)

From the Gaurdian

An attack on Iran would be an act of criminal stupidity

From The Guardian

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers(1).

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”(2)

Luntz’s technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution or burning fossil fuels causes climate change is still wide open, and that both sides of the “controversy” should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

(Rest of Article Here)

Charles Dickens: Best Ghost Stories published by Wordsworth Classics

(Book Review)

I came across this book while browsing through the shelves of a used bookstore. My first reaction was to think:
a) Everyone loves Ghost stories
b) Everyone loves Charles Dickens
c) How could you go wrong with a book like this?

However, upon completing the book, I must confess to having a lot of mixed feelings about it. Perhaps some of these less remembered stories are less remembered for a reason.

As always it’s difficult to review - an - anthology book  because the different stories collected here are of varying style, purpose and quality.
(And in fact, this much is admitted in the publisher’s introduction:  “The quality of these twelve stories is inevitably uneven, for they span virtually the whole of Dickens’s creative lifetime, cover a variety of supernatural elements, and were written with varying intentions” p. viii-ix).

Some of these stories I enjoyed immensely. Others were a real struggle to get through, and required me to force myself to keep reading till the end.

The title of the anthology is perhaps a bit misleading. All of these stories involve hints of the supernatural, but not all of them are “ghost stories” in the sense of a spooky tale that gives you chills at night. Some of them are more traditional ghost stories, but many of these stories are morality tales in which somebody learns a lesson about humanity through the intervention of supernatural elements. These morality tales can get a bit repetitive when they are all collected together in one volume.
Most of these stories also lack the sort of surprise plot twist you expect from a ghost story, and have a predictable ending.

And then there’s Dickens’s famous long-winded prose. There are stories in this book where he takes forever to get to the point.
Depending on your patience as a reader, Dickens’s long descriptions, filled with various digressions and dry humor, are either the best thing about his writing, or the most frustrating.
Although I count “A Tale of Two Cities” among my favorite books of all time, some stories in this book had me wondering if I really possess enough patience to read Dickens.
(This may be more reflective on my limitations as a reader than on the strength of Dickens’s writing.)


When I mentioned Dickens’s tendency to describe things to excess back in a high school report on “A Tale of Two Cities”, my English teacher wrote in the margins, “He got paid by the word.” According to this website [LINK], that’s actually not technically true (he got paid by the installment), but I can certainly see where the rumor got started. Take, for example, the opening few paragraphs from “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” and see if they don’t read like the author was getting paid for every extra word he crammed in, and every pointless extra digression he took.


Everybody said so.
Far be it from me to assert that what everyone says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be infallible. Everybody may sometimes be right, ‘but that’s no rule’ as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the balled.
The dread word, Ghost, recalls me.
Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is that they were so far right. He did.
Who could have seen his hollow cheeks; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well knit and well proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled seaweed, about his face—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity, but might have said he looked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to bygone places and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?
Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, with a natural fullness and melody in it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a haunted man?
Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library, and part laboratory—for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily—who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at heart, like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour, who that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too?
Who might not, by a very flight of fancy, have believed that everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on haunted ground?
His dwelling was so solitary and vaultlike—an old, retired of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects; smoke-age-and weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stacks; its old trees insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sundial a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when in all other places it was silent and still.
His dwelling, at its heart and core—within doors—at his fireside—was so lowering and old, so crazy, yet so strong, with its wormeaten beams of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelving downward to the great oak chimneypieces; so environed and hemmed in by the pressure of the town, yet so remote in fashion, age, and custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door was shut—echoes, not confined to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten crypt where the Norman arches were half-buried in the earth.

Dickens actually goes on like this for another 2 pages before any action happens, but you get the point.
And this is actually very typical of a lot of the stories in this collection, many of which start out with two or three pages of long ramblings before Dickens gets to the story.
A better reader than myself might enjoy these long descriptive passages. Read the above excerpt, and see what your reaction is. If you’re able to get all the way through it without your mind wandering off somewhere else, than you will probably enjoy this book.
As for me, I discovered I have a limited attention span. I need to have lots of things happening in each paragraph in order to hold my attention. I would get a couple lines into these long descriptions, and then my mind would immediately go someplace else. And then I would get to the bottom of the page and realize I hadn’t absorbed anything, and have to go back up to the top of the page and try to read it again. And again. And again. Some of these pages took me forever to get through, and in the end much of this book ended up being a forced march rather than pleasure reading.

And then after working my way through all that description, I was frequently disappointed when the pay off wasn’t very good—when the actual story would be very mundane or predictable.

***********************************************************

The stories collected in this volume are as follows:
1. The Queer Chair
2. A Madman’s Manuscript
3. The Goblins who Stole a Sexton
4. The Ghosts of the Mail
5. The Baron of Grogzwig
6. A Christmas Carol
7. The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
8. To be Read at Dusk
9. The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber
10. The Haunted House
11. Trial for Murder
12. The Signalman

Of these stories, I enjoyed “The Queer Chair,” “The Baron of Grogzwig”, “A Christmas Carol,” “To Be Read at Dusk,”, “The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber,” and “Trial for Murder,” and “The Signalman”. Long-winded descriptions aside, all of these were worth the trouble, although for different reasons. “The Queer Chair” is recommended for its humor, while “The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber” is more of a chilling tale.

The other stories I had more mixed feelings about, but I suppose that is to be expected in an anthology volume.

Some of these are excerpts from larger works. The first 4 stories, for example, all come from The Pickwick Papers, but you would never know that because they stand perfectly on their own as short stories. (According to the publisher’s introduction, it was apparently Dickens’ practice to insert smaller stand alone stories into some of his longer serializations.)

The only place where the short story did not excerpt itself cleanly was “The Haunted House”. This was apparently from a book that was a collaborative effort between Dickens and several other writers (W). Dickens was given the job of setting up the story, but I never got to see how it concluded.
Everything else stands on its own very nicely.

A Christmas Carol

This is the most famous story in the collection and is often published as a novella in its own right, so I’ll say a few words about it separately.
I think everyone is familiar with this story whether you’ve read the original or not. If you’re anything like me, you’ve seen so many television adaptations of this story that you’ve got the entire plot memorized before you start reading it.

That being said, it’s well written and worth reading, even if you know exactly what is going to happen next. Unlike some of the other stories in this collection, the pacing is pretty good. The characters are very colorful. And the story manages to do (and do well) humor, pathos, and redemption.

As someone who dislikes - Christmas - myself, I fully expected to hate this story, which was the mother of all subsequent sappy Christmas stories—not to mention the story that made hating Christmas equivalent to misanthropy in the popular mind.
But despite myself I found myself enjoying it.

For one thing, the liberal in me enjoyed seeing Dickens’ liberal views on display.
Dickens was no revolutionary, as Orwell  points out clearly in this essay here [LINK], but he was definitely on the side of the liberal reformers of his day.

As the publisher’s introduction sums up the theme of this story, “The virtues of generosity and goodwill to all mankind which are traditionally associated with Christmas are presented as an antidote to the harsh puritan attitude that prevailed in the world of Victorian trade.”

Dickens’ message of putting people before profit comes through clearly in his writing.

When confronted with the doomed ghost of his old business partner, Jacob Marley, who is being punished in the afterlife for his greedy business practices, Scrooge says:

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

At other points, the miserly Scrooge (pre-redemption) sounds very much like today’s Gingrich-esque conservative, complaining about the lazy poor people on welfare. When asked to give money to the poor, Scrooge has the following response:

“At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman. “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid from what you said at first that something had had occurred to stop them in their usual course,” said Scrooge. “I am very glad to hear it…. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas, and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”


I also found myself getting drawn into the drama of Scrooge’s life as the spirits take him back and forwards in time to show him what his life used to be like, and what his future will be. The reader feels, along with Scrooge, the intense sorrow of the relationships he’s lost in the past, and the happiness that could have been his.

[Actually some of Scrooge’s life reminded me a little bit of Citizen Kane. Scrooge starts out as a poor child with nothing, goes to be hard working young man, becomes obsessed with money and success and loses track of what is important in life, and then is seemingly fated to die alone. But unlike Citizen Kane, Scrooge is given a chance to change his fate and rejoin humanity.]

It’s true that this story uses Christmas as a setting, but actually the really appealing parts of the story have nothing to do with Christmas, and the story could easily have been re-written without Christmas altogether.

In fact, it is the Christmas sections of the story that are the weakest.
I’m not sure if Dickens amplified the importance of Christmas because he though it would make his story more popular, or if he really believed what he wrote, but the Christmas sections are pretty over the top.
Dickens seemed to believe that without Christmas, society would completely collapse. And yet plenty of societies have gotten along for centuries just fine without it.

At one point the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge around the world to show Scrooge that Christmas is even being celebrated down in the ground in the mines, and in the middle of the ocean in the ships.
What Dickens forgets to mention is that most of the world actually doesn’t celebrate Christmas. (Well, globalization is spreading some of the superficial aspects of Christmas into Asia these days, but it is still not considered a major holiday, and it certainly wasn’t celebrated in Asia in the 19th century.)

But the charms of the story were more than enough to make up for its excessive zeal about Christmas.

According to the publisher’s introduction, it became Dickens’ tradition to publish a Christmas themed story every year, and two others are included in this anthology: “The Goblins who Stole a Sexton”, and “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.”
These stories are very similar in theme and plot to “A Christmas Carol” and when included in the same book they can quickly start to feel repetitive. By the time I got to the end of the 3rd story about ghosts showing a man the error of his ways on Christmas I had just about lost patience for the formula.
But that’s the problem of the anthology. Standing alone, these stories are perfectly fine.

Link of the Day
Chomsky on two party system alternatives -- 2/14/12

Charles Dickens: Best Ghost Stories published by Wordsworth Classics: Book Review (Scripted)

More Links:

I listen to the BBC World Service constantly at my apartment. I don't normally link to their programs, but this recent program on America's Poor really deserves to be listened to. It's 25 minutes long, but you can put it on in the background when you're doing something else.

Also while I'm linking around to stuff:
I found this article from Salon.com to be the best I've read so far on the contraception debate:

Freedom of religion is freedom from religion: Obama's contraception compromise is a rare practical solution to America's perennial church-state tensions

Speaking of which--Did anyone else see this Wall Street Journal article in which the Catholic Church is comparing their opposition to insuring their employees for Contraception to the Civil Rights movement?
The full text of original article is no longer online--but the New Republic has excerpted some of the best parts.

At St. Brendan Church in San Francisco, the Rev. Michael Quinn compared the church’s opposition to the contraceptive rules to the civil-rights fight waged by 1950s activist Rosa Parks, who refused to give her seat up to a white man on a bus. “I believe this is our Rosa Parks moment,” Father Quinn told more than 200 parishioners on Sunday. “This is our moment to say this is wrong.”

From Salon.com

The Hysterical American Decline by Noam Chomsky

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.

The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out — “anything that flies on anything that moves” — a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.

(Rest of article here)

...stealing this from my friend's facebook page.

From Salon.com

I’m pro-life and I support Planned Parenthood

From the Guardian:

With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war
As technology allows machines to make their own decisions, warfare will become bloodier – and less accountable


These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfil one of humankind's abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance. That these powers are already being abused is suggested by the mendacity of those who are deploying them. The CIA, which is running the undeclared and unacknowledged drone war in Pakistan, insists that there have been no recent civilian casualties. So does Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan. It is a blatant whitewash.

As a report last year by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism showed, of some 2,300 people killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 until August 2011, between 392 and 781 appear to have been civilians; 175 were children. In the period about which the CIA and Brennan made their claims, at least 45 civilians have been killed.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it might be worth comparing this to what would have happened if American citizens had been killed in the same way, and by doing so get a sense of how much a Pakistani life is worth these days.
If these had been American civilians killed, I think someone would have gone to jail for involuntary manslaughter at the very least, not to mention several people losing their jobs.
During the Vietnam War, it was quite obvious that the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians were not important to US government policy makers.
Now are we seeing the same thing with the new war?

14 must-read books for the college rebel (and me)

Ran across this article in my Internet surfing:
14 must-read books for the college rebel

Although no longer in college, just for fun (and for the sake of wasting time on this sunny afternoon) I thought I'd see how well my reading list would stock up as a college rebel. And if anyone else is up for this, maybe we can make a little blogging game out of this list. Tell me how many of these books you've got under your belt.

Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

Read it back in freshman year of college. Don't remember it all that well now years later, but remember enjoying it at the time.

(In fact I even quoted from this book in this Chimes article I wrote. Although re-reading it now, I wish I hadn't because that quote isn't really on topic, and just looks stupid.)

Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader

Um, never read the Chomsky Reader per se, but I've certainly read plenty of Chomsky over the years. Does that count?

Howard Zinn, A People’s History Of The United States

As I mentioned in this post, I never actually got around to reading this book cover to cover, although I've read large sections of it at different times.

William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook
Never read it, don't plan to. I certainly remember this book popping up in a lot of conversations back in college, but if you don't have an active interest in manufacturing explosives it sounds like it would be pretty boring reading.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Never read it. Don't particularly plan to.
I'm more of a history nut than a philosophy nerd, and too much philosophy hurts my brain. Plus I tend to associate Nietzsche too much with a Freshman philosophy major. (Although Emma Goldman did mention in her autobiography how much she loved Nietzsche, so maybe I should read him one day.)

Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works
Haven't read this yet, but may someday. Maybe. Or maybe not.
I'm a little bit too much of a philistine to enjoy poetry, but Rimbaud does strike me as an interesting guy. And he lived during a period of French History that I'm interested in. (Rimbaud was around during the Paris Commune days, and although he didn't have much of an active role his name occasionally pops up in history books on the Paris Commune).
May have read some Rimbaud back in college literature classes actually. Don't remember. Tend to get him mixed up sometimes with Baudelaire.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
Haven't read it. Don't plan to.
It seems most 17 or 18 year olds go through a period when they're fascinated by drug culture.
(At least for men anyway. From my own observations it doesn't seem to be such a big fascination to most girls, for whatever reason. Or am I going out on a limb here?)
Despite not using a lot of drugs, I was fascinated by drug culture. Perhaps those of us who are too cautious to do our own experimenting tend to be all the more interested in doing it vicariously through books. And so I read with great fascination books like "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe.
However having moved on from that stage of life, I have now lost all interest in it, and don't imagine I'll be reading this book anytime soon.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Haven't read it. Don't plan to.
At the risk of reinforcing stereotypes, all of my knowledge of Sylvia Plath just comes from talking to girls who were big fans--the type of girls who thought that they experienced feelings deeper than the ordinary person did. It turned me off of it.

Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible
Haven't read it. Don't plan to.
(I probably shouldn't say this without having read the book, but I'm of the opinion that Satanism is not so much a real philosophy as it is a boogey-man created by Church Evangelicals on the one hand, and by metal fans who want to shock their parents on the other hand. But if someone out there can convince me that this book is worth reading, I might reconsider.)

Charles Bukowski, Factotum
Never even heard of it.

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Read it. Reviewed it on this blog. And wasn't overly impressed with it.
(I must be a bit out of it, but at the time I read this book I didn't realize this was a classic back-packers' book. I was just looking to learn a little bit more about Buddhist mythology.)

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
Haven't read it. Because Siddhartha failed to make a big impression on me, I doubt I'll be checking out any books by the same author.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Read it. Reviewed it on this blog. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

This book used to be on my reading list back when I was 18 and really into the beat poets, but I never got around to it at the time and my interests have since moved.  Now I doubt I'll ever go back for it.

I did however read "On the Road", and "The Subterraneans" by Jack Kerouac and tried to struggle my way through a couple books of Ginsberg's poetry. Also read "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" by Ken Kesey and (as mentioned above) "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Do I get any points for any of those?

Actually a book like "On the Road" really should be on this list. Which just illustrates once again how random and utterly subjective these kind of Internet lists really are.

So let me make a couple suggestions of my own. (Since my own brain is much more interested in politics and history than poetry and philosophy, my own list would weigh heavily towards those genres. A different person with different interests might create a different list, but that's all part of the fun isn't it?)

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
In my experience hanging out with anarchist groups, this book comes up frequently in conversation. In any group of anarchists guaranteed there's at least one of them who's read this book.
If you're hanging out with Trotskyists, the preferred book seems to be "10 Days that Shook the World" by Jack Reed (something I haven't read yet but plan on doing someday.) Just don't get into a conversation with them about what happened after those 10 days. They don't like talking about that part nearly as much.
"1984" gets honorable mention.  It's a little bit too mainstream to be hip, I know.  (Anything your high school English teacher is likely to assign to you doesn't get written up as a rebellious book.)  But for anyone who's trying to position themselves as anti-establishment, it's always useful to be able to quote from this book and compare it to the current government.


All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The ultimate anti-war book. Plus it gets bonus cool points for being banned by the Nazis.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller  gets honorable mention.

Anything by Marx. (Really, what is a book list for college rebels without any Marx?)
Personally I find his political writings to be much more readable than his philosophical writings.

Ditto for Bakunin.

I'm tempted to add classic leftist history books here like, History of the Paris Commune by Prosper Oliver Lissagaray, but that's probably too obscure. The point of a list like this is to highlight the classics, not list every last book on the subject.

Okay, let me know what I missed, or what other books you would add.

Update: Someone criticized this list for being too white (over in the comments section over at the original post).  That's probably a fair criticism.  The two big books connected with Black Radicalism that come to mind are:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X 
(Which I've read)

And Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
...Which I haven't read. Although back when I was a college student I did try to track this book down. Calvin College library didn't have it, and none of my local bookstores had it.

Which raised the question: Does anyone still read "Soul on Ice" anymore or is it purely a time piece from the 60s now?

If memory serves, Calvin's library didn't have "Soul on Ice" but they did have Cleaver's born again Christian novel "Soul on Fire". You could make some sort of cheap jibe here about how this is just what you would expect from a conservative Christian college like Calvin, but actually their library wasn't half bad when it came to books on black radicalism.  They had several books sympathetic to the Black Panthers, like A Panther is a Black Cat by Reginald Major

They also had "Die Nigger Die!" by H. Rap Brown (A), which I read. And "The Autobiography of Angela Davis" (A), which I also read. And the Autobiography of David Hillard (A) (which I never did get around to reading at the time, unfortunately).
All of those books should probably get honorable mention on this list although probably none of them are famous enough to warrant their own entry.

Okay, what else did I miss?

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