Books Reviewed by Author, M-Z

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“My tongue tastes pleasure,
The future of change.
My heart aches in the slowness of history.”

This excerpt from “I Speak Again” expresses the many life long passions of Elizabeth Mayne, a Victoria resident and a visual artist who turned to expressing herself in poetry ten years ago.

Her continuity of sensual passion and pleasure is for some, including the publisher, a major focus of this book, both in the poems and the drawings of fragments of men´s bodies as well as poignant renditions of women´s bodies. She loves beauty but does not ignore hard reality. Her physical response to love, lust and lost are graphically and elegantly expressed.

There is much more. She is a transplanted exile from South Africa and worked for years in anti–apartheid campaigns. Now she can go back to her homeland to visit and she turns her poetic sensibilities to the heritage of injustice and cruelty that still dominate South African life.

Speaking again in her mother tongue, she is overwhelmed by the power of Afrikaans to evoke both joy and fear. Joy for her ease, and fear for a poor old man she jostles and apologizes to for her act; he is bewildered by an apology in the language of oppression.

In “The Sign” she is gripped by black energy; she feels an ambiguous dark power...
“I long to have the instant ability/ to act together. with many/for the common good”.

Elizabeth Mayne writes with clear specific detail and multi-layered nuances of sensuous personal passion, but there is also a rich and lasting passion for humanity, justice and the earth in this collection.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

He may be a respectable academic at York University, but what impressed me most was that this book was born in fumes of tear gas at the FTAA meeting in Quebec in April, 2002. It was there that the author, with his partner and children, in the heat of resistance, saw a beginning of a new left that would build a new global movement. McNally says, “It is written in the conviction that another world of freedom, justice and human cooperation is possible.”

It is also good to read what some may consider yet another book on this subject by a Canadian with a Canadian perspective. Much that he wrote 5 years ago is still valid; worth knowing and reflecting on. He has a real ability to make connections, some of which may be uncomfortable to Canadians with a lily white attitude.

In the beginning of the book he shows that globalization is far more than trade agreements; it is a construct of power and domination. In Chapter 4 on The Colours of Money: Race, Gender and the Many Oppressions of Global Capital, he quotes Malcolm X: “You can‘t have capitalism without racism. And in today‘s global capitalism you can‘t have it without oppressed women either.”

This is a valuable survey of the 500 years of capitalism in Canada and the USA since the European invasion and occupation of this hemisphere. As I write there is an action in Ontario where 1st nations are trying to stop a development on their stolen land. Little has changed and judging by the non-native citizens quoted on the CBC we still have a long way to go to eradicate racism in Canada. McNally says: “What is unique to the world of modern capitalism is the idea that there are physically distinct races of humans with radically different characteristics and attributes.”

Because of this capitalism uses the rhetoric of freedom and equality to mask “extra-economic bases of social domination.” White workers are compensated for their lowly status by their whiteness – divide and conquer nearly always succeeds. I found that McNally can present and connect complex ideas in a simple and straightforward way – there is no way to miss the significance of his ideas.

When he writes about the global dispossession of people from their land, making them dependent on external economic power, women suffer more than men. Although they retain their lower status, they become wage earners in sweatshops, migrant domestic and sex trade workers and are exposed to more dangers and health hazards than if they stayed on the land – all the while supporting families with no other earning power. Related to this are the inhumane and restrictive immigration and refugee laws that Canada and other countries enact to control the economically and militarily dispossessed while all the while making sure that enough people are available to do our grubby work and jobs that nobody else wants – knowing that many migrants without documentation will be exploited and abused.

After his thorough, honest and clear review and analysis of our dirty history, McNally examines and illustrates the many changes in contemporary society that make him hopeful that another world is possible – indeed it is being created now. From the continuing endurance of the Zapatistas to new fair trade developments to the power of citizen groups in regularly blockading trade agreements and, most recently, to the related rise of new governments in Latin America. (Remember the FTAA? It was supposed to be signed, sealed and delivered last year; instead it ended up in dead letter department.)

Chapter 7: Freedom Song goes from these and many examples of the search for alternatives based on the necessity to de-commodify human life. This commodification of people is the linking common factor in social justice struggles around the globe. For that McNally gives 10 guiding principles for anti-Capitalist Politics – self-determination for oppressed peoples (return Diego Garcia to the Chagossian people, for starters) to social ecology to the building of democratic mass movements. We must guard against elitism in our movements, recognize the need to change ourselves as we change the world and create a politics of self-activity. This last chapter is too full and varied to summarize – but it is here that McNally surpasses many other books on globalization and social change. He takes social activism seriously, covers many aspects of needed work and encourages us to participate in the struggle wherever we are so that we create while we realize: Another World is Possible. TW

Review by Theresa Wolfwood  

“... we are a player of some significance on the global stage, due to our reputation – partly deserved and partly undeserved – as a fair arbiter and promoter of just causes, as a decent sort of country. By lining ourselves up so uncritically with Washington, even as the Bush administration has become a renegade in the world and highly unpopular on its own home turf, the Canadian government has played a role in enabling a regime that is considered by many around the world to be the major obstacle to peace and security.” from the introduction

McQuaig is a good investigative journalist with a knack for pinning the tail right on the donkey every time she writes a book. In her latest, she zooms right in on Canada´s new role in the world wrought by our governments who uncritically, even fawningly, endorse the line of USA imperialism.

It is not a new role for Canada, in spite of our illusions of being a peaceable, tolerant and caring society; but our present government has swollen our complicity to new levels and hidden depths. From our diminishing social structures to our war on Afghanistan and an all time high military budget, our national character is drastically changing.

The rapid change has been wrought by a minority government Prime Minister who plans to increase our military spending to more than 50% above 2005 levels to $21.5 billion annually by 2010 with barely a public murmur or a boo from other parties. It is obvious there is little effective political choice left for Canadian voters. We are standing by as Canada becomes “one of the gang´ but always as a lesser member, fit to hold the bully´s coat – soon probably we´ll be waving his flag: ironically as the USA wallows in debt, fights no-win wars, becomes reviled around the world, Canada, seemingly oblivious to current history, is getter cozier and more complicit with the global bully. McQuaig says that corporate-Canada, its elitist “comprador class,” the Department of National Defense (DND), and the Canadian media which has always glamourized USA are the drivers behind our integration into the USA. Few are willing to say publicly that we are scrambling to climb on the Titanic.

McQuaig believes that Harper´s cooperation with Washington´s “war on terrorism” ´lies at the very heart of (his) agenda.´ Maintaining that close relationship with the USA matters more to Harper, the front for big capital in Canada, than citizens´ rights and our livelihoods.  In late August, 2007, leaders of Canada, USA & Mexico meet in Quebec to promote the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). From what´s already known, SPP unmasked isn´t pretty. It´s a corporate–led coup d´etat against the sovereignty of three nations SPP in Quebec and to further consolidate USA´s global rule and corporate freedoms – a plan to allow USA based capital to control resources like water, minerals, energy and access through the continent and further diminish democratic and public control of our assets combined with a militaristic obsession about ´security´ which will further destroy our human rights and our sense of humanity.

In “Holding the Bully´s Coat,” McQuaig also shows how recent governments have forced globalization for corporate capital while whittling away at our tradition base of social equity and the universality and public ownership of health, education and utilities. Our laws about refugees and possible “terrorists” are copycats of USA laws while more and more decisions about our sovereignty and future are made outside parliament and behind a curtain of propaganda and deceit.

Canada has forgotten about international commitments to development and equality in order to enjoy basking in the reflected light of immoral and incompetent leaders, whose failings seem to be obvious to everyone except Canadian politicians. From Haiti to Afghanistan to our lack of environmental action we are mired in the toxic mud of the USA. In our apathy we may become truly one of the ´United States of America´, as someone once said sixty years ago, “The name is a program.” And calling the USA, just US, means we recognize that program as legitimate. We need McQuaig´s tough and punchy writing to wake up Canadians to the smell the gunpowder and profit – before it is too late. Read this book – get mad & get busy.

Review by Roger Annis of the Canadian Haiti Action Network

I recently read a comprehensive history of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and I was drawn to read a history of the Rwandan genocide by the experience of the current UN—sponsored occupation of Haiti. There are important lessons and parallels between the two experiences.

In 1994, the United Nations Security Council stood by while more than one million Rwandans were killed in a planned genocide by a regime that received important backing from the U.S., France, Belgium and Egypt. The regime acted in the name of a fictional "Hutu" nationality against a minority people called "Tutsi". Killings on a massive scale began in April of that year and only ended with the military and political defeat of the "Hutu Power" regime by the Rwanda Patriotic Front. The human misery continued because the new government inherited a shattered country, and some one million people were driven out of Rwanda into a barren region of Zaire by the genocide regime in order that it could preserve a population base.

I knew the rough outlines of the genocide. What the book reveals is that not only did the UN Security Council and its member countries stand by before and during the genocide, they gave active military and diplomatic support to the genocide regime. France and Egypt provided arms. France and the Security Council maintained their diplomatic recognition of the regime until its dying days. With Security Council backing, France intervened in late June with a 2,500-member military force in order to salvage the remnants of the regime and impose a "coalition" regime on the Rwandan people, that is, a government of the RPF and the architects of the genocide. (The RPF flatly refused).

Canadian General Romeo Dallaire was the head of the UN´s "peacekeeping" contingent in Rwanda. It arrived in the summer of 1993 and numbered 2,500 troops. It did not have a mandate nor the resources to intervene and stop the genocide when it began in earnest in April 1994. In fact, as the killings mounted, Belgium, the former colonial power, pulled out the remainder of its armed forces. (France had withdrawn in late 1993). Dallaire is treated as a folk hero in Canada and internationally for his apparent efforts to stop the genocide. I think the adulation is undeserved, for several reasons.

One, if UN forces were truly interested in stopping the genocide, they would have aided the patriotic forces in the RPF who were attempting to do just that. But Dallaire always couched his appeal for stronger UN intervention as a measure to "separate two warring sides." In other words, he sought to preserve elements of the genocide regime in the form of an imposed coalition government, the same goal that France attempted in June. The RPF never received support nor cooperation from UN forces.

Two, Dallaire travels and speaks widely on the Rwanda genocide. And what is his message? That the UN, the very agency that "betrayed" the Rwandan people, as the title of the book under review states, should be strengthened and reinforced. He is an enthusiastic proponent of the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine authored by the ideologues of his government (Dallaire is a member of the unelected Canadian Senate).

Dallaire has unique insight and information of the events that transpired in Rwanda. He knows first—hand of the cruel betrayal of the Rwandan people by the U.S. and France in particular, not to speak of the UN Security Council. Does he condemn this betrayal? Only in the vaguest of language. Meanwhile, he preaches forgiveness and renewal of confidence in the governments and international institutions that betrayed.

If Dallaire were sincerely interested in averting future Rwandas, he would denounce the "betrayals" of other peoples by the Security Council, including in Haiti. There, in early 2004, the Security Council sanctioned the violent overthrow of Haiti´s elected president and other governing institutions, and then recognized an appointed and illegal regime that perpetrated widespread killings and human rights violations against supporters of Haiti´s democracy.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the role of the UN in today´s world. "Peacekeeping?" "Responsibility to Protect?" This book is a reminder of how poisonous are these doctrines. Beware of their proponents.

This is a memoir about life of women in Morocco living under the social and physical constraints of the harem. There are many happy moments as women live with joy and companionship within this framework. Mernissi is a wonderful writer – her descriptions of her relatives and family life are colourful and affectionate.

Her carefree life ends with end of childhood; she learns of her powerlessness in this male dominated society. She is told by her female elders, “Childhood is when the difference does not matter. From now on, you won’t be able to escape it. You’ll be ruled by the difference. The world is going to turn ruthless.” But the door is open, just a crack for this modern educated girl who was told, “If you can’t get out, you are on the powerless side.”

Change came from within and without; Mernissi grew up to be an educated person with the freedom to teach at a university, to choose her life and to write books like this. She walked out the door with perception and the support of women who did not get her chance.

Many of her books are feminist and scholarly interpretations of Islam, very accessible to non-Islamic readers. The next book is a more recent one that I also enjoyed.

Mernissi bases this book on a modern interpretation and evaluation of the famous fables spun by a woman to ensure her survival; stories considered so subversive because of her success in not only surviving, but empowering her to change the mind of her absolute ruler.

Thus the author believes that, ”dialogue-nurturing is considered magic, because it fuels power with beauty.” A heady combination that has delighted listeners and readers in many cultures for years, so her comparison of the harem of spatial confinement, a place she returns to in much of her writing, with the harem imposed on western women is both metaphorical and literal.

In this personal and vivid account she weaves together with humour and inight the constraints that modern women in her culture and ours are bound by. She sees our harem as one not of space, but time and appearance. We in the west are trapped in a male-dominated society that demands we be thin to the point of child like, beautiful and forever youthful. If that seems extreme I recommend the August 12, 2005 issue of The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada) about the obsession with cosmetic plastic surgery in the USA – a story from Los Angeles about designer vaginas.

Throughout the book, Mernissi writes about western male artists and writers to conclude that, ”Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eye of the beholder turns the educated modern western woman into a harem slave.”

TW

This book is a devastating report on the deaths and disappearances of women, mainly of indigenous Mexican origin, who die and disappear from towns on the Mexican-USA border. These towns are full of designated tax-free zones where global factories, called maquiladoras, are a rich source of profit for the owners, mainly USA companies. The workers, most of whom are women from poor families, are over worked and under paid, have few legal or health benefits. The factories pour toxic waste into the community polluting land, water and air.

400 women have been murdered in Cuidad Juarez and Chihuahua City since 1993. Little official action has been taken to solve these killings. In an area where where neoliberal trade agreements and politics are intertwined with drug trafficking and corrupt police, there is little interest and often deliberate cover up of these crimes. . The women murdered are young, poor and of aboriginal background. They are taken from the street – en route to and from distant factories- and are usually raped and beaten before they are murdered.

The book explains the rural crisis of small farmers driven from their land, unable to compete with subsidized maize from enormous corporations from the USA. Often it is only the young women who can get work in the factories and they are expected to support their destitute families on their pittance of less that $5/day. For many men the main source of income is the production and transport of illegal drugs with the help of local police.

On page 86 the authors say, "The decade-long series of femicides occurs in the context of a neoliberal experiment that is out of control. Cuidad Juarez and Chihuahua City are the leading edge of 21st century frontier capitalism, part of the race to the bottom that is enveloping ever-larger parts of the world. Young women are little more than replaceable cogs in a profit-driven machine that values neither life nor dignity...
You need not look far in your own community to find the beginnings of the same race to the bottom - decreasing education budgets, increased unemployment, declining standards of living, less access to health care, and, most importantly, less democracy. The race to the bottom tears apart the cultural fabric, tears apart community, resulting in a situation where femicide takes its place among a number of pressing social problems. And given the historic position of women in male-dominated societies, femicide does not make it anywhere near the top of the list."

That excerpt sums it up and makes it easy to understand that the main group working for justice for the victims are mothers, sisters, aunts and cousins. This is the group we are called to support in solidarity. The book ends with lists of concrete action we can take and contacts for action groups. A film, Senorita Extravida, and more information are available from msn@MexicoSolidarity.org See also: www.amigosdemujeres.org www.casa-amiga.org, www.mexicosolidarity.org TW

“The third phase of global restructuring began with the recession around 1990. It is characterized by an unprecedented penetration of all regions of the globe and all areas of life by the logic and practice of capital accumulation.” p.35

“The rise of the global market has exacerbated the plight of women.” p. 225

Maria Mies has had a profound affect on research and activism in many countries in our globalized world. The distinguished author, teacher and activist with her colleague, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, has produced a clear, concise, often humorous, detailed account of a radical alternative to globalization. When this book was published, there appeared to be no alternative: TINA, as Margaret Thatcher insisted. Since that time, no doubt helped by Mies’ work, cracks have occurred in the face of globalization; it is not working everywhere, and as these authors explain capitalist growth is based on the unpaid labour of women and peasants and the exploitation of nature.

We have realized in the last few years the finite limits of nature. Women and peasants are in the lead in the ant-globalization movement which spread from the majority world to the minority world as comfortable citizens in Europe and north America saw their livelihoods and security eroded by the latest stages of the global market; the privatization of the commons.

Many of the examples of the subsistence alternative are inspiring and provocative in their challenge to contemporary popular notions of wealth. Particularity amusing and enlightening is the story of the title in German: A Cow for Hilary; the story of how peasant women pity the wife of the US president because she lacks the security of a large family, ducks and a cow. This is a new perspective: the subsistence perspective from women who feel more empowered than a wealthy famous US woman!

The authors believe and present convincing reasons why an alternative to globalization based on self-reliance, access to food security, community, respect for nature and others is te best way to resist the greedy disempowering forces of globalization and capital.

Their important contribution to our limited definition of “feminism” is a state of “ecofeminism” where women accept the concept of ´subsistence´ by respecting their own (mainly unpaid) labour, the strength of community and the power to seek and implement ideas and solutions created in that community. Mies says, "It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production – mainly performed through the non–wage labour of women and other non–wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies – constitutes the perennial basis upon which ´capitalist productive labour´ can be built up and exploited".

This book makes it clear that freedom from this oppression from above is the basis for a sustainable life and happy fulfilled life. Reading it is a great antidote to the gloom and despair mongering that mainstream thought uses to discourage and disempower us all.

Mies’ books, especially those on “Ecofeminism” and “Patriarchy and the Accumulation of Capital” are excellent reading also.

Review by TW

This is a wonderful collection of poetry that will never date from many lands and many centuries. I usually find anthologies disappointing, but I found this volume of 300 poems chosen by the Nobel Prize winner, Czeslaw Milosz, to be the best gathering of poetry in one volume that I have read. His choices are based on his criteria of, ‘…realist, that is loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible.’ He selects poems that are universal in their timeless themes of love, transience, death. He quotes the philosopher, Schopenhauer who believed that artists are committed to, ‘the predominance of knowing over willing…purely objective perception to the most insignificant objects…a lasting monument of…spiritual peace…’

But what is seemingly insignificant is often very important – we see the results of insignificance every day – wars and massive change are often precipitated by small events. An anonymous Inuit poet says in Magic Words:

There was a time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.

But as Milosz says, Šthe secret of all art, also of poetry is…distance.’ Our memories are often purer and more distilled after an event, when we are away from the powerful emotions evoked at the time. Then also we may be able to judge their importance. These poems may be defined as realist, but they also may be memorable for their truths, their beauty and clarity of expression which make them timeless in their ability to move, inspire and inform us.

Some of my favourites are the words of African bush people who express their sense of transience in:

the day we die
the wind comes down
to take away
our footprints

Tu Fu expresses he loneliness of exiles in the 8th century:

I watch the spring go by and wonder
if I shall ever return home.

There are fine poems from the contemporary poets like Denise Levertov, always an inspiration for me, she writes in Eye Mask:

I need
more of the night before I open
eyes and heart
to illumination…

I am sorry the author did not find poems by the great Canadians like Dorothy Livesay & Margaret Atwood, and contemporary Arabic poets, like Mourid Barghouti; many of their poems would fit perfectly in this collection but I was happy to find the Spanish Antonio Machado & Polish Nobel winner, Wislawa Symborska and, he had to stop somewhere. There are always more anthologies to be written that will record the distilled wisdom, passion and truth of many more poets around the world. This selection is a treasure to keep for constant reference and pleasure. TW

The blurb on the back cover says that Mitchell is “restoring a radical, subversive voice to the public face of British poetry.” For that he is most welcome! Mitchell is a skilled and imaginative poet, creating humorous works about sacred cows and searing indictments of war, greed and violence.

It was the mainstream media’s mania for royal hagiography that gave the magazine, Red Pepper, the idea to anoint a shadow poet laureate who could speak to and for the people. I’ll always remember Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper saying at the World Social Forum that action creates ideas. The act of creating a shadow poet laureate has poured Mitchell’s ideas, imagination and insight onto these pages.

Much of Mitchell’s poetry sears in its heated exposure of the horrors of war and violence, as in "To the pre-emptive Air Forces ":

...You are Jack the Ripper on a surgical strike.

And the deceptively sing-song Back to the Happidrome about armaments and war:

“..Tear the face off the human race–
with British Aerospace
it gives employment...”

One poem that stays with me is a classic haiku, a form usually associated with cherry blossoms, but this one, National Pride Haiku, says:

if smacking children
were an Olympic event
England would take the gold

Not all his poems are about violence and stupidity; many are full of love and joy, celebrations of friendship and natural beauty. Even activists who don´t normally read poetry can enjoy the insight, satire and beauty of Mitchell’s work.

One of Britain ’s best journalists uses his own country for an in-depth case study of how industrial capitalism has invaded and mostly conquered every aspect of British life. It could be applied to Canada and many other countries.

Monbiot, the brilliant and prolific writer for the UK Guardian, blazes out his excellent ideas for saving our environment from global warming. In the special preface to this Canadian edition, he tells us that Canada is one of the highest producers of greenhouse gases.

“You think of yourselves as a liberal and enlightened people….But you could scarcely do more to destroy the biosphere if you tried…The sustainable limit for carbon dioxide emissions is…one—sixteenth of what you currently produce.”

Much of what he writes many of us already know — the scenario for global disaster has been well—articulated by many writers. But Monbiot is not just giving us excellent information — he has an action plan that will enable countries like Australia, USA, UK and Canada to reduce emissions drastically without forcing us to live a Pleistocene lifestyle. He says we can cut our emissions by 80% without going back to pre—history.

He takes on all the corporate liars, the conniving governments as well as wild predictions from some environmentalists — many of whom make action so unattractive that most people choose to ignore the evidence of global catastrophe and continue to live a Faustian contract with fossil fuels.

Feasible, conceivable, practical and thoughtful action ideas are what are needed and Monbiot’s well documented strategies are what make this book so valuable —from confronting governments and corporations in denial to changing our transport, building and heating practices we can still live a comfortable life and not commit our descendents to peril. It is not just do—it—yourself saving that will help; it is political action and change that is needed.

He writes, “This book has an overtly political purpose. It aims to encourage people to not only change the way they live but to force their governments to make such changes easier…My purpose is to equip you with the political tools you need — the arguments, technologies and ideas for implementing them — to turn one of the most polluting nations on Earth into a place which commands the rest of the world’s respect.”

If I had to recommend only one book of the many on climate change & global warming — this would be it. Read it and be prepared to act no matter how difficult it may be.

He ends with this warning about the campaign against climate change. “…it is a campaign not for abundance, but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom, but less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves.”

“There is no way; we make the road by walking it”.
Antonio Machado

The seriousness of social movements in recent decades can be judged by the fact that many academics who seldom leave the ivory tower deem them worthy and timely to study and joyfully criticize and deconstruct. Their studies are rarely available or of value to working activists.

This book is different; Moyer and the other authors have been deeply committed social activists for many years. Their book is a very practical guide and a clear analysis of movements that activists will find very helpful. Although published in Canada the examples and interpretations are primarily based on the USA where the authors did their work. Allowing for certain cultural differences, the book is still helpful in other places.

They have a theory and explanations of the roles and stages of the beginning, development and end of movements; the end is often because they have succeeded. The issue has become mainstream, political groups and society have absorbed them and often the issues have been resolved. The authors focus on many successful movements – gay and lesbian rights, civil rights in the USA and others. They are essentially very hopeful, seeing success in the increase of movements in numbers and their diversity as well as results. The book helps activists to be realistic and set goals, and to recognize that even when the movement folds, it may be a sign of success. I remember the Anti-MAI movement which started with a copy of a secret trade agreement being leaked here in Victoria; the contents quickly spawned a international movement that folded when the MAI was rejected.

In the conclusion we are urged to create an analysis, vision, and action strategy for transformation of society. We need to integrate social action into our personal and public lives, to eliminate the negative features we bring from our flawed societies – greed, anger, selfishness and competitiveness and create healthy, positive and caring ways to interact within social movements. It is time to recognize activists as important in themselves, not because they are actors or physicists. We need to see that we can be important and effective in bringing ideas and causes from the margins of society into the mainstream as we place our goals of transforming a consumerist and militarist society to one of ecology, justice and sustainability. This book can help us along our way. TW/2005

This is a handsome and big book, qualifying for ”coffee table“ status, but it also a wonderful collection of stunning photos and wise words of women who work with a passion for social change. Nebenzahl and Ackerman travelled the world finding the answers from each woman to their question: Why do they care enough to dedicate their lives to helping other? The answers are diverse but they found a common thread: “That activist women often come to their work out of sadness and despair, because of personal loss, but sometimes simply out of deep conviction that something has to be done...caring gives them hope...that they can change the world.”

Some of the women are famous and familiar to social activists, including the Egyptian writer, Nawal el Saadawi, who recently ran for the presidency of Egypt. She writes and talks about “the taboos of her society – women, sex and religion”. A medical doctor she writes constantly and has never stopped questioning and rebelling. She says, “...even innocent love stories are political. When you have two people in a bedroom, that is political – who is above, who is below. There is no such thing as neutrality.”

Other women are less known and it is a pleasure to read and learn about them. Vancouver breast cancer activists Jane Frost and Brenda Hochachka became messengers of hope to other breast cancer survivors with the now famous dragon boat festivals. Olayinka Koso Thomas campaigns again the horrors, pain, infection, later diseases, and sterilization and death resulting from genital mutilation. She works in exile from Sierra Leone in London, UK; the practice of genital mutilation is in decline, but still millions are mutilated every year. Olayinka believes that education in the key. Educated people won’t let their children be mutilated.

And then there is Agnes Daroczi, an activist for Roma women, surely the most persecuted group in Europe. She has spent her life bringing “into the light a culture that had been trampled and hidden away” in her native Hungary and throughout the world. She has organized an independent Roma political movement to promote the rights and history of this rich culture.

There are 45 women in the book. As I took courage from the stories and admired the expressive photos, I thought, how wonderful; I am sure every reader, just as I can, will also think of 45 more to honour. It’s an inspiration! TW

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

I have a poem in this book, otherwise I would not know of it. So I am glad my poem was printed here so I could read and appreciate the writers of a vast collection of poetry on subjects including war, cultural identity, political art and privilege – a book that the editor said she produced because it was the kind of poetry she wanted to read. I think it is a book many women – and men – would want to read. I read it cover to cover when it arrived and was amazed by the scope and breadth of the poems included. Let´s hope it gets well advertised, reviewed and read because it fills a need and an open space.

The poets are old and young and from many parts of the world – Nigeria, South Africa, Malaysia, Europe and India, Australia & a few more in between with many from the USA & a few Canadians. The range is great, reflecting creative experience and powerful experiences. The illustrations by Brenda Cleary connect the diverse themes and enhance the written word with clear and bold images. I mention only a few of the poems that moved me.

In “Pink” by Jane Eaton Hamilton a pink sweet pea becomes an unforgettable symbol of torture in a few short lines. “Do you believe flowers ask for it?”

Jackie Joice describes the rarely reported murders of Mexican women in “Not Too Far From Here (for the women of Juarez) in brief vivid words where, ”Not too far from here an uneasy/silence/covers unmentionable deaths/ Brujas blancas are working overtime calling on/the Virgen for assistance Not too far from here we/can hear whispers of restless souls/crying for peace crying for/ justice.

And I loved “Dialogue of Breasts” by Liza Ezzard who would have women claim their own bodies with joy and independence. She writes, “My breasts have defied bondage/they rarely need support. They are doubly independent mirror images of a self–made women.”/

This is a book to savour, poems of pain and horror, yes; but also words of joy, humour and empowerment.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“In my view language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner. The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.”

This slim volume was and is important enough to go through many printings. Everything the author, a respected Kenyan scholar & writer, says is still relevant today. He pens with a vivid description of the role of a writer who must have a passion for truth and a rigorous analysis of reality – like a surgeon.

“Writers are the surgeons of the heart and souls of a community.”

Ngugi places himself right in the heart of the community and says, “…literary work, is not the result of an individual genius, but the result of a collective effort…the very words we use are a product of a collective history.”

He also places the language of African literature in the context of social forces – colonialism and “…imperialism continues to control the economy, politics and culture of Africa.” Sounds like Canada.

In this context Ngugi’s central thesis is that no one can write fully and honestly in the language of the oppressor. His education, like that of most English speaking Africans was totally based on the culture & literature of Britain. Many African writers defined themselves by their colonial language, English and also French and Portuguese. Few educated Africans looked to a renaissance of African cultures in any languages except those. Modern African writers accepted this as ‘fait accompli’. He challenges this as a too fatalistic conclusion and a betrayal of the richness of the many African languages and cultures.

He remembers the power and creativity of the stories of his childhood in Gikuyu, which had magic and beauty, based in the environment of the society. It presented a unique world view that was shattered by the enforced use of English as the language of formal education. Language, as his teachers well knew, is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. As were First Nations’ children in Canada, Kenyan children were beaten for using their own language and not only that, but they were trained to inform on other children who also spoke the forbidden tongue. They “… were being taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community.”

As Ngugi became a scholar and teacher he continued to accept English as the essential language of his creation and went to African conferences where participants enjoyed and lauded their fine English scholarship. He now says, “It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.” Ultimately this educated class becomes the enabling cultural bourgeoisie of the new neocolonialism.

After recognizing this imperialism, he realizes that African languages and culture are still thriving and maintained by the peasantry from which the elites have become disconnected. Singers, storytellers and writers still flourished even if, as some were, they were jailed for the use of their own language. The issue of cultural workers creating in the context of their own society has reemerged after years of repression. Capitalism may have introduced technology and means, but these further consolidated its elitism and control of other cultures. The printing press could control whose work was published and originally Africans who were published wrote with biblical and positive colonial themes. Universities in Africa further strengthened these trends; students were schooled in European literature to the neglect of their own heritage.

It was jail that clarified the issue for Ngugi, after publishing in English; he grasped during incarceration the necessity to commit his creativity to a truly African novel. In fact in this book, he makes it clear that this is the last work he will write and publish in English Translation he welcomes, but the original work needs be in the language of its creator. Later when teaching, he also pursued the importance in schools and universities of the teaching and study of African languages. This became a vital role for the educated class in order to reconnect and situate themselves among their own people, the peasants and workers who could not read English. It seems straight forward, but it was truly an amazing new and bold transformation of scholarship only a few decades ago.

In 1978 he said, “Kenyan writers have no alternative but to return to the roots, return to the sources of their being in the rhythms of life and speech and language of the Kenyan masses if they are to rise to the great challenge of recreating in their poems, plays and novels, the epic grandeur of that history.”

Towards the end of this forceful and impassioned book he quotes another product of colonialism, the Guatemalan poet, Otto Rene Castillo, who asks intellectuals what they will answer when asked what they did when our nations dried out slowly, ‘like a sweet fire, small and lone’.

“What did you do when the poor
Suffered, when tenderness
And life
Burned out in them?”

In the end Ngugi says this is all part of and really about the struggle for liberation on all levels.

“Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In struggle is our history, our language and being.”

That is a good place to end a book and to begin a commitment we can all make to human and personal liberation.

The story of a sustainable logger, a committed social activist and a persistent thorn in the side of governments and corporations.  Merve is one of my heroes. He lives near Victoria and his beautiful forest is in the process of becoming a preserve now that he is in his eighties and is slowing down a little bit.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“What better place than here
What better place than now”

This quote really sums up the main thrust of this highly original critique of the Judeo–Christian mythology of future and distant rewards. He makes a strong case for ignoring determinist historic theory and urges us to seize the moment and make our own destiny, where we are, now, using many examples of social action that were unpredicted and successful from the decline of the WTO starting in Seattle to the rise of autonomous power in Chiapas, Mexico. Recently I have hears speakers from Oaxaca, Mexico who also reject state governments and are creating their own systems of governance. So Noble’s book is very much an expression of hope as well as a critique.

Noble is an iconoclastic academic at York University who frequently sees what others deny and speaks out on these unpopular issues. He wrote an excellent essay in September, 2005 Canadian Dimension on the privatization of universities and learning; he does not think that religious holidays should be observed by universities – unless they all are – and has refused to teach on Muslim holy days, because York has recognized Judaic holidays.

He believes that these myths dominate science, technology and politics and postulate a sense of inevitability that oppresses our thinking and our creative choices of action. He says that,“…while the myth of the promised land could mean different things to different people, in all its forms it had one basic structure – a structure that located the fulfilment of the promise in a place and time far removed from which it was offered…and onto some abstract predetermined destiny.”

Thus the promises of a better place and a better time can be a useful tool for the oppressor and a hope for the oppressed. As Noble points out both radical religious activists like Martin Luther King and today’s suicide bombers take comfort in this abstraction.

Noble recounts the recorded history of the Babylonian Gilgamish whose central thesis to wanderers is to go home and make peace, advice given by a wise goddess, Shiduri, who directed, “that the only true comfort for mortals lies in their awareness and celebration of the joys of being alive.”

Centuries later another leader rose, according to some records, Abraham, whose received message, given by a disembodied voice, was to go forth to find a promised land, not only both an earthly and an unearthly territory, but also power among and over other people. Then along came Jesus, who is described as a descendant of Abraham who represents, “the culmination of the Hebrew story…the realization of the promise.”

The author says, “the Christians, then took the eschatological essence of the Hebrew mythology and triple–distilled it into the purest of fantasies: an otherworldly promise of triumph over nature and the limits of human existence that for two millennia has fuelled the West’s fevered flight from place and the wisdom of the elders.” Muslims also believe in predetermined destiny and the possibility of eternal bliss.

My understanding of Noble’s explanations is that the drive to conquer minds, continents, peoples and nations in our contemporary society is fuelled by our acceptance of these myths, which paradoxically also preach pre-destiny and power in the might of an external force usually called God. How handy when we can believe that this god is on our side and we have the right to kill, plunder and pillage! Surely the roots of capitalism and expanding consumerism lie in our divine right to have it all, as they say in the USA – even if it includes Iraq and outer space. How clever is this! In fact, our right to have power over everything allows us freedom to oppress and offer the oppressed the hope of the promised land, also, but later!

Noble also sees this mythology as the force that binds the USA to Israel. Early leaders of the USA compared their country to a new Israel, a holy, Promised Land. Modern USA leaders use this mythology to bind fundamental Christianity to modern Israel, but don’t just trust in God, but make sure there are enough weapons to secure the Promised Land for the deserving mighty.

It takes powerful and creative thinking to shake off divine determinism and to face the world, here and now, wherever we are. There have been thinkers and philosophers who have helped shape the new paradigm of engaged activism. Noble writes about many of them including the famous philosopher, Sartre, who believed we must free ourselves from the old myths and grasp our own destiny saying, “life is nothing until it is lived, but it is yours to make sense of.”

Noble embraces this reality of optimism and finds it all around us in the activism of today; feminists who question patriarchy (surely another biblical myth), ecologists who develop a new way of living as part of the earth, not dominion over it, and the poor and oppressed who are determined to make a better world.

I recommend this book to all those who are committed to and interested in social change. Even in the darkest times, we have choices, possibilities and power. Noble has provided a documented and original sophisticated thesis to support hope for change if we are willing to try – here and now. TW, 2006

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“When refugees take flight from violence and persecution, their human life is stripped bare, with all political qualifiers (presence, voice, agency) erased from their identity.” P.124

This rarely questioned truism is where Nyers begins his intense and challenging text on the political reality and the real people whom we label as Refugees. The challenge starts with the cover: a seemly traditional photograph of young females from an unidentified African or Asian region. But a second look at the classic pose of the central figure with a baby on her lap reveals her gaze firmly fixed down the sights of a gun instead of looking soulfully into the camera. The refugee has become an agent of her own destiny, not just an object of our pity.

“The refugee is an aberration only when people accept as a matter of common sense that citizenship is the only authentic political identity of modern life.” P.17

The concept of the Refugee Warrior, described in Chapter 5, is one of an active, politicized, militarized agent with an agenda we seldom consider belonging to any but states. These refugees see themselves as engaged and empowered to choose a role in defining their destiny – a far cry from the classic mother with a limp baby on her breast. Nyers provides many examples; the Kurds in Iraq and Iran who are in conflict with Turkey, the Kerens who fight against the military regime of Myanmar from Thai refugee camps and even the Cubans who dream from Florida of overthrowing the government of their homeland. None of these appear passive; some have support and recognition from governments, others act independently. This concept contradicts the common definition of a refugee and it goes against our comfortable illusions of humanitarian kindness being bestowed on (preferably grateful) inactive recipients.

Because, in order to be an authentic refugee as defined by the UN Refugee Convention, the refugee must have a well-founded fear of persecution, we think right away we are dealing with a fearful person whom we are rescuing; already by accepting this definition we have disempowered her. It is certainly easier to be charitable to people without speech, security or place, than those who seize and act through a sense of full humanity. Nyers explains that we are encouraged to see refugees as less than human; in fact we assign them the position of animals, captive in our perceived free societies; a position Nyers says even a dog does not deserve.

Nyers uses a poem by a refugee, Agustin Nsanzineza Gus, to illustrate the contradictions of refugee definition, political restriction and human connectedness.

‘...We all belong to the family of humans Did I say humans? No, sorry The world of potential refugees Or better than that The world of refugees to be....’ Quoted on P.65

This is a leap in conventional thinking; that all people are in a state of being or becoming refugees, unless we revise our definition of refugee-ism. We might have to see that we all have times when we are or feel we are insecure, even fearful, unwelcome, pushed out, marginalized or excluded, including economically. These are unrecognized states of being that the cold war based official definition of Refugee does not include. Nyers says that this poem suggests we have obligations to humanity that are greater than our obligation to the sovereign state.

In Chapter 2, provocatively titled, ‘On Humanitarian Violence’, Nyers exposes the fallacy that humanitarianism is neutral and separated from politics. He writes that ‘...my position is that humanitarianism has always been an inherently political concept.’ The structures that cause and promote violence and generate refugees are not opposed or revealed. Thus the refugee phenomenon is seen as a non-political occurrence; yet to even operate in a limited way, agencies must recognize and cooperate with sovereign states, including those whose violence results in refugees. This humanitarian aid can be seen as violent if it is seen as legitimizing and supporting violent regimes and appearing to maybe seemingly cynical observers that so-called humanitarianism is just another hierarchical business opportunity. In his current writings Nyers discusses the new concept of “Responsibility to Protect” a new definition of state intervention into the territory and politics of other states by the powerful under the aegis of ‘protecting’ those who again are presented as fearful, voiceless and powerless. This is an incredibly complex issue leading to Nyers’ questioning of a set of opposing, but related constructs; coercion and altruism, violence and morality, the political and the ethical. He tells us to ask ourselves the question “what relation of universality and particularity allows me to express my humanitarian vision?”

As Jenny Edkins argued, “The relationship between humanitarianism and either violent militarism or politics is not an oxymoron. Humanitarianism is essential to both: it is deeply implicated in the production of a sovereign power that claims monopoly of the legitimate use of force.” Quoted on p.42

In its most profound essence this work is telling us that we somehow think that those who lack a nation-state, a paramount construct of our globalized world view, are somehow lesser humans than we are. Thus we can shuffle these people around in ways that both suit our political purposes and also enhance our own self-image as humanitarians taking care of victims. This works until the victims, showing less than subservient gratitude, find their own voices and follow their own agendas. This concept is being challenged more and more, politicians as well as society are recognizing a different reality. Refugees won’t play the victim any longer. Also being challenged and recognized is that private persecution, mainly against women in a state that supports patriarchal values, must, as feminists insist, be recognized as persecution that gives women that right to claim asylum. It is just beginning to happen. The importance of humanity is gradually being recognized as states, institutions and agencies fail to serve people and instead reinforce the violence of the status quo of powerful elites.

“Through their resistance and their imagination, they powerfully help us give [politics] a new life. We owe them this recognition, and to say it, and to commit ourselves even more numerously at their side, until right and justice are repaid them.” Etienne Balibar quoted on P.123

Nyers has written a fine scholarly, well-documented work, achieving his purpose of providing new insights and information while forcing us to think and rethink in vastly new and different ways about a previously well packaged and controlled group of people. Nyers is an academic; he is also a political activist working with refugees in central Canada. His book is an admirable blend of scholarship and an impassioned call to action.
TW

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“…wafers of warm bliss give
moments of ecstatic oblivion to all who taste
but this pleasure has no history …”from a poem by T. Wolfwood

Carol Off, a Canadian journalist, sets off into the jungle of West Africa in search of the truth about Cote d’Ivoire’s most precious commodity, cocoa. She reached a poor remote village where the tired and weary people have no school, no clinic, no electricity or phones. She says they grow “the food of the gods”, but live a long way from paradise. They grow cocoa, sell it to buyers, but have no concept of what happens to it or where it goes when the raw product leaves their community. When chocolate bars are explained to the children of the village they do not grasp the idea that children here eat chocolate bars frequently.

She writes, “…the children who struggle to produce the small delights of life in the world I come from have never known such pleasure, and most likely, never will. It’s a measure of the separation in our worlds, a distance now so staggeringly vast…the distance between the hand that picks the cocoa and the hand that reaches for the chocolate bar.” The misery and slavery – yes, slavery – of today’s cocoa producers, including thousands of children, is the present result of centuries of injustice. Off describes in Bitter Chocolate the horrific history of the production of cocoa and its sweet offspring, chocolate, that our privileged world loves so much.

When Cortes invaded what is now Mexico he found the elite of Montezuma court and army drinking a miraculous liquid that nourished and strengthened leaders and soldiers. He took it cocoa, a commodity so precious that it was used in the conquered lands as currency, to Spain from where is spread in popularity across Europe. Thus began our society’s participation in the more than 500 years of exploitation, colonialism and slavery that continues to this day so that millions of the privileged can enjoy chocolate in all its forms. From the plantations of indigenous people the trade expanded so that slaves were imported from Africa to the new colonies to produce both sugar and cocoa. Meanwhile improvements and additives made the popularity of the new drink spread throughout Europe – from the royalty down to any who could afford it. Cocoa became a beverage imbued with health, sexual and sensuous pleasures. By the 1700s Van Houten, a Dutch inventor, had created cocoa powder and the Fry enterprise in England invented the modern chocolate bar.

The Fry’s were Quakers and soon other Quakers, Cadbury’s and Rowntree’s, were in the chocolate business (a nice alternative to the arms trade) and they all had sense of social responsibility to their workers. They pioneered social benefits, housing and good working conditions for their English employees (as did Hershey later in the USA); but their morality did not extend to the workers who produced the cocoa who “had hardly any control over their destinies and lived and died as slaves”. By then cocoa production had been established in Africa with a ready source of labour in European colonies. Journalists began to track the story, a task which continues to the present as chocolate grown with slave and child labour is still promoted as a symbol of love, luxury, religion and even health. New empires were created on cocoa by Hershey, Nestles and Mars. It just keeps growing (and so do profits) to fill our endless desire for this pleasure.

It seem like such a cosy and warm feeling thing to do – give a lover a box of chocolates, make a cup of cocoa for a sick a child, take chocolate chip cookies to a party. But as Susan Hawthorne says in Wild Politics, Disconnection is critical for a system based on profit. And profit is what contemporary trade and food production is all about. We enjoy these small luxuries (and expensive ones, like diamonds) without any connection to the workers who make our pleasure possible. Off makes the connections for us without mercy for our sensitivities, driven by her experiences in West Africa where she followed other journalists who were murdered because they sought the truth. Organizations dedicated to human rights and relief also feel the pressure, many pack up and leave countries when their work and workers are threatened.

Today the Ivory Coast still produces more cocoa than any other country but no nation controls the production or price of the raw cocoa it exports. Slave child labour is still used, no supposed agreements and commitments to end this practice has worked, because there is not proper monitoring and as Off learned, trying to reveal the truth is dangerous. We are talking big business here; marketing is controlled by the notorious Cargill and the lesser known Archer Daniels Midland – both secretive and powerful in many agricultural commodities. Cocoa, like diamonds, is a useful currency for the arms that the minority world industry and governments are happy to peddle in the majority world to dictators who have no desire to upset this trade by creating justice for peasants and labourers.

Several issues become very clear as one reads Bitter Chocolate; issues that stay with the reader, issues firmly based in the documentation Off provides. First of all, we in the minority world seem to believe we have a divine right to cheap food and other commodities, but especially food. We rarely connect the price of food to the conditions of farms, including the rapidly disappearing Canadian family farm. Another issue is the much

touted “free trade” we are supposed to enjoy. The powerful nations, corporations and institutions like the IMF, which inflict trade liberalization on small, poor, countries that produce raw materials, all support the subsidies and protection that big farmers in the USA and European Union enjoy (and then there is British Columbia, a global exporter of raw logs and always being manipulated by USA softwood lumber interests).

This book does a good job of explaining the advantages and problems of Fair Trade using a project in Belize as an example. Here Mayan farmers have gone back to traditional varieties of cocoa trees that do not need chemical inputs. The farmers get a guaranteed price for their production; they and their communities prosper. In order to assure European consumers of the trustworthiness of fair trade, the cost and administrative work is very high for farmers. A Canadian manager tells us that the bureaucratic demands will be difficult to sustain, these costs present real problems, particularly for small producers who want to have the security of fair trade. The need of veracity and the limited capacity of small farmers have to be addressed and reconciled if we want to support community based Fair Trade.

One company that Off does not mention is Camino, the cocoa brand that I use; it is widely available in supermarkets as well as specialty shops. Based in Ontario, Camino products come from La Siembra growers in the Dominican Republic. Since 1999, La Siembra has increased its sales as the first organization to import, manufacture and distribute fair trade certified organic cocoa products in North America. La Siembra’s Cocoa Camino products include cocoa, chocolate bars and chocolate chips. See: www.lasiembra.com. It is a sobering incentive to buy Fair Trade when we know that the producer of coca gets barely 5% of the profit of this finished retail product.

So it is possible to enjoy cocoa products that mean better lives, health and working environment for whole communities. So far only a few thousands of the 14 million cocoa works worldwide enjoy this opportunity, in Belize and Dominican Republic as well as those on cooperatives in Ghana, but the Fair Trade of cocoa products is growing rapidly and cocoa sales are approaching those of Fair trade coffee.

Fair Trade is the immediate answer for privileged consumers but we also need to work on the dismantling of unfair trade regulations and the appalling power of corporate buyers who can make or break producers, whole countries, at will. We have to respect food and be willing to pay those who produce it. Bitter Chocolate is a real eye–opener and expose of a filthy oppressive trade system. I recommend we follow up Off’s references and incorporate the issues she illustrates with action.

A good book to read as a companion to this book is The Bittersweet World of Chocolate by Troth Wells & Nikki van der Gaag of the New Internationalist Publications. It has wonderful recipes interspersed with interesting information about cocoa and Fair trade as well as references and action data.

Canadians involved in the Co–op movement can initiate action here like this: the UK Co–operative 2,400 supermarket chain sources all cocoa for its own brand of chocolate bars from the Ghanaian Kuapa Kokoo farmers.

The words and faces of cocoa producers that benefit from Fair Trade will melt your heart faster than chocolate in your mouth and will convince anyone to use Fair Trade.

************************************************************

Revue littéraire de T. Wolfwood.  En francais de Andreé Scott

“Ceux qui se délectent à ces gaufrettes de chaude béatitude
Connaissent un moment d´oubli ravissant
Mais ce plaisir cache son pass´.” … extrait d´un poème de T. Wolfwood

 

Carol Off, journaliste canadienne, parcourt la jungle africaine à la recherche de la vérité concernant le cacao, denrée précieuse de la Côte d´Ivoire. Elle a fini par atteindre un village pauvre et écarté où les gens las et abattus manquent de clinique, d´électricité et de téléphone. Elle affirme qu´ils cultivent ‘la nourriture des dieux’, mais la vie qu´ils mènent est loin d´être le paradis sur terre. Ils cultivent le cacao, le vendent aux acheteurs, mais n´ont pas la moindre idée oú il se rend par la suite ou ce que l´on en fait une fois que disparaît le produit á l´état brut. Lorsqu´on explique aux enfants du village le concept des tablettes de chocolat, ils ne saisissent toujours pas l´idée qu´il y ait des enfants ailleurs qui mangent du chocolat à leur gré.

Elle témoigne, “…les enfants qui s´éreintent pour produire un des délices du monde auquel j´appartiens n´ont jamais connu de tels délices, et de toute évidence, n´en connâitront jamais.” Ceci démontre la séparation de nos mondes, dire qu´il peut y avoir une distance aussi frappante, la distance entre la main qui cueille le cacao et la main tendue pour saisir la tablette de chocolat! La misère et l´esclavage — oui, l´esclavage — des producteurs actuels de cacao, y compris des milliers d´enfants, est le résultat actuel des siècles d´injustices. Dans son livre CHOCOLAT AMER, Off décrit l´affreuse histoire de la production du cacao, et de sa progéniture alléchante, le chocolat, dont raffole notre monde privilégié.

Lorsque Cortès a envahi ce qui est aujourd´hui le Mexique, il s´est aperçu que l´élite de la cour de Moctézuma et de son armée dégustaient un breuvage miraculeux qui nourrissait et fortifiait les nobles et les soldats. C´était la cacao, une denrée si précieuse qu´on s´en servait entre pays en guise d´unité monétaire.  Cortès en a rapporté en Espagne, d´où sa renommée s´est répandue à travers l´ Europe. Ainsi commença la participation de notre société aux 500 ans et plus d´ exploitation, colonialisme et esclavage qui continuent jusqu´ à nos jours afin que les millions de privilégiés puissent savourer le chocolat sous toutes ses formes. A partir des plantations des indigènes, le commerce du cacao s´ est accru, si bien que des esclaves ont dû être importés d´Afrique pour cultiver et le sucre et le cacao. 
Cortes
Pendant ce temps, dûe aux améliorations apportées au nouveau breuvage, sa rénommée s´ est répandue à travers l´ Europe — depuis la royauté jusqu´aux gens du peuple qui en avaient les moyens. L´ on croyait que le cacao représentait la santé, la vigueur et la sensualité. Dans les années 1700, un inventeur hollandais, Van Houten, a crée la poudre de cacao, et les entreprises Fry d´ Angleterre ont inventé la tablette de chocolat de nos jours.

La famille Fry était Quaker, et bientôt d´ autres Quakers, les Cadbury et les Rowntree, se sont joints à l´entreprise du chocolat (une alternative plus sympathique que la traite des armes); ils étaient aussi conscients de leur responsabilité sociale envers leurs employés. Ils ont été pionniers dans le domaine des bénéfices sociaux, de la construction de l´hébergement et des conditions de travail acceptables pour leurs employés anglais (tout comme le ferait Hershey plus tard aux E—U), mais leurs principes n´allaient pas jusqu´à inclure les paysans qui cultivaient le cacao et qui  “n´avaient guére de contrôle sur leur destin, et vivaient et mouraient en esclavage”.  A cette époque, la production du cacao était bien établie en Afrique grâce à la main-d´oeuvre disponible des colonies européennes. Les journalistes se sont mis à suivre le sujet, et le font encore de nos jours, puisque le cacao cultivé par des enfants et des esclaves nous est prôné comme étant un symbole d´amour, de luxe, de culte et même de santé. Le cacao a créé de nouveaux empires — ceux de Hershey, Nestlés et Mars — qui ne cessent de croître, ainsi que leurs profits, pour rassasier notre envie de cette friandise.

On dirait un geste chaleureux — offrir des chocolats à son amant, préparer une tasse de chocolat chaud pour un enfant malade, apporter à une fête des biscuits aux brisures de chocolat. Mais comme le dit Susan Haworthe dans son livre  ‘Wild Politics’, la déconnection s´impose si on veut composer avec un système basé sur le profit. Et le profit est à la base du commerce contemporain et de la production alimentaire. Nous jouissons de ces petits luxes (et aussi des plus chers, tels les diamants) sans nous soucier de la main d´oeuvre qui a rendu possible tout ça.

Off nous expose ces liens, sans scrupules, inspirée par ses expériences en Afrique occidentale où elle a suivi les traces d´autres journalistes — assassinés pour avoir cherché la vérité. Les organizations vouées aux droits humains et aux secours frissonnent d´inquiétude; nombreux sont ceux qui abandonnent le travail menacé.

Aujourd´hui la Côte d´Ivoire produit toujours plus de cacao que tout autre pays, mais aucun pays ne contrôle ni la production ni le prix du cacao brut qu´il exporte. Le travail des enfants esclaves continue, aucun soit-disant accord ni engagement n´ayant été honoré à cause du manque de suivi, et, comme Off l´a appris à ses dépens, parce que les contrôles fiables manquent et qu´il est dangereux de chercher à exposer la vérité. Il s´agit de la grosse entreprise; la mise en marché est dirigée par la Cargill notoire, et la moins connue Archer Daniels Midland — compagnies cachottières et puissantes qui s´immiscent dans plusieurs denrées alimentaires. Le cacao, tout comme les diamants, sert de monnaie pour l´achat des armes à feu que le tiers monde veut bien marchander aux dictateurs du monde majoritaire: ceux-ci n´ont aucun intérêt à renverser ce commerce en faveur d´un monde plus juste pour les paysans et les ouvriers. Notre temptation

Plusieurs questions nous viennent à l´esprit en lisant CHOCOLAT AMER; des questions qui peuvent agasser le lecteur, des questions dont les réponses se trouvent dans la documentation fournie par l´auteur.  En premier, nous du monde minoritaire semblons croire avoir droit à l´alimentation et à d´autres nécessités, à prix modiques. Rarement faison—nous le lien entre le prix des aliments et les conditions du secteur agricole, y compris la disparition de plus en plus accentuée de la ferme familiale canadienne.

Et la question du fameux ‘Libre commerce’ qui va nous enjoliver la vie! Les pays puissants et les sociétés enregistrées qui fournissent les matières premiéres, tous appuyent les subventions et l´appui financier offerts à la grosse industrie agricole aux Etats-Unis et en Europe. (Sans oublier la Colombie-britannique, exportateur global de bois à l´état brut et toujours à la merci des marchands américains de bois de charpente.)

Ce livre illumine les avantages et les problèmes du Commerce Equitable, prenant comme example un projet au Bélize. C´est là que des paysans Maya entreprennent la culture des variétés de cacao qui ne demandent aucun engrais chimique. Les cultivateurs recoivent un prix fixe —une sécurité pour eux et pour la communauté. Afin de convaincre les consommateurs européens de la bonne foi du Commerce Equitable, les cultivateurs s´engagent à assumer les coûts additionnels et le travail supplémentaire d´administration. Un gérant canadien opine que les exigeances administratifs seront difficiles à soutenir, et que les coûts
présentent un obstacle pour les petits producteurs qui aspirent  à la sécurité du Commerce Equitable. Le besoin de véracité ainsi que la capacité limitée des petits producteurs sont des problèmes qu´il faut solutionner afin d´appuyer le Commerce Equitable à base communautaire.

Off ne fait pas mention de la compagnie Camino, la marque de cacao que j´utilise: on en trouve facilement dans les supermarchés ainsi qu´aux magasins specialisés. Basés en Ontario, les produits Camino viennent des producteurs La Siembra en République dominicaine. Depuis 1999, la vente des produits La Siembra ne fait qu´augmenter, puisque c´est la première organization en Amerique du Nord à importer, confectionner et distribuer les produits de Commerce Equitable en Amérique du Nord. Parmi les produits Cacao Camino de La Siembra, on compte le cacao, les tablettes de chocolat et les brisures de chocolat. Voir:www.lasiembra.com
Sachant que les producteurs du cacao réalisent à peine 5%; des profits de leur produit au détail, nous devrions sûrement profiter de toute occasion pour acheter les produits de Commerce Equitable.

Ce qui veut dire qu´il est possible de nous régaler des produits chocolatiers tout en contribuant à l´amélioration les conditions de vie, de santé et de l´environnement de travail pour des communautés entières.
Jusqu´à présent, seuls quelques mille des quatorze millions de travailleurs de cacao à travers le monde jouissent de cette avantage, ceux au Bélize et en République Dominicaine, tout comme ceux des coopératives au Ghana: cependant, le mouvement du Commerce Equitable est en croissance rapide, et la vente du cacao se rapproche a celle du café Commerce Equitable.

Le Commerce Equitable est le juste moyen pour les consommateurs privilégiés, mais il nous faut agir pour nous débarasser des règlements onéreux de commerce et la puissance épouvantable des acheteurs corporatifs qui exercent le pouvoir de vie et de mort sur les producteurs, voir même sur certains pays. Il nous faut respecter la nourriture et accepter de compenser ceux qui la produisent. ‘CHOCOLAT AMER’ est un appel à l´action, une révélation sordide d´un système de commerce opprimant. Je recommende que l´on suive les recommendations d´Off, et que l´on passe à l´action!

Le lecteur de ce livre profiterait également de la lecture du ´MONDE  DOUX-AMER DU CHOCOLAT´, de Troth Wells et Nikki vander Gaag, publié par New Internationalist Publications. On y trouve de bonnes recettes emaillées de faits divers sur le cacao et le Commerce Equitable, aussi bien que des rérérences et des informations sur des actions à prendre.

Les canadiens qui font parti du mouvement coopératif peuvent s´inspirer de la UK Cooperative, dont les 2400 supermarchés achètent le cacao pour sa marque de tablettes de chocolat chez les cultivateurs ghaniens de Kuapa Kokoo.

Les paroles et les visages que vous trouverez dans ce livre sur les producteurs de cacao qui profitent du Commerce Equitable vous fera fondre le coeur comme le chocolat à la bouche, et saura vous convaincre de faire vos achats chez le Commerce Equitable.

"...your wife has been for me, ever since I was a boy, one of the great interpreters of the world."
Hubert Butler, Ireland. page 149

I know the editor of this book and have read her works; some are reviewed on this site. A whole book of condolence letters seemed such a narrow and peculiar subject that I would not have chosen to read it if it weren’t for my knowing Oldfield. I am so glad I did seek it out and pour over these letters. They gave me the realization that the greater world of friendship and creativity can enclose us all.

Oldfield taught at the University of Sussex for many years and lives near Rodmell where Woolf lived and died. Her previous writing and her own commitment to peace and feminism makes her sensitive and knowledgeable on the life and importance of Virginia Woolf. She is the right person to gather these letters and link them with information and perception. In 2006 she gave the Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture in London on ‘The Child of Two Atheists–Virginia Woolf’s Humanism’.

We live in an era where letter writing is no longer common – replaced by the brief and ephemeral E-mail and telephone. We are fortunate that all these letters were preserved and apparently every one of them was answered personally. Every letter is different and each expresses a personal and literary sense of loss. This collection is a vivid cultural history of the significance of one woman, her work and her place in the world. Not least was her part in the life of a ten year old friend who wrote a touching letter of sincere sympathy.

Oldfield prepares us with an excellent introduction setting the correspondence in a time of crisis, when England was at war and defeat seemed possible. The Woolf home in London was bombed; their country home, Monk’s House, close to the Sussex coast, was in a restricted zone. Virginia Woolf was opposed to war and her sorrow at this time is reflected in her work. Her death was however a result of her recurring bouts of extreme mental illness and her suicide was her way of ending her fear of yet another attack of pain and illness. Her husband Leonard and her close family, devoted at all times and caring throughout her bouts, were grief-stricken at her action, but she could not face her pain or theirs any longer. When I visited her home, a bright and pretty house, preserved with the colourful art and craft of friends and family, I saw her sunny and humble garden studio and the peaceful meadow leading to the River Ouse, I could not begin to imagine the depth of her fear and despair.

The editor’s introduction and the notes after every letter with a brief biography of the writer and her/his connection to Woolf put the letters in a broad historic, personal and literary context and give them a wider and deeper meaning. It is truly amazing how many people from all walks of life – neighbours, writers, academics, politicians, activists, her wider readership and friends of all kinds – poured out their sympathy, love, grief, and acknowledged their personal and artistic debt to this great figure of the 20th century. I was moved by so much eloquence, honesty and compassion. I felt I learned much about this woman to whom all feminists and pacifists owe so much. I finished the book in tears and went out to obtain and re-read Three Guineas. Sixty years later she is interpreting my world and helping me understand the present. TW

"How dare the government presume the right to kill others in our name?"
Women in Newbury Court, UK, 1982.

"...The Pentagon sits on like sone grotesque chicken caged in its nest and fed/ cancerous hormone, exceed and exceed and exceed/ Hiroshima, over and over and over, in weight/ in power/ in horror/ of genocide" Denise Levertov, 1980
(2 quotes from this book)

Sybil Oldfield is half- German and half English, so by her birth and her well articulated convictions is the ideal person to write movingly about many woman of the last century. Some are famous, some are barely known; Oldfield says that we honour, even if we do not heed, many men for their ‘anti-militarism and internationalist humanism’, but women do not get heard.

Opposition to war is still not universal. Oldfield says that the legitimations of ‘the iron fist’, the myth of war-prevention by war preparedness, the preferrability of death to defeat are still with us. She reveals the terrible philosophy of Bismarck and von Treitschke as the founding philosophy of the 20th Century – still now into the 21st... without war no state could be...the features of history are virile...after internal law and order the next essential function of the State is war.

Many women have challenged this philosophy in Europe and North America – the geography of this study. The well-known Virginia Woolf believed that war could not be prevented for as long as men in power continue to exclude women’s socially constructed, traditional values of the private life – including the value of every irreplaceable individual.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher worked hard to prevent WW2 and was articulate on the subject of war as the affliction of the 20th Century. Although she saw the defeat of Hitler as necessary as did the UK pacifist, Maude Royden, both with great reluctance, Weil said that defeat must come from the combatants against Hitler becoming more democratic and ant-racist themselves and not try to out do Hitler’s brutality. (Eisenhower’s role, documented elsewhere in disposing of more that 1 million Germans after the war in a camp – maybe be seen as the immediate failure of the victors who have now become the bullies of the world – and torturers of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay TW)

Sophie Scholl, a young German woman, and her brother were beheaded for treason for their courageous work in the internal German resistance – a virtually unknown part of WW2 history. She believed that those who put their faith in force deny the real purpose of life: life.

Oldfield writes about Europeans Christa Wolf, Inge Thorsson, the Greenham Common women, Clara Ragaz and USA women who opposed war – the poets Muriel Rukeyer, Denise Levertov, Sharon Olds whose words and political actions continue to inspire.

This is the book that really inspired me to write about the women I know who oppose war and oppression; to make an impression in the historic neglect of women who lived and died for freedom from the evils of war and war preparation. Oldfield has written other good books; I particularly liked Spinsters of this Parish, mainly the story of women’s rights activist, Mary Sheepshank. We need many more of these kinds of books. TW/2005

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“I think there was a concern that the American people, given the facts, would not make the right risk—benefit judgements.” Peter Libassi, Chair, Interagency Task Force on the Health Effects of Ionizing Radiation.

“If your mountain is not in the right place, drop us a card.” Edward Teller

“I´m pretty sure you don´t like to see your home blasted by some other people who don´t live in your place like we live in Point Hope.” Kitty Kinneeveauk

Tikigaq, home of the Inupiat people is a finger of land in the Chukchi Sea, north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. It is place of great antiquity, continuous habitation for millennia, a polar Machu Picchu and may predate the pyramids. This place roots the whale hunting Tikiramiut in a feeling “of belonging inalienably where they are” as they practice in modern times their traditional hunting combined with available technology and English literacy — vital to their struggle for survival against the dreams of “the firecracker boys” as the Tikiramiut of the nearest, community, Point Hope, called the atomic scientists who wanted to use their homeland as a testing ground for “weapons for peace.”

Even before the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic scientists were dreaming of an atomic future where the friendly atom would do much of the drudgery of humanity and would create a “promise of Utopia” in an “atomic garden of Eden.“ By 1942 it was not utopia but the bomb that occupied the minds of scientists as the USA raced to develop the bomb and use it before Germany. An enormous, secret and expensive infrastructure was created across the USA which exploded Trinity, the first atomic bomb, in Nevada in July, 1945, unleashing not only massive power and radiation, but fear, awe and excitement in its creators. Though Germany had not built this bomb and Japan was on the verge of surrender the military said, “…if we have such a weapon we are going to use it.”

Three weeks after the Trinity test, bombs were dropped on Japan, the immediate deaths and the continuing deaths from these now, relatively small bombs, were appalling. Five years later, half a million were dead in what President Harry Truman called “the greatest achievement of organized science in the world.”

This is an amazing and extremely important book — amazing in its wealth of connected detail and history, excellent writing and vivid personal stories and 50 years later, highly relevant. O´Neill even makes nuclear physics understandable to the non—scientific reader. He also makes it clear, that the end of the war and the horror of August, 1945, did nothing to deter those hell—bent on continuing nuclear bomb research; the cold war just provided a handy excuse. Every page has an important quote — this review could be almost as long as the book. But this book is vital reading and reference for any group and anyone concerned about history, racism, contemporary nuclear weapons, Disarmament and Test Ban Treaties, ´Cold War´ politics and nuclear energy. Most important, perhaps, how a small group of people worked together, shared information and committed themselves to a cause with overwhelmingly odds and won; they created models that peace and environment activists have been following ever since.

As the book unfolds we learn about the life and motivation of the real anti—hero or, some would say, villain of the time, Edward Teller, the father of the H—bomb, and the development of a powerful cabal of scientists who seemed to be willing to do or say anything to further their primary cause after bizarre failures like nuclear powered airplanes, cars and other attempts to make nuclear a household commodity. Then came Teller´s idea of the ´peaceful´ bomb´, mooted to create an alternative Suez Canal during 1956 when the canal was closed — by exploding enough bombs from the Mediterranean through Israel to the Gulf of Aqaba to “excavate an enormous ditch.” Beyond that he had all kinds of other “landscaping” projects in mind for Earth — like a new canal in Central America — as well as nuking the moon. But the scientists noted “there is some kind of a public relations problem here,” as “all kinds of phobic public reactions have been built about nuclear bombs.”

Project Plowshare, a perversion of a biblical quote, was name given in 1957 to the program to investigate nonmilitary uses of nuclear explosions to use not only for nonmilitary purposes but in Lewis Strauss´ words, to “highlight the peaceful applications of nuclear explosive devices and thereby create a climate of world opinion that is more favourable to weapons development and tests.” Strauss, then Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) is the infamous author of the now infamous declaration, “It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electric energy too cheap to meter.” Teller became the project director in Livermore, California; he called it ´Geographic engineering´ and said, “We will change the earth´s surface to suit us.”

A national test site was decided on before trying to convince other nations to accept nuclear engineering and where better than remote and thinly populated Alaska? The Livermore scientists consulted an expert in Alaskan geology about the best place to blast out a harbour. Dr. Hopkins was leery of military—oriented science; he had been involved in a project that used geology to find out the effect of nuclear attack on Moscow & Leningrad and later regarded his part in that project as “one of the greatest sins of my life.” Some years later that project continued elsewhere in the USA and I was a lowly geologic researcher on it. But then Hopkins thought a harbour scheme had some “constructive value”. The possible site was narrowed down to 31 miles SE of Point Hope, near the Ogotoruk Creek entry into the Chukchi Sea. Soon a survey camp established by the creek was spotted by Daniel Lisbourne, president of the Port Hope Village Council. This field crew were the advance party of the scientists that Lisbourne and his Eskimo community were to call, “the firecracker boys”.

Those boys lead by Teller then launched a well—funded leave—no—stone—unturned public relations campaign in Alaska on government, academia, media, business and citizens. With promises of economic benefits and lavish spending to compensate for the decrease in wartime & military spending, Teller and his “Project Chariot” intended to create a crater with thermonuclear bombs that would make a great deep sea harbour. Even though some of these groups posed difficult questions and objections to the proposal, Teller had reassurances, promises and answers for just about everyone — except the people who would be most affected whom they finally got around to visiting — the Eskimo citizens of Point Hope. “Charming and persuasive”, Teller bustled around Alaska, always changing figures and projections — flexible and responsive to any doubters. “Charming and lying”, might be a more accurate description; he insisted, to biological scientists that, “radiation hazard was a nonissue.” O´Neill has done a meticulously documented report of this campaign — he used not only press & print archives, but has interviewed dozens of people exposed to the fallout of this PR campaign.

This was all at a time when people the world over, including in Point Hope, had read and learned about the effects of bombs dropped in Japan and the results of ongoing tests in the South Pacific. In Canada in 1959 groups were coalescing around the initiative of Mary van Stolk in Edmonton, forming branches of “The Canadian Committee for the Control of Radiation Hazards.” I was a founding member of this group in Regina Saskatchewan; we were concerned with the levels of fallout blowing north into Canada from Nevada bomb test sites. Even the Saskatchewan government was willing to measure and monitor fallout; the dangers of radioactive strontium and caesium, particularly to children were well known. This group later became the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, following the lead of the UK campaign — knowing that radiation without disarmament and an end to testing nuclear weapons could never be controlled. The Canadian Voice of Women launched a brilliant campaign of collecting baby teeth from Canadian parents in order to analyze the absorption of radioactive elements. At the time my co—activists and I were desperately trying to stop a life—threatening juggernaut; now, in perspective I see that the peace movement of the time, in Canada and elsewhere, was actually also an environmental movement, long before Save the Whales or old—growth forests movements. Yet today, few environmentalists are aware, interested or involved in activism on the connected issues of militarism and environment.

It was soon documented in Canada and the USA, that caribou, the main food source for many indigenous northern people had amazingly high levels of radioactivity — their food source was lichen which absorbs its food from the atmosphere and thus concentrated radioactivity in caribou. Thirty years later, thousands of highly contaminated reindeer (caribou´s European relatives) were destroyed in northern Europe after the Chernobyl disaster.

All these things that were known to citizen groups were also known to the Livermore scientists but they did their best to brush radiation hazards under the rug or as they promised — out to sea towards nearby Russia. Teller and his boys had other hidden agendas. They really did not care about the economic feasibility to Alaska anymore than they cared about fallout; later release of documents reveal that Teller really wanted a model for a new Panama Canal and to promote its value for military development of the bomb use. As the AEC manager said, “the circumstances created by an integration of work performed to produce explosive nuclear devices, whether for peaceful application or for weapons, makes it impractical to separate this function.” After these uses of the bomb were finally discredited, the use of nuclear energy has continued to today to be inseparable from military functions. Now nuclear power is being mooted as the clean response to global warming and simultaneously, there is an upsurge in nuclear weapons production, mainly in USA and other major nuclear nations.

By 1958, even as Teller worked his powers on government and academia, people were questioning the value of a blast planned to be “1600 times larger than Hiroshima.”  Scientists within the USA establishment were concerned about nuclear tests and Eisenhower, always a reluctant nuclear warrior, agreed to negotiate a test ban treaty with USSR after Khrushchev took the initiative; but Teller and his boys kept up the pressure for ´peaceful´ tests.

Meanwhile the Teller´s boys were touring the Arctic trying to sell Project Chariot without the promised economic benefits but purely for research purposes. At a meeting in Fairbanks, biology faculty at the University of Alaska were not impressed by the physicists who, with no data or background expertise in radiobiology, were giving categorical assurances that there would be little environmental damage and even claimed the project would yield valuable bioenvironmental information. But they had no background studies for reference even the gung—ho University President had proposed some baseline work was needed. But the biologists did not think that Chariot should do its own research as one fisheries instructor cited the “AEC´s well-known reputation of ´mendacity.”  That prompted a break while the visiting physicists looked up the meaning of that word and “they were furious.” The biologists went public with their objections as did citizens like Ginny Wood, a retired bush pilot. She called the proposal “a pig in a poke” and shredded the AEC´s assurances, but local commerce and media were still boosting Chariot as a boon to the north; “located in the wilderness, far away from human habitation.”

“…the village of Point Hope was only 31 miles from ground zero”…and seasonally occupied.,. ground zero itself — to collect the eggs of cliff—nesting birds.”

But Chariot survived and contracts for ´health and safety studies´ were promised as politicians in Alaska and Washington were embroiled in struggles with AEC and Livermore — Teller´s own empire. An AEC biologist, John Wolfe, who appreciated the north and its people, was appointed to oversee the study.  After visiting the Arctic, he said, “Not infrequently it is described as remote, barren and climatically rigorous….It is not remote to the Eskimo, the Arctic fox, the ptarmigan, the flowering plants blooming by the thousands…and the arctic climate is most salubrious to indigenous dwellers among which are some of the most majestic animals of the earth, not excluding man.”

He hired University of Alaska biologists to work on the project, they saw it as an opportunity to do fieldwork, but also suspected, “that we were the tame biologists they had bought.” In 1959, that institution bestowed an honorary PhD. on Teller. The ´tame biologists´ turned out to be strong opponents of Chariot and supporters of the Eskimo people who opposed the project and scientists were increasingly disturbed at the manipulation and misrepresentation of data.

Plans and surveys continued without any communication to the residents of Point Hope, the supportive scientists were aghast. The community of Point Hope, closest to the proposed blast site was not on the list of visited places. Still living in a traditional way, the Eskimos were literate in English, politically sophisticated, skilled communicators and were well-informed and aware of world events. They knew much about the results of Japan & South Pacific bombing. They loved their land and all the lived on it and in the sea around. They sent a unanimously approved petition to the AEC. “We, the undersigned the Point Hope Village Council do not want to see the explosion at the near area of our village Point Hope for any reason and at any time.”

The local media, fed by the AEC, was claiming that “these natives living largely a primitive life would not be disturbed…or suffer future ill effects”. In March 1960 the AEC finally met the people of Point Hope. The degree of preparation of the locals and their questions and reactions were a surprise to the AEC men who thought they could easily sell Chariot. After much prevarication and outright lying by the AEC boys, “we will protect your interests completely”, enough was enough. Outspoken Kitty Kinneeveauk was knowledgeable and articulate, talked about AEC´s other projects and their disastrous results; she, council leader Daniel Lisbourne and others kept asking embarrassing questions & ended up by reinforcing their petition and accusing other Alaskans as supporters of Chariot because they were profiting from it. Absolutely true. The community of Point Hope got all the mendacity down on tape and remained implacably opposed to Chariot. O´Neill devotes a whole chapter to the data then known about the effects of bombing Japan, and tests in Nevada and Bikini, showing indeed that those in power for AEC were lying from one end of Alaska to the other.

I read this book at the same time I read ´the GIRL in SASKATOON: A Meditation on Friendship, Memory and Murder´ by Sharon Butala. They are vastly different books. Hers is ultimately a meditation on the nature of evil, as expressed in the murder of one of her school colleagues. ´The Firecracker Boys´ is also a meditation on the nature of evil; the evil of men with the power of knowledge and money who abuse both for their own ambitions with little feeling for the immense destruction they did and could unleash.

O´Neill leads us through the labyrinths of evil, but he also documents how concerned scientists, citizens and workers throughout the USA and the world were also capable of good; how many people of integrity sacrificed jobs, status and energy to organize and to educate others about the evil of war and war preparation that might and still could destroy the world. Remember this was the Cold War period and undercover agents were everywhere, even in Alaska; intimidation was real and dangerous for many. Citizen groups were alerted to the violation of law and the unauthorized use of Native Land and worked with the Eskimos. Groups concerned with the dangers of radiation were in contact exchanging and distributing information, using the slow and awkward ´Gestetner´ machine to copy in those pre— internet and photocopying days. More lies were revealed and doubts were spreading about the ´peaceful bomb´ by conservation societies whose members clearly understood the effects of thermonuclear explosions. The contract scientists in the field were in a major ethical quandary as their findings were ignored or misrepresented. Those who were on contract from the University of Alaska were fired from there by its pro—AEC president. Churches got involved — on both sides. Still the opposition to Chariot grew, forming the early peace—environment alliance that happened in Canada at the same time. By 1961, “…the ripple was widening. It was becoming, in fact, a wave.”

I felt as I read through the description of the ´wave´ that I was in a much neglected meditation on good. It is not easy; today we see the same abuses of knowledge and power on greater, even more destructive levels, the horror of the widespread use of ´Depleted Uranium´ containing weapons on innocent people in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and where else? All this serves as an example of the evil we confront now, as innocent people — some whom I have know — die from the effects of DU. Weapons with DU emit radioactivity just as other forms of Uranium do, but without a nuclear bomb, just impact and dissemination can spreads the deadly isotopes. Enormous and obscene military spending, the use of DU, continuous war on earth and soon in space and the revival of building nuclear weapons are being rebuilt in many forms around the world — but mainly in the USA — are all part of our daily confrontation with evil.

Back to “Spiking the Wheels of Chariot” and the final chapters of this true life thriller. By 1961, more Alaskans were questioning the wisdom of a nuclear harbour and in the USA main stream media were also running articles that expressed doubts about the blast. Support groups were springing up across the USA. New political officials in the federal government were concerned about native land rights and the effects on Eskimos and their environment of the Chariot project. The meteorology of the blast time, the geologic effects on rocks and permafrost and more public information about the biological effects were raising major
qualms about the blast — even its value as research data for ´peaceful bombs´ elsewhere like Panama were in doubt. In 1962 the AEC commissioners were concerned about “intervening political events” like a Test Ban Treaty.

The Sedan Bomb, exploded in Nevada on July 6, 1962, was the answer and face saver. “…the largest explosion to have occurred on North America up to that point was substantially dirtier” than the claim that 95% of its radioactivity was contained; not so, it spread across the USA in immediate clouds and crossed the Canadian border. But the AEC could then claim that they did not need the Chariot blast in Alaska, it got the data they sought from Sedan. But in reality the AEC had “internal analyses that recognized the political and public relations influence of certain “small but very vocal groups.”

“And something larger than Project Chariot had been knocked off course. Bogged down also was Edward Teller´s headlong rush to establish Plowshare as a highly visible affirmation of the value of fission. Indeed, the civilian application of nuclear energy — other than for electric power generation — never regained its momentum.”

Scientists who put their intellectual integrity on the line were later refused academic positions in the USA because of AEC interference and one who returned to Alaska to do research, Don Foote, died after a minor car accident in 1969. Another, William Pruitt became a Canadian and is recognized now as “the father of North American boreal ecology.” In 1993 he and his colleague Leslie Viereck were awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Alaska ´in recognition of the very actions for which the men had lost their jobs thirty years earlier.´

In his Epilogue, Afterword and Appendix on Methodology, O´Neill brings us up to date on the many results of the proposed project, response to it and its cancellation, the history of those involved, the current political USA political situation and his avenues and sources during research for this book.

For me, in the end, this story is an affirmation of the rights of citizens to know, to organize and to control their own lives. To never forget that social movements are effective; in day´s world we are needed more than ever. Around the world groups organize, inform and act, often at great danger to themselves, to present an alternative to cynical, violent and greedy political powers t