The Beast Reawakens: The Chilling Story of the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement
Martin A. Lee
Routledge
1997
560 pages
There are a number of books published between approximately 1990 and 2010 that attempt to survey the post-war radical racist scene in various geographic contexts. Perhaps the best recent book that attempts such a history is Leonard Zeskind’s 2008 survey Blood and Politics, which looks at the political efforts of American white supremacists during the second half of the 20th century. Martin A Lee, a co-founder of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, produced his own contribution to that subject, a lengthy work of investigative journalism on the global far-right scene of the post-WWII period, ranging from a post-Third Reich German Nazi underground to the contemporary American anti-semitic “second revolution” fantasizing militia movement.
Lee’s book is probably the only text about the racist far-right, that I know of, that follows the threads of that scene all the way back to the Third Reich. He describes the post-war influence of Nazi Party members who were close to Hitler including Otto Skorzeny, an SS Colonel who was in the Furher’s bodyguard regiment who, up to the time of his death, was involved in numerous racist organizations. The narrative of Lee’s history comes almost full circle when he notes that Oklahoma City bomber and American right-wing fanatic Timothy McVeigh had a contact in the German ultra-right wing scene in a section that sounds almost like conspiracy theory if only because this contact is not mentioned in other sources about the bomber.
We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism
Notes from Nowhere Collective (editors)
Verso
2003
521 pages
Hello out there on the internet! I borrowed We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism from the Toronto Public Library.
There are at least two texts that are fundamentally important to the study of the worldwide movement to resist globalization. The first of these texts is Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which examines the global effects of consumer branding and its associated activities, with regards to consumption, production, and opposition. The other text is Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, a theoretical text proposing that a shift in political and social organization has occurred from a period of modernist capitalism to a postmodernist ‘empire’ oriented around networks and perpetual crisis. We Are Everywhere can be added to this list as a companion text that details numerous accounts of resistance to the damaging actions of multi-national corporations and international administrative organizations.
We Are Everywhere is a book assembled by the Notes from Nowhere Collective, a group of western (I gather from reading each member’s brief bio at the back of the book that most of them are from the U.K. although at least one member appears to be American) writers, educators and activists. They are all involved with other activist media outlets and events such as Indymedia and Reclaim the Streets parties. Through their engagement with an international activist media, and with anti-globalization efforts in their home countries, the collective appeared to develop a holistic view of the worldwide activist scene, which they brought to this text.
We Are Everywhere is a comprehensive series of dispatches, written by a large number of different writers and in a number of different forms, from the global anti-capitalist movement. The book includes articles and anecdotes about various actions, writings whereby individuals representing an activist group survey that groups actions, photo-essays and interviews with activists. The book also maintains a timeline, of events of significance to the anti-globalization movement, that runs along a bottom register of most of its pages.
In addition to its wide array of textual forms, We Are Everywhere strives to be truly global in its scope. The Notes from Nowhere collective begin the book with accounts of the 1994 events in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas surrounding the foundation of the ELZN movement and their demands for autonomy for the indigenous populations of that region. Thus the book charts a history of international activism that begins in January 1994 in Mexico and attempts to include pieces on actions and protests from as many different locales as possible, from Mexico to Italy, Kenya, Brazil, Paupa New Guinea and so forth, everywhere, ending with a 2003(?) interview with South African activist and intellectual, Ashwin Desai. In Empire, Hardt and Negri discuss how multi-national corporations have realized some of the ideas put forth by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, where the localized nodes of networked corporations can adjust their operations to suit the contours of the location. Many pieces featured in We Are Everywhere describe the unique tactics of protest and sabotage developed by local activist organizations in counter-force to shape-shifting corporations. Furthermore, many pieces describe anti-globalization protests as carnivalesque (c.f. Reclaim the Streets), and out of the hundreds of black-and-white photos featured in the book many of them depict protesters in costume and blur the lines between revelry and serious political activity.
The Notes from Nowhere collective have compiled a volume that fits into a book-type that attempt to survey a global activist scene. Other such books include The New Revolutionaries, edited by Tariq Ali, which represents the global far-left scene of the 1960s, and Goran Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, which surveys Marxist activity worldwide in the contemporary period. Ali’s book is primarily written by well-known movement intellectuals and spokespeople, and From Marxism is the work of a single author. The editors of We Are Everywhere give voice to the participants of the movement and its associated sub-movements, and provides a view into global efforts to confront global capital between the years 1994 and 2003.
Related: see the Signalfire blog for daily accounts of anti-globalization activity, workers strikes, student protests and general unrest from around the world.
Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories
Ralph “Sonny” Barger with Keith and Kent Zimmerman
Harper
2002
277 pages
Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free is a collection of fourty-one motorcycle related stories collected by Sonny Barger, the former national president of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, and Keith and Kent Zimmerman, the twin brothers who collaborated with Barger on his 2000 autobiography, Hells Angel 
and also worked with John Lydon (also known as Johnny Rotten, the frontman for seminal punk group, The Sex Pistols) on his autobiography, Rotten
. Barger and the Zimmerman brothers present the reader with biker tales from a number of different aspects of motorcycle culture (many of them about 1% bikers) and demonstrate just how varied the subculture of motorcycle enthusiasts can be.
The book begins with the story 'The Wandering Gypsy and The Silver Satin Kid', with photos of the ‘kid’ showing a young Sonny Barger. The story tells how Barger became the leader of the Oakland Hells Angels and thus transitioned motorcycling from a practice to a subculture in the popular imagination. From this story of outlaw genesis, Barger and associates tell a number of stories that shine a light onto a number of lesser-known aspects of the motorcycling subculture, both outlaw and lawful.
Many of the stories contained in Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free are stories of outlaws, some are tales of interaction with celebrities such as actor Steve McQueen, singer David Crosby, and outlaw country musician, Kinky Friedman. Many of them are stories of kindness, done by or for outlaw motorcyclists, in an effort to oppose the stereotype of the maniac biker, however others are stories that detail the outrageous biker behavior we all expect from such a book. ‘Blake’s World Record Whore-House Jump’ for example, describes a biker jumping a motorcycle into a brothel bedroom that was already in use by a fellow brother. ‘On the Lam’ is a story of running from law enforcement personnel. The most interesting stories, however, are those that highlight some aspect of biker culture that is seldom made visible by other media coverage. One of the first stories describes a long running black biker club called the East Bay Dragons, a club that the Zimmermans have recently devoted a full book to, distorting the concept of the 1%ers as a purely white (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) phenomena. Other stories discuss the experiences of women bikers, and another story, 'The Ballad of Rocky's Green Gables,' discusses the conversion of an old biker bar into a Christian ministry and church....for bikers. These stories illustrate how people of all kinds gravitate towards the technology of the motorcycle and make it mean more than a mode of transportation.
Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free is also interesting because it points towards something that simply must exist although its almost completely absent in literature. That is, it points towards a folklore of counterculture. In one sentence in A Secret History of the IRA, Ed Moloney makes a passing reference to IRA folklore, but presents no examples of it. Barger et. al. have created a volume of biker stories that has many similarities to folklore. The authors even using the folklorist term of ‘capturing’ stories, to refer to their transcription of the tails included. The stories of Ridin' High, Livin' Free are all told in what is presumably a outlaw vernacular of rough speech, and while many of the stories are probably based on a kernel of truth (with accompanying photographs of the people who populate them) they also often have a fantastic edge to their tellings that suggests the embellishments that build with repeated oral transmissions.
The book also presents a fuller range of biker activities than other biker books and not the simply criminal that are represented by true crime authors and former undercover infiltrators, not is it bogged down by the rhetoric of a victim of social misconception. Finally, Ridin' High, Livin' Free conveys the appeal of the activity of riding to the reader, an aspect of the subculture that should often be foregrounded but is actually often absent from too many biker books that instead focus on the wild lives of the people who join 1% clubs.
Cedar Lewisohn, a curator at Tate Modern gallery in London, U.K. has written an insightful study of the international phenomena known as graffiti and street art. Street Art is, by my estimation, far more substantive than such publications as the already profiled Stencil Graffiti or Graffiti NYC. Lewisohn’s book attempts to theorize the differences between graffiti and the new, emerging forms it inspires, which he refers to as ‘street art’ proper. Furthermore, Lewisohn’s text comprises an attempt, which has already been seen in Tristan Manco’s Stencil Graffiti, to formulate a canon of street artists.
This book was released to coincide with a Lewisohn-curated Street Art exhibition held at the Tate Modern from 23 May – 25 August 2008. I am often skeptical of the relevance of graffiti or street art gallery exhibitions because I believe the loss of the ‘street’ setting empties such works of much of their essence. Lewisohn’s show was accompanied by a walking tour lead by a number of practicing street artists, thus returning the street to the academic discourse on the cultural form. In Street Art, the author makes calls for academic and high-art institutions to recognize street art and in particular he requests that museums begin including such works in their collections. While Lewisohn’s arguments are more nuanced and articulate than the simplistic griping about lack of recognition done by Hugo Martinez in Graffiti NYC, the call for graffiti to appear museums still sounds problematic to me. The transposition from street to gallery for a work of art creates for it a radical change of status, because graffiti/street art is not simply imagery and its street setting is of critical importance to its value.
Graffiti and Street art (its questionable whether or not people who are not hip to the scene differentiate between the two the way Lewisohn does) normally exist in a tension between the street artists and the city officials who believe that nothing can improve upon the appearance of an unadorned concrete wall. Spectators play in the balance, choosing their level of engagement with the art as they move through the city, and making evaluations as they proceed. Combining a gallery exhibition of street art with a walking tour is perhaps a strategy for attempting to reconcile the transposition of street art into the gallery, with the original experience of viewing such art in the street.
As has already been stated, Lewisohn’s book operates in a manner different from many other street art texts, and this is first evidenced in the images he uses. While Stencil Graffiti and Graffiti NYC often displayed closely cropped images (with some exceptions) of street art, Street Art often displays a work of graffiti surrounded by a number of other markings, tags, stickers, etc. The images in the book display the hypergraphic reality that works of street art exist in. They are seldom discreet graphic objects and are almost always on a surface with a myriad of other ‘works’ of similar art.
Another aspect to Lewisohn’s text that makes it an interesting book in the graffiti art literature is its construction of a history for the craft. Lewisohn operates along two lines of history, the first is with regards to the art, which he grounds in NYC graffiti of the 1970s and 1980s as well as practices by the “high-art” artists who used the street as a showplace, including Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Fekner, and some others. Lewisohn reaches as far back as Brassai, a photographer of mid-20th-century streetlife and his photos of children’s scratchings on the sides of Parisian buildings. Lewisohn’s history of the art draws on both folk and fine art traditions, radical politics, and desires for illegal thrills, which lead into his descriptions of the most reputable contemporary practitioners of street art. Street Art, for Lewisohn, is the culmination of the convergence of all of these traditions. The canon of contemporary street artists includes Blek Le Rat, Banksy, Judith Supine, Lady Pink, Shepard Fairey, and Miss Van. The author's prehistory of street is varied and comprehensive and it is fitting that Lewisohn's list of currently relevant artists is also varied in terms of location, style, motivations, and materials.
The other history Lewisohn presents is that of the documentation and theory about graffiti and street art. Lewisohn includes discussions with Henry Chalfant (author of early books about graffiti and director of the 1984 graffiti documentary film, Style Wars
). He also includes photographs and discussions with Martha Cooper who produced the 1988 book Subway Art
a seminal photobook of the era of NYC subway graffiti. Numerous references are made throughout the book to seminal writings on the art form, including Norman Mailer’s text The Faith of Graffiti
, and French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of NYC tagging in Symbolic Exchange and Death
. Interspersed with Lewisohn’s profiles of the most reputable members of the international street artist scene are some notes considering specific cultural influences such as punk culture or the formative art-school environment. Lewisohn’s text and innovative 2008 exhibition has placed himself as a recent figure in the field of graffiti research, and his book is as much about the history of graffiti history as it is about the emerging street art scene. It should also go without saying but this Tate publication is filled with full colour images of examples of the art Lewisohn finds to be such a vital form of modern expression.
The New Revolutionaries: A Handbook of the International Left
Tariq Ali (editor)
McClelland and Stewart Ltd.
1969
319 pages
Tariq Ali is a notable historian and an editor of the New Left Review, one of the journals that established a new direction for leftist politics in the 1960s. Ali has recently increased his status as a voice against empire through the publication of a number of books criticizing American and European foreign policy towards the Middle East. The New Revolutionaries, one of Ali’s first books, is a survey of worldwide radical left thought dating from the mid to late 1960s.
This book is edited by Ali however it also contains two writings by the well known activist, written while he was a student at Oxford University. The first of his pieces, titled 'The Extra-Parliamentary' Option, seeks alternative forms of social organization and governance to the parliamentary model. His second piece, the final essay of the book, ‘The Age of Permanent Revolution’, takes a brief survey of the radical-left activity in the world during the 1960s and also takes a survey of the material conditions that inspire such activity. Aside from Ali’s own pieces, there are eighteen other texts contained in this collection. These other texts are of various forms, for example a transcript of the court martial testimony by French rebel of the Bolivian Civil War (and professor of philosophy) Regis Debray is featured. Also featured is a letter by Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, written from prison, and republished from Ramparts magazine. Also included are brief pieces by Stokley Charmichael and Fidel Castro. Additionally a number of other essays are included by authors who examine the situation of the radical left movement in a number of countries (Italy, Poland, China, Japan, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, and others).
Not much additional information is given regarding each written piece. The book contains an ‘about the authors’ section which gives a few details about each contributor and their commitment to the left, although it would be preferable if these brief biographical statements appeared as preambles to each essay. Futhermore Ali's introduction states that many of the pieces are republished from other journals and it would have improved the book to have listed each essay's original publication details. These simple changes and additions would have helped the reader (me) contextualize these writings and situate their writers. The book attempts to map out a global radical left and the inclusion of such information as the publication details may have underscored such a mapping by pointing to a global publication network of the left in addition to the global leftist will to action that these pieces describe. Despite such shortcomings, the book is, however, a handbook to a socio-political phenomena, and adequately notes the movement’s situation as of the late 1960s, during its peak.
