Book Reviews by Author, A - L

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

It is hard to imagine that there can be humour about and in a brutal war and occupation, but Amiry proves me wrong and shows again the amazing resilience of the Palestinian people. As someone else once said about her tragic life, “if I can´t laugh about it, I will cry all the time”. Maybe humour helps one through the bad times — certainly it helped Amiry cope with her somewhat senile mother—in—law who worries about potted begonias, the garbage and marmalade in the middle of an Israeli invasion.

One of the 600 checkpoints that control Palestinian freedom of movement that Amiry endures whenever she leaves Ramallah. . Photo: TW/ 2008 “The diaries, which span 1981-2004, begin with my journey away from my mother and Amman, the city where I grew up and had lived all my life till then, to Ramallah, a town under Israeli occupation. The trip, which was meant to be for six months turned into a lifelong journey. In Ramallah, I lived, worked, fell in love, married and acquired a mother—in—law.”

The diaries also span major events in Palestinian history — the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, the Gulf War, the Oslo peace accords and two Intifada. All while Amiry tries to teach architecture, study building preservation and is constantly harassed by soldiers at checkpoints as she and her husband try to live a ´normal´ life. And she is surrounded by a neighbour of real characters whose daily life is part of her life. Her descriptions make them all into real people we can imagine knowing and sharing our lives with.

She is driven by anger at the humiliation and violence around Palestinian life, but she also has time for compassion and caring for neighbours and friends, even their pesky children, and yes, her mother—in—law who she rescues from her tank—surrounded home and takes her to her own home. As she says though, she may forgive Ariel Sharon for the forty—two day curfew but she will find it hard to forgive him for the obligation of caring for Um Salim.

Internet photo of author Some how throughout the book comes a vivid and immediate portrayal of the never ´normal´ life Palestinians are forced to live; Amiry brings it alive and makes it more believable than most scholarly or journalistic accounts by male writers. She lives the personal and it is political.

I saw the play based on the book, before I read it; I enjoyed the book far more, particularly as the reader can imagine more clearly the thought and actions of Amiry in all her predicaments and dangerous times.

Her account of getting her dog a Jerusalem passport so that she can enter the forbidden city as her dog´s driver is worth the price of the book alone. Her feisty dealings with officials and soldiers are truly awesome (as my young friends would say)

But in the end it is still tragic. Amiry and her friends make a dangerous trip to Nablus, the beautiful old Ottoman city and she learns about the death and destruction wrought by the barbaric Israeli invasion in 2002. I connect with her, as if we are side—by—side, when I see this memorial in 2008 to those who died as she wept. Humour helps with the coping, but only courage and persistence — and our solidarity — will help solve the situation. TW

I am addicted to reading, but rarely do I read comics. I'm glad I read this comic book with a difference it says a lot more and says it better than many weighty tomes I wade through. Andreas is focussed on the real problem- addiction to militarism. This dogma not only occupies the minds of general and presidents in the USA, but it grips nearly all politicians everywhere and the minds of most people. We rarely question the idea that there are alternatives to war – other ways to settle conflicts – and most important to change the conditions that militarism and war flourish in. This comic stimulates us to see the absurdity and waste of war and forces us to confront the need to create a non-military politics.

From the cost of war in taxes and services to communities to the greed of corporations, from the war on terrorism to the complicity of the media, it is all here in simple words with great graphics. This comic book should be in every school and makes a great kid gift.

Andreas does not stop with the telling, he gets right into action and resistance. He lists many references and organizations to plug into and there is no time to waste. On the last page he says: Think about it. Do something about it. Kick out the War Junkies! It is up to us.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“Even a small share of the military expenditure of the rich would, if appropriately attribute, make a substantial difference to the struggle against poverty …”

This report is the latest in an International Peace Bureau (IPB) series (see website above for information & ordering) that examines specific aspects of the obstacles and strategies on the road to peace making. It expands on the contents of War or Welfare? which IPB produced in 2005. All these publications provide useful information for activists who seek factual information to make our work more effective.

Whose Priorities? makes it clear that military spending, the economic metastasis of the cancer of militarism, robs most of our world of a dignified and security life, and steals resources from our finite planet. The subtext is: if you love this earth, work for peace.

The main text is well presented in easy to read articles and graphics that respond to the title question. The cover page features large photo of armed soldiers overwhelming a smaller photo of a woman carrying water: a good image to launch our enquiry.

It is truly mind boggling to try to grasp $USA 1200 billion — the annual world military spending (as the USA $ goes down, the spending continues to increase.) Social spending on human security internationally within a sustainable environment is neglected by most of the rich minority world. The USA spends half the global total of military expenses, followed by UK, France, Japan and China. Efforts have been made by well meaning governments and agencies to increase development aid, but loans tied to neoliberal aims and restrictions on trade diminish the value of aid.

Author Colin Archer, director of the IPB also points out that development aid is not usually (except by peace groups) linked to decreases in military spending; even when military budgets did decrease for a few years in the early 1990s, economic restructuring directed funds to debt relief and other projects, not social spending. Archer recommends an alliance of development groups with social movements including peace and disarmament groups is needed to realize policies. This will be difficult as many development organizations are dependent on government and ´charitable status´ making them vulnerable to criticism and funding cuts if they become political and lobby for change. Environmentalists need to be convinced of the links between resource waste, global warming, wars for resources and the justification for bloated military budgets. Peace, social justice, solidarity and democracy groups are more independent and could take the lead in alliances building.

Archer uses several examples, including perennially poor (but rich in potential) Ethiopia to show the appalling neglect of social priorities while militarism soars. He explains, “From a human security point of view, good basic education and healthcare, as well as adequate food and clean water are the crucial forms of security that a government should provide.” Few governments see those priorities and whose priorities matter are clear in the chart of the 10 leading corporations who benefit from military spending. Halliburton is #6, the company that most profits from the war in Iraq.

The discussion on strategy reflects on the power of institutions, governments and the media to influence citizens to think that war making is their priority as well. We need to think more about our imagery, our strategies and our means of communication in our campaigns for peace if we are to be more successful. Those who do not live in electoral democracies have the added risk of personal danger and even less access to public opinion. At the base of it all lies humanity´s inability to recognize new and creative ways of conflict resolution while developing a decent livelihood for all as we try to overcome powerful forces that profit from war and war preparation. It may well be that the fear of massive resource scarcity and global warming will unite many now separate interest groups.

The main part of this document is devoted to identifying groups worldwide which are active in creative campaigns which can inspire and inform actions by other groups. We need these examples because we rarely reflect on success; the need for coordinated resource sharing, networks like the IPB and better communication will help the cause of peace directed at social security and human dignity. IPB´s publications like this are valuable contributions to strengthening our movements.

While it is both a useful reference and guide for experienced activists and groups; Whose Priorities? could well be used in classrooms, workshops, and seminars. It could also be and to reach new activists and the yet to be active; it presents an attractive format for bookstores and literature tables of groups at meetings and conferences. It could actually be the basis of a workshop or course given in peace campaigns. The very existence of this and other IPB reports is an example of outreach and action in itself.
Women carry the heaviest load of military spending and suffer most from the loss of sustainable development.

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Theresa Wolfwood is the director of The Barnard—Boecker Centre Foundation, Victoria, BC, Canada www.bbcf.ca

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

There is a rich body of literature in Arabic; English readers are deprived of much of it by our disinterest and our historic political antagonism both to Arabic culture and our debt to it. We rarely have access to modern Arabic fiction in translation, particularly by women, so it is an unusual treat to read two books by this contemporary Egyptian writer and academic. Her books are not dry or academic but bold novels with strong characters whose lives and actions are lovingly detailed with daily life meshed into unfolding history.

This is the saga of a family, its friends and neighbours living what might be called ordinary lives in an extraordinary time and place. The time is 1492 in Spain; the family is Arab and the king of Spain sends his ships off to the unknown, seeking India, finding the American hemisphere. At home he wants to consolidate his power over the remnants of the Arab civilization in Spain that created a land of rich culture as well as prosperity and lasting architecture. Granada is lone holdout against Castilian power and the Spaniards break their promises to respect this city of Islam.

Within the matrix of dramatic history, Ashour describes the lives of Abu Jaafar, a bookbinder and a lover of books and knowledge, his family and community, their joys as well as their sadness and tribulations resulting from the oppression of their religion and culture. Life has joys in the most terrible of circumstances; happiness, even in short bursts, is essential for survival. People fall in love, some marry, children are born, daily life has its pleasures - food and books, even pets and gardens can be sources of joy in the most trying of times. And so this family creates a life for itself within a time when the king and queen, “forced all the people of Granada to taste the bitterness of defeat.”

I was fascinated by the different ways her characters react to the betrayal of their society and the capitulation of its leader. Some comply outwardly, but rage inwardly, rebel secretly by continuing their practices, hiding books destined to be burned, keep their stories alive at home; some retreat into mental anguish; others give in, the oppression is too persuasive and fearful. Some choose collaboration and opportunism. Some men take the armed resistance route and join rebels in the hills; others flee to North Africa. Ashour´s insight into how different personalities react is fascinating. Her skill in describing the minutiae of the oppression and people’s reactions are what makes her book great writing and absorbing reading.

Islam funeral custom is to wrap the naked dead in a clean shroud for burial. Christians prohibited that custom and dictated the dressing of the dead in their clothing. When I was in Iraq before the last USA invasion when the population was suffering under the cruelty of trade sanctions, one item that the Iraqis wanted and raged against its prohibition was shroud cloth (cited as a possible war material in the sanctions) to wrap their dead — of which there were so many due to untreated illness, malnutrition, contaminated water and depleted uranium. Ashour´s fiction and present reality are fused forever in my mind.

Although Granada, like all novels must succeed on the credibility of its fiction and its specific invention, it also, as does all good fiction, creates universality. Thus in this specific story of dispossession and betrayal, Granada resonates in today´s world where betrayal and dispossession form the reality of millions of Palestinians.

In 1527, this first volume of the Granada trilogy ends sadly as the barbaric authority of the Roman Catholic inquisition metes out its terrible verdict to Saleema, Jaafar´s scholarly daughter, who, like so many women of her time, receives the ultimate punishment for her wisdom, healing skills and independent thought.

This ending is made less unbearable by knowing that this is the only the beginning of a long story. I wait for the next volumes to become available in English. While Saleema faces her execution, her daughter is loved by her aunt who tells her the story of the tree of life. Thus life goes on and this family continues to struggle against history and fate to multiply, remember and to express humanity throughout all its fortunes and misfortunes.

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Review by Theresa Wolfwood

This is a slim volume and a seemingly simple story of a baker working for a despotic sultan on an island off East Africa at end of the 1800s. Amina´s husband was lost at sea so she waits anxiously for her son, Said, to return from a long voyage. He does return and is full of the history he has witnessed. He has been to Egypt, lived there with Egyptians and has witnessed the British invasion of Alexandria.

The fictitious island, set near Zanzibar, is a small lush fiefdom of a fabulously wealthy sultan with a castle full of Arabic servants and plantations full of African slaves. But his world is also changing; when the British navy comes in the name of Queen Victoria demanding the right to a military base on the island, the sultan knows he lacks the power base to say no.

Meanwhile the serfs, servants and slaves are organizing a revolt and the sultan gets a tip in the name of Siraaj, but he can find only a senile old woman by that name. Power supports and understands power: the sultan calls upon his new British allies to crush the revolt and the significance of the title name is revealed.

Siraaj is easy to read, colourful and vivid, but it is set in the complexity of global conquests by Europe to which the many characters respond to in various and completely believable ways to the changing times.

If water is essential to human society and our global economy it seems that a vast labour pool of unprotected and dispensable workers is just as vital. If we think slavery went out a few centuries ago, it is time to think again. Slavery exists today in many forms from child labour in agriculture in much of the world to sex slavery, organized as a global business in Asia, but also the result of wars everywhere to brutal physical labour in resource extraction and manufacturing world wide. This is a depressing overview of humanity's inhumanity, but we need to know and understand it. The business of slavery in business, Bale writes. We must examine and change our ways of investment and consumption. We have to delegitimize and deconstruct global trade agreements that allow the exploitation of people and we can join and work in anti-slavery, fair trade, pro-democracy and social justice movements locally and internationally. Bales, a British academic and expert on modern slavery, provides the necessary information for informed action.

In his introduction to this beautiful memoir the late Edward Said says: what gives this book an unmistakeable stamp of profound authenticity is its life-affirming poetic texture . This is no surprise as Barghouti is indeed a poet of great sensitivity, he is the author of nine books of poetry; few of his poems are translated into English. For us in the English-speaking minority world, the idea that there is a body of Palestinian literature is probably as remote and unbelievable as the idea that there is a land and history of a country called Palestine. It is our loss in more ways than one.

This memoir of the painful consciousness of displacement is the first of his books to be published and widely available in English.   The series of vignettes of his life as a child in Ramallah, his student days in Egypt, years of exile in Europe and Asia, and his return to his birth city after thirty years, all in no particular order, read like prose poems.

Throughout the book are fragments of his poetry, scattered like the dead members of his family to whom the poems are dedicated. The poem about his grandmother is the most beautiful and serene:

On her last day
Death sat in her arms.
She was tender to him and pampered him
And told him a story
And they fell asleep together .

Other poems and stories reflect the bitterness of loss and exile as people die without their families to support and love them. He starts his tale when he reaches the border between Jordan and Palestine, in reality, Israel's Occupied Territory. Waiting for hours in uncertainty beside the small narrow Jordan (it is neither wide nor deep in spite of the Christian songs) almost without water. “ Nature had colluded with Israel in stealing its water. It used to have a voice, now it was a silent river, a river like a parked car.” He reflects that return to his home will not cure the permanent condition of displacement even as he realizes that his changed homeland is no longer a poem or abstraction; it is real soil, trees, people and homes.

Even as he muses and sometimes agonizes about the plight of an exile, Barghouti colours the pages with the vivid detail of daily life in a real land that is not a real country, reinforced by the border soldier in his yarmulke carrying a shiny gun. Barghouti says: His poem is my personal history. His gun took from us the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land . He sees the faults of the victim, he says: we were not always a beautiful scene, but this does not absolve the enemy of his original crime. The occupation means that although life was not paradise before, the occupation means powerlessness now, the absence of ability to mange one's own affairs - from walking in the street to access to food and water, the lack of freedom to travel to relatives and friends in a nearby village - and if one leaves this land, the possibility of return denied

Politics is the family at breakfast, he says. It includes the missing, the absent children, and the price of food. Real politics are thyme cakes and beans. The looming missing figure is the poet's older brother who died young, alone, in Paris.

“A motherly man....Who dared to kill beauty's last cry for help?

The story becomes an elegy for this loved brother, every corner and gateway is a tribute to his lost genius. When he reads his poetry to villagers, one asks him: What I the most beautiful thing you saw since your return to the homeland?” He replies : your faces. The faces of his lost family are always with him .

In those faces he has found the truth of his displacement; this is where he has been displaced from. He knows it. A prize for school work, a tea set, the subject of historic jokes, has disappeared. Return from exile always means irrevocable change. The river changes as well as drying up.   But it also means the joy of old friends, shared reminiscence, learning of the secret goodness of the brother who paid school fee for girls from poor families, the pleasure of reading poetry to the people assembled in the square of his home village. But he says: The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, and surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror . This I can understand, in a global and more removed sense, we all live this way.

But it is for many of us, far removed beyond daily reality. I can leave my country, travel to nearly every nation in the world on a respected passport and always know I can return “home”, even though I organize and engage in public acts of resistance for social justice and peace. I was not born here, I came as a war refugee in my mother's arms, but I can call Canada home.  

Barghouti knows these bricks, trees, family faces, old friends are his home, but his country has disappeared. But he finds the joy in Palestine; the book has many funny stories. He says tragedy cannot produce only tragic writing. We are living in a time of historical and geographic farce. There is still dance, song, music and poetry – even TV- in a land where bookshops do not sell books.

In its very personalness and poetic expression, this is a very political book; it is an unanswered question for Barghouti and for us. For us the question is what are we doing to rid the world of military cancer? Where were we when it erupted in Palestine? Where are we now?

For Barghouti, it is to understand the reality of oppression and to express the truth that will overcome the violence and brutality, and yet to be rooted, even in exile, in the daily history of home. And finally, for the poet, it is the “life affirming” certainty that his son, born in exile, will see his father's homeland. But for us all it leaves the responsibility of the uncertain future of the millions of Palestinians in Diaspora, dreaming of the day they can return to a liberated homeland.

“We have to be precise. Creative writing is a critical process”

Except for his memoir, most of this poet´s works are not published in English. This is a first — a gift to English—only readers — a major collection of Barghouti´s poetry (it also prints the Arabic original on the opposite pages.)

Midnight, 142 pages long, is a story in a poem of a prisoner, the story of loss, displacement and loneliness. The poem of one who seems to have only poetry left. What makes it poetry is the leanness of language, the precision that rejects generality, the clarity of a single image or thought that defies vagueness and sentimentality.

His life is one of waiting — what else can a prisoner do, as he remembers a time of family and freedom, as images race through his mind: goats, gazelles and Geraniums shamelessly parade their wantonness/on balconies.

Even the memory of a single button creates dozens of images of where a button may have been —on bride´s nightgown, a blue quilt or lost when a boy climbs a fig tree. One can see much in a dark cell — even his grandfather´s cloaked hooked on a home destroying bulldozer.
 He speaks to those who have no ears to hear — the victor who cannot dance for joy and he asks: what´s the point of the flag you have dreamt of raising/if it fails to raise you?

There is always hope when all else is lost for the prisoner: I will try to discover life here/on this earth
At midnight the year ends and the poem ends with a directive: On the same nail,/from the same wall,/hang the new calendar;/ that´s all you can do.
Can we do less?

I hold this book in my hand, my bookmark of Za´atar herb, a scented memory of fields in Palestine, opens to In The Neighbouring Room, a reminder of the fragility of Palestinian & of all life: next to/the great room we call our country/death/ stays up, active/ for our sake.
So many achingly beautifully poems, lines words writ with skill and devotion of a creative master.

He ends the book with Silence; razor —like, painful precision in five lines: Silence said:/truth needs no eloquence./After the death of the horseman,/ the homeward—bound horse/says everything/ without saying anything. TW
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"Although world water supplies are dwindling and transnational corporations are working hard to reap substantial profits from that scarce resource, it is not too late to turn the situation around"

This quote sums up the authors'overview of the diminishing global supply of a resource most of us take for granted. But as new frontiers for capitalist expansion shrink and disappear, politically and geographically, the corporate world has turned in recent decades to the privatization of the commons and making commodities out of life’s necessities. Water is being consumed at double the rate of our population increase – mainly for industrial use. So people, and particularly people in the Majority World, are loosing this vital life force. Children go to dead thirsty; they die of dehydration or of water-borne disease because the water they do get is contaminated.

We seem to be working on many fronts in recent times - militarism, radioactivity, food, seeds, human rights, homelessness and the increase in wealth of a few as more and more become poorer. Social movements are growing too, and we have had many successes in the struggle to keep our commons - from Bolivia to Kamloops - people have prevented the privatization and sale of water resources. The authors state that the inequality of access to water can only be rectified by the elimination of economic and political inequality. When we work for one we work for the other. This is an issue that concerns all living creature and we need to be responsible stewards for those who can not speak for themselves, while we create justice for all.

Along with the serious background information in Blue Gold, the authors also give many actions and strategy along with success stories. An excellent overview and call for action. Have a drink of water, now, but from the tap, not a plastic Dasani or Aquafina bottle.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

The title of this anthology of mainly young activist women from an academic discipline intrigued me right away. I often think of art & activism, sometimes connected, sometimes separate. But Art as Activism implies a relationship of deeper integration. The twenty–one contributors have been graduate students of the editor; in this anthology they express their creativity as activism – a process that reaches out to the community to participate in social transformation. In her introduction the editor, Deborah Barndt of the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, reflects on the conventional understandings of art, activism and academia and writes, “ We question…the elitism and individualism of conventional art practices …We question how art has become increasingly separate from daily life, and even more commodified as a consumer good in the global marketplace…Similarly we question a narrow understanding of activism that frames mass protests as the primary mode of political action. How we think, converse, write, draw, sing, move…can unveil power relations and transform knowledge production ad everyday actions.”

We are still living in a cold war based mentality that dictates that art is made by trained professionals, art is not political, art is not related to community and art for social change is propaganda, so this book is a very welcome addition to our new awareness that everything is political and everything is connected. Barndt makes it clear that there are many modes and mediums of artistic expression, but most important for her in their relationship to the context in which they are produced and how they are presented to the community. Her important questions that we can recall and ask ourselves are “the why and for whom of artmaking.”

The answers that lie in these diverse essays are richly expressive of many issues, many places, many contexts and forms of art as activism. It is impossible to do justice to every contribution in a review; I choose a few favourites, another reader may choose others that offer some connection or insight with special significance for her.

There are good lessons to be learned from the first essay by Leah Burns who writes about her work with ‘at risk youth’ in Toronto. She is willing to reveal her own self–doubts and to acknowledge her position of privilege and power to the youth with humour…from the beginning when she has to answer the question, “Seriously…are you really an artist?” When the group is asked to make a mural for a food organization that wants it to look ‘professional’ and the staff suggests she can fix it up if it isn’t, she uses the opportunity to explore power dynamics with the youth. She sees her participation as an ongoing cultural conversation that others also participate in the determining of process and the finished work. When she writes about humour, she says it is based on interaction and cannot be done alone and that humour can be a way of connecting divergent to a collective consciousness of taken–for–granted knowledge.

I liked Heather Chetwynd’s essay on voice because so often the most obvious way people are oppressed is to silence them and rob them of their own voices. We speak in the name of children, old people, those who lack languages skills so often, never stopping to think we are stealing their rights of self-expression. Chetwynd writes about her experiences in exploring voices – from singing and chanting to progressing to the realization that “when we raise our voices, we challenge our perception of weakness, challenging those who have power over us and claiming our own power.” Song is the sound of social resistance through which many groups have expressed their stories, their history and their power.

Salmon Tales: Eco-art Activism, really affected me as a west coast person who grew up with neighbours who dip netted and rack dried salmon on the banks of the Fraser River. Penner, Mack and Bensted started with co-creating banners about salmon for a festival. They wanted to stimulate awareness of salmon–human relationships rather than salmon as a food commodity. The project “has now shifted towards community art, activism and education in a community context…we argue that visual art allows us to see and experience the world in a radically different way. It also allows us to focus on why salmon matter.” The banners illustrated in this book show how salmon as well as people have been colonized and that colonization of “the worlds above and below water” are connected and equally important. What began as an academic project has moved into the community, changing and growing and reclaiming community through stories and discussion as well as visual art. I hope it comes to Victoria soon and politicians who love ‘fish&ndashfarming’ go to see it.

Oona Padgham has contributed an essay & interview on Arts in Detention: Creating Connections with Immigrant Women Detainees. Not a subject most us know or want to know much about. Padgham says we detain thousands of people in Canada who have committed no crime, in jails and hotels that are converted to jails. Families are separated; the children usually stay with their mothers in waiting process that may last months and end in deportation or residence in Canada. Padgham belongs to a group, No One is Illegal, which organizes in solidarity with immigrants of all status. This group started an arts group project with women and children in detention and in this essay Padgham tells the project story with three other women who worked with the detainees. Sima Zerehi says that art production is a way of communication for people who cannot always connect in a common language; Farrah Miranda says art gives the women a chance “to do something that is actually human.” The project includes women and children expressing their anxiety, fears and hopes but it also allowed for some of the women to start their own art projects. The political nature of the art workers and the group they belong was not hidden. Jean McDonald said the project reveal the needs of women detainees – some end up there because they reported a sexual assault or domestic abuse – showing the urgent need for a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for human service workers.

The project gave the women the opportunity to meet and work with one another, to distract them from their painful reality and uncertain future. Children could play together and women could share childcare. The art was integrated into the context of No One is Illegal’s community work and it was exhibited publicly as an outreach and educational action, but also to show powerful creativity of people we repress to our larger society.

Padgham writes that, “The art itself is an outlet for frustration and pain, but also an opportunity to express hope for the future and joy in life.”

Wildfire is a valuable and inspiring contribution to the culture of creative social transformation; a place where activists, artists, academics participate together in the struggle for a justice and peace.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

This book fulfills its title´s promise; it is an informative, engrossing, readable and moving history; a chronicle in the best sense of a period and place for which we have had little news or analysis that is not filtered by the aggressors of Palestine and their friends worldwide.

In their foreword, Kathleen and Bill Christison write that, “The Palestinian—Israeli conflict has gone beyond being a mere political problem, beyond the stuff of cool debate. It is a human disaster that can no longer be treated with dispassion… The Israeli appropriation of the Palestinians´ land, livelihood and very existence is terrorist violence, as surely as any suicide bomber is terrorism…In the international media coverage of the two sides, only Israel´s story is told, so that the Palestinian violence has no context or reason…”

Baroud provides the context and the reason in a tale of courage, endurance and betrayal. He covers the events with a deeply personal interest and a keenly informed eye. If his story is not detailed enough, check out Appendix 1 of deaths and losses in 2000—2005, Appendix 11, a chronology of events during that period and Appendix 111, his exhaustive notes, references and recommended reading. But the main body of the book is rich with specific descriptions and detailed background of his story of struggle.

The author grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza with resistance in his blood. His grandfather, exiled in the Nakba of 1948 to the camp in Gaza, waited in vain for forty years for the moment when he could return to his village. Baroud was a teenager during the first Uprising in 1987 when ordinary Palestinians went into the streets to confront the Israeli army; many of his family and friends died in that uprising. He lived near what was called Red Square, ”there many of my peers fell to a cruel fate, the trails of their blood leaving stains that would last forever.” He wrote poetry that was published on the walls of the refugee camps of Gaza. Author photo: TW/09

The Second Uprising began when he was studying in the USA; there he saw the power of a totally biased international media. “Palestinians were duly blamed and condemned. Venomous speech was spat out everywhere and by every media, reducing the Palestinians to the role designated to them by the official Israeli account — they were the wrongdoers, innately violent, politically conniving and manipulative, twisted and essentially terrorist.”

So the author, a writer, journalist, and editor of www.palestinechronicle.com, now based in the USA, felt it was essential to respond this global propaganda and to write this book which he hoped would present the Palestinian response in the context of decades of oppression and “to articulate a independent Palestinian view that holds no allegiance to any political party, individual, or official entity of any sort. In this it is simply an attempt to cling to the same principles espoused by countless refugees in small and over—crowded refugee camps where freedom is proudly cherished over life.”

The Second Uprising may have had its origins in Israel reaction to its unacknowledged defeat in Lebanon in 2000. Then the Israelis built up its military aggression in Palestine, with fortified settlements and attacks of incredible intensity on civilians and their homes in refugee camps. “Three months after the outbreak of the Intifada, Israel began using illegal and unknown chemical agents [intimations of Gaza 2008] against Palestinians.” Appeals to the outside world were as usual unheeded as the camp was bulldozed. “The collective efforts of dedicated soldiers and settlers succeeded in obliterating an entire neighbourhood. But in the midst of the ruins, a solitary wall remained standing, covered with graffiti and images drawn with the colours of the Palestinian flag. There was a picture of a fist, breaking chains and bursting out of the ground. The trunk of the tree had the shape of the face of a little boy, and the roots were human hands holding tight to the soil. And below, a short statement in Arabic read “like the trees we die standing.” ”

Israel also launched a fierce assassination policy against anyone suspected of political activity and leadership. But as Baroud writes, as many died, more leaders were born. At the same time the world was watching the trial of Milosovic for war crimes, Ariel Sharon was never charged with his war crimes and his “audacious mandate of institutionalized violence.” The comparison is a good one.

In 2003, Baroud writes, the Palestinians declared a ceasefire of their response to the escalation of Israeli aggression, perhaps in hopes that the international community might show some support. But the Israelis continued their attacks and the Palestinians responded with more violence. Rachael Corrie was killed by a bulldozer while participating in non—violent resistance to the destruction of a Palestinian home. Baroud suffered the loss of two cousins in Burej, Gaza during a religious celebration. And Palestinian politicians had their own internal disagreements and they also faced accusations of corruption. Their own leaders were willing to compromise repeatedly the integrity of Palestinian cause and people.

Baroud does not intend to propagate the idea of violent resistance, he wants to reconstruct, if briefly, the argument that the Palestinian people´s struggle, including their armed struggle in the occupied Territories, is defended and protected under international law, In fact, “all States [are encouraged] to provide material and moral assistance to the national liberation movements in colonial territories.” Baroud uses the brutal attack on Jenin refugee camp as an example of Israel´s aggression, but reminds us that some did label this state—terrorism, but criticism was ignored by Israel and the USA (and their media).

However, Baroud does not accept the idea of Palestinians resorting to “morally degrading acts equivalent to those advocated by the Israeli government…To maintain its moral edge, the Palestinian revolution should not depart from its all—encompassing, tolerant and inclusive path.”

By 2004, the wall had cut off Palestinians from Palestinians and Palestinian lands from their owners. The political landscape changed with assassinations of Palestinian leaders and the death of Arafat. Baroud pays tribute to the solidarity and dignified kindness of the French government during the time of Arafat´s death and funeral. But one hears little from today´s French government — times have changed quickly. The wall near Jerusalem creatively decorated. TW/08

The “Separation” Wall was another of Sharon´s dreams to see reality even though the International Court of Justice ruled it was illegal — it still stands and now in 2009 it continues to be constructed on the ruins of villages and fields every day. Israel intensified its attacks on homes and people in Rafah, Gaza, even as UN officials were present assessing the damage there. While recounting details of this and other attacks, Baroud asks “What must Palestinians do to stand up against the Israeli occupation without being blamed for their own misery…?”

By 2005, he says, the Uprising was at an impasse, little in the way of freedom or justice had been realized. Israel continued and continues on its own path of destruction and warfare. And Israel, thanks to the UK (it provided the essential heavy water), has joined the nuclear club. And although we hear much about Iran and North Korea having the bomb, there is little objection to Israel´s possession of the ultimate weapon.

A few settlements were dismantled; more were and are being constructed in the West Bank. “Israel was leaving Gaza in order to retain large chunks of the West Bank” quoted from the Jerusalem Post. Any idea of free movement between parts of the ever diminishing fragmented Palestine were dashed. A look at current maps of Palestine show that it is nearly impossible to create a viable state with any independence of movement with the borders defined by the Wall. And the maritime blockade of Gaza stops even fishermen from making a safe livelihood.

Baroud has given us an excellent history of a situation we know only one side of — and even solidarity activists rarely have access to the careful documentation and accumulation of facts in context that Baroud has compiled. Our solidarity is well informed by this important book; invaluable and essential for our understanding and our campaign work. Baroud´s next book, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza´s Untold Story will be available later in 2009.

In the epilogue, Baroud states, “”…peace and justice movements around the world, representing an array of struggles, continue to look to the Palestinian people as an icon of resistance…no other national struggle in the world has come to symbolize so many things to so many different people….Palestine itself lingers in the world´s consciousness merely as a symbol…”

But Palestine is a reality, part of our fragile world, he warns, “If Palestine continues to be understood — or misunderstood— outside its proper frame as a national struggle for rights within the appropriately corresponding international context, than little can be expected from any attempts to remedy its ailments.”

He ends with what solidarity activists everywhere must take to heart; the struggle continues within Palestine, “…the Palestinian resistance, which has for the most part taken the form of a non—violent and popular movement, will continue as long as the circumstances that contributed to its commencement remain in place.” For the millions of Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territory, the struggle does not end. Nor, if we are sincere in our words, should our solidarity. TW

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

This is a collection of essays, research and reports on ‘development’ as it affects the people who have to live with it and who had little to say about it. Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) is intended to be privatized, globalized economic development of a vast area from Mexico, through Central America to Panama that will only benefit capital and its collaborators. Many of the writers explain the details of this scheme and the anticipated social, economic and environmental results of such a neoliberal model – a plan that would among other effects, “administer poverty.” Other writers show that the flaws in the PPP are part of the flawed process of globalization, what Subcommandante Marcos calls, “ …A world of broken mirrors reflecting the ineffective global unity of the neoliberal jigsaw puzzle.” But fortunately many of the essays in this useful volume illustrate the wealth of ways in which peasants, indigenous peoples, cooperatives and workers are building different and sustainable models of self-directed development of all kinds – not just economic – building on community values and traditions.

Thus have been many setbacks to this PPP thanks to the resistance of indigenous cultures of Mexico from Chiapas and Guerrero to, most recently, Oaxaca. Worldwide the strength of resistance to neoliberalism reinforces Latin American resistance, as well as taking courage & strength from it. Trade agreements stall, dams are stopped, highway expansion is abandoned, mining companies face local opposition and many new forms of community and neighbourhood cooperation are forged. The profound rivers are the ever growing movements of peoples who have grasped their own future – perhaps for the first time in centuries and are overflowing with energy and ideas to create “another possible world” now.

In conclusion, Tom Hansen, Director of the Mexican Solidarity Network says, “ Since we are all literally immersed in the neoliberal model, it may be difficult to envision an alternative future based on values like equity and democracy, yet each of us has a small but important role. It begins with our daily decisions – what to buy, what to eat, how to live – and it extends to our collective and social responsibilities – how to organize, how to struggle, how to share…After all it’s our collective future.”

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

I found this book in a small radical bookshop in Saskatoon this summer, just as the invasion of Lebanon ended with a ceasefire after incredible death and damage had been wreaked in a few days. I know little about this country and even less about Lebanese women so I bought it with interest. And I learned a lot about Lebanon and its political history. What I also found was a very intimate story of a bright young woman from happy Lebanese family with a Christian mother and a Communist father and how she became a member of a secret resistance group, eager to assassinate for the cause; a cause which she saw as the independence of Lebanon.

This is a very personal memoir, like no other that I have read. This idealist woman, with a love of friends and family, a dedicated athlete, became a member of a secret resistance group opposing the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, including her home village, Deir Mimas, near the market town of Khiam where she was later jailed. Israel, the foreign occupying power, was fronted from 1978–2000 by The South Lebanese Army. The Israelis finally withdrew in the face of Hezbollah, and its efforts to re–occupy Lebanon this year were repelled by this same militant group.

A seemingly unconnected local event helped me understand the passion of Soha and her comrades who were willing to die and kill for Lebanon. I attend, in Victoria, a poetry evening with an “open mike”. One middle aged woman often reads poems about her Israeli–Hebrew culture. Recently the theme for the reading was “summer” and she introduced her poem as being about a friend";s summer camp. It was about camping in empty homes, the campers wore flak jackets and boots…the poem finally reveals that these happy campers were actually an invading army; the Israeli army occupying Lebanon using empty homes whose residents had fled before their invasion. That is a summer camp? Invading soldiers are campers? No wonder Lebanese people feel so passionate about the freedom of their country. No wonder a young woman would consider killing someone she considered a traitor to her country.

When the Israelis and their allies reached Beirut in 1982 and Palestinians were massacred in refugee camps by the Israeli forces, Soha was already immersed in the politics of her country; she saw the internal conflicts as well as the foreign aggression. She writes about her pacifism and abhorrence of violence throughout the conflicts and invasions, but began to believe that violent resistance was the only response. Her family had fled from the south, moved to Beirut and then had to leave their home again. She writes, “;My apprenticeship in politics sped up dramatically during 1982, that terrible year. The Israeli invasion gave me a bitter strength in my beliefs. I was fifteen, and I was ready to move into action.”

She sought out and joined the secret resistance force. She saw herself first and foremost as a Lebanese, a fighter for the freedom of her country. In 1986 she was sent to gather information in the occupied territory of South Lebanon which was being considered for separation and independence – while occupied by Israel aided by the South Lebanon Army under its leader, Antoine Lahad. She was soon in his home as an aerobics instructor for his wife. Then she decided and convinced her comrades in the resistance that she would be his assassin. After one failure of resolve, she succeeds and shoots him in his home.

She is taken away, beaten, tortured and imprisoned in Khiam. She learns eventually that she had not killed him. She had injured Lahad and he eventually recovered, with slight paralysis. At the age of twenty-one she is incarcerated in the infamous jail, controlled by the Israelis while their Lebanese mercenaries did the dirty work.

Most of the book is her personal story of survival and endurance during her years of abuse, torture and constant uncertainty. She works hard at staying fit and healthy so she can endure the beatings. She sets a goal for her release from detention as she calls it – because she is never tried for her attempt to kill Lahad. She wrote a journal on toilet paper. She endured, made friends, and helped others to keep strong. This account of her time in Khiam is an amazing record of determination and conviction.

Meanwhile, unknown to her, an international campaign for her release had been launched. Ten years after her incarceration, in 1998, Soha was released. She was thirty-one and had spent one-third of her life in prison. Two years later, South Lebanon was liberated and Soha returned to see Khiam, stripped of its terrible power. But she reminds us that, “there are dozens of Khiams around the world. Let us never forget them and finally, tear down those walls, once and for all.”

She remembers her experience and her commitment and maintains her spirit of resistance, “Because what I did, I did for tomorrow’s children, for that fragile time when they will play in the shade of trees, and the air will echo with their shouts of joy.” TW

When the Afghan MP, Malalai Joya, quoted from this book during her talk in Victoria, I looked for it and found it the youth section of the library.

On one level it is a simple & vivid story of a brave and adventuresome fish; but given the political repression in Iran and the author’s politics and the circumstances around his early death in a drowning ‘accident’s, it can also be read as a political allegory.

The Little Black Fish shows that it is impossible to completely suppress expression and resistance; the brave and creative will always find a way. This book can be interpreted as a call for independent thinking and action — a call to challenge authority and the status quo. Whatever the outcome of such adventures the author tells us that brave actions inspire even after death. That alone is a political statement for all of us. So do read it, then read it to and discuss it with the children in your life. TW

Victorians had the rare chance to hear Walden Bello discuss his thoughtful and constructive theories about globalization and the new global democracy movement at the Small World Social Forum in November. The New Internationalist magazine says,” Clear analysis and impressive scholarship have made Bello on of Asia's key progressive thinkers.” In Deglobalization, Bello explains the crisis of legitimacy in the institutions and actions of global financial powers – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the G-8. This set of organizations have imposed on the world – both states and people, a system that empowers corporations and their servant governments while it  weakens governments that try to serve the interests of people and impoverishes the majority of the world's population. There is little argument these days; we can see the results of these policies from Bangkok to BC, from Qatar to Calgary, and Victoria to Venezuela. Global capitalism reaches everywhere, even as Bello shows it is in crisis and failing its own objectives.

Fortunately, most of the world's people are not greedy, stupid nor passive. And an unpredicted and creative global movement for democracy, justice, peace and a healthy environment is sweeping the world. Bello is the scholar/chronicler/participant of this movement. Bello says we must deconstruct while we construct. We need to decommission the financial institutions while we build a pluralist system of governments.

This system will finance local development, based on human needs that de-emphasize growth rather than ecological equilibrium, will make decisions based on democratic choice, not the imperative of market forces, redistribute land and resources equitably for all and make sure that corporations and the state are constantly monitored by civil society.

Bello concludes by saying: a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world…will be enable nation and communities to carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms and the strategies of their choice. This short concise volume is a guidebook no activist should travel without.

Every once in awhile, involvement in the struggle becomes overwhelming, and an activist needs to recharge, and to remember what drew them into the movement at the start. One way to do this is to read a book that combines cutting analysis with alternatives and hope. There is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization is such a book

There is an Alternative is an anthology of essays by academics and activists paying tribute to the important work of German scholar and activist, Maria Mies. Mies is widely respected for her work, including Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986) and Eco-Feminism (1993), which was co-authored with Vandana Shiva. Her theories centre around alternatives to global capitalism, based in the lived experience and expertise of women around the world and efforts by indigenous cultures to resist colonialisation. She argues for a subsistence economy, rather than an economic model based on unlimited "growth", and shows how most economic models, including Marxism, fail to account for the unpaid work of women, the productivity of the earth, and the knowledge of indigenous cultures.

The beauty of a well written essay is that it is based in strong analysis and therefore remains relevant over time. The reader who begins this volume with the opening interview by Ariel Salleh with Maria Mies might be shocked to learn, as I was, that it was originally published in 1988. The ideas seem fresh and important as if they were written last week. The interview also provides a base understanding of Mies' theories; theories' whose influence can be felt in the essays throughout this volume.

Silvia Federici's article, "War, Globalization, and Reproduction" is another example of an article whose relevance stands the test of time. Giving several examples of colonization and war in Africa, she argues, "In many cases, what arms could not accomplish was achieved through 'food aid' provided by the USA, the UN and various NGOs …"(137). She uses Mozambique as a model to demonstrate a paradigm where structural adjustment leads to economic unrest and finally to justification for foreign military invasion. As I read her description of the relationship between food aid, structural adjustment and war, unnerving visions of cluster bombs and food 'aid' dropping on Afghanistan create a chillingly current echo to her theories.

A powerful aspect of the anthology is its diversity of subjects. Readers are taken to the streets of the Battle of Seattle in "Seattle: A Convergence of Globalization and Militarization" by Theresa J. Wolfwood, and then to Melanesia where indigenous people are fighting western-style land ownership in "Melanesia, the Banks, and the BINGOs: Real Alternatives are Everywhere (Except in the Consultants' Briefcases)" by Nicholas G. Faraclas. Further reading finds us in Kenya learning about the "fight for fertility" in which women struggle for control over their own reproduction, but also for control of fertility in farming, and access to land in "Women Never Surrendered" by Terisa E. Turner and Leigh S. Brownhill, or following Vandana Shiva to the Punjab in "Globalization and Poverty". Wherever the authors take us the message is the same: corporate globalization is a form of colonization that is devastating the earth, the lives of indigenous people, and the bodies of women. SC

 Review by Theresa Wolfwood

However flawed the UN of the 21st century may still be, it remains a crucial part of any potentially successful effort to mount a serious challenge to US empire. PB

Although this is mainly a book about USA foreign policy and the internal and global resistance to it, Bennis dedicates it: For the dead of Iraq and New Orleans who paid the price for empire.

And an empire that wages war on distant shores also neglects its own shores with disastrous results. The cost of war has to come from somewhere and in the USA it comes from the poor and public services.

Bennis writes mainly about the resistance to militarism and imperial expansion exercised by her government around the world. This is not an intellectual treatise, but history as it is being made by people everyday.

In his introduction, Danny Glover, actor and activist, says that although wars still rage and much early resistance by the UN and other governments have collapsed, “Yet the tripartite internationalism that challenged the beginning of the Iraq war is still an important model, though it will require a great deal of work to reclaim and recapture that moment. This book aims to help that process”.

This book does express the urgency and action around global resistance of the war and what we need now is to learn from our own and others´ experiences how to make that moment into – long commitment, to learn that war cannot be stopped on a weekend. Bennis makes the connection between many events – from Europe´s growing global flexing of muscle to alliances of small nations with social movements to help sway the UN and to scuttle the WTO &ndash particularly effective in Cancun, Mexico in 2003. 

We often do not recognize our successes until they are documented; Bennis does a good job of this and keeps hope alive for activists.  In particular Bennis offers real hope that the UN with the power of many governments allied with citizen groups can and will resist empire and, that the UN does not have to be the tool of the USA, as Madeleine Albright once called it, if informed and motivated people around the world are willing to persevere in their resistance to war, poverty and injustice. Then empire will surely crumble. – if we keep working at reaction and positive resistance – being and demonstrating the alternatives so other citizens will join us.

Activists need to integrate their community work with pressure on governments. Bennis writes: To change people’s lives demands change at the governmental level. It is therefore not enough for people to mobilize in the street: the mobilization must demonstrate enough strength to force those in power to change.

 Bennis speaks at World Social Forum, 2007. Photo TW

“…in spite of fears of abuse, Earth is still an amazing and beautiful creation…It deserves our best efforts. Enjoy it, love it and save it!” RB

Rosalie Bertell believes, as have many ecologists before her, that the current focus on economics is at the expense of ecology and the social environment. In Planet Earth, this internationally-respected scientist states that the most urgent problem facing humanity now is how to sustain Earth, our life-support system. To do this, we must find a new model of global living which is not based on military force in support of a hard, unbending capitalism. This book is a vital contribution to the search for new solutions and means to create change. She sees signs of hope in new social movements springing up around the world.

She begins with a detailed and devastating analysis of the wars of the last ten years of the 20th century. In Part II she provides an acute scientific basis for the madness of war and the destruction that science, harnessed to the military, is planning for us and our world. She discusses so-called natural disasters that are linked to human-caused climate change, the "down-to-earth problems with Start Wars," and the environmental crises spawned by war-making, including pollution caused by depleted uranium and chlorine-based herbicides. She examines the economic fallacy of the military providing jobs and prosperity. There is detail and fact here enough to convince any concerned citizen, particularly those who see saving the environment as a separate struggle, that the work of peace, economic justice and ecology are one.

In the chapter, Rethinking Security, Bertell brings it all together. She says that "global consumption of resources is exceeding Earth's restorative capacity by at least 33 per cent. War and the preparation for war drastically reduce the store of these resources still further, leading to a self-perpetuating cycle on which competition for raw materials leads to further conflict."

In order to redress this crisis, she says, we must tackle the question of security. We need to challenge the belief of many that military force is a 'necessary evil'. This new concept embraces a vision of social justice, human rights and the health of the environment. Security will be achieved through the protection and responsible stewardship of the Earth.

Bertell calls this 'ecological security,' based on a complex multi-faceted approach to the world's problems. Realizing this vision is a big job and required multi-faceted solutions.

Bertell has many insights and ideas on how to create such solutions. She cites the need to alter the core belief of military security. Change always follows a challenge to core belief. Consider the examples of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights and the new challenges in the work of children's rights, child soldiers and animal rights.

This book is full of examples and ideas. It is a book to hold on to, for repeated reference to information and inspiration. In her own words:

"It is my hope that this book will open up for the reader an historical matrix against which to view the present and future… I also hope it will spur the reader to become involved in peaceful enterprises. We must set up a co-operative relationship with the Earth, not one of dominance."

By Theresa Wolfwood

“It [the story of the earth] is larger than all of us, shaped by rules that antedate and superseded every economic, legal and religious doctrine humans have ever created.”

It is not often that a scientist writes a book about her area of study that can be easily understood and appreciated by any reader. Bjornerud is a geologist with a deep and broad love of our planet; she makes the history and existence of our Earth relevant to the important issues facing humanity today. She makes all the vital inks between resource depletion, global warming and the billions of years the earth has existed and reached a state of balance, now severely threatened. She writes that we have an ancient fear, “ … that we will one day wake up to find the cupboards bare. An old and frail Mother Earth will no longer be able to provide for her children.” A fear that becomes more present and obvious every day.

The history of the history of the earth is short; until a few hundred years ago, most societies wrapped geology into a rigid theological framework. Many people observed the earth´s surface, collected samples and fossils and interpreted it for exploitation and development, without questioning its formation and processes. Now geologists can use sophisticated measurement techniques to plumb earth´s depth, calculate its composition, to interpret slow and sudden changes and to date its existence.

Sitting on my shelf is a piece of tonalite gneiss, accompanied by a card that identified this specimen as “the Oldest Known Rock in the World”, dated 3.962 billion years old; an age that most of us cannot comprehend, even when compared to the less than 2 million years humans have had to ravish their home. How is it possible that we can have a fatal effect on a massive planet in such a short time — really only the last few hundred years?

With the basic geologic timescale, clear explanations, and vivid details with understandable metaphors, Bjornerud in elegant prose writes the complicated history of our planet and of our fortune to be one life form among many on this delicately balanced combination of age, heat, air, water and chemical elements. The earth is so old and so vast, we perch on its surface with little understanding of its place in the universe or what lies just beneath our feet. For this, she says, we must understand the language of rocks. Interpreting the landscape around and under us, she shows how the earth reached its present form after 4 billion years of activity, change and reaction until we have the continents we recognize surrounded by air and water. The heat of the sun rules our atmosphere, creating weather and climate, soil and even volcanoes that come from a place where heat has been stored for millennia. The solidity of our planet is deceptive; change happens constantly, the balance of forces is precarious, rocks form and other disappear to dissolve or to be transformed. She calls it a dance with underlying rhythms and idioms.

“Our bones evolved in the constant presence of gravity, and without this force to challenge them, they lose their strength. In the same way, without the force field of scarcity, a constant in our evolutionary past, we lose something of our full potential. Once we have enough to survive, we crave limits — the discipline of the dance…unchecked consumption and unchallenged political power are violations of ancient earth—law. The only uncertainty is what the penalties are.”

To understand the limitations and fragility of the earth is know that we are on a dangerous course that will take the power of informed and caring people to pull us back from the precipice where, like lemmings, we rush to the newest mall or war.

Bjornerud wants us to know and appreciate our home for its own sake; it will be here long after we are gone, even extinct. But she also wants us to appreciate it so that we can re—balance our place on this earth as we change it at an alarming rate. We are with our constant exploitation of our home and its treasures, changing it more profoundly now than nature itself.

“The magnitude of human actions on the Earth mow matches those of natural agents. We are changing the underlying beat of the global dance…if we wish to preserve our social, political and economic structures, which don´t weather surprises very well, we need to understand the range of possible outcomes. Fortunately Earth has kept a good record of what has happened in the past when biogeochemical upheavals have occurred. To read it, we need to speak the language of rocks.”

Bjornerud has written a story combining her passion and wisdom; this wonderful book is ultimately a call for all of us to understand what we are doing to our only home and to act now to save it. Learn and learn to dance with the rhythms of the Earth.

In Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, William Blum shows that in spite of the efforts of U.S. leaders to make their actions appear humanitarian and democratic, the U.S. has run a global protection racket based on four imperatives:
(1) making the world hospitable for globalization, particularly for U.S.-based corporations;
(2) enriching military contractors who donate generously to politicians;
(3) preventing the rise of any society that might serve as an alternative to capitalism; and
(4) extending political, economic and military hegemony over the world while creating a world order in America’s image.
Part I makes the connection between supporting terrorism abroad in U.S. interest (from Cambodia to Afghanistan, to the School of Americas and the CIA), and the criminal “justice” system at home. He documents military interventions since 1945; the U.S. still has military forces in more than 100 countries. Earth is not enough though, Blum quotes the Pentagon’s plan to wage war in space: “we’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space.”

Part II covers U.S. weapons of mass destruction from Hiroshima to Depleted Uranium in Iraq and Yugoslavia. There is a long list of when and where the U.S. used chemical and biological weapons, at home and abroad – literally insecticides for people.

Part III is “The American Empire: Coming soon to a country near you.” Blum lists military and political interventions all over the world. The U.S. has stood as a true “rogue” in dozens of votes at the UN, often supported only by Israel, and a handful of other faithful allies, like Canada. The U.S. even voted against the right to food as a human right.

Even when the truth is revealed, “being the World's Superpower means never having to say you're sorry.” This powerful empire is based on repression abroad and at home. How do they get away with it? Blum says, “little is left to chance in the Selling of America.” The worldwide love affair with America is the result of a media as powerful as the military that glorifies the U.S. everywhere and in every form of media. Blum says most Americans do not yet recognize the consequences of their government's deeds.

To order, contact the publisher or send US$18 to W. Blum, #707 – 5100 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC 20008-2064 for an autographed copy

A new book by Blum is an occasion. He has only written two earlier books of political analysis; Killing Hope: U.S.A. Military and CIA interventions Since WW2 and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. His exhaustive research combined with witty commentary make his books easy to read but powerfully authoritative.

In this latest collection of essays his fertile mind ranges across a wide geography of issues and events. On the subject of, “Interventions Are Us,” Blum reminds us of the USA bombing of a drug factory in Sudan and the support for a corrupt regime in Peru. Iraq and Afghanistan have overshadowed mendacity of USA foreign policy in the rest of the world but, interventions, force and threat are still the order of the day. Indeed we may ask what technique is being used now to make Canada a second home for BMD?

Blum does a wonderful job of using politicians own words to illustrate their deceit and lies. From Madeleine Albright justifying murderous sanctions to the justification for armed intervention in Iraq from the latest bunch of oil slicks back to the lies surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he covers them all.

But the part that I liked and was new to me was the list of socialist governments in today’s world. We know about Cuba and Venezuela, but what about Tajikistan and Estonia?

In a scary essay, “Winning hearts and mindless”, Blum shows the depth and breadth of ignorance of the American people, concluding that the peace movement has the necessary and enormous task of overcoming this vacuum. As in his other books, there is a wealth of information and wit here to help that task; it belongs on the activist reference shelf with his other books.

The Fraser is one of the largest rivers in the world, and still, one of the few unfettered by dams or diversions. It flows through British Columbia creating a giant “S” before it empties into the Pacific at Vancouver. Bocking, an eloquent writer and passionate naturalist, describes the Fraser as the organizing element of a vast landscape. The Fraser traverses desert, alpine meadows, forests, deep canyons and a broad island—dotted valley of its own creation over the last 12 million years.
I lived most of my early life near the Fraser, in its valley and canyon, I still thrill when I see its brown silt laden water spill into the clear sea. This year I read this book as I travelled in the Cariboo region of the Fraser, seeing for the first time an upper canyon and multi coloured rock faces set in open range country.

I saw the natural elements Bocking describes, but also better understood the human history around the Fraser. Bocking writes about the 1st Nations peoples´ relationship with the mighty river and the exploration and settlement by Europeans and the development of industry in the last 300 years. Although he has researched well and reported fairly on the latter, the author leaves no doubt as to where he stands — on the side of this unique environment and the people who respect it.

Anyone interested in Canadian natural or human history will enjoy this book. Those who recognize the importance of riverine culture and ecosystems will learn much from this study. (photo of Fraser river by TW, 2005)

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“The greatness in being human lies not in giving up, not accepting one´s own limitations.”

“…:that by whatever means they choose, all human beings can and must struggle to resist propaganda and falsehoods; and that this resistance is never more important than for those who have thought and language as their professions.”

Called by some, the mother of Swedish social democracy; it is her work in nuclear disarmament and peace issues is what Alva Myrdal is now usually remembered for; the work that earned her the Nobel Prize in 1982 when she was eighty and already suffering from the effects of a brain tumour that killed her four years later. Yet even then she wrote and managed to deliver a powerful acceptance speech without showing her aphasia.

This memoir by her daughter is a personal and political narrative of a long and fruitful life of one of Sweden´s and the world´s inspired and inspiring women and her wealth of contributions to our ideas of social democracy, human rights, equality, justice and peace.

Myrdal started very young refusing to accept limitations least of all that she was female. And throughout her amazingly productive life, she challenged the limitations imposed on women, wives, mothers, workers, and citizens from a small country. She believed in humanity, that problems could be solved by study and discussion.

“All her life, Alva Myrdal had taken for granted that it was possible to explain oneself and to explain human problems in such a way to offer scope for imaginative responses. If only she could make some difficulty dramatically clear and suggest practical steps for resolving it, then how could people refuse to take action?”

It was this faith that motivated Alva Myrdal in all aspects of her life. In 1934 she co—authored with her husband, economist and writer Gunnar Myrdal, a book on family planning that advocated policies on housing, family law, education, the rights of woman and children and medical care. The government responded to these ideas and the resulting changes in Swedish laws and attitudes became the basis of Swedish social democracy.

She was active in politics in the Social Democratic Party and was responsible for formulating post—war government policies and international aid and reconstruction after 1943. The new United Nations called her and she worked in creating social policy for the UN and was the chair of UNESCO´s social science department, at the time the highest ranking woman in an international organization. In 1955, she became Sweden´s first woman ambassador and not to a small quiet country, but to India and all its neighbouring countries. She became a good friend of Nehru, but at the same time she spent much time and energy meeting with women and women´s groups.

In 1962, her life took a new turn when she was asked to be Sweden´s representative at the Geneva disarmament conference. She also became an MP in Sweden; in 1967, as a member of the Cabinet, she was assigned to disarmament. Under her leadership and with great skill and diplomacy the group of non—aligned nations pressured the then super powers to make real progress in disarmament. She later wrote a book, “The Game of Disarmament”, about the failure of the nuclear powers to seriously consider the international concerns. She became totally devoted to that cause, learning about all political and scientific aspects of disarmament.

“…all humankind is now learning that these nuclear weapons can only serve to destroy, never become beneficial…First and foremost arms are tools in the service of rival nations, pointing at the possibility of a future war …The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.”

She was one of the founders of the internationally respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI. She was an excellent choice for the Nobel Peace Prize which she received with her colleague, Alfonso Garcia Robles.

Throughout her public adult life, Alva Myrdal appeared to be that rare woman who had it all. In a time when the few women engaged in politics were either single or childless, she was determined to have a full life, as a wife, mother, and mother with a creative career life. But until I read this sensitive but acute portrait by a loving daughter, I, like many, did not know that her private life was fraught with conflicts she wished other women to avoid. Her husband was jealous of her fame and career, but most of all jealous of her love of their three children.

In retrospect she felt the two biggest mistakes she had made were to leave her small children in the care of family to go abroad with her demanding husband, who had little interest in child rearing or even caring for his own children. Later family discord caused her great anguish when her husband alienated their son — for ever, it seems. There were many opportunities she turned down because of her temperamental, sometimes philandering and depressive husband. Nonetheless she inspired many women; she made many recommendations for women to continue their careers and also made it possible through changes in policy and public perception to make women more equal and free. Later it became common for men in Sweden to accept child care responsibilities, but long after Alva Mrydal´s time.

As is the case with many intelligent and creative people, she was not satisfied with her impressive accomplishments and for a woman who believed in the importance of words, her aphasia was a special hardship in her last year. But in one her last speeches she rejected despair and encouraged everyone to act for peace and to never give up. She said in part, “I know only two things for certain. One is that we gain nothing by walking around difficulties and merely indulging in wistful thinking. The other is that there is always something one can do oneself… it is not worthy of human beings to give up.”

Those words should resonate with all of us who work for a better world, to rebuild democracy as neoliberalism attempts to overwhelm us and to remember that social change is a life time project. TW

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

In the introduction to this big and beautiful book by Boullata, a prolific Palestinian artist and writer, the UK artist, John Berger, writes about the absurdity of the identity cards Palestinians are required to carry. He says they have nothing to do with identity; they are an inventory of stolen facts. He goes straight to the heart of Palestinian identity when he writes: True identity can be neither delivered on demand nor stored as mere information. To believe that it can be is weakness of all so—called security records kept by oppressors. True identity is something known in one heart and recognized within another. It always contains a secret that no interrogation can reveal. Its secret is its human—beingness.

This identity pours out of many Palestinians in creative works — poetry, drama and the visual arts. Now Boullata has created a wonderful illustrated historic collection of Palestinian art and thoughtful reflections that express and illuminate the many Palestinian identities with grace and integrity.

Berger concludes his remarks with: “this…book…takes the reader close to the struggle of those visionary, obstinate Palestinian artists who create, each in her or his own personal way, so that their anonymous heroic land with its ancestral olive trees may survive.”

In the first part Boullata gives the historical background of visual art in Palestine under Ottoman occupation. Much of the art is photographic (as well photography was quickly accepted in Palestine), pastoral and pictorial. There was also a tradition of Christian iconography and illustration.

Tamam Al-Akhal in her studio painting a scene of Jaffa harbour.

Then the author moves to the next period in history. He writes that: Just as today´s Palestinians who are scattered in separate geographic regions but whose lives continue to share a common destiny with their people wherever they may continue to live, each chapter may be read independently…each section contributes to the making of a homogenous whole. …place is an essential factor that often predisposes the formation of art …In the process the reader finds how proximity and distance from the homeland played a role in moulding the language of expression.he most important event in Palestinian contemporary history is the NAKBA, the forced exile of 800,000 people from their homeland. They fled to Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and eventually they and their descendents scattered around the world. The Nakba dominates art and life today, both in the diaspora and in the occupied land of today´s Palestine.In 2008, in Amman, I had the privilege of visiting the studio of Tamam Al—Akhal where she showed us her work and that of her late husband, Ismail Shammout. I was emotionally overwhelmed by a room full of brilliant works all depicting the result of the Nakba on their home city of Jaffa. (to learn more about this couple see : Palestine: The exodus and The Odyssey by Isamail and Tamam Shammout. National Press, Amman, Jordan)

 

Boullata writes in Section II: Memory and Resistance of the importance of keeping memory alive as part of resistance from the outside; visual expression of the memory is so important that it is passed down in kindergartens and schools in permanent refugee communities in Beirut. We saw the art of 3rd generations Palestinians in the kindergartens of the Kanafani Foundation, about the Wall and the Intifada. 2 photos of art from these kindergartens. tw photos

 

 

The art of Naji al—´Ali mainly depicts the life of Palestinians under occupation; he used now famous cartoons to portray the injustices and he sought to shake them {viewers} from the passive stance of mere observer and force them to confront their own predicament vis—à—vis the Palestinian experiences. He was assassinated in London UK in 1987; his cartoon figures are copied everywhere in Palestine — on the Wall and many public surfaces.tw photo

Boullata devotes special attention to Palestinian women´s art — once confined to embroidery and domestic arts; women are now prominent in Palestinian art.  The most well—known of Palestinian artists outside the region is Mona Hatoum who lives in Europe. We saw one of her bold installations in a gallery in Amman — a barbed wire bed and a clothes hanger in the familiar shape of Palestine. photo tw

It is very important to recognize the work of artists who live in ´the interior´ within occupied Palestine. Their art expresses the hardship, the daily harassment and the oppression of their existence. Evocative photographs, stark wood engravings and sketches of the dead and injured are part of their creative reality. Just going from one part of the West Bank to another to attend an exhibition that one is in, is a painful harrowing experience of checkpoints and delays. A one hour journey takes a whole day for pregnant Manal Mahameed.

The author himself has moved into abstraction in “The Evocation of Place” He became inspired by the square and he continues… to explore the metamorphosis of the most stable of geometric forms and one that once represented the equilibrium of earth.

This is a very comprehensive work which no one review can really do justice to. It is available and is not expensive for such a well produced art book. Through his writings and the images he uses, Boullata makes it clear that Palestinian art is as strong and as varied as Palestinians are. And this art is an integral part of resistance and the struggle for homeland and self—determination. This is a political book, but then I believe all art is ultimately political.

Reviewed by Theresa Wolfwood

This is one of a series of small easy to pocket & carry books that also include Green Action & Political Animals. The New Internationalist is the global voice of inspiration and information for all of us in the work for peace and social justice; it produces an excellent magazine and many publications including The World Guide.

Peace is full of quotations from many lands & peoples – a bit heavy on men & USA presidents & generals but still it is a little gem and an excellent ethical gift for a person just starting out in the peace movement.

The photos and graphics are striking; my favourites are; the beaming faces of women in Burundi, great photos of historic demonstrations, a poignant scene of a woman in a Bosnian graveyard and the photo of Serb woman grieving during the NATO bombing with the stunning caption that that was the first major conflict with NO casualties on the winning side.

Some of the quotes are from ancient and historic texts from many cultures. Some are less known like the timely words of RH Tawney, “Militarism is the characteristic, not of an army, but of a society” and Aung San Suu Kyi who reminds us that, “the quintessential revolution is that of the spirit.”

When I spoke recently at an alternate armistice ceremony at the memorial to the Canadians who died in the Spanish civil war I quoted the words of Oscar Romero, remembering my visit to the 65 metre long wall of names of those who died in El Salvador’s civil war. The much revered priest said, just before his assassination, “…Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty.”

A pleasant part of our duty is to pass on images and words like those in Peace to new activists as a welcoming introduction to a culture of peace.

“Justice forgets about the dead women of Juarez”
On that mountain near
El Mozote in El Salvador
Where they took them away
Young girls as petite as their rag dolls.”

from Death in the Desert: The Women of Cuidad Juarez by Marjorie Agosin.

Nearly all the writers in this collection now live and teach in the USA, an ironic situation when one considers the role of the USA in supporting the oppression that many of them fled. Cherrie Moraga, a USA born Chicana, recognizes this when she asks herself: How can I, as a Latina, identify with those who invade Latin American land? George Bush in not my leader, I did not elect him, although my taxes pay for the Salvadoran Army´s guns. We are a living breathing contradiction, we who live en las entranas del monstruo.

Twenty women writing resistance represent a wide historic and geographic range, from the island of Antigua to the mountains of Guatemala where Rigoberta Menchu witnessed massacres of peasants to cities in Argentina, the birthplace of Ruth Irupe Sanabria who credits her spirit of resistance to her mother and her mother´s parent who passed down to her a disdain for supremacy and oppression.

Elena Poniatowska of Mexico observed and documented a massacre of peaceful demonstrators in Tlatelolco in 1968, an event which is only now beginning to be discussed in the new neoliberal Mexico. She says, “In these pages there echo the cries of whose who died and those who lived on after them.” The stories of the many who participated and watched in horror as children and youth were murdered are heartrending in their detail. The demonstrators were sealed into a square and shot by troops on the ground and from low—hovering helicopters.

In the final essay, Julia Alvarez reflects on the life of Salome Urena, a poet whose words inspired the new free republic of Santo Domingo and then founded the first school for women there. Her daughter, Camila, lived a conservative academic life in the USA until she was 64 year old when she left to work in Cuba. When questioned she said: Vine a ayudar: I came to help. Alvarez says that this comment gives her courage, the courage to change things through very simple actions. She quotes Toni Morrison: the function of freedom is to free someone else.

In her closing words Alvarez warns against the mistake of copying the power structures of those we resist and says, “I trust that connective, consensus—building, hand—on process which I think of as a traditionally female process with its roots in the kitchen, women working together. Here, let me help you with that.” TW

Brutus, Dennis. Poetry & Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader. Edited by Lee Sustar & Aisha Karim. 2006. Haymarket Books. USA List also as: Sustar, Lee & Aisha Karim, editors. Poetry & Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader. 2006. Haymarket Books. USA

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“The perfume of freedom has burned my mind…”

When I finished reading this history of a remarkable and committed activist and the anthology of his sixty years of poetry, prose, and speeches, I regretted my own failure to talk with him four years ago. In a grassy field by the river in Porto Alegre, we were participating in the opening of the World Social Forum; I was carrying two of my handmade banners that many people wanted to photograph. A wispy gray haired man approached with a camera and asked me about the banners and chatted for a few minutes. He introduced himself as Dennis Brutus. I was speechless – a rare event – but managed to say: Are you the South African Dennis Brutus, the poet? Then, photos taken, I scuttled off in confused awe and never saw him again.

In my years of work in the international and local anti–apartheid movements and my pursuit of poetry that spoke to political reality, I discovered Brutus’ poetry and heard of his activism. But I knew few details of his life and work. This book of memoir, speeches, interviews and poetry is an excellent account of Dennis Brutus and informed my admiration of his courage, commitment and perseverance.

Classified as “coloured” by the South African government, Brutus’ parents were schoolteachers and they instilled a love of literature in their son; he also was able to get a reasonable education. At an early age he became aware of the injustice and inequality in South African society; an active boy, he saw the results in sport; non–whites had not the opportunity, equipment nor place to become good athletes. None were allowed on prestigious national teams. He saw the system in South Africa as a form of Nazism, developed and strengthened by the white South African government after WW2. Brutus was teaching school then and he began to challenge apartheid on many levels, including education and sport. He lost his job, was arrested, shot and jailed for his activism in 1964.

The accounts of his time in jail are horrific, the conditions were appalling and both guards and prisoners were dehumanized and brutal in this terrible system. Brutus, as were all prisoners, was beaten and tormented; but he still cared for others he saw as weaker and more vulnerable – young men who were tortured until they accepted rape and constant sexual abuse. He managed to express his feelings and observations in poetry that carries the smell and feel of horror.

In Letters to Martha, he writes:

“…To what separate limits are they driven
and what fierce agonies they have endured
that this, which they have resisted,
should seem to them preferable,
even desirable.”

In a series of stanzas entitled, Robben Island sequence, he describes the bleak setting and the soul destroying labour that prisoners on this infamous hellhole endured.

“ neonbright orange
vermillion
on the chopped broken slate
that graveled the path and yard
bright orange was the red blood
freshly spilt when prisoners had passed; …”

Some died, others were broken, but Brutus survived; perhaps poetry and political conviction helped him through.

“…Take out the poetry and fire
or watch it ember out of sight,
sanity reassembles its ash
the moon relinquishes the night.
But here and there remain the scalds
a sudden turn or breathe may ache,
and I walk soft on cindered pasts
for thought or hope (what else) can break.”

Brutus not only survived; after leaving prison and going into exile, he helped bring the conditions in South Africa to world attention. He organized massive and wide reaching actions that saw the government South Africa isolated and despised throughout the world. Brutus organized successful boycotts of white–only South African athletes’ attendance at the Olympics and many touring sport events. In the early 1970’s I remember I heard a news report on CBC radio – I was living in Yellowknife at the time – that my friend, Don Grier in Edmonton, had been carried off a football field and was one of many protestors jailed because they demonstrated against a white South African team playing in Canada, an act, no doubt inspired by Brutus and his comrades. Soon South African became isolated in many areas – cultural workers refused to go there, trade and tourism boycotts became widespread. The Rand sank in value.

Brutus was working hard throughout Europe and North America to expose apartheid. One group that got support, even from governments like Mulroney’s Conservatives in Canada, was The Aid and Defense Fund to help families of jailed and killed political activists and to provide legal assistance to those arrested for their political actions.

This was a group I was also involved in and we were able to funnel millions to the needy in South Africa and give them hope and dignity along with material assistance. Brutus writes that international support was crucial for the anti–apartheid struggle and its success.

When the jubilation over the fall of apartheid and the possibility of true democratic government in South Africa had passed by and world attention moved on to other issues –like the end of the ‘cold war’ and new trade liberalization agreements, Brutus and many others saw the beginning of betrayal of commitment to social justice by the new government they had worked so hard to support and elect in the new South Africa.

Even as early as 1974 Brutus saw a deeper and more complex reality. He said then that the struggle was deeper and more complex than apartheid, “…the significance of the Southern Africa [he was including Namibia, Mozambique etc.] Liberation movement is that it goes beyond resistance. It is not resistance to oppression; it is not even liberation merely in the sense of freedom to govern yourself…It is not a local nor even a national struggle. We see ourselves as an element in the global struggle against imperialism….”

So although Brutus does not live in South Africa he connects all struggles and is still in 2006 deeply committed to justice in South Africa. He participates in and supports the new movements against neoliberalism and privatization in South Africa, the oppression by the World Bank and the IMF and South Africa’s new role as a sub-imperialist power for the USA.

He is criticized for his global view and for his long distance involvement; but he remains connected, optimistic and active. When speaking about cultural change he says that, “…that one of the things we are doing is to engage ourselves in the struggle to recover and rediscover our humanity…” He sees that resistance is part of presenting to society that there are other ways of being and that creative political engagement requires that we participate in the creation of ‘another possible world’ as the Social Forum process calls it. In an interview in 2002 Brutus says that, “The reality is that Africa has been recolonized. It is the neocolonial process that is now paralyzed” by conflicts in which South Africa arms both sides, so he concludes, “don’t send in the killer to clean up the killing. Find alternatives among themselves.” A call that was also eloquently stated by Wangari Maathai in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2004 when she said that solutions to problems must come from us.

>The answers lie in all of us, not in powerful forces that help create the problem. This seems to me to be at the heart and to be the strength of Brutus’ life work – not only protest but constructive resistance that creates new ways of living together and serving liberation and justice, “in the struggle for the liberation of humanity in Africa and the rest of the world, in an attempt to achieve our full potential, our full dignity, our full humanity.”

This connected engagement is very clear when he talks about his poetry. He says he could not be a full time poet, that poetry is an outflow of his personal and political life. He says that the poet as a pet has no obligation to be committed to social activism – he believes that the poet as a human being, that all human beings have an obligation.

“We ought all to be committed because we are people, we’re all part of the same human environment.” He says he could not make a total commitment to poetry because it, “would do damage to what I now regard as essential to integrity for me. Which means social concern.”.

Although some of his poetry may seem fleeting and fragmented, when looked at in the total context it is part of a continuous flow of life, work, feelings and relationships. That gives it a vivid power and a particular strength.

Just after I met him so briefly he would have written these lines in: At night, after Porto Alegre: South African Airways 747

“In this dim winged cathedral
soaring above oceans of silvery cloud
far beyond Atlantic’s tumultuous heave
we move, star–girt distant
from greed’s debris, genocides, calcined bones
curled in our private shrines
or bent over light–pooled pages
to a new world, new earth, where finally
our dreams can be fulfilled.”

Much can understood of Brutus’ perseverance and productivity by reading an untitled poem in 1989 where he wrote:

“…the creative act is an act
of dissent and defiance: creative
ability is a quintessential part
of being human: to assert one’s
Creativity is also to assert one’s
Humanity. This is a premise on which
I have acted all my life and it is
the premise I have offered to others
As an inspiration.”

TW

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“Children such as Alex and I lived in mystery…”

Butala is the much loved author of many books and plays; she is best known for her “Perfection of the Morning”, a memoir of her experiences for nature and landscape in southern Saskatchewan. Her writing is deeply rooted in the life of the prairies. If Saskatchewan could be called the quintessential Canada, Butala can be called the quintessential Canadian writer. All her writing has been imbued with the sense of continuity and hope of life despite hardships and failures. Her latest work, also a memoir of her experiences, is very different.

On a warm summer evening in Saskatoon in 1962, Alexandra Wiwcharuk paused during a stroll, before her night shift as a nurse, on the bank of the South Saskatchewan River. There she was brutally raped and murdered, buried hastily nearby while still alive. Her murderer has never been found. Butala says this terrible deed devastated not only Alex´s family and friends, but changed a whole community that had never known such a terrible crime in the small prairie city.

Butala went to high school with Alex, but was not a close friend, but Butala, like so many others, remained haunted by this death for more than forty years. She decided to write the story of the pretty and

popular young woman who died so young. She did not set out to be a detective and solve the murder, she wanted to write Alex´s story.

But her research lead her down strange paths, she was obstructed, harassed, followed by police, her phone was tapped, she was threatened and warned off. She does not find the murderer, but finds a chilling reluctance on the part of officialdom to be open about that crime four decades ago. It may be that the murderer is still alive and well in Saskatoon.

But the life and death of Alexandra Wiwcharuk is more than the account of promise destroyed by cruelty and horror, it is a symbol of the evil that is always present in human society. Of the mystery of Alex´s end she writes,

“By struggling to find Alex´s story and to tell it, I had entered the stream of life that had always evaded me, that my own fears had kept me from. Alex herself had awakened me, her beautiful promise, her terrible death, her rage at having life snatched from her, her determination that her story would be told. Alex herself had thrust me into life at last. What I found there had changed me forever. Now it seemed to me that darkness was creeping up…the real world, it turned out is almost too terrible to contemplate.”

Butala cannot forget her colleague and her murder; she has created a story that is a meditation on evil that forces us beyond the tragedy of Alex to a contemplation of evil everywhere in our world. It changed Butala as she wrote it and it will move and change her readers.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” George Eliot in Middlemarch.

History is made by everyone and recorded by the powerful. The silence of the poor, the weak, the illiterate – mainly women – is seldom noticed. Urvashi Butalia, an Indian feminist, writer and publisher, grew up in a family whose life was shaped by the Partition. The roar was suppressed but still there.

This 1947 event which divided India into India, supposedly a Hindu nation and into Muslim West Pakistan and East Pakistan, that later became Bangladesh. Ten million people crossed the border which divided Punjab into two countries. It is now widely accepted that about one million people died in this transport across invisible lines. It was a violent and bloody birth for new nations, based on religious differences; the messages of peace and love of all religions were lost in the frenzy of upheaval, movement and loss. The author says this data, including the widespread abduction and rape of women, is “the generality of Partition: it exists in history books.”

It even exists in travel guides. When I crossed the border from India to Pakistan, at the only open point, between Amritsar and Lahore, more than fifty years later, I choose not to go by train; our guide book described refugees fleeing for safety during partition using this train. When the trains arrived and doors were opened blood and bodies poured out. We walked across the border.

“…The truth is that this experience has been with us for a long time. Do you think these tapes will make any difference to the next set of rules?” These are the doubting word of one of the villagers the author interviewed for this book and they stay with her throughout; her doubt is infectious, I ask the same question.

She wrote the book with the hope, I think, that she, like all of us, can make a difference and affect the powerful: that the truth can make a difference. She wanted to record the private stories that only families know; the secrets that women had not broadcast, but held within them, scars on their souls. The author knew some stories but they seemed remote to her until in 1984 Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh security guards, again an orgy of terror and killing swept India and Partition did not seem so remote anymore. She has to acknowledge that Partition is still alive and present. In her efforts to understand and reveal the experience and meaning of Partition, Butalia searched for stories beyond written history. She went to the survivors, the families of survivors, to the stories passed down to find the other side of silence.

The stories, recorded verbatim, are heart rending. Honour is such a strong concept in this culture, that fathers and male relatives killed women and girls so they would not be raped by marauding men from the other religions. Women jumped down wells, some survived and live with memories of those who did not survive. Homes were burned, people abandoned villages, hospitals had no staff, and there was no one to bury the dead. Raped women were stigmatized when they bore the children of rapists. All this happened. And yet people did not really know what was happening; Butalia tries to set these stories in a context of known history and searches to explain why neighbours, friends and relatives will murder, rape and injure one another. The personal trauma remains fresh.

“We did wonder what was happening but we had little understanding of it. It was the big people who seemed to know what was happening.” said one person she interviewed. Most blamed people of other religions; some blamed their leaders or the English.

So will this book help to end hatred and fear? Will it help us disclose our deepest feelings about ‘the other’ and understand how we can all so easy turn against those with whom we share life and feeling? Why do aggressors become aggressors? Why do victims become aggressors? To be a victim is to justify one’s own violence? Is that the universal truth of all wars? She creates many questions, examines her doubts and yet continued in her recording. Words are all that many of us have to verify our experience.

The author is a feminist with a deep awareness of the official disregard for women’s lives and self–regard; she understands the marginalization of women’s experience, so she listened and tried to understand them, to place them in the history of their time and location, along side of official history.

She says that, “Although my book is not ‘only’ about women, I have come to the conclusion that, women, their histories, and where those histories lead us, lie at the core of it.” Many would not speak, or would not speak of the worst of horrors, silence takes many forms. Butalia writes about her work, “I believe this can only take us further forward in our understanding.”

It helps to know and read her stories of those who refused to be consumed by hatred, those who helped their friends and neighbours and who refused to commit acts of horror. These stories are part of the whole and yet, I still wonder, why can some people, everywhere, refuse to engage in horror and why will some embrace brutality with self–righteous relish? TW

When I was given this book by the editor, a world respected authority on biosafety, I knew it was about our biological resources and knowledge, but I was not prepared for the outrageous information about such a benign sounding concept. “Benefit Sharing” is yet another way in which politically and economically poor groups and countries are forced to render unto the Caesars of the world their biodiversity and natural wealth. This one issue is the metaphor for current imperialistic globalization. To read it is to be instructed in how we are sold out and what we can do about it.

Burrows explains in her introduction that when “access to genetic resources and fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of their utilization” was negotiated by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, she realized this was going to be a painful and ugly deal.

In today’s world everything is a commodity, even though many of the writers in this book want to believe that life is sacred and cannot be owned, most acknowledge that the powerful are stealing and patenting many life forms from seed to human cells. For indigenous peoples who see no separation from their lives and the life around them, the theft of their biodiversity is most devastating.

The eleven writers are themselves a diverse group comprising scientists, activists, lawyers, scholars from all parts of the earth. They clarify this complex subject and some offer possibilities for citizen directed change. TW 2005

Theresa Wolfwood

“…any every tide teaches the lesson/impressions of water on sand/and then erases it/ to make this garden/you must stay here.”
from Garden in sand. P 19 - Still Life under the Occupation.

The best of poetry is rooted in place and passion; for Carole Chambers her passion is the place. She lives and writes on an island off the east coast of Vancouver Island. Hornby Island is a very special place of sea and ever changing sky and lush green and secret crannies. I live there part time and first met Carole at her day job in the post office. She is finely tuned to her physical environment and also to the social environment of this beautiful place, seemingly remote, but very connected to the larger world.

Chambers poetry is both specific and local and universal at the same time. Her images are powerful and her language honed to rock and sea, forest and garden.

In Echolocation, Chambers writes far and wide from the wars of Yugoslavia to the barbarous hunting to extinction of the Beotek by British gentlemen who gathered after church, “to hunt the savages/who knew how to live here.”

She also recalls her experience as one of a thousand citizens who gathered to protest logging in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island. When she is arrested by a mountie just doing what she had to, Carole mourns, “…. It is human to be afraid/of an unknown future/ to look after one’s own./We thought we had forever/against the green.”

About 10 years ago I had the pleasure of hearing Carole read The Great Rift at a glorious mixed media performance of music, song, dance and word on Hornby Island, a uniquely local production about the beginning of humanity in Olduvai Gorge. This epic poem, is included in Echolocation; I still get chills when I read it. The final words are about all creation and a paen of hope for life.

“…the ancient fault/ imperceptibly separates land from land/and will again allow the sea to take/its tithe of the dying/to feed the hatching world,/without end.”

Her ear hears the bees in the garden and she muses and warns against our destruction of the earth.

“…If we anger the bees/they will desert us/and our bellies will swell/with the emptiness/of our creation”

Chambers is a prophet of incredible power and vision; her poems are jewels of language; they are also psalms for our time.

I don’t often review a best seller, but that is what this book by Chomsky has become recently. Although well known to political activists and students of political thought around the world, Chomsky, prolific and active as he is, has never been a popular best seller. That has changed with Hugo Chavez recommending this book to the world at the UN General Assembly.

He said. “It’s an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what's happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet…The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.”

That sent many diplomats, politicians and curious listeners running to the bookstore. For many of us who have read Chomsky for years, it is an amusing, but heartening sight to imagine. This is a important book; the more people who read it, the better. As I write this I am organizing a vigil besides navy ships at Navy Days in Victoria. And Chomsky could not be more relevant & serious. Canada has become an extra wing on the USA eagle, while the USA soldiers on in Iraq; we are on ground for its strategy in Afghanistan. Chomsky, author of nearly 100 books over his long career is seldom wrong and is always full of insight into the machinations of the USA government.

Chomsky shows us how the present USA policies are rooted in the past, Bush II is no new aberration but he has built on the success of his father & his predecessors and the end of “the cold war” and the development of what the military planners call “full spectrum dominance.” With a powerful military–industrial complex (General/President Eisenhower’s phrase) ruling the White House and a president programmed to look like a simple Christian guy, the USA is hell–bent on global control. Most recently the 911 bombings of New York & Washington have provided a heaven send opportunity to be even more ruthless in pursuit of its goal.

Chomsky like many radical thinkers and activists is optimistic, putting the onus for creating a better world onto to activists and politicians everywhere who have integrity and commitment to believe and act as though ‘another world is possible.’ His works are a vital part of the matrix of our activism.

TW

Churchill, an enrolled Cherokee, is an activist in the American Indian Movement, a professor and a prolific author of many books and articles on the aboriginal peoples of the Americas. This book is well documented and has exhaustive references and bibliography.

His main thesis is clear and unequivocally stated: the crime of genocide does not belong to any one group, that is has been perpetrated on many groups from Armenians to Romas and that the longest enduring genocide has been against the native peoples of the Americas. This genocide is denied in official history – both in the USA and Canada. Native peoples are still the poorest and unhealthiest groups in both countries. In South America as well, the Mayan civilization is only now being recognized as a contemporary culture and in Bolivia in 2006, an indigenous person just became the first native President of a country.

Yet the genocide continues in the USA, as Churchill documents in detail. The government of the USA refuses to sign the International Convention on Genocide and still officially denies ‘this most horrible of crimes’ in its settled territory. Churchill states that since the bombing of Hiroshima, the start of the nuclear era of human history, the cold war up to the present, the resources, lands and health of the native peoples have been sacrificed for USA global imperialism. (In Canada also: see my review of the film, “Village of Widows”) Impoverished bands are bribed or ignored as the USA uses native land to mine and dump radioactive materials.  In November 2-8, 2005, the Guardian Weekly of the UK carried a story about the massive toxic storage dump on Shoshone land in Nevada.

This book is placed not only in the Americas but in a context of genocides in Europe and Asia; the scholarship is impressive and comprehensive. It is an excellent reference for anyone needing a matrix for hemispheric history as well as the history of killing and oppressing whole groups of people.

Missing is any analysis or awareness of the gendered genocide of aboriginal women – now reaching massive proportions in the USA, Mexico and Canada where only  a women’s movement is responding to the genocide of the poorest and most vulnerable of native society. The fate of “Stolen Sisters” is still only whispered about.

Genocide in all it forms must be acknowledged and although history cannot be undone, we need to act with awareness and understanding so that it does not continue in new military and economic forms.   TW

Inside The Bottle: An Expose of the Bottled Water Industry tells us that bottled water is relatively new to Canada - it was introduced by the big corporations, like Nestle, from Europe. Then the cola companies, seeing their sales of sugary soft drinks stagnate as a result of health concerns, got into this profit able market. They had the great advantage, Clarke says, of already owning the facilities and having almost free access to municipal water (just like us, they can take it from the tap!) In Canada, 20% of drinking water is now bottled; its consumption exceeds coffee, tea, milk and apple juice. It's more than fad now. Massive marketing with sophisticated and deceptive appeals to health and fashion consciousness keeps pushing up sales. Aging baby boomers and schools are a major focus of this advertising. Clarke says, "It is also one of the most unregulated industries that deal with people's basic health needs."

Clarke details a complete breakdown of the privileges, marketing strategies, prices and profit potential of bottled water. The book is worth the reasonable price of just for his clear and illuminating charts and tables alone.

This book is also a great resource for data on corporate water operations in North America and, most important, for stopping the corporate capture of a public resource. If we ignore the right of all people to safe and adequate water, properly managed as part of the public commons, we will soon face privatization of this public domain which surely will lead to increased pollution, limited access and higher prices. Water is a public and political issue for us all. It is the ultimate commons.

The excellent, well referenced background on community resistance and specific actions in Inside The Bottle send a compelling call to action to us all. So read the book and start organizing!

This morning on radio, I heard a USA government lawyer proclaim the intention to grant no rights to foreigners in the USA, warning us we may be subject to detention without any contact, food deprivation and various forms of abuse, even if we are in the transit area of an airport. She ended her speech with the blatant statement (lie) that the USA does not torture.

I felt a chill as I realized I may never again see my friends in the USA who are too frail to travel, that I cannot visit or meet with the many committed activists who are trying to change the path of their country, I just will not risk it now.

In the dense, information- and analysis-packed book, by Coates, this latest development is described precisely on the back cover, “American military doctrine has been transmuted into Full Spectrum Dominance, or unchallengeable superiority in any contest on or in land, sea, air, space or information.” This frightening statement comes straight from the USA Department of Defence statement of May, 2000. (see page. 130)

Since the end of the so-called "Cold War", the USA has been emboldened to proclaim its intention of global hegemony, an intent that was always there and implicit in the capitalist drive to expand - it thinks no longer need worry about opposition or counter-balance.

Coates has collected a number of essays that examine the USA hegemony, the faltering power of the UN, the wars of the last 15 years, the erosion of peace and human rights globally and our efforts to change this dangerous slide into repression we seem to be headed for.

These papers were intended for discussion by the Network for Peace and Human Rights that has been meeting in Europe since 2002. As such they help for any activist looking for insight and direction in the work of peace and human rights – inextricably bound together in these “parlous times”.

The continuing nuclear proliferation today with the USA holding over 10,000 nuclear weapons while it shakes its fist at Iran, the development of new ‘nuclear weapons’, those using U-238 as a steel hardener, while treaties on nuclear proliferation and weapons in space are all abandoned by the USA present great instability even though nuclear disarmament is, to many, yesterday’s issue. Unfortunately not.

While those with full spectrum vision and understanding cannot see any threat against USA hegemony that calls for military dominance, the USA government leaders are moving into a shady world of unreality where the threat of “terrorism” can be used to subdue any opposition and trample human rights.

The later part of this useful text covers the important connections between the major concerns of today, peace, poverty, human rights and resource control. Torture may become the defining and connective issue that will challenge the empire. Coates points to many areas and directions we are working and need to increase our efforts.

The book ends with the ever-inspiring words of Arundhati Roy. “Our strategy should not be to only confront Empire, but to lay siege to it…..To shame it. To mock it. With our art, music, our literature, our joy our brilliance, our sheer relentless…The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their vision of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few…”

Case Studies of how women in major conflict zones, in Ireland, Israel/Palestine and Yugoslavia have come together to work together peacefully.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

This is another gripping story of women from the Mauritian writer of The Rape of Sita. If that book was in lush forest colours, this tense drama, set in a prison as cyclones approach, is stark black and white overshadowed by a sky of deep intense mauve of the impending tempest. The tension builds inside as the cyclone nears outside.

Three women are thrown together in a gaol cell. At first, suspicious and unfriendly to each other, they gradually develop friendship and support. They talk about their varied experiences; not too different from any women´s in or out of prison. And to relieve the tension and appalling conditions of incarceration, the women talk about food, exchange recipes and become connected to women´s lives everywhere.

Chapters are interlayered with quotes from the Criminal Code and the power of ´justice´ meted out to the powerless becomes a caricature of how governments and official in power can twist and warp the laws with impunity.

Juna is, supposedly, she thinks, inside because she tried to organize a union. But she is accused of drug dealing. I didn´t understand anything about my arrest. Neither reason nor procedure. Neither motive nor charge.
To me, it was a bolt out of the blue. I am a person who doesn´t understand very much about anything, come to think of it. Except for computer systems and what I call the common map of all human language—they hold few secrets for me‏everything else is very hard for me to come to grips with. Any number of things are bolts out of the blue to me. I feel hurled into the world myself. Just like they have hurled me into this cell. As if I´m a bolt out of the blue myself.

The older woman, thrown in the cell designed for two, Mama Gracienne, has made a confession under torture. Her crime? Murdering her daughter – but she is so confused she doesn´t know if or when she did it.

The third prisoner, is just a girl, Leila, who is imprisoned for being “out of control” whatever that means is never clear, except that someone did not like the way she behaved; she calls Mama Gracienne a loon because she seems so vague and confused.

There is a fragile unity among prisoners against the guards and police who have power over their every minute. They despise the “blue ladies”; they become a family in their small cell, united in their determination to defy authority.

What is usually seen as a disaster, an act of destruction, slowly emerges as the saviour of the prisoners, the opportunity for freedom. The cyclones become the possibility for mutiny, the realizations that there are greater powers than those of police and prisons.

“Three generations sitting on the cement floor of a prison cell waiting while a cyclone approaches....
And then I say a funny thing. I say: They won´t rob us of this cyclone, they won´t.”

The staff panic, doors are left open and prisoners dance and laugh their way to freedom. Juma continues to write their story with a mascara stick on pink toilet paper. A story like no other that could be a story of many women in many places. Lindsey Collen, I am waiting for your next story.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

It starts with a poem full of questions that resonated in my thoughts as I read this wonderful story and forced me to examine my own behaviour and actions.

“What action for you	...Will this act
Would be moral	Make history progress
Would be true	Or allow us
Would be good	To slip back
Would be right?	Into the mud of the past?...”

Recently I ´met´ Lindsey Collen on a conference call and although I knew her interesting letters in New Internationalist, I was not aware of her novels. I immediately found The Rape of Sita & Mutiny, both written a few years ago, absolutely timely and fascinating. Collen is an activist in Mauritius, probably the only hyphenated activist-novelist in that small island nation. Her latest letter from Mauritius in NI is about an unusual and well-organized strike by fishers.

The Rape of Sita is a like a story told to a small group of friends in an intimate space – a fire lit room, a shady grove of trees or in a tent by moonlight; it reflects how most women think, the main story, the details of the lush setting, the feelings of the characters, many asides to bring in other voices, related information and description – because to a good story teller everything is related and everything is relevant.

Even though the story is told by a man, Iqbal the Umpire, he is a respected community figure and wants to be a woman. Is that common among men who relate to female sensitivities or it is an inchoate form of womb-envy? But the book is really by a woman who understands women´s fears and vulnerability.

Sita is a powerful woman leader on a tropical island with a history of resistance. She comes from a family of independently minded warriors from the struggles against colonialism. These struggles erupt throughout the story. Sita works beside her husband, Dharma, an organizer who loves her as an equal. Much of her strength comes from her legendary mother, Doorga, who is capable of shaming men into buying her a drink, because women are paid less, and if they don´t she beats them up.

Sita grows up to be a perceptive and courageous activist. The rape, the central crisis of the story, occurs when she leaves the island for a women´s conference. Her rapist is someone she knows (most rapists are known or related to the woman), her host at travel stopover – now separated from his wife.

For years he has feared Sita, so he fantasizes about the classic means of oppressing her – sexual attack. Sita is unprepared and throughout the act, all the thoughts of self–doubt, self–loathing, and disbelief, mixed with desperate survival reactions pour through her mind even as she becomes physically numb.

She returns home to join Dharma at an important meeting and doesn´t mention her trauma; the pressure of political organizing overwhelms her private feelings. “Did she have time to announce a rape? Worse still. Did she have space? Worse still. Did she have time and space to absorb it in herself? Of course, she must have had time to tell at least herself? Why didn´t she, reader?”

She then buries her memory of rape for many years until she can barely function and even considers suicide, no one can reach her. And this reader believes she didn´t tell about the rape because women are conditioned, even strong, progressive women, into thinking their sexual humiliation is not as important as the “struggle”. We deny to ourselves that it is a vital element of the struggle.

Finally, “she drove into it with her whole self... She bumped into an illusive, heavy, dense, presence.... The hole...It was Anger. It was Rage. It was Fury.”

She knows she has buried something – and typically for women – she thinks she has buried a violent crime of her own.

“What she had found: Rage. The rage of the history of wounded womankind. And with it: Slavery. The slavery of humans historically doomed to be unable to move.”

So the story moves from universality, the symbol of one woman´s oppression becoming the symbols of many oppressions, and back to the story of Sita whom I desperately want to triumph, to shed her rage and guilt, to not let it defeat her. So I read on....

The narrator recalls that time and timing are important, Sita has created a time bomb and when the time is right she explodes her memory. She considers travelling back and murdering her rapist. “Would this act of murder stop men thinking they could rape women the world over?” She rejects that idea. Her shame and guilt, confronted, wither. When a woman in need comes to her she understands that violence and oppression can be overcome if we reach out to others, we help as we are helped. In community and union, mutual solidarity among the oppressed will triumph over evil. Even in defeat, there can be victory.

And for the narrator who wanted to be a woman, he recognizes that we are all woman and man as he is. If we love ourselves as we are, we will all have freedom and equality.

“We dwell in many homes on earth, the dearest is the place of birth.”
By Theresa Wolfwood
This poetic sentence was one of many which Wadad Cortas´s father recited. He instilled in her a love of the Arabic language, Arabic culture and a deep love of her birth place. Her parents also believed in the education and rights of women. Cortas was well—educated and widely travelled. She was a perceptive observer of her own and other worlds; fortunately she recorded many of her reflections and memories that became the substance of this memoir.
Wadad Cortas had a successful and happy life as a child, a wife, a mother and a satisfying career as a headmistress of a fine school for 40 years. All this makes a wonderful story. But this story is set in a time and place of conflict, war, betrayal and heartbreak that she was completely immersed in.
Lebanon is a beautiful land, fertile and rich in natural resources and resourceful people. It has had little peace for the last 100 years since Ottoman rule, French occupation, the occupation of Palestine, civil war and military invasion by Israel. Cortas lived through all these periods; her life and career were marked by these events.
This book is her personal story until her death in 1979. Her daughter, Mariam Said, has written an excellent introduction to her mother and a useful historical overview, placing the life of her mother into the larger life of Lebanon.
She loved her extended family; she often comments in the book that the love of family and the ties that hold them together are an integral part of Arab culture. She also cared for her family of students, over the years many of her students came as refugees and seekers of a haven in a world of war. I loved her stories of her cake—baking mother—in—law who died suddenly with her last words being about her granddaughter´s birthday and her hope that someone else would bake her birthday cake.
The book has many interesting photos that help make this book come to life; the cover shows Cortas with her husband and children. The photos show her extended family, homes, friends and her beloved Al Ahliah School for Girls and its students and ceremonies; the school is still open in the same building in Beirut.
Cortas was a modern humanist who believed in the potential of all people — particularly her students; she was deeply committed to an Arab culture that embraced people of all faiths and beliefs from all over the Arab world. She believed that education and awareness of many cultures could create a just and peaceful society. The French did their best to force France´s system of education on their subjects. Cortas helped set up an Academy of Fine Arts (the French were always suspicious of any Arab culture but “fine arts do not frighten colonial powers“) for architecture, painting & sculpture and her great love — music. She writes, “If the Lebanese Academy played a limited role in our cultural life, it was certainly a pioneering role. In its search for an identity, Lebanon was awakened to the importance of liberal education in the hands of its own people.”
In 1967 she wrote that young people were restless and wanted to free Palestine and that older people were complacent because they believed; “ ´Our cause is plain as the sun and will surely win in the end.´ They did not stop to think that a friendless justice does not interest humanity. We all knew the Arab proverb ´no right is lost if it has a defender.´ Although in the end justice may prevail, justice has to be defended lest it be lost in the labyrinth of human scheming.”
Unfortunately Lebanon and Palestine have been lost for many years in that labyrinth of human scheming, the play of the powerful. Cortas did not live to see a world that is finally awakening to the rights of people in her land; the world she loved. The terrible attacks on Gaza in 2008-09 and the war on Lebanon in 2006 have given rise to a new global consciousness that Cortas´s legacy of faith in justice may yet be realized. I found this memoir both interesting and informative; it gave me more insight and context than a scholarly impersonal history could; it engaged me completely into Cortas´s world of Lebanon and her informed wide world view.

´The history of Latin America has been one of expropriation… Resources, and with them workers´ rights and public services have been squashed in a post—colonial free for all´.

Dangl, a young USA writer, travels through Latin America learning about the past and present history—in—the—making events of our southern neighbours. The main focus is Bolivia but he puts it into context with reports from surrounding countries as well. Recent events in this small mountainous country — the plebiscites on the elected President, Evo Morales, and state governors, that were demanded by the US—backed wealthy who want to make a new country of the petroleum—rich region — confirmed that a majority of Bolivian people want a new government that answers to citizens and their social movements that protect and empower people & save their resources. In spite of incredible resources — petroleum, iron and other metals — Bolivia is the 2nd poorest country in this hemisphere.
The citizen—organized Gas War in 2003, a popular uprising reversed corporate policies and ousted a president. They were empowered by the success of another social uprising in Cochabamba, a Water War against the privatization of water and its sale to the Bechtel Corporation which saw Bechtel chased out — and inspired many richer more powerful groups and places around the world to fight to keep their water public. It was in these movements that the leadership skills of activist Evo Morales — the first indigenous president in Latin America — were honed.

´In the 1980s, the policies that enforced those beliefs came together under the umbrella of “neoliberalism.”… Neoliberalism´s objectives were the deregulation of the economy and the attraction of foreign investors. Across Latin America, trade barriers were removed, labour and environmental laws were loosened, tax breaks were given to foreign companies, and public telephones, water systems, railroads and electricity were “privatized” and sold…education, healthcare and public transportation were slashed.´

This is the program for not only Latin America, but the world. The people of Latin America have provided incredible and courageous resistance to this program — to the shame of those of us who are apathetic and politically ignorant in wealthier lands. This resistance takes different forms across Latin America; those who occupy land, some who take over factories, others create social movements that topple governments. Dangl gives good reports from around the continent on these exciting waves of change, but I was most fascinated by his personal accounts of social groups in Bolivia that provided the hope, organization and strength for political change. He was right there on the streets during many events and it makes gripping reading. From the feminists in Mujeres Creando who create the ways and means for women to overcome traditional oppressive values and customs so they can participate fully in society to Teatro Trono, a theatre group founded in the 1980s to ´reclaim democracy through theatre and art´ with those who are normally exclude from artistic expression — homeless children, poor miners and many others. Social movements were the creative force for resistance.

´…nowhere else In Latin America did corporate globalization wreak as much havoc as it did in Boliva. Nowhere else has the people´s resistance been so strong.´

The Price of Fire is a great antidote to our ignorance and apathy, full of lively current history and stories to inspire all who long for social change but are not engaged in the process. We face the same fate if we don´t see the parallels and start organizing. TW

The Governor-General's Award Winner opens his wide-ranging account of the importance of water with a page of quotes. The one I remember is: Millions have lived without love. No one has lived without water.

De Villiers has written a comprehensive survey of global water resources and use, the effect of climate change on water and human intervention in water distribution and its geopolitical results. He writes about Canada and NAFTA, water in Africa and the Middle East. In the end he presents the necessary solutions – conservation, new technology, and most important the recognition of the political importance of water and how it must be shared to avoid water wars. This is an excellent primer and reference for one of the most important issues of our time.

Maggie de Vries is a writer and teacher; she is also pretty and blonde. She and her beautiful sister, Sarah, grew up in a loving family. But Sarah was a woman of colour and was harassed and tormented as she grew up in our bigoted society. She was murdered in 1998 after a short and often brutal life without developing her special writing talent.

It is the circumstances of Sarah’s death which finally shocked Canadians and made her a public figure after she vanished. Sarah had become a sex worker and an addict, following her trade on the streets of Vancouver, living, sometimes happy and sometimes sad, in a community of sex workers who watched in horror as Sarah and other disappeared.

Initially the police were not interested – a woman can leave, go where they want, why suspect foul play…she is only a prostitute. That was the response until more and more families complained and went public – too many women had vanished. Finally the police responded; the trail of disappearances led to a pig farm outside Vancouver. DNA tests confirmed remains of many women, including Sarah. The count is over fifty now. How many would still be alive if police had acted as swiftly as if they were sports stars or businessmen?

Maggie de Vries tells a story of broken dreams, love, perseverance, pain and violence. Maggie kept in touch with Sarah, helped care for her daughter and never gave up on Sarah, in life or in death. After the appalling truth was revealed and the deaths were discovered, Maggie needed to tell this story. Sarah deserves to be known and remembered as a bright, loving and talented woman, loved and mourned by many.

Last summer I visited the memorial to the Montreal women, murdered in 1989, in front of Vancouver’s bus/ train depot. While I walked the circle of benches and read the donor names on the bricks, some people asked what I was doing. I stopped to explain. They asked: Why not a memorial to the women of the pig farm? There is a brick in the circle that reads: “ In memory of the women of Vancouver’s Eastside. We dream of another world when the war on women is over ”.

Maggie describes the ceremony of the placing of a bench in a park nearby in memory of Sarah and others. One day something of Sarah’s will be buried in her family’s grave in Ontario. But this story must not be buried, we need to create a social and public memorial to these women and all the women who today end up without hope or recognition in the dark canyons of our unspoken cruelty and prejudice. We must confront our own dark chasms and work for justice and safety for our marginalized sisters. It is our responsibility to end the war on women at home and everywhere.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“In Mexico, to defend human rights is to risk your life.” Digna Ochoa

This is not a pretty book nor is it a quick read. It is a detailed account of the life and commitment of a young Mexican human rights lawyer who was murdered in her office in Mexico City in 2001 and of the ensuing investigation and cover up of her assassination. She defended human rights knowing the risk, she was kidnapped, beaten and raped, and finally at the age of 36, she died for her beliefs and her work.

Ochoa was internationally known for her courage and dedication to the poorest and most oppressed people of her native country. She helped gain recognition and justice for the Guerrero villagers who were being beaten and killed by death squads and military groups. She worked for justice for victims of murder and torture in Chiapas and Vera Cruz. She understood the need for international publicity to focus on Mexican human rights violations because the Mexican government wants the image of a country where free trade and tourism are wonderful to go out to the world. Her success in publicizing these injustices was her death sentence.

The author, a Toronto journalist, provides a valuable context for this lawyer’s fate. From the massacres during the Olympics in 1968 to the many murders and crimes of the military and government–backed paramilitary squads in Chiapas, the Mexican government has been ruthless in its own crimes and complicit in many others whenever the struggle for justice has become open and successful. Recent events in Oaxaca and the continuing fight for rights by the poor all over Mexico are part of this struggle.

Diebel provides meticulous and careful research into Ochoa’s murder; the evidence of political assassination is clear, but in 2003 her death was classified as suicide and the case was officially closed. I hope that this book will be translated into Spanish and distributed widely in Mexico – in which case, Diebel better stay away. She has made an important contribution to the public record in Mexico, a story of corruption, cruelty, dishonesty and impunity which is as evil as any story from anywhere in this terrible world. A story that the Mexican government would prefer not be known internationally. Other North Americans who think Mexico is all about sun, fun, sand and mariachi bands should read this report about their partner in NAFTA.

The details of the investigation are woven together with the story of a lively and bright woman who loved life, her parents, her family, her lover and her friends. Ochoa was warm and outgoing; she enjoyed social gatherings and parties. She was loved by all those who knew her and worked with her; their memories of her courage, wisdom and kindness deserve to be honoured with justice and truth being upheld; Ochoa’s murderers must be identified as an important step in changing Mexico today. Her ultimate sacrifice will only be justified if justice is done and seen to be done and a new generation of activists are motivated and inspired by Ochoa’s example.

Diebel concludes with the warning that the situation in Mexico is “getting worse and the proud, brave people of Mexico deserve better.”  tw

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

Canada shares with the Philippines the dubious distinction of not having foreign military bases. But Canadians know that, from Nanoose Bay on the Pacific to Cold Lake Alberta, to Goose Bay in Labrador, the USA and other NATO countries military make regular, frequent and lengthy use of so-called Canadian bases.

In the Philippines, foreign bases were closed by the post-Marcos constitution and the presence of foreign troops was to be limited to so-called training exercises. Things are not quite so simple and Docena has prepared this report because, “since January 2002, US Special operations Forces (SOFs) have been stationed in the southern Philippines and have not left...” Not only does this report verify the presence and nefarious activities of SOFs but it also makes it clear that civil society must respond on many levels to a local and global danger.

A petition aimed at stopping this deployment “was junked” by the Supreme Court because it did not accept the statement that foreign forces were engaged in an offensive war – it said this had to be proven.

Docena and his colleagues at Focus on Global South have laid out very clearly the positive proof that, indeed, SOFs were and are in a direct military role in the Philippines and they give well–documented evidence to prove their case. Not an easy task – given military secrecy and disregard of democratic right of information of citizens and the well–founded fears of witnesses that if they spoke out they would suffer reprisals.

These forces are a particular and little known part of the USA´s policy. By their own definition they conduct, “special operations”, those “conducted in hostile, denied or politically sensitive environments” and that require “covert, clandestine or discreet capabilities.” In other words wherever local law or opinion may be unfriendly, SOF are used to maintain the USA imperial aims and to reinforce and to subjugate national governments. If local laws or opinions oppose these forces, as Docena shows, secrecy, deceit and intimidation can be used to overcome such objection to, “unconventional warfare operations in Southern Philippines...to help the Philippine government separate the population form and to destroy the terrorists”. – Col. David Maxwell Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines commander.
Note that in this photo from the report, USA troops & Philippine troops pose in front of a mosque.

Although this is a short document, it is concise and thorough in its mandate to prove the engagement of USA military in the Philippines, its use of chilling quotes from USA military documents show clearly the purpose of its occupation of the Philippines and any other place they might want to go. The report is also of much wider interest to peace activists and investigators everywhere; not just as a model of research and publishing but also in its disturbing content. The report is a warning the world that, as he quotes, “countries that harbour terrorists, either by consent or because they are unable to enforce their laws within their territory, effectively forfeit their rights of sovereignty.” To the USA – it goes without saying; “from conducting war against nations – to conducting war in countries we are not at war with.” Quote from Quadrennial Defense Review, 2006. (QDR).

Docena says, ´As the US embarks on the most radical realignment of its worldwide presence since World War II, the aim, according to the QDR is “to develop a basing system that provides greater flexibility for US forces in critical areas of the world...” Re-establishing it presence in the Philippines is key to deepening US military presence in the region and worldwide...´

This the greater international significance of this violation of Philippine law and sovereignty – which could happen to Canada, Venezuela or Iran at anytime – is that, the world´s only super power gives itself the right to interfere and intervene anywhere on earth it sees fit. As the US embarks on more and more economic, political and military incursions everywhere, this report alerts us to one possibility and also concludes with possible action to end and prevent this bullying power from continuing.

The answer to the title question is a resounding YES.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“The Philippines gives us a base at the door of all the East.” U.S. Senator Alfred J. Beveridge, 1900

Herbert Docena´s excellent research reports are on the cutting edge of modern documentation. Much more useful than whole books with long publication time lines and limited availability, these reports are available in print and many electronic forms soon after completion and are readily accessible. This is the latest of his reports from the respected group Focus on the Global South which is an integral part of the social movements in the Philippines and globally. These reports are models of presentation and content; they have excellent graphics, photos, charts, maps etc and clear precise prose, all well laid out and easy to read with extensive endnotes for both veracity and more detailed study.

(see www.bbcf.ca for a review of his previous report: UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE: Are US Special Forces engaged in an ´offensive war´ in the Philippines?)

While much activist attention is rightly being focussed on Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and western Asia, Docena has documented the build up of the USA´s military in the Philippines as part of its long term policy on its real perceived enemy — China.

Beveridge´s statement held for most of the 20th Century as the USA used the Philippines as a colony, then as a base after independence in 1946. Its strategic location and history made the country a vital part of USA´s military campaigns in Korea, Vietnam and interventions elsewhere, including within the Philippines.

Other countries, while friendly to the USA, are too close to China to consider allowing a USA military presence; others are not well located. On Page 92 a map of the region displays all the possibilities and inherent problems of their political and geographic positions.

In 1991 the forces of change swept the Philippines and as result, political decisions were made that re—evaluated the country´s relationship with the USA and there was a closing of bases and a much diminished USA military presence in the country. Although there are not supposed to be any permanent USA bases now, recent more friendly government signed a Visiting Forces Agreement in 1998, and “a steady stream of US troops has been arriving in the country for regular and recurring military exercises…”

Since 9/11/01 the USA presence has steadily increased beyond any idea of ´visiting´ as Docena documents in his previous report (see above). This has happened under the constant mantra we have all heard, a mantra that has invoked major changes in human and civil rights legislation of other countries, including Canada and the UK: the global war against terrorism.

Docena concludes with a wider and longer view of the future of the Philippines´ policies and position in a new global order. As he points out, “the Philippines´ continuing support for US military objectives is also by no means predestined.” It may well be that future politicians may see China as a better ally or choose not to align their governments with either power.

“What is sure, at this stage, is that the Philippines has become even more crucial to US military strategy than ever. Whether US military strategy is critical to the Philippines, however, is the more fundamental question… As this report has tried to show, the Philippines plays a key role in underpinning the US´ larger goal of containing China and assuring its own pre—eminence. The question therefore, is whether the Philippines should continue to support the US strategy of permanent dominance and whether a world ordered by one permanent superpower is the kind of world that best serves the interests of the Philippines. Because of the critical role it could potentially play in contributing to sustaining or thwarting US military ambitions, the answer will have global implications.”

There are about 150 countries in the world where we should be asking those questions of our own involvement with the USA. Docena has done a brilliant job of framing issues that are extremely important for many peace activists everywhere, while setting the problems so clearly in his own country.

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Theresa Wolfwood is the Director of the Barnard-Boecker Centre Foundation in Victoria, BC, CANADA. See: www.bbcf.ca

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well–roasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall: Donald, Go Home!” From the authors’ introduction.

A friend just entrusted me with a treasured photocopy of this little gem which I had never heard of; the analysis is witty, serious, and important Fortunately it is still available second hand; it is completely relevant today, 30 years later.

When I was in Porto Alegre for the World Social Forum I bought a T–shirt with a graphic of Donald duck being whacked – Donald Duck is still a powerful symbol of imperialism decades after this book was banned and burned in Chile. South America loves its own cartoon character, Mafalda, a feisty girl who symbolizes the new politics of many countries in that continent with the power and the will to thump the USA.

Donald Duck, a powerful symbol of imperialism in Latin America, is the famous product of Walt Disney, a poor man from an abusive family who became a friend of right–wing politicians, a skilled war propagandist, an exploitive employer and one of the richest men in the USA. As comics declined in popularity in the USA, he started exporting his duck version of the American dream to the world, most specifically to Latin America. Donald Duck was a clean–living, parentless, sex–less creature who symbolized American innocence while glorifying capitalism.

It may sound like frothy and far fetched but when the USA blockaded Chile before it helped overthrow the Popular Unity government by backing Pinochet’s brutal coupe, arms for the Chilean military and USA produced media still poured into Chile. In the preface to the English edition, the authors quote Pinochet as saying the point was “to conquer the minds of Chileans”. So this expose of the power and purpose of comic characters was burned along with hundreds of others by the military dictatorship. The Disney comic was retained with its particular USA–created world view. Reading Donald Duck was written in 1971, in the fervour of hope created by Allende’s government to, the authors say, critique the popular culture exported so profitably by the USA. They saw it, not as an academic exercise, but a practical need. It was part of cultural context that included printing millions of books, including in indigenous languages, murals, music, writing and theatre that were all part of cultural liberation – and smashed by the fascistic new junta. But memory was not obliterated, words, music and art survived underground and abroad. And this book was published in the “uncleland of Disney” in 1975.

The authors expose the life of Walt Disney, a rapacious and exploitive devourer of the property and creativity of many workers and artists and find similarities to him in the comic strip characters, mainly Scrooge McDuck in Duckburg, the placeless place of modern mass media. Although it mostly emanates from the USA with firmly inculcated USA values of individualism and capitalism, Duckburg is a male world with no specific location, time or culture except that of imperialism. What has changed in the 30 years since this book appeared is the political landscape of Latin America.

It may be best seen as symbolized by feisty Mafalda, a working class girl from Argentina with parents who she pesters with her questions about peace and global issues. Created in 1962 by Argentine cartoonist, Quino, Mafalda has always combined humour, satire and social comment. The comic strip ceased publication in June, 1973 but Quino produced her to promote human rights in a poster for the UNICEF illustrating the Convention on the Rights of Children in 1976.

I bought my T–shirt in 2002; Mafalda still lives in Latin America and she probably played an important role in banishing Donald Duck as change swept Latin America. If any place in the world today symbolizes the hope of liberation from USA based imperialism – cultural, military and economic – it is Latin America.

Dorfman and Mattelart did not predict this change; they offered tools to create change, as did Quino. In fact the authors caution in their conclusion that: “No one is able to ‘propose’ his individual solutions to these problems. There can be no elite of experts in the reformation of culture.” But when we can all work together and present and implement our ideas and dreams, social change will come – witness Latin America in 2006!

Long live the spirit of Mafalda! TW

Our border with the USA is both the symbol and the geographic reality of our nearness and our similarities to - and our differences from - the culture of that large and looming giant that 80% of us live within shopping distance of. In spite of recent efforts to integrate Canada, militarily and economically into the USA, we have a unique society and many values worth preserving. That is the crux of Drache’s optimistic presentation.

Integration seemed to be an assured downhill slide after NAFTA was signed seven years ago, but Drache says that September 11, 2001 changed the USA’s perception of its neighbour and supposed friend. We are now just another foreign country to reinforce the border against. USA’s homeland security has forced us to realize we are part of a fortress North America, but we have also been shocked into a new nationalism.

This in itself has made us acknowledge our differences – in health and social programs, in our ability to juggle two languages and our rare but notable independence in foreign policy. If we are just another bunch of foreigners to mistrust, the so-called special relationship is blown away by the security phobia of the USA; all the more opportunity for us to get on with Canada and question privacy issues, the rights of refugees and other concerns that the USA has lined up at the border. There can be no better time than now to demand independent action from our government to develop our self-interest.

Drache goes into detail about the effects of globalization, the imbalance of trade and power, the isolation of USA foreign policy and the Iraq war, not only as a turning point for USA’s world image, but for new possibilities for Canada.

This is a useful addition to our endless national identity debate. Next time you wonder about the validity of Canada or someone else denies it, you’ll find many cogent arguments in “Borders Matter”.

“These facts lead to only one conclusion: public health, with its integral conception of ultimate social equality is the key to health in general.”

This book might also have been subtitled: Who really runs Canada? Dressel, a respected historian, was funded to investigate the closing of an excellent hospital, the Queen Elizabeth with a long tradition of successful patient care when it was forced to close along with many other hospitals in Montréal and the rest of Canada in the mid-1990s.

Dressel starts with the local — the history of this remarkable hospital, its founders, policies and personnel, set in the context of the past and present status of health care and health concerns, including payment, in Montreal and the rest of Canada.

Anyone interested and involved in the politics of universality and social services and who wants to maintain Canada´s ability to provide equitable care to all Canadians should read and respond to this book. Dressel leads us through the personal memories of those who lost their community hospital, including staff, who discuss the sometimes tragic results of that closure — right on up to the slashing of provincial programs across our land to the international forces behind these drastic changes.

The second part of the book reads like a detective novel, but it is oh—so—true. In her years of extensive research, not only into the closing of this one hospital, but into all health cuts, Dressel reveals the dangers to our medical care system — the envy of many — from sources of which the Canadian public has no awareness. Secrets are pried out of government documents, while it was still possible, and we learn that our healthcare, along with education and social services are threatened by foreign influences unknown even to most politicians and concealed or ignored by those who do.

Yet we have (or had) a health care system which is the envy of the world. Gilles Brucker is the general director of France´s health care system and told Dressel he is a great admirer of Canadian Healthcare. And like many foreign health officials he has made a pilgrimage to study our system.

“Brucker feels the forces of globalization that have enormously aided the power of the big pharmaceutical companies and have also helped spread new diseases are a formidable challenge….”

The opponents of our universal system are formidable. The modern world has few borders, except for poor and endangered people. But viruses, tainted food, untested drugs, toxins of many kinds can travel freely. Corporations have international powers under NAFTA, WTO, TILMA and the latest SPP agreement. ´Big Pharma´ has enormous power to influence and control our health system (and profit from it) which does little to regulate it until tragedies happen. Respected researchers have lost funding and positions for reporting the truth about drugs; universities flourish on grants from drug companies and do not want their donors criticized.

Government borrow money and as a result, they are all rated by a USA company, Standard and Poor´s. Then the IMF which is the hit man for big banks comes in and tells governments their rating will suffer, they won´t get credit, their loans will be called if they don´t follow orders. This is the well—known ´Structural Adjustment´ that so many majority world citizens have suffered from. Worthy of note are the governments who have defied this order — Malaysia, Malawi, Venezuela, to name a few.  All poorer than Canada. We are in the G8 — remember?

What we in Canada have not realized is that we too are treated like a ´Third World´ country. In the last 20 years we have been pummelled with stories about ´balanced budgets´ and debt interest owed by ´big government´ without realising the source of these stories is corporations or groups like the Fraser Institute which is a corporate charity.

Yet the blame has to be placed firmly on those we elect to govern us. Politicians of all stripes have slashed health, education, social services without telling us why or who has ordered them.
As citizens we are never consulted and in the 2008 federal election, no politician (with one exception) is talking about our lack of sovereignty in controlling our political and social infrastructure and that we have signed over many powers to corporate or foreign interests in these trade agreements.

Statistics are manipulated and often quoted totally out of context to make the point. The list of services affected is long — not just health but as the IMF points out, ´eliminating regional programming, & other television services by the CBC; eliminating transfers to VIA rail and the CHMC, the National Film Board and the Canadian Film Development Corporation.´ (Most of these are now gone). Dressel notes cuts to Indian and Inuit Affairs, veterans and government scientific research. She quotes from the IMF, “that there would seem to be scope for ´rationalizing these services with a view to increasing the private sectors responsibility for such activity.” She adds, “In short they suggest privatizing any government service possible.”

Dressel writes about alternatives to the slide into privatization and health for profit — which is really what it is all about. She interviews doctors who emphasize patient— based treatment, not disease— based treatment, universality, preventative health care and community involvement. We know that many facilities are not maintained, waiting lists are publicized, and some procedures are already privatized. Poor service is designed to make us think public care is not serving us and so we need or have the right to choose private care.

But most important: is making our politicians accountable and knowledgeable and that every citizen insists on the universality of services in one of the richest countries of the world. If poor Cuba can do it — why can´t we? If we can afford to kill people across the world, why can´t we afford to keep Canadians alive and healthy? This is a moral issue and a human rights issue. We need to recognize that awareness and political will, not economics, can and should dictate our fate

“The price of transforming Iran peacefully, I have long known but these days feel more acutely, is sacrifice of the highest order.”

As the USA rattles its bombs and boycotts at Iran, I found 2 books that helped me understand that country and its recent past; it all started in 1953 when the CIA overthrew the democratic and nationalist leader of Iran, Mossadegh, and installed the Shah to do the USA’s bidding. Ebadi’s memoir is the story of a society and its resistance, not just of one woman.

Shirin Ebadi started life as a privileged daughter of liberal middle class parents. In the time of the Shah she went to university and became a judge. Her life was normal; she married and enjoyed her work. Like many young educated people she saw the cruelty and corruption of the Shah’s regime and supported a revolution to topple him. When the new regime became one of religious fanaticism, she and other women in positions of authority were dismissed and discarded. The law changed along with society and daily life.

Ebadi writes about the pain and hardship, particularly to women who were classified as being half the value of men. Uprisings against the new regime were brutally crushed; her brother—in—law died in jail. Any criticism by intellectuals was punished — people disappeared, often in ‘accidents’. When she started to work as a lawyer defending women and those accused of dissent, the government cracked down on her — her name appeared on a death squad list; she spent weeks in jail. Yet through all this time she was raising a family, cooking and cleaning at night — the model of a devout Iranian housewife. This duality of her life, trying to work for justice while protecting her family from her troubled professional life, damaged her health, but her will never weakened.

The regime attempted to unite people during the war with Iraq, she and all Iranians knew that Iraq and Hussein were armed and backed by the USA. Many people still saw and experienced the violence of the regime, but sickened by war, they could not support a bloody civil war as well. She saw many of the country’s brightest people flee into exile; many begged her and her family to leave also. Her religious faith and commitment to her society kept and keep her in Iran. As she writes, she would not be any use in exile.

A friend from Iran here in Victoria told me that she made a very dangerous and important decision to stay and fight the system from within. She believes fervently in her fellow Iranians and the triumph of justice through law — no matter how difficult the struggle. It is that belief and her constant work to defend and help those who are the victims of injustice that gradually gained her international attention which she saw as only helpful for her work and clients, not for herself. She represented the family of the Canadian—Iranian photographer, Zahra Kazemi, who was beaten to death in jail in Tehran in 2003, trying to bring the murderers to justice.

That was the year she won the Nobel Prize for Peace — one of that Committee’s good choices. Flying back from a conference in Paris where she received the news of her award she reflected on her life, “Such lofty recognition could only be intended for what someone’s life symbolized, the path or approach they had followed in pursuit of some higher purpose.”

When she heard the award statement, her religion was mentioned alongside her human rights work. “I knew at that moment what was being recognized: the belief in a positive interpretation of Islam, and the power of that belief to aid Iranians who aspire to peacefully transform their country.”
Her memoir is her testament to another truth, “that the written word is the most powerful tool we have to protect ourselves, both from tyrants of the day and from our own traditions.”

This UK environmental writer draws on Chomsky, Fromm and other writers to explain how we can free ourselves from the destructive and unthinking acceptance of corporate capitalism and all its trappings.