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What I finished:
+ On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky. Read for my anarchist book club, lol. This was actually my first time reading Chomsky? Which is wild, but my whole life he was presented to me as some kind of kook--as a public intellectual, anyway, I don't think most people in my life knew he was a linguist so they didn't care what he said about that.
Shockingly (lol), I do not find him a kook when it comes to politics, I find him imminently reasonable.
But anyway, as with most collections, this was hit-or-miss. There's nothing that's bad, it's just some of it was certainly more interesting or relevant to me. It also would have benefited from being arranged differently and certainly from having some DATES AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ESSAYS. Why do editors never include the dates when the pieces were written?
The bits I liked best were the pieces of interviews where he talks about his political background, the way he views anarchism, etc. These were mostly from the first part, which was excerpts from Understanding Power, which I now want to read. There was also another little interview second-to-last, and since that one talked about his life and how it affected his politics it REALLY should have been the first essay.
There was an extended essay that was a critical reading of another writer's history of the Spanish Civil War, which was well done, but didn't mean as much to me as it should have because I am not terribly educated on the Spanish Civil War (though I definitely want to read more about the anarchist communities that flourished for a short while). The final essay was a speech he gave on a topic assigned to him--language and freedom. This was a fairly dense text full of references to Rousseau and Humboldt and the Enlightenment in general that was mostly interesting to me because it combined Chomskys two big Things, linguistics and politics. I wish he'd grappled with it more straightforwardly, but I caught some interesting glimpses.
I don't think this particular collection is the best introduction to Chomsky's thoughts on anarchism--I want to seek out something better--but I am glad I read it.
+ Terre Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land by Sven Lindqvist.
This was paired in ebook form with the first Lindqvist book I read; together, the volume was called The Dead Do Not Die. They went extremely well together, though I counted them as the two separate books they were written as.
This one was about colonialism in Australia and the destruction of Indigenous life and culture. As with Exterminate All the Brutes, it's also part travelogue, though it works better here because the places he's describing are the places where the history he talks about took place.
I of course knew that the settlers treated the native peoples terribly, but I didn't know details, really, other than having a vague idea of the indoctrination schools that some children were taken to. It's horrifically fascinating to me, the way that colonialism takes education, a space that is meant to enlighten and expand our worlds, and turn it into incredibly brutal spaces of obliteration and torture. There's a dissertation to be written--actually, I'm sure it's already written, I'd just need to find it it--tying together the experiences of Native kids in boarding schools in the US and Canada with Indigenous kids in these schools in Australia and Romani kids in Central/Eastern Europe. And probably in other places too that I don't know about.
Lindqvist's argument is straightforward: the "settling" of Australia was horrifically brutal, many Australians don't want to face this, but this history is all around in the land that was stolen, the land that was everything to the Indigenous way of life. The story is mostly told through white eyes, a series of historical figures who encountered the native people of the Australian continent and the widely varying ways in which they reacted. There are people here who were straight-up evil in their actions, people who had good motivations but bad results, and people who managed to do some good. The glimpses of Indigenous culture we get are very intriguing and make me (yet again) want to read more about them.
Taken together, the two volumes are an incredibly powerful indictment of white settler colonialism and imperialism; Lindqvist just wants people to face the fact that Western wealth and power is built upon unspeakable brutality committed against millions of people in the global south. I think he does this well. He's not doing any original research per se (at least as far as I can tell), but he's pulling together a wide variety of sources and putting them together in an effective and provocative (complimentary) way.
What I'm reading now:
Bury Me Standing: The [Romani] and Their Journey. Speaking of the Romani, I had been meaning to read this one for a long time and I've finally gotten around to it. I have mixed feelings about and I'm sure I'll have things to say when I finish. For now, I'll just say that it's uncomfortable to me that they still haven't updated the language used at least in the subtitle.
+ On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky. Read for my anarchist book club, lol. This was actually my first time reading Chomsky? Which is wild, but my whole life he was presented to me as some kind of kook--as a public intellectual, anyway, I don't think most people in my life knew he was a linguist so they didn't care what he said about that.
Shockingly (lol), I do not find him a kook when it comes to politics, I find him imminently reasonable.
But anyway, as with most collections, this was hit-or-miss. There's nothing that's bad, it's just some of it was certainly more interesting or relevant to me. It also would have benefited from being arranged differently and certainly from having some DATES AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ESSAYS. Why do editors never include the dates when the pieces were written?
The bits I liked best were the pieces of interviews where he talks about his political background, the way he views anarchism, etc. These were mostly from the first part, which was excerpts from Understanding Power, which I now want to read. There was also another little interview second-to-last, and since that one talked about his life and how it affected his politics it REALLY should have been the first essay.
There was an extended essay that was a critical reading of another writer's history of the Spanish Civil War, which was well done, but didn't mean as much to me as it should have because I am not terribly educated on the Spanish Civil War (though I definitely want to read more about the anarchist communities that flourished for a short while). The final essay was a speech he gave on a topic assigned to him--language and freedom. This was a fairly dense text full of references to Rousseau and Humboldt and the Enlightenment in general that was mostly interesting to me because it combined Chomskys two big Things, linguistics and politics. I wish he'd grappled with it more straightforwardly, but I caught some interesting glimpses.
I don't think this particular collection is the best introduction to Chomsky's thoughts on anarchism--I want to seek out something better--but I am glad I read it.
+ Terre Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land by Sven Lindqvist.
This was paired in ebook form with the first Lindqvist book I read; together, the volume was called The Dead Do Not Die. They went extremely well together, though I counted them as the two separate books they were written as.
This one was about colonialism in Australia and the destruction of Indigenous life and culture. As with Exterminate All the Brutes, it's also part travelogue, though it works better here because the places he's describing are the places where the history he talks about took place.
I of course knew that the settlers treated the native peoples terribly, but I didn't know details, really, other than having a vague idea of the indoctrination schools that some children were taken to. It's horrifically fascinating to me, the way that colonialism takes education, a space that is meant to enlighten and expand our worlds, and turn it into incredibly brutal spaces of obliteration and torture. There's a dissertation to be written--actually, I'm sure it's already written, I'd just need to find it it--tying together the experiences of Native kids in boarding schools in the US and Canada with Indigenous kids in these schools in Australia and Romani kids in Central/Eastern Europe. And probably in other places too that I don't know about.
Lindqvist's argument is straightforward: the "settling" of Australia was horrifically brutal, many Australians don't want to face this, but this history is all around in the land that was stolen, the land that was everything to the Indigenous way of life. The story is mostly told through white eyes, a series of historical figures who encountered the native people of the Australian continent and the widely varying ways in which they reacted. There are people here who were straight-up evil in their actions, people who had good motivations but bad results, and people who managed to do some good. The glimpses of Indigenous culture we get are very intriguing and make me (yet again) want to read more about them.
Taken together, the two volumes are an incredibly powerful indictment of white settler colonialism and imperialism; Lindqvist just wants people to face the fact that Western wealth and power is built upon unspeakable brutality committed against millions of people in the global south. I think he does this well. He's not doing any original research per se (at least as far as I can tell), but he's pulling together a wide variety of sources and putting them together in an effective and provocative (complimentary) way.
What I'm reading now:
Bury Me Standing: The [Romani] and Their Journey. Speaking of the Romani, I had been meaning to read this one for a long time and I've finally gotten around to it. I have mixed feelings about and I'm sure I'll have things to say when I finish. For now, I'll just say that it's uncomfortable to me that they still haven't updated the language used at least in the subtitle.
