(and by the way, big respect for the dude who got L M H R tattooed accross his knuckles in response to the BNP turning up to his band’s gigs)

This obsession isn’t peculiar to Almodovar. The process which Raimunda and her family have to go through in Volver reflects what is happening on a larger scale across Spain. The dictatorship of General Franco only came to an end in the 1970s, still very much within the lifetimes of many people and the lifetimes of many more people’s parents. The transition to democracy was managed by the King and the conservative establishment after Franco’s death, and there was a great deal of continuity from the old regime to the new one (indeed Spain’s last Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, the warmongering bastard and close ally of Bush and Blair, was once a member of Franco’s own party).

Accordingly, there was never much in the way of Truth and Reconciliation; on the contrary, an unspoken pact of forgetting bound people never to speak of what had passed. Not unlike the aftermath of many a family trauma, all references to the fascist regime were locked away in a dark cupboard which – at least until very recently, as a generation that never knew fascism began to reach maturity – everyone sort of knew never to open.

This is a confusing and oppressive way to live. A line in Volver reveals Raimunda’s village, isolated and built on secrets, to have the highest rate of insanity in the world, or something, and that’s not exactly surprising. Our lives are shaped by the experiences we’ve lived through just as our societies are products of their histories and if that-thing-we-don’t-talk-about was really such a big deal then its legacy will be more or less everywhere. Avoiding it will require constant, unacknowledged vigilance. Pretty stressful stuff.

This kind of stress is one of the themes of China Miéville’s new novel, The City and the City, although I think it might tell us more about Northern Ireland than Spain. As surreal as you’d expect from Miéville, the book is set in two cities which occupy the same physical location. Their separation is the product of tremendous mental discipline from the inhabitants of both, with presence in one city dependent upon an ability to “unsee” what is happening in the other. This unseeing is, in turn, enforced by a terror of the mysterious authority known only as “Breach”. Like Breach, the main role of Franco’s secret police was to scare people out of seeing what they weren’t supposed to see – and the terror they inspired continued to do so long after they had gone.

The classic example of social control through suppression of history usually comes from revisionism in Stalinist Russia and its satellites, of which George Orwell provided the best-known literary examination. “In times of usual deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” “Who controls the present controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future.” Stuff like that. That Stalin and Franco had to go to such extraordinary lengths to bury the past is no coincidence, as we’ll soon see, but the suppression of history is routinely achieved with much less effort in the “free world” of market capitalist democracies.

I say “suppression”, but of course it’s not that. Historical knowledge isn’t just available, it’s actively taught in schools and propagated on TV and in the media. It’s quite a strange and convoluted form of history, though. I remember my GCSE in Social and Economic History, which basically told the story of the Industrial Revolution in Britain mainly through tedious lists of inventions. Even this was a great leap forward from all I’d been taught before, in which the point of view of ordinary people was completely off the agenda.

The French Revolution, if it happened at all, was best understood through the eyes of Marie Antoinette – and not the tens of thousands of ordinary Parisians who risked everything to confront a regime that kept them in starvation, establish democracy and abolish slavery. But it’s in the 20th Century that we really lose the plot. In the space of a few short generations, the memory of the uprisings of the 1920s has been almost completely edited out of existence. People know about the Jarrow march, maybe, but the general strike that nearly toppled the government? The mass mutinies that stopped Churchill carrying WWI into revolutionary Russia when everyone had had quite enough of dying for no reason? Nothing.

As we get closer to the present it gets worse and worse. Labour Party member John O’Farrell’s popular book An Utterly Impartial History of Britain arbitrarily decides to stop history at 1945. The struggle for women’s liberation, the economic collapse and subsequent fightback of the 1970s, the miners’ strike, the rise of the National Front and its long defeat by mass antifascist activity, the collapse of Social Democracy, the war on Iraq and our opposition to it – O’Farrell wants you to know your history, but not that history. Not the history that made the world as we know it and certainly not the history that people like you have helped to shape.

History, in other words, hasn’t been suppressed, as such. It has been atomised. It has been cut off from the people who make it (or rather, they have been cut off from it). This is, of course, a product of ruling class propaganda and indoctrination, but not that much. When Marx wrote that the ruling ideas of society are the ideas of the ruling class, he didn’t think it was because all capitalists are as skilful manipulators as Derren Brown. He meant that the kind of society we live in, and the way it is run, informs the context in which we form our ideas, to the extent that the ideas of those at the top just seem like common sense.

For example, under capitalism, we are made to compete with each other for wages, conditions and artificially scarce resources, and so many people’s experience makes it easier for them to believe the capitalist telling them that deep down everyone is a ruthless bastard than the socialist telling them that we can all unite in the struggle. What’s more we organise society through the exchange of commodities between individuals: you can buy something from wherever its on offer, or you can sell it to whoever’s asking, but you’re pretty much totally cut off from the big picture of how it gets produced and distributed and consumed. This too has implications for our understanding of the world.

We can see this very clearly in economics. The “neoclassical” model and its predecessors, which between them have dominated mainstream economics since the 19th century (give or take some necessary flirtations with stuff that actually make sense) take the isolated individual as their starting point, and have this individual buy and sell things to no-one in particular. They love using the example of Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on a desert island. Now there are aspects of our lives under capitalism which undermine such an understanding – in particular in the workplace, where most of us do spend most of our time and energy, and where we are blatantly anything but consumerist hermits – and others which reinforce it.

Insofar as we do think of ourselves in Robinson Crusoe mode, we cut ourselves off from each other and thus from our power to act collectively. This act of “unseeing” our shared interests and shared power is, of course, something that all socialists seek to undermine. As revolutionary socialists, though, we have to go further. We have to remember that if history happens anywhere, it isn’t on Robinson Crusoe’s island. The commodity fetish, the atomisation of capitalist society, doesn’t just cut us off from each other, it cuts us off from the big picture of historical change – and in doing so, from the possibility of changing history.

This is why Lenin, if it was Lenin (I am writing this offline so I’m not able to check), said that a revolutionary party needs to be the memory of the working class. We need to stop “unseeing” our past if we are to play any role in our future. This is why the bit at the end of the Marxism festival when everyone sings the Internationale is so electrifying. It doesn’t just link us up with the other people in the room: it links us up with the workers of the Russian Revolution and the partisans defending the Warsaw Ghetto.

Franco came to power in a fascist counterrevolution. When his uprising began, it was a response to mass general strikes and demonstrations, to election landslides by socialists, communists and anarchists, by collectivisation programmes of land and industry, to a society in which, as George Orwell put it, the workers were in the saddle. It wasn’t enough merely to defeat this revolution: there would always be many many more workers than there were fascist boot boys. That’s why the act of forgetting, of unseeing, of disowning history became so important the idea of taking the saddle loomed large in the minds of the workers and, for Franco, Hitler, Pinochet and fascists everywhere, that possibility needed to be wiped out of their consciousness with as much violence as necessary. (Stalinism too, it hardly needs to be said, has its origins in a counterrevolution to purge the legacy of 1917 once and for all.)

And so, opening up to the truth about Franco leads the way to opening up about what came before. Let’s go back to where we started, with contemporary Spanish cinema. Before Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom in the mid 1990s – a wonderful film, by the way, and one that was available to view online at Google video last time I checked – the subject of the Civil War and the revolution was more or less completely out of bounds; now there is a surge of interest, and a bumper crop of films on the subject (There’s an article in Socialist Review a few months back on this, but like I said I can’t get the links).

But even if there had never been a Spanish Revolution to rediscover in the past, the act of breaking the pact of forgetting massively improves the chances of making one happen in the future. We’ve all seen the effect that mass meetings and demonstrations can have on people, raising the possibility of taking collective action after a lifetime of atomisation. Similarly, it’s hard to really think about shaping history until you stop being terrified of even looking at it. The skeletons in the cupboard count among the many enemies whose power we will have to smash. It’s very exciting to see this happening in Spain – and, looking at how hard the place has been hit by the crisis, not a moment too soon.

One thing sort of spoils it though:

The death toll from a suspected US air raid in Pakistan has risen after nine more bodies were pulled from the rubble, officials have said.

Three Pakistani intelligence officers said on Saturday that 21 people had been killed in the attack in the village of Dande Darpa Khel in North Waziristan a day earlier.

A local tribal elder said six children were among the dead.

…

Friday’s raid was the third in three weeks by what are believed to be CIA-operated pilotless aircraft.

I’d also like to convey my Ramadan greetings to my Muslim friends and comrades, but alas I don’t have a flying deathbot to deliver them.

MATHEMATICIAN, LOGICIAN, WARTIME CODEBREAKER, VICTIM OF PREJUDICE - "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere like that of sculpture."

Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.

He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a ‘cure’, and took his own life, aged 41.

The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment and recognize that his work created much of the world we live in and saved us from Nazi Germany. And an apology would recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended this man’s life and career.

The Devil In Amber

After The Vesuvius Club, this is the second book for Gatiss’ bed-hopping Edwardian socialite and secret agent Lucifer Box.  It’s a couple of years now since I read TVC, but I remember clearly enough to say that the sequel offers broadly more of the same: our hero alternately seduces or assassinates a series of acquaintances named for increasingly outlandish puns (this time we get to meet Percy Flarge, Agnes Daye and ‘Twice’ Daley, as well as Lucifer’s sister Pandora) all the while thwarting a dastardly plot of epic proportions.

Good times, and in TDIA the plot as advertised on the back of the book looks particularly promising, revolving around both the return of the Devil – a mythology which, even if I understand it to owe more to mediaeval epic poetry than to anything in the old or new testaments, has enormous cultural resonance which sci-fi writers have often exploited to great effect – and the rise of fascism – something the significance of which hardly needs to be underlined in times like these.  Having read it, though, I can’t help but be completely baffled at Gatiss’ choice of subject matter.

Lucifer Box, as the first book has established, is a shallow bon viveur who sees people primarily in terms of what he can get out of them - usually either a gunfight or a shag.  At first the casual treatment of his bisexuality is quite refreshing, asserting in much the same way as Doctor Who/Torchwood that sexuality is a broad spectrum and people shouldn’t have to be forever apologising or explaining themselves for not being hetereosexual vanilla, but without any further sexual politics it ends up just enabling Lucifer to relate to everyone in the way that (pre-Daniel Craig, at least) James Bond related to women: as things to consume.

Among the few he’s not after killing or shagging is his “domestic” Delilah, initially something of a sidekick employed by the secret service, but by this tired retired and working as Box’s proper honest-to-goodness servant (with an hover-hegged Parker-from-Thunderbirds haccent that’s a lot easier to lose patience with in print than it is in the mouth of a puppet).  Of course, between servants, enemies and casual shags Box has very few proper friends, and this kind of lifestyle doesn’t necessarily rule out an interesting book.  One can imagine an Alan Moore comic starting with a not wholly dissimilar setup and ending in some seriously mind-blowing setup.

TDIA is not a book about banality, however, just a banal book.  Box’s disinterested treatment of people informs Gatiss’ treatment of what is at stake.  The fascists are just a peripherally political cult who like to wear uniforms.  The Devil is hardly more threatening, and even when his presence forces Box to fall back on the power of the Christian God he has never believed in and abandon himself to prayer, this ultimately has no more consequences than smoking a different kind of cigar.  Again, handled differently the inability of either Hitler or Satan to peturb our hero might have been interesting, but in Gatiss it just sucks the horror out of either.

Ultimately, TDIA just plays it too safe: even though it’s only the second Lucifer Box book it ends up feeling drearily formulaic, and the outlandish choice of villians just makes this more noticeable.  It’s a shame really, given Gatiss’ pedigree: whatever anyone says against The League Of Gentlemen and, more recently, Psychoville, they were anything but safe or predictable, and often managed to be both very funny and genuinely chilling within the same five minute scene.  I enjoyed TDIA at a superficial level, but couldn’t get into it anywhere near as much as The Vesuvius Club; if Gatiss bothers with another Lucifer Box book I hope he finds something to peturb his nonchalant hero and raise the stakes a bit, or else there’s really no point.

Huh, that all reads a lot more negative than it sounded in my head!  Now, let’s see how I get on with A Thousand Splendid Suns…

Unlike TDIA, this is a book you’ll have had a hard time missing.  As well as being an officially “long-awaited” follow-up to The Kite Runner, which I haven’t read, t’s a Richard & Judy number one bestseller, donchakno.  A quick Google search reveals it to be the subject of more reading groups and study guides than you can shake a mujahadeen’s kalashnikov at.  But alas! instead of making it a book that needs no introduction, all this means is that this has to be the review not just of a book in and of itself, but of how the book is and can be interpreted.

In brief, ATSS tells the story of Mariam, an illegitimate child whose wealthy father marries her off to avoid embarrassment after her mother’s suicide, and Laila, whose dreams of an education are blown to smithereens along with her progressive parents by a rocket attack on their Kabul home.  Thus do both women fall into the clutches of their almost cartoonishly abusive husband Rasheed, whose escalating torment of his wives mirrors the escalating brutality of Afghanistan’s recent history.

Both themes are fairly well-handled.  The level of violence to which the women are subject does, at times, strain credibility – until you pinch yourself (assuming you are fortunate to have to pinch yourself) and remind yourself of the reality of domestic violence.  The sad thing is, their tortures to which Mariam and Laila would be familiar to many women, and their matter-of-fact presentation only helps “the facts speak for themselves” without too much mediation from the author.

While Rasheed’s own perspective is never fully explored, he is much better realised than the cardboard monsters of TDIA.  He seeks absolute control over his wives in large part because he has so little control over anything else – more than once I was reminded of Tony Cliff’s saying that while power corrupts, it is powerlessness that corrupts absolutely – and while this doesn’t excuse him, it does make him human enough to be believable and all the more threatening for it.

Hosseini similarly manages to avoid cliche and caricature in his portrayal of history, and brings to the reader’s attention many of the era’s complications and contradictions.  Particularly important, given what happens at the end, is the fairly accurate description of the “Communists” whose coup brings universal education and rights for women but also hated secret police and Russian tanks; even Laila’s progressive family ends up giving up two sons for the jihad against them.

Unfortunately that jihad, fueled with weapons and indoctrination from the CIA and its allies, only lays the basis for a brutal civil war that only ends with the Taliban, whose reign of terror is, in turn, only ended by American invasion.  And that’s where the review really has to begin.

At one point under the Taliban, the film Titanic becomes spectacularly popular on the black market of Kabul and, like Titanic, at no point in ATSS can you escape the ending that no-one needs to spoil.  It ends with the start of a war which is still going on, and the validity of which is still a topic for fierce debate.  In particular, the oppression of Afghan women is a recurring theme in pro-war interventions, and so, even if the war itself doesn’t start until the closing chapters – and even if Khaled Hosseini didn’t want to write either a pro-war or an anti-war book – the whole thing is inescapably “about” the war.  Subtextually at least, all those Richard & Judy reading groups will be even more so.

As a piece of “War on Terror” propaganda, happily, ATSS would fail on many levels.

Hosseini quite firmly rules out any interpretation that would brutal misogyny as part and parcel of Islam.  For all that the worst of her suffering is upheld by the Mullah’s with religious justification, Mariam’s only real friend before she meets Laila is the Mullah Faizullah – and it is he who not only tries to look out for her, but is uniquely concerned with the education she is ultimately denied – and it is to the Koran that she looks to for support at the worst of times.  One is reminded of Marx’s words: her religion “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances”; it is her opium, the expression of her suffering as much as its cause.

It also contains much ammunition against the idea of humanitarian intervention.  The Soviets and their Afghan puppets show just how impossible it is to liberate a people at gunpoint, and when the Americans do come to the rescue Laila upbraids her optimistic (second) husband by reminding him how much their bombs have in common with the one that, by killing her parents, started her nightmarish years at Rasheed’s hands.  This is, potentially, some pretty wild anti-war stuff, and while the narrator never says anything to reinforce it, nor does he say anything to contradict it.

However, he does make one of the heaviest interventions a narrator can (and, indeed, has to) make, with the decision of where the story ends.  Even though the book was published in 2007, the narrative leaves off several years earlier, after the invasion but before the insurrection, before the occupation got really bogged down.  It is pretty much the only point in history at which he could have given the last word to Laila’s young son who – for all his parents’ reservations – looks forward to a life in which the Afghan people will, finally, be free from the yoke of oppression.

If you’re already pretty familiar with what happens next, this optimistic end point only undermines the tragedy of it.  Of the violence in which whole villages are wiped out by robot drones.  Of the absurdity of asking whether this is “a price worth paying” for women’s liberation when, as the female Afghan MP and campaigner Malalai Joya relates, in Afghanistan “today killing a woman is like killing a bird.”  In fact, one of Joya’s stories of misogyny in post-Taliban Afghanistan is so obscene that if Hosseini had included it in his novel it would have been stretching his credibility a little too far:

When [puppet president Hamid] Karzai visited a village that was destroyed in the Farah province in May he said he would pay for new marriage celebrations for those who lost their wives.

Don’t worry, Afghan women: whatever tragedy befalls you, your husband will at least be given cash for a replacement!  ATSS provides a rich context in which to understand this tragedy.  But at the same time, if you’re trying to reconcile yourself to the reality of a war you never really wanted to support, the against-all-odds optimism of Laila’s young family could help you do that too.  For that reason alone it is worth reading ATSS: it gives plenty of ammunition for opposing the war, but it won’t use that ammunition by itself, and God alone knows what all those study guides will make of it.

They’ve also just brought out a new song dedicated tothe memory Harry Patch, the man who never wanted to go to war – and who now finds warmongering generals trying to hide behind his memory.  But when I listened to Like Spinning Plates just now I was more reminded of Ed Miliband, whose inane adventures you can follow on Twitter while the Vestas workers are forced out of work in the background.

Chano Salgado is a tired, bitter man.  The assassination of his wife on a demonstration has alienated him from the political struggle that had been their life together, leaving him cursed with Gramsci’s nightmare: “the optimism of the intellect, the pessimism of the will”.  His estranged son Daniel, on the other hand, lets none of his foster parents’ sober realism get in the way of a mad quest to track down the father he never knew – just as that father is forced to go on the run.  Chano’s even more estranged brother, English-raised corporate spinmeister Evan Hatch, needs to track him down too, in the hopes that a bit of brotherly bone marrow can save him from an early grave.

The preposterous yet somehow believable efforts of the Salgado family to find each other – via demonstrations, autonomist squats and police cells, the clutches of human-trafficking coyotes and a migrant detention camp in the West Country – culminate in the novel’s extended climax at the 1999 WTO summit and associated “Battle of Seattle”.  Along the way, the three men grapple with the realities of poverty, power, and the possibility of change: Chano and Daniel alternately dodging round or rising up to confront the injustices that keep them down, while Ewan artfully fine-tunes the magic that preserves corporate power from any generalised uprising of people power.

One thing that The Fountain… does very effectively, particular during the first half, is show just how brutal, and yet how fragile, capitalist rule can be.  There is a world out there, a world of Chanos and Daniels, whose water is being stolen and whose environment is being destroyed by the same corporations that squeeze them bone dry for cheap labour, that take all the wealth that can be extracted from them North of the border and then lock them in detention centres if they try to follow it.  There’s a world of them, and they are angry.  Even with the explicit and brutal efforts of the army and police, it takes all of Ewan’s sorcery to keep this potentially insurgent global underclass confused, cowed and divided.

But I really loved it for when I first read it for the same reason that Reasons To Be Cheerful managed to cheer me up as much as it did.  The Fountain..., like Reasons… puts into print a world that’s not even supposed to exist.  One of the many quotables to come out of Orwell’s 1984 says that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four” and in practice it’s a freedom rarely practiced in the print media.  You can show the two, maybe even allude to the other two, but to make the four is unacceptable.  The point of view of the activist, the protestor, the striker, the politically-conscious worker or student, is all but never acknowledged – at least, not without merciless and painfully off-kilter ridicule.

Of course you could argue that it’s a small niche, but really it’s not.  2 million people in Britain marched against the war in Iraq, yet discussion of this experience is all but out of bounds.  Meanwhile very very few people have had much involvement with forensic teams tracking down grotesque serial killers, yet this is an absurdly over-crowded bookshelf in the middle of a cops and robbers section – all from the cops’ point of view, you understand – that goes on forever.  The Fountain… is not the only book to tell the forbidden truth of fighting the power, but they’re rare enough for it to still be a breathtaking initiation.

My only gripe is that it is impossible to write a book that raises so many political questions without at least subtly hinting at some political answers – which is fine if you’re Ken Loach, but Newman is not.  The book’s “message” is nowhere near so overbearing as to spoil the fun, but it is an elitist message that comes straight from autonomist philosophy.  It’s a wake-up-and-smell-the-Matrix kind of situation: the main characters are all alert to the struggle that needs to be fought, all dedicated to fighting it, and all pretty much oblivious to – or even contemptuous of – the people who aren’t yet fighting alongside them.

When Chano is reluctant to make a bomb to sabotage the chemical factory – preferring to try and build some kind of mass action – his friend Ayo mentally chides him for “find[ing] a way out of doing anything there and then (and manag[ing] to sound more revolutionary than anyone else in the process)” but there is no such finger-wagging for Yolanda, who refuses to take part in a lawsuit against the company that deformed her child because only a factory occupation that never comes would be good enough.  Nor is there any question of working within the existing trade unions, the very idea is a reformist deviation.

There are a few ideological debates to be had in Newman’s world - such as when smashy-smashy black-blocquist Ramona has had it up to here with the cuddly non-violent autonomists of Seattle, and to Newman’s credit he resists the temptation to wade in patronisingly with the correct line – but there are only two kinds of people: those who haven’t seen the truth, and those who have.

When, at The Fountain…‘s conclusion Daniel graduates from the first group to the second, he comes fully alive for the first time in his life and doesn’t look back, and in some ways it is one of the best passages in the book when he does.  What happens next, though, is he somehow gets himself to Bolivia and stares down the riot police that are coming for the town’s water supply, a jet-setting, bulletproof superactivist.  Or when Chano looks back at his origin story: the city is destroyed by an earthquake, and people rise up en masse to rebuild it, collectively and autonomously, until they are demoralised and demobilised by the arrival of the army.  Only a hardcore of activists remains up for it – and this hardcore continues, autonomously, to organise collective action in the absence of the rest of the collective.

Some socialists diss the anarchists and autonomists for refusing to organise, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.  Newman’s characters are fiendishly well-organised, and things like climate camp will show just how realistic that portrayal is.  The one explicit reference to the likes of us that graces the pages of The Fountain… – we are called, tellingly, ”the ‘organised’ left” – speaks a bit truer, dismissing us for wasting time on bombastic speeches when we could be finessing our plans to withstand a barrage of teargas.  For the difference is actually this:

Anarcho-syndicalists struggle against the capitalist class, and that’s good, socialists do that too.  But socialists also struggle within the working class, while the anarcho-syndicalists are content to struggle on behalf of it.  If 99% of people are not up for a revolution, then it’s not really enough for the other 1% to fight 100 times harder: they have to try and pull some of the rest in with them.  In a race between “the ’organised’ left” and a “direct action network” of similar size I’m sure they’d succeed in giving the enemy a slightly bloodier nose than we could before being crushed.  But it’s not a race we’d enter, because we have no intention of fighting a revolution by ourselves.  It is more about leading the whole working class into revolution – a different prospect altogether.

It’s curious, in some ways, that so much is made of Ewan Hatch’s brilliant, subtly all-pervasive, propaganda matrix.  If maintaining this ideological hegemony is so important to them, shouldn’t undermining it be just as important to us?  But then again perhaps it’s not so curious at all.  With the exception of outright reactionary figures like the police chief and the people-smuggler, the only people in The Fountain… to hold reactionary or contradictory ideas (and there are precious few!) hold them only because they’ve been manipulated and lied to.  These ideas are just a veil that is being held over their eyes by the system, and will surely fall away when that system has been conveniently smashed by friendly neighbourhood revolutionaries.

I wonder if this subtle elitism isn’t behind some of the more gratuitous use of jargon too – why say SIDA instead of AIDS unless your target audience is expected to already be giving over its Thursday nights to campaigining for the poor in Latin America – or maybe I’m being paranoid.  Probably I’m being paranoid.  In any case, I’ve spent almost half the review on that one gripe, and so I kind of need to come back to the point that The Fountain… is a really enjoyable book – and not despite its politics but, overall, because of them.

It’s not every book that even tries to show not only how the many are exploited and dispossessed by the few, but how that unhappy multitude can fight back.  Okay, so it comes with something of a naive approach to strategy – if you’re worried, take out a year’s subscription to Full Spectrum Resistance (SW+SR+ISJ) to balance it out – but The Fountain at the Centre of the World takes the liberty of saying that two plus two makes four and it has a roaring adventure along the way.  Recommended.

Now, let’s see if I can’t get some sleep.  And don’t get me started on The History of the World Backwards.