“we will not be silent. We are your bad conscience” White Rose Leaflet

“Even the most dull-witted German has had his eyes opened by the terrible bloodbath, which, in the name of the freedom and honour of the German nation, they have unleashed upon Europe and unleash a new each day. The German name will remain forever tarnished unless finally the German youth stands up, pursues both revenge and atonement, smites our tormentors, and founds a new intellectual Europe. Students! The German people look to us! The responsibility is ours: just as the power of the spirit broke the Napoleonic terror in 1813, so too will it break the terror of the National Socialists in 1943.”

White Rose Pamphlet

“To say to the Social Democratic workers: “Cast your leaders aside and join our ‘non-party united front” means to add just one more hollow phrase to a thousand others. We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders in reality. But the reality today is the struggle against fascism. … The overwhelming majority of the Social Democratic workers will fight against the fascists, but – for the present at least – only together with their organizations. This stage cannot be skipped”.

Leon Trotsky-For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism (December 1931)

This book provides the reader with a very thorough and accessible introduction to the life of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement. The struggle of the Scholl family belies the common myth that there was no opposition to the Nazi’s during the Second World War.

The book fails to address the reason why this opposition was so small and disparate. The fact that Hitler was able to rise to power and smash the worker’s movement and the most progressive sections of the middle class was due to the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy who allowed him to come to power without a shot being fired.

This history was to shape the character of the opposition to Hitler. After all, the White Rose movement was a non-violent resistance group comprised of five middle-class students at Munich University. At its heart, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, their fellow students Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, and their professor Kurt Huber.

Despite knowing full well that if caught, they faced instant death, they began distributing leaflets and graffiti. They were caught in 1943 by the Gestapo and, after a brief trial, executed. Sophie Magdalena Scholl was just 21 at the time of her state murder.

It is clear from the history of Scholl and the White Rose movement that it did not have a fully worked-out political agenda that drove its activities, and some of its activities against the fascist regime were dominated by their religious leanings. Scholl was heavily influenced by the theologian Augustine of Hippo. She described that her “soul was hungry”.

Not everything was guided by their religious beliefs. As this statement from a White rose Pamphlet states, “Our current ‘state’ is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we do not need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don’t you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?”[1]They had substantial political opposition to the Nazi dictatorship.

As Tanja B. Spitzer writes, “The White Rose was a small endeavour with large consequences. Together they published and distributed six pamphlets, first typed on a typewriter, then multiplied via mimeograph. At first, they only distributed them via mail, sending them to professors, booksellers, authors, friends and others—going through phone books for addresses and hand-writing each envelope. In the end, they distributed thousands, reaching households all over Germany. Acquiring such large amounts of paper, envelopes, and stamps at a time of strict rationing without raising suspicion was problematic, but the students managed by engaging a wide-ranging network of supporters in cities and towns as far north as Hamburg and as far south as Vienna. These networks were also activated to distribute the pamphlets, attempting to trick the Gestapo into believing the White Rose had locations all across the country”.[2]

They did provide a clear tactic to anyone who wanted to oppose the fascists saying “in their fifth pamphlet. “And now every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present ‘state’ in the most effective way….We cannot provide each man with the blueprint for his acts, we can only suggest them in general terms, and he alone will find the way of achieving this end: Sabotage in armament plants and war industries, sabotage at all gatherings, rallies, public ceremonies, and organizations of the National Socialist Party. Obstruction of the smooth functioning of the war machine….Try to convince all your acquaintances. Of the senselessness of continuing, of the hopelessness of this war; of our spiritual and economic enslavement at the hands of the National Socialists; of the destruction of all moral and religious values; and urge them to passive resistance!”

While it was very difficult for the group to act amid war and being hounded by the Nazi’s secret police, a major weakness of the group is that it did not appeal to the one class that could bring down the hated Nazi dictatorship, and that was the German and international working class. The defeat of the German revolution because of the betrayal of Stalinism and Social Democracy had meant the class consciousness working class in Germany had been thrown back for decades.

It is doubtful that any of the White Rose movement had read any of the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky works, which is a shame because even a cursory read of his work would have given the group an entirely different political outlook. As Trotsky writes “When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini – the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role – but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism. This was precisely the situation facing the White Rose group.

To conclude, this 75^th-anniversary edition deserves a wide readership. The story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement contains an important lesson for the international working class and will inspire anyone who has a burning hatred of fascism and all forms of racism. As Sophie Scholl said, “I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best I could do for my nation. I, therefore, do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct.”

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[1] See the http://whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk/

[2] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/contributors/tanja-b-spitzer

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests.  These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truth—the honest presentation of facts and tendencies of the past.—Vadim Z. Rogovin

“Tell me anyway–Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”

― Leon Trotsky

This groundbreaking book adds significantly to the arsenal of Marxist works that have utilised the historical materialist method in examing complex historical questions. This collection of essays and interviews represents the most consistent and sustained attack on the New York Times 1619 Project, released in August 2019. The book’s publication is a significant political and intellectual event

The 1619 project denounced two seminal events in American history: the 1776 revolution that founded the United States and the Civil War of 1861–65. In its place, the New York Times put forward a completely new revisionist narrative that stipulated that the rebellion against Britain was a counterrevolution instigated to defend slavery and that the union forces in the Civil War were led by a president, Abraham Lincoln, who was a racist.

The lead writer and Project founder Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true”. For this piece of deep insight, the author was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Hannah-Jones made the preposterous claim that anti-black racism “runs in the very DNA of this country”.

As you would expect from a work published by Mehring books, this collection of essays and lectures is based on meticulous research. It thoroughly discredits the 1619 Project’s lies and distortions.

One question to book seeks to answer is why would the Times lie. As Leon Trotsky once pointed out the that when one lies about history, it is done to conceal real social contradictions. The Times project was released amidst truly staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. As one writer wrote, “These contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the methods of class struggle. Efforts to divert and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism”.[1]

Contained in the book are interviews with the most renowned scholars and specialists in the history of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s — Gordon Wood, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., and Dolores Janiewski. Subjects examined are the “complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the twentieth century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present”.

The most disturbing feature of the Times revisionist project was not so much what it contained, which was easily refuted, but the fact that it was left to the Trotskyist movement and the World Socialist Website(WSWS) to attack this abomination of historical falsehood. The Attack by the WSWS drew immediate media attention and very quickly seriously undermined the whole 1619 project. As one writer put it, it destroyed the Times “new historical narrative” and exposed it as a money-making venture.

In reading this book and its sustained attack on the 1619 project, it is not hard to understand why the stand taken by the WSWS and several leading Historians has altered the political and “intellectual terrain”. It has destroyed the 1619 project. It has provided a textbook Marxist approach and has implemented a historical materialist method of historical investigation. One also has to admire the bravery of the historians that collaborated with the WSWS. These historians had “strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project” and were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” It is one thing for a Marxist to launch a polemical attack. After all, it is in their DNA. It is another for world-renowned historians to put their life’s work on the line by defending historical truth.

The stand taken by the WSWS and these leading historian has encouraged others to enter the field of battle. One notable book has been Peter W Wood’s book 1620. Peter.W.Wood’s book is a very useful critique of the New York Times 1619 Project. It has been described as historiography of the debates over the 1619 Project. The Times basic premise is to reset American history by “asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans”.

To his credit, Woods does not buy into this absurd and dangerously wrong assumption. The book is an attempt, to sum up what critiques of the Project have written. While many of the most important historians who have written on the subject have published articles and letters opposing the Times, the political leadership in this fight against this travesty of historical study has fallen to the Trotskyist’s at the World Socialist Website. While semi acknowledging this in the book, Wood’s is not happy that it was the Trotskyists who first exposed this racialist and revisionist approach to American history. The fact that the Times project has been so discredited is down to the role played by the Marxists.

As the Marxist writer David North correctly points out, “As a business venture, the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision, it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of several distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history”.

In his book, Wood opposes the 1619 project and offers a different starting point for modern American history, which is when the first pilgrims set foot in America in the 1620s. The political and historical study of the pilgrims is a worthwhile subject. To some degree, Wood’s has a case in point, but American history has many such starting points. Most historians seem to stick with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as America’s founding.

Wood’s book is one of the better critiques of the 1619 project, but it does not probe the politics behind 1619. As David North points out, “The “financialisation” of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper’s selection of issues to be publicised and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times’ financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed to provide the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimised its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party’s decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritising racial conflict, marginalises, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics”.[2]

Given that the Trotskyists from the WSWS have led the political and historical fight against the Times deeply right-wing and revisionist historical viewpoint, it is perhaps not surprising that the WSWS has come under sustained attack from not only conservative sources but has been attacked by several Stalinist and Pseudo left individuals and organisations.

One of the more stupid and ignorant attacks came from the predictable Louis Proyect, who wrote,” Indeed, nobody has published more “Trotskyist polemics” than them, as long as you are using the term Trotskyist without regard for what Trotsky stood for. An examination of the record will place Trotsky firmly in the Project 1619 camp. When Trotsky was living in Prinkipo, an island near Istanbul, in 1933, he met with Arne Swabeck (who coincidentally was one of the talking heads in Warren Beatty’s “Reds”). Swabeck asked, “How must we view the position of the American Negro: As a national minority or as a racial minority?” Trotsky’s reply probably would have made both Wilentz and his friends at WSWS beet-red with fury. He urged his comrades to support self-determination for Blacks even if it antagonised white workers, who were far more radical in 1933 than they are today”.[3]

Proyect has a history of right-wing attacks on the WSWS. The WSWS called him a professional liar and said, “Proyect’s blog—or should we call it blather—lacks all credibility. In his dishonesty, cynicism, and debased vulgarity, he epitomises all that is politically diseased in the milieu of American pseudo-left politics. His attack on the WSWS is the work of a man who has absolutely nothing to do with the politics, principles and culture of the Marxist movement. His blog were it correctly named, would be called “The Unrepentant Liar.”[4]

Further attacks on the WSWS have come from the Stalinists of the USA Communist Party who wrote, “Trotskyists have traditionally attacked mainstream Communists and others who have sought to construct centre-left coalitions to defeat the right, attacks that have aided the right. Here, North, London, and the World Socialist Review have acted to support a centre-right backlash against a new history of slavery, a kind of negative United Front with the liberal and conservative celebrators of U.S. history. The author and co-signers of the protest letter, whom they defend, would never put “bourgeois” in front of “democratic” to define the American Revolution. In my experience, they would do what they usually do—reject the work of those like the scholars of the 1619 Project who challenge conventional wisdom and by their rejection prevent the article’s publication in mainstream media”.[5]

This duplicity has been the trademark of the Stalinists for nearly a century. It has been exposed and refuted by the Trotskyist movement and represents a desperate attempt by the Stalinist to breathe new life into the discredited Democratic party and join forces with the various other Pseudo Left groups that have backed the Project and have attacked the WSWS.

In the past, these Pseudo left organisations would have at least paid lip service to the struggles of the working class, but now this has been replaced by an open acceptance of new forms of non working class forms of struggle. James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose summarise this succinctly in this article[6] “We have moved into a new stage of history. The battles the left fought over the past half-century have largely been won. We cannot go back to focusing on miners’ rights and trade unions, or on securing equal pay for women, outlawing racial discrimination, or legalising homosexuality: we have won those wars. Much of the right support these advances now too. We have new battles to fight. These include combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering cohesive multiculturalism, free from moral relativism and enforced conformity. The left now finds itself pulled in many directions at once. This is the source of its profound identity crisis”.One manifestation of this right-wing shift is the support by the Pseudo Left organisations of the 1619 racialist project.

Conclusion

It is hoped that The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews will find a wide audience. Its essays and interviews will be of interest to all readers of American history.

It is an essential aid for all teachers and college professors, students and the general reading public to counter the Times’ blatant historical falsifications. It will also be a valuable tool in the struggle of both black and white workers in their struggle against capitalism.

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html

[3] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/10/project-1619-and-its-detractors/

[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/08/proy-j08.html

[5] https://www.cpusa.org/article/the-1619-project-backlash-from-the-left/

[6] The Left is Having an Identity Crisis- https://areomagazine.com/2019/12/18/the-left-is-having-an-identity-crisis/

I spent part of yesterday morning watching and listening in to Ann Hughes’s comments on the transformation of county studies in the period up to and including the English Civil War during the course of her academic career. She had been an undergraduate and then a postgraduate at Liverpool University where she completed a doctoral thesis on Warwickshire before moving on to the Open University, to Manchester university and then to Keele University where she occupied a professorial chair until her retirement.  In the course of her talk, she paid tribute to the influence of the late Brian Quintrell and reflected on the evolution of county studies since the 1960s.

Early work tended to be focused on the role of the gentry within counties, work that illuminated the lives of the gentry as a landed elite and which contributed to understanding the administrative, constitutional and political activities of local governors within such a framework. J.T.Cliffe’s work on the Yorkshire gentry was a good example of the first kind and Tom Barnes’s study of Somerset between 1625 and 1642 exemplified the second.  Her slightly older contemporary, Robin Silcock (like Brian Quintrell’s unpublished study of Essex) evaluated the record of King Charles I’s period of personal rule and how this contributed to the causes of the English Civil War.

Hughes herself was less influenced by localist approaches emphasising the introspection of county communities and the importance of local interests reacting to central pressures. Alan Everitt’s work on Kent was of this kind but rather less important to her than David Underdown’s study of Pride’s Purge. She did not believe that a rigid central-local analysis was helpful and, in any case, there were areas within counties where the focus would not necessarily be on the gentry. The work of John Walter and others on popular politics and culture suggested interaction between different social groups. These contrasting approaches, she believed had resulted in a victory for her contemporaries amongst historians as the collection published by Jackie Eales and Andrew Hopper in 2012 showed.

The focus of county studies had now changed. There was more attention now to the consequences of the civil war, on, for example, casualties, on memories, and on trauma as the work of David Appleby and Andrew Hopper at Leicester showed. She did, however, have some doubts about the level of casualties in the period and thought that the exhilaration and excitement of a radicalised revolution needed to be taken into account. Like other historians too, she had move on beyond 1660. There had been important work by Simon Osborne on popular politics in the midland counties, on cultural differences – most importantly by Mark Stoyle under the inspiration of Underdown, on communications, personal relationships and religion. Peter Lake’s works on Northamptonshire with Isaac Stephens and, later with Richard Cust, on Cheshire testified to this change and to an interest in micro-history.

But the most stimulating way in her view of looking at the Civil war lay in the notion of state formation: this had been little noticed in the 1970s and 1980s but Michael Braddick’s work had brought it to wider attention. State formation had been driven by internal conflicts rather than by foreign wars. This had occurred at a time of political fragmentation and was recorded in the growth of self-conscious documentation. Warwickshire was particularly well-documented at county, city and parish level as local communities responded to the demand of central authority, i.e. of Parliament. Their accounts and reports were shaped by local concerns nonetheless as the bills from one of Coventry’s parishes showed.

She was now looking at the ambiguities of the wartime English state where the records illustrated the cost to local inhabitants of free quarter for soldiers, of damage to the environment, e.g. in the loss of trees, and how narratives of the conflict would be made richer. Individuals’ senses of identity had been affected as the experiences of George Medley, gardener, civilian and soldier, showed: he had been employed as a gardener before becoming a relatively well-paid soldier. Ann Hughes was now involved in working with Andrew Hopper on the Greville family accounts and on the evidence they provided for consumption and household links.

In answer to questions, Ann Hughes elaborated on some of the points she had made earlier. She was now working on the Gell family of Hopton in Derbyshire and the archive of sermon notes they had kept over three generations. A book, moreover, on the career of the 2nd Lord Brooke would, in her view, be extremely useful. As far as Alan Everitt’s work was concerned, his assessment on the politics of Kent reflected the view of the centre: he had too readily considered the county as cohesive and had been unable to accept that the late-1648 petition demanding justice against the King was genuine. In fact, as Jackie Eales had shown, it was associated with a radical group in the county. William Dugdale’s work on Warwickshire was, however interesting and multi-faceted it proved to be, the partisan account of a Tory Royalist looking back at the events of the Civil War. Her conclusion was that, in the 1640s and 1650s, roles could be blurred and identities become fragmented.

I found this talk very interesting and certainly concur in thinking that Brian Quintrell was a much under-recognised and important figure in early modern historiography. In one sense, studies of counties initially grew out of the ancient controversy over the fortunes of the gentry as an arena in which competing hypotheses could be tested as the studies by Joyce Mouseley, Gordon Blackwood and others showed. Like Ann Hughes, I found Alan Everitt’s 1968 study of Kent as an illustration of provincial insularity and localism improbable: no such phenomenon could be found in medieval Kent. But it did have some appeal and, to a degree, influenced the study of the Eastern Association by Clive Holmes: John Morrill’s study of Cheshire was, in part, a response to it. Where I differ from her analysis can be found in two unmentioned gaps in her analysis. It did not touch upon the collapse of the ‘good old cause’ by 1660, on the divisions that grew between the military victors themselves and on the failure of post-1646 regimes to secure widespread consent to their rule. More important still is the point that the post-1660 Stuart regimes were not, in my view, effectively engaged in state formation: they were fiscally and militarily weak by comparison with France or even with the Dutch, a weakness only remedied after 1688/1689. She is, of course, entitled to express her view as, indeed, am I.

 Christopher Thompson  2021.christhomps84388@aol.com                                                                                                                              

Every day when I look at the internet in general and at Twitter in particular I come across independent scholars writing about their own research and writing and the problems they face outside the academic environment in which they have been trained. Most of them are very well qualified with doctorates or other advanced degrees but have found themselves unable to gain jobs in universities or colleges. This is partly the result of universities awarding more advanced degrees and thus producing more candidates for a relatively restricted number of prospective posts. It also has the effect from the point of view of employers of gaining a wide degree of choice in appointments and of keeping salaries lower because of the competition for posts. Having experienced this situation in the past myself, I have every sympathy with the predicament of those with a vocation for academic work but who must endure the frustration of being unable to secure appropriate work.

For this reason, I was interested to see Dr S.J.Ainsworth’s suggestion on Twitter in the middle of April asking if anyone might be interested in forming a network of independent scholars.[1] I have tried in the past to suggest a similar idea with the creation of a website offering items of news on early modern subjects, details of jobs that have become available, links to sites with academic articles (like CORE), to repositories for theses (like the  DART-etheses portal), to databases (like the Internet Archive), and other facilities like discussion forums, audio and video recordings, reviews of books, early modern blogs,  etc. Admittedly, such a project would need in my view at least half a dozen people to be committed to contributing and making it successful over a period of time. I have made an overture detailing these suggestions to Dr Ainsworth and shall be interested to get a response.

The news that Aston University and the South Bank University of London will both be abandoning the teaching of history courses in the autumn makes positive action to bridge the gaps between academics teaching the subject and those outside their ranks more urgent. One of my long-standing friends has, as I have mentioned before, expressed his apprehension that history may not survive as a discipline in higher education in the foreseeable future. I do understand why accountants, administrators and politicians find business course, science and technology courses so appealing: the demand for them is obvious in the interests of the development of modern economies. Politicians often view higher education as a primary instrument for feeding the growth of this and other countries’ economies. More growth means more resources in tax revenues which they can then use to re-allocate to objectives they approve of. The humanities, including history, serve no such obvious purpose. But history is the major discipline for explaining how we in this society have come to be where we are and the appetite for historical knowledge is immense. Phasing it out of higher education institutions would be self-defeating and highly damaging to a civilized society.

Joe Saunders’s account of the British Association of Local History’s discussion of the Civil War in the Localities held on 19th April[2] makes this point very effectively since it attracted an audience of just over 180 people. Dr Charlotte Young and Tim Hasker made a presentation that clearly engaged the interest of those attending and stimulated some intriguing questions. The only puzzling feature was the local bibliography on county histories that cited works by R.C.Richardson, Alan Everitt, Ann Hughes, Anthony Fletcher, John Morrill, David Underdown and William Hunt, all of them by now somewhat long in the tooth. But county histories, pace the recent work by Richard Cust and Peter Lake on Cheshire, has been out of fashion for a considerable period of time.

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[1] https://twitter.com/S_J_Ainsworth/status/1382613368180211712

[2] https://www.balh.org.uk/blog-report-from-local-history-hour-the-english-civil-war-in-the-localities-2021-04-19

The decision by publisher W.W.Norton to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of the late novelist Philip Roth from print is a significant act of censorship and has dangerous implications for democratic rights.

The publisher said it had decided to do this because several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual harassment. So far, none have produced evidence to back their claim up. Bailey’s book, which on the whole has been well received with be pulped. Bailey’s 2014 memoir will also be dropped. The publisher has amended its website, so anyone looking for the book gets the message, “Our apologies! We cannot find the page you are looking for.”

Norton said that it was contacted by email anonymously by a woman in 2018, who alleged that Bailey had assaulted her. This begs the question of why act now against Bailey.

Despite saying that “Norton is here for you.” and will “stick to the business of publishing the best books we can lay our hands on and then keep our hands on them for as long as maybe.” Or as one writer put it “until some clique of gender-fixated zealots applies a bit of pressure”. Well Norton has now folded like a cheap shirt as soon as a few MeToo “zealots” make some noise.

As the writer, David Walsh, points out, “The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs establishment public opinion the wrong way can be denounced and dispatched in like manner. The filthy snout of the New York Times has been busily at work in this affair. On April 21, the Times published an article setting out the “sexual assault allegations” against Bailey. There is no reason to give the slightest a priori credence to the claims made in the Times article, which conforms to a pattern of trial-by-media that has been “perfected” since the launching of the #MeToo witchhunt in October 2017. Bailey has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. None of the alleged incidents was ever reported to the authorities”.[1]

Bailey has rejected the allegations calling them “categorically false and libellous.” His lawyer criticised the publisher’s “drastic, unilateral decision … based on the false and unsubstantiated allegations against him, without undertaking any investigation or offering Mr Bailey the opportunity to refute the allegations.”

As Walsh points out, “The attack on Bailey is unprecedented since the dark days of McCarthyism when the U.S. government removed thousands of books by left-wing authors and sympathisers from its overseas libraries. It continues and escalates a recent process that has already involved the ruination (or attempted ruination) of individuals such as the late James Levine, Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Placido Domingo, Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., Charles Dutoit, Garrison Keillor and Geoffrey Rush, and the institutionalisation of censorship.[2]

It would seem that those attacking Bailey are also attacking the subject of his biography, Philip Roth. Many reviewers of Bailey’s biography have attacked him for his refusal to attack Roth’s so-called indiscretions or “mistreatment” of women. That Roth is no longer around to defend himself has only emboldened those who wish to see his work trashed and Roth becoming a non-person. Roth accused  his critics of resurrecting the old McCarthyite witchhunt, which he says, “In some quarters, ‘misogynist’ is now a word used almost as laxly as was ‘Communist’ by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s—and for very like the same purpose.”[3]

Not everyone has gone along with this right-wing attack on democratic rights. The chief executive of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, has raised concerns that “If we were to apply that standard writ large there would be thousands of books by bigots, misogynists and miscreants that could be removed from circulation on those grounds,” While these books may be picked up elsewhere, once that stigma is attached, there might not be another publisher willing to touch them.”[4]

The attack on Roth and Bailey has a definite right-wing feel about it. As the working class starts to come into conflict with the ruling elite, this same elite encourages any form of backwardness to, as Walsh writes, “ dull popular consciousness and awareness. It inevitably fears any work that sensitises and alerts the viewer or reader or encourages a searching, thoughtful approach to public matters. In that sense, every significant attack on democratic rights is an attack on the working class and its political progress”.

In a typical attempt to play down the attack on democratic rights, New Yorker Magazine writer Alexandra Schwartz said, “This is not a case of censorship, which implies the suppression of ideas but, rather, a scramble at damage control”.[5]Unlike Schwartz, I believe this is an attack on democratic rights and a suppression of ideas. It must be opposed, and Norton’s censorship should be opposed, and I defend Bailey’s and Roth’s right to represent the world as they saw it.

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[1] Book-burning comes to America https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html

[2] Book-burning comes to America https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html

[3] https://terenceblacker.com/philip-roth-it-was-my-good-luck-that-happiness-didnt-matter-to-me/

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/28/publisher-cancels-philip-roth-biography-after-sexual-abuse-claims-against-blake-bailey

[5] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/blake-bailey-philip-roth-and-the-biography-that-backfired

“Can men write about women?” And the fool expects an answer.”

Heinrich Heine

“Roth possessed a verbal brilliance and breadth probably unsurpassed by any American novelist in the postwar period. He could be enormously, subversively funny. He mocked many sacred cows and poured cold water on many national myths. His treatment of his own foibles and those of his friends and lovers were often unsparing”.

David Walsh

“In some quarters, ‘misogynist’ is now a word used almost as laxly as was ‘Communist’ by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s—and for very like the same purpose.”

Philip Roth

To tell the truth, is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

Leo Tolstoy

Thomas Carlyle complained once that during the writing of his study of Oliver Cromwell, he had been required to “drag out the Lord Protector from under a mountain of dead dogs”. With Philip Roth being dead only two years I feel the same must be required of him.

The last two years have seen an outpouring of vitriol against Roth. This has increased with the recent release of several biographies. The most important one of these biographies is one by Blake Bailey.[1]Since I have not read this 900-page book, I will not comment on it but will later. This article is about the hysterical response from the book reviewer Leo Robson.

Although not all of the book reviews needlessly attack Roth, the majority highlight that we live in a time, according to the writer David Walsh that contains “widespread historical ignorance and cultural debasement”. In Roth’s case, the manufactured controversy is a product of this environment. It must be said that in the latest reviews of Bailey’s biography, some preposterous things have been written accusing the novelist of misunderstanding or being hostile to women and having sexual failings.[2]This new collection of reviews have a commonality about them. All of them seem to advocate a new form of Puritanism and want to return to a period when writers were censored and their books burnt.

As Walsh writes, “What irks a good number of the commentators is the fact that the late novelist had no use, generally speaking, for the obsession with identity politics, the brand of fraudulent and reactionary postmodern “leftism” that has proliferated on American campuses and elsewhere over the past 40 years or so. Roth treated several female academics and other such types rather roughly in his books, suggesting that behind their aggressive “feminism” lay a good number of hidden factors, including psychological insecurity, personal ambition and avarice. His instinctive hostility was entirely appropriate”.[3]

Perhaps the vilest and worthless attack on Roth comes from Leo Robson, whose review of Bailey book reaches new heights of hysterics and manufactured controversy. He writes, “He reports without comment the BBC’s bananas contention that Roth was ‘arguably the best writer not to have won the Nobel Prize since Tolstoy’, as well as the maybe even sillier claim made by Roth’s friend Benjamin Taylor that his work is ‘built to outlast whatever unforeseeable chances and changes await us and our descendants’. Quoting postmortem hyperbole is always a tempting recourse for the exhausted biographer bidding farewell, but by loading his epilogue with the encomia of the novelist’s most ardent fans, not exactly absent from the rest of the book, Bailey dodges a far more pressing duty, to explain why Philip Roth – nostalgist, American chauvinist, spouter of ‘amazingly tasteless’ opinions, serial seducer of students, and, latterly and not unrelatedly, a critic of #MeToo – has outlasted the changes already upon us”.

Like all critics of Roth, Robson hates the fact that Roth had the temerity to attack the #MeToo movement. David Walsh correctly attacked this movement whose ostensible aim “is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign’s “progressive” claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other great social and political issues of the day”.

Robson does have a track record of hating Roth.His review of Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth-By Benjamin Taylor was not too flattering. His latest review of Blake Bailey’s biography of Roth should have been sent back to him by the editors, and have been asked to do better.The first thing that strikes you of Robson’s article is the title which has a question mark. I am unsure if the editor at Literary Review magazine choose this or Robson himself. Either way, it is a pretty stupid thing to do because any objective criteria would show Roth to be one the greatest writers of the 20^th century.

Also, the low level of Robson’s article is shocking, but even more shocking is the fact that Literary Review printed in that form in the first place. Take this quote, “But even as Roth settled into the role of grumbling grand old man, he remained more than ever the entitled child, in permanent need of soothing, powerless to resist a tempting treat or keep a tantrum at bay. ‘Tell him to grow up,’ Nicole Kidman, who played Faunia in the film adaptation of The Human Stain, is reported to have said on learning that Roth was annoyed about a date that went awry. I mean, what is that about. It is just childish gossip. Who cares.

Robson is right about one thing that Roth was a product of his environment. The monkey finally typed a sentence. It is not Roth’s fault that he grew up in the early part of the 20^th century. He did not choose the conditions, but he achieved artistic greatness despite all the political handicaps he faced.As Walsh said, “Roth grew up during the Cold War, and the limitations of American intellectual life during that epoch also helped shape him, as much as he may have cursed and even kicked against its confines”.

The great Marxist writer Leon Trotsky put it even better “There would be no art without human physiology because there would be no human beings at all, but that does not mean art can simply be explained by human physiology. Between that physiology and artwork, as Marxists understand, lies a complex system of transmitting mechanisms in which there are individual, species-particular and, above all, social elements. The sexual-physiological foundation of humanity changes very slowly, its social relations more rapidly. Artists find material for their art primarily in their social environment and in alterations in the social environment. Otherwise, there would be no change in art over time, and “people would continue from generation to generation to be content with the poetry of the Bible, or of the old Greeks”.[4]

To conclude, it is only fitting to end with the words by David Walsh, who has intelligently commented on Roth’s work when he “wrote “I’m less and less convinced that one ought to judge an artist primarily or even substantially by the social views he or she espouses. A great many factors go into the formation of such views, many of them outside the control of the individual artist. But the artist does have responsibility for the honesty and integrity of his or her approach to life and art, for the continual reworking of themes and language or materials, for the maintenance of that level of dissatisfaction and restlessness, transmitted to a reader, that contributes to giving a work meaning and value. I am moved by Roth’s efforts. Roth’s best novels will endure”.[5]If Mr Robson wants to reply to this article, my website is free for him to reply. I wait with bated breath.

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[1] Philip Roth: The Biography Hardcover – 8 April 2021 Blake Bailey

[2] David walsh -https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/18/roth-j18.html

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/18/roth-j18.html

[4] Leon Trotsky – Culture and Socialism – 1927

[5] See Walsh’s collected writings- The Sky Between the Leaves: Film Reviews, Essays and Interviews 1992 – 2012 Paperback – 22 Nov. 2013 Mehring books

Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar:the Blueprint of contemporary Storytelling in Latin America

At the turn of the 20^th century, it seemed that Latin American literature would be built on poetry. Authors like Rubén Darío, Vicente Huidobro, Alfonsina Storni, among others developed an impressive catalogue of literary work that could have defined the literary legacy of the century. However, the political and social turmoil of the continent set the stage for the introduction of narrative as a pivotal point in how the reality was portrayed. There are three particular writers that set the blueprint for innovation in how the reality of Latin America would be narrated.

Juan Rulfo, in his short stories shows the daily life of a post-revolution Mexico that coexists with death on a daily basis. In “The Burning Plain,” he manages to show the conflicts of the countryside and its people, and the consequences of war and revolution. But instead of a folktale snapshot with linear narrative, his stories are not social chronicles, but rather games in storytelling.

In “Macario”, the intradiegetic narrator offers scenes of his life in a suspended narrative timeframe. It can be inferred that Macario suffers from some cognitive impairment that limits his understanding of time and reality, therefore he narrates the events from his life in a disorganized flow of consciousness where time does not lapse and closes the narrative where it began. It also happens that this narrator gives images and details that he himself does not fully understand. His lack of malice in judging the events and the way Felipa and his godmother treat him means that he himself does not understand the implications of what he is telling. This strategy focuses on the narrator’s consciousness and allows the content of the story to hide for the receptor of the narration in the subtext of what Macario says.

In “The Night They Left Him Alone”, there is a constant tension in the narrative, there is no exposition, rising action, falling action, and resolution; the entire narrative space of the story exists in the climax of a submerged plot we can only infer. Rulfo uses phrases that build the storytelling by creating constant expectation. The anticipation of doom appears from the beginning with the sentences: “It was the last thing he heard them say. Their last words.” Since that initiation, the narrator increases the tension with short sentences that build on anticipation: “They can catch us asleep.” and “”… in case we have to run.” This scaffolding of the structure would anticipate the confrontation between Feliciano Ruelas, his companions, and those we later know are the soldier lookouts waiting for them. The background details of the story, that his comrades are his relatives, and that the scene takes place during the War of the Cristeros, we discover through dialogue, in what would have been the confrontation if the story followed a traditional structure. The narrator gives us the outcome of what will happen to Feliciano’s companions from the beginning but does not reveal their identity (family) or the context of what happens until almost the end of the story.

Both in “Macario”, and in “The Night They Left Him Alone” (and in most of his narratives) Rulfo tells the everyday content of life in Mexico, within the social framework, completely breaking with the traditional forms of how to tell the stories. Rulfo’s characters are always the underdogs; their stories are not extraordinary in plot devices, but Rulfo’s narrative strategy affects form, they are captivating in the shape of storytelling they embody.

In Cortázar’s case, his strategy is to tell the extraordinary plots as if they were ordinary.  Narratives such as “The Night Face Up”, “Axolotl” and “The Southern Highway” show an absence of strangeness from narrative voices in the face of plot events that would prove extraordinary. There is a contrast in the title “The Night Face Up” and the actual location of the temporary space in which the story begins, the morning. Likewise, the narrative takes place with apparent normality, there is no over emphasis on the events of the plot beyond what would be a traditional story. There are some references to time that seem to suggest without ado the events: “He would arrive with plenty of time where he was going.” In increasingly brief lapses, the protagonist’s consciousness shifts from an apparent dream in pre-Columbian times to the reality of the twentieth century without strangeness. The narrative attitude shows no rarity in the face of that exchange, this resource is also used in “Axolotl” when the narrative voice goes from being a human to the creature that looks from the other side of the glass. There is no surprise or strangeness in the tone.

Cortázar moves narrative spaces naturally creating a time dislocation without being abrupt or seeming extraordinary. The pre-Columbian place/time is not dreamlike, because there is no sense of strangeness or ambiguity, when the protagonist becomes a Moteca native fleeing the Aztecs, he knows where he is and what to do. Even this story, despite having an extradiegetic narrator who appears to focus on the protagonist’s consciousness, does not give him a name; that does not commit him to either reality as the real one.

A reader of traditional narratives would expect the narrator to clarify and show the extraordinary, however, the dislocations of reality are treated with the normal tone that a more traditional short-story would have. Despite the innovation in the structure and focus of the narrator, Cortázar manages to create an emotional tension through the feelings of anguish of the protagonist, they are not lost in the conversions of reality.

In “The Aleph”, Borges begins by narrating an everyday scene to manifest an existential concern: the passage of time and oblivion. From the first sentence, the narrator shows us his lament because “… the incessant and vast universe was already moving away from her and that this change was the first in an infinite series.” In the small extent of this narrative, Borges works in many strategies. In my opinion, the most important is the “nod” to the reader. He is an encyclopedic writer, who stops at the details. The characterization of Carlos Argentino Daneri, is a bet that the reader will “catch” the references: the mediocre intellectual who sometimes seems to be a joke about Borges himself and other Scholarly writers of his time. Daneri as a character is unbearable, unfriendly, and in the story, he is the embodiment of the literary academy. There are even editorial comments that seem like a conversation directly with the reader: “So inept I found those ideas, so pompous and so vast in their exhibition, that I immediately linked them to literature…”

With a plot like we find in “The Aleph,” it would be easy to think that the most important aspect of the story is the metaphysical discovery of a point that condenses the entirety of the universe, all realities and time. However, the story contains layers of meaning, and within the narrative strategies, there is the direct, insinuating conversation with the reader. If one only suspected it, it is corroborated when the narrator identifies as “I am Borges” and at the mystical moment of seeing the Aleph it says, “I saw your face”. There are so many implicit games to discover in what this story tells that it becomes impossible for me to think that it doesn’t speak to the reader. Borges makes a bet in those strategies, and there is an acute awareness of the receptor of the narration as an active player in its meaning.

The three writers work narratives that exist between the everyday life and the extraordinary, breaking with the traditional linear narrative. Cortázar tells the extraordinary with a sobering, unsurprised tone; Borges tells the extraordinary with rational awareness, but counting on the astonishment of the reader, creating amazement, and returning to normality, and Rulfo creates everyday anecdotes in an extraordinary way. With different strategies, they conceive narratives of Latin American reality while creating a map, or a basis on which the Spanish-American story is anchored during the twentieth century.

The book is a diary kept by a young slave girl called Clotee on a Virginia plantation in 1859. The book belongs to the historical fiction genre and is one of many by the prolific author Patricia C Mckissack.The plot is quite simple in that it follows the life of the slave girl Clotee and depicts the everyday brutality of the slave life. The book’s violence is toned down to a certain extent because it is targeted primarily at a younger audience.The book is well written and charts the growing abolitionist movement that fought for the end of slavery. The motto of this movement was “Freedom is more than a word”.

As Patricia C. McKissack stated in an interview: “Clotee’s voice was difficult for me because I wanted her diary to sound authentic. I could not have her vocabulary too sophisticated, yet I had to give her more command of words than an illiterate person might know in order to tell a good story. Finding that balance was challenging. I achieved it by allowing Clotee’s skills to grow throughout the book. If you will note, I sometimes had Clotee misspell words such as clumbsy for clumsy; confusing words such as compression for expression, suspection for suspicion, and abolistines for abolitionists. Throughout I tried to show her growing, learning, developing her skills, so her voice matures naturally”.

Despite being a work of fiction, McKissack has researched her subject well. As she says, “Writing Clotee’s diary was not much different from some of the nonfiction books I have co-authored with my husband, Fredrick McKissack. I researched for this book the same way I would a nonfiction book. I wanted Clotee’s story to be believable, and the only way to do that was to base it on historical facts. The difference between this story and biography, for example, is that I was able to control all the action. In a biography, the events in a person’s life cannot be changed. In this fictional story, I could change events and create characters and invent a whole world to place them. I liked that!”.