ReligiousLeftLaw.com

For bibliophiles, readers, researchers … and perhaps the curious, or those with significant discretionary time

I recently completed three comparatively short bibliographies that may be of interest to some of our readers:

• Chinese Law and Legal History
• Coffee: cultivation, commodity, and culture
• Sugar

And among several bibliographies I recently updated, I’ve chosen three to highlight:

• Classical Chinese Worldviews
• The Emotions
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law

Whoever runs the Bureau of Prisons Should Be Called to Account If this is True

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale was sent on Sunday to the notorious Communications Management Unit (CMU) at the maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary (USP) at Marion, Illinois to serve a 45-month sentence, rather than to the low-security prison at Butner, North Carolina, where federal Judge Liam O’Grady had recommendedhe go. 

Butner is a prison hospital complex, and O’Grady was cognizant of Daniel’s need for psychological therapy to deal with post traumatic stress disorder from his time as a U.S. Air Force drone operator. 

USP Marion, on the other hand, is a former “Supermax” prison that was built in the early 1960s as a replacement for Alcatraz. It was converted into a CMU to keep terrorists from being in contact with the media. The Bureau of Prisons, which apparently knows better than a federal judge, decided that the American public must be protected from Daniel Hale’s dangerous ideas, like the notion that we shouldn’t murder innocent civilians with drones.

The Republic’s Liberal Democratic Constitutional Crisis — a flailing and failing capitalist democratic polity

First, please read (and share!), if you have not already, this article by Adolph Reed, Jr.: “The Whole Country is the Reichstag.” Then, please read, again, if you’ve not already done so (and share!), Neil H. Buchanan’s equally alarming analysis for Verdict, “Dead Democracy Walking.” Finally, what follows is a substantial portion from a recent opinion piece last month by Robert Kagan for The Washington Post (also share worthy). Alas, the people that absolutely should read this material will likely not do so. Together, they rightly strike an apocalyptic tone in a time and place in which denial, self-deception, and wishful thinking are tied to illusions and delusions that shape the minds of millions of our fellow Americans.

“Our constitutional crisis is already here”

By Robert Kagan, contributing columnist, The Washington Post

September 23, 2021

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.” — James Madison

“The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

Meanwhile, the amateurish ‘stop the steal’ efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to ‘find’ more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may ‘revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election’ by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed ‘technical infractions,’ including obstructing the view of poll watchers.

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.

Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.

Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.

These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality. They assumed that the new republic’s vast expanse and the historic divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable barriers to national movements based on party or personality. ‘Petty’ demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent interests.

Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place, therefore, depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party

In recent decades, however, party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible. In such circumstances, the Framers left no other check against usurpation by the executive — except (small-r) republican virtue.

Critics and supporters alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in American history. Because his followers share fundamentally conservative views, many see Trump as merely the continuation, and perhaps the logical culmination, of the Reagan Revolution. This is a mistake: Although most Trump supporters are or have become Republicans, they hold a set of beliefs that were not necessarily shared by all Republicans. Some Trump supporters are former Democrats and independents. In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.

Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic Party was the home of white supremacists until they jumped to George Wallace in 1968 and later to the Republicans. Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself.

What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. Although the Founders feared the rise of a king or a Caesar, for two centuries Americans proved relatively immune to unwavering hero-worship of politicians. Their men on horseback — Theodore Roosevelt, Grant, even Washington — were not regarded as infallible. This was true of great populist leaders as well. William Jennings Bryan a century ago was venerated because he advanced certain ideas and policies, but he did not enjoy unquestioning loyalty from his followers. Even Reagan was criticized by conservatives for selling out conservative principles, for deficit spending, for his equivocal stance on abortion, for being ‘soft’ on the Soviet Union.

Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — ‘losers,’ to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the ‘Mitch McConnell Republicans.’ His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.

There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites,” his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. ‘I’m not going to add to the numbers,’ he told a reporter.

Because the Trump movement is less about policies than about Trump himself, it has undermined the normal role of American political parties, which is to absorb new political and ideological movements into the mainstream. Bryan never became president, but some of his populist policies were adopted by both political parties. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters might not have wanted Biden for president, but having lost the nomination battle they could work on getting Biden to pursue their agenda. Liberal democracy requires acceptance of adverse electoral results, a willingness to countenance the temporary rule of those with whom we disagree. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed, it requires that people ‘endure error in the interest of social peace.’ Part of that willingness stems from the belief that the democratic system makes it possible to work, even in opposition, to correct the ruling party’s errors and overreach. Movements based on ideas and policies can also quickly shift their allegiances. Today, the progressives’ flag-bearer might be Sanders, but tomorrow it could be Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or someone else.

For a movement built around a cult of personality, these adjustments are not possible. For Trump supporters, the ‘error’ is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime. While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the party’s mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trump’s grip on Republican voters: not Sen. Josh Hawley, not Sen. Tom Cotton, not Tucker Carlson, not Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is still all about Trump. The fact that he is not in office means that the United States is ‘a territory controlled by enemy tribes,’ writes one conservative intellectual. The government, as one Trump supporter put it, ‘is monopolized by a Regime that believes [Trump voters] are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it.’ If so, the intellectual posits, what choice do they have but to view the government as the enemy and to become “united and armed to take care of themselves as they think best”?

The Trump movement might not have begun as an insurrection, but it became one after its leader claimed he had been cheated out of reelection. For Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 were not an embarrassing debacle but a patriotic effort to save the nation, by violent action if necessary. As one 56-year-old Michigan woman explained: ‘We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.’

The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trump’s supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties.

Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.

As it happens, however, that is what the American experiment in republican democracy requires. It is what the Framers meant by ‘republican virtue,’ a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind. Even James Madison, who framed the Constitution on the assumption that people would always pursue their selfish interests, nevertheless argued that it was ‘chimerical’ to believe that any form of government could ‘secure liberty and happiness without any virtue in the people.’ Al Gore and his supporters displayed republican virtue when they abided by the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 despite the partisan nature of the justices’ decision. (Whether the court itself displayed republican virtue is another question.)

The events of Jan. 6, on the other hand, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past. While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.

It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an aberration that will not be repeated. Because Trump supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there is every reason to expect more such episodes. Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a ‘landslide,’ that the “radical left Democrat communist party” stole the presidency in the ‘most corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our country’ and that they have to give it back. He has targeted for defeat those Republicans who voted for his impeachment — or criticized him for his role in the riot. Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. “You and your family will be killed very slowly,” the wife of Georgia’s top election official was texted earlier this year. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, Trump insists “there is no way they win elections without cheating. There’s no way.” So, if the results come in showing another Democratic victory, Trump’s supporters will know what to do. Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to fight” to restore “our American birthright.”

Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trump’s triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movement’s passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trump’s election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trump’s appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trump’s excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the party’s interests.

That plan seemed plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that the presence of “adults” would restrain him, protecting their traditional agenda and, in their view, the country’s interests, from his worst instincts.

This was a miscalculation. Trump’s grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the “adults” resigned or were run off. The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party — the Northeast moderate Republicans in Reagan’s day; the progressives in today’s Democratic Party — disappeared from Trump’s Republican Party. The only real issue was Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of Trump could either keep silent or leave.

The takeover extended beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors and intellectuals. All have a stake in the party’s viability; all ultimately depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump audiences — and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or lost clout.

It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trump’s defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to “conservative nationalism” and conservative populism. Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.

All this has left few dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.

With the party firmly under his thumb, Trump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.

The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.

This pincer assault has several advantages. Republican politicians and would-be policymakers can play the role of the legitimate opposition. They can rediscover their hawkish internationalist foreign policy (suspended during the Trump years) and their deficit-minded economics (also suspended during the Trump years). They can go on the mainstream Sunday shows and critique the Biden administration on issues such as Afghanistan. They can pretend that Trump is no longer part of the equation. Biden is the president, after all, and his administration is not exactly without faults.

Yet whatever the legitimacy of Republican critiques of Biden, there is a fundamental disingenuousness to it all. It is a dodge. Republicans focus on China and critical race theory and avoid any mention of Trump, even as the party works to fix the next election in his favor. The left hand professes to know nothing of what the right hand is doing.

Even Trump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized Trump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving “regular order” and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.

The result is that even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?

Today, we are in a time of hope and illusion. The same people who said that Trump wouldn’t try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one. Republicans have been playing this game for five years, first pooh-poohing concerns about Trump’s intentions, or about the likelihood of their being realized, and then going silent, or worse, when what they insisted was improbable came to pass. These days, even the anti-Trump media constantly looks for signs that Trump’s influence might be fading and that drastic measures might not be necessary.

The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.

But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then?” [….] The rest of this urgent opinion piece is here.

“Why are you carrying a gun?”

The reply to this question: “I carry a gun because it is my constitutional right to do so,” is not to proffer a compelling or persuasive or even honest answer as to precisely why one in fact believes it is necessary to carry a gun. One may of course supply any number of reasons (reasons ranging from the incoherent or false to the sensible and true, or the plausible to sound and so forth) to explain why one is carrying a gun, the putative constitutional right only accounting for the fact that one is carrying a gun is not a presumptive reason for a criminal offense (or that one is abiding by the law) as well as the fact that the sundry reasons one might proffer by way of an explanation are backed by an (alleged) constitutional liberty (one I happen to think does not does or should not exist, but that is beside the point for now). The knowledge of this alleged right often works in subsidiary conjunction with the actual reason(s) one has for carrying a gun. Thus, one is legally permitted, according to the prevailing interpretation of the first and second clauses of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (the axiomatic logic of which begins by stating the necessity of a ‘well-regulated Militia’ for ‘the security of a free State’), to carry a gun, but to invoke that as a necessary and sufficient reason for why one is carrying a gun is to avoid providing even a plausible or truthful reason for doing so, thus one is in fact not answering the question, “Why are you carrying a gun?” To properly answer the question one has to provide a minimal practical reason for one’s decision to exercise this particular (putative) constitutional liberty.

Water as a Natural Resource, Common Good, and Commodity: A Basic Bibliography

My latest bibliography: Water as a Natural Resource, Common Good, and Commodity, is available on my Academia page for viewing or download (in pdf format).

A brief introduction to the history and political economy of sugar

       

“Sugar has always been central to industry and empire, and has transformed global economic history. Slave driven sugar mills of the seventeenth century were one of the earliest factories. But the history of sugar predates these modern developments. It is a history that witnesses the transformation of an unassuming plant into a global commodity. For most of its existence, sugar in the human diet was a luxury that came in the form of sucrose extracted from sugar cane. Only in the nineteenth century did sugar beet become a competitor to sugar cane. And only starting in the 1970s did sucrose start losing out to high-fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners that dominate the contemporary industrialized [agricultural] diet.

What began as a grass native to Southeast Asia was picked up in Persia by Arab traders. They were the first to introduce sugar to the European palate, as the Umayyad Empire expanded into Europe through Spain and Sicily during the seventh and eighth centuries CE. Later, crusaders established sugar plantations in the Levan and Mesopotamia, and brought new of what was considered and exotic spice from the Orient. European nobility then started to incorporate sugar as a luxurious additive, elevating the flavor of food and forming part of the stock for apothecaries. By 1440, sugar began replacing honey in the diet of European nobility. [Fernand] Braudel notes [in Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th-18^th Century, Vol, II: The Wheels of Commerce (1982)] that in 1544 there was a German saying, Zucker verderbt keine Speis (‘sugar spoils no dish’).

Sugar first came to the so-called New World on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. This set the foundation for centuries of African slave labor sustaining sugar cane plantations in the Americas. By the seventeenth century, the French and British had acquired a voracious appetite for coffee, tea, and cocoa; because of this hot beverage revolution, sugar was no longer a luxury item and became an everyday good. The British were one of the first nations to move away from a starch-rich diet towards a sugar-rich diet. By the end of the eighteenth century, sugar was a staple in Britain, as many cups of sweet tea were incorporated into the diets of workers, providing a ‘calorie-laden stimulant that warms the body and blunts the pangs of hunger.’ [Sidney] Mintz notes that this change in diet coincided with the Industrial Revolution, exemplifying one sort of modernization. [….]

       

Sugar is central to the colonial history of the formation of many states and territories, such as Hawaii, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Indonesia, India, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Some suggest that sugar was the driving force of imperial expansion. Others propose that imperial expansion reduced the price of sugar, enabling popular consumption. Regardless, sugar (along with coffee, tea, and cocoa) played an important part in the expansion of the British and other European empires.

Sugar may very well have been central to the history of modern trade law because the nature of sugar production lends itself to competing transnational interests. Sugar cane harvested from the fields must be processed into raw sugar. The mill that processes cane into raw sugar must be close to the fields to ensure that the cane does not spoil. One mill would be a center of power fed by multiple peripheral sugar cane fields. As such, mill owners often constituted a sugar elite within their own country, with ties to international capital, or were owned by foreign investors. People could eat moist, raw sugar, but the demand was highest for white, refined sugar. Refining was also where much of sugar’s economic value was added. Most refineries were located in industrialized countries. One refinery might source its raw sugar from different points around the world. Thus, there was also a global pattern of an industrialized center drawing sugar from mills in the periphery. All of this created a relationship of dependence and disparity of power between sugar growers and sugar refineries.” — Michael Fakhri, Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

A mere taste of the relevant literature:

• Abbott, Elizabeth. Sugar: A Bittersweet History (Penguin Canada, 2008).
• Ayala, César J. American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
• Beachey, R.W. The British West Indies Sugar Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Basil Blackwell, 1957).
• Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (Verso, 1997).
• Dye, Alan. Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929 (Stanford University Press, 1998).
• Fakhri, Michael. Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
• Galloway, Jock H. The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• McGillivray, Gillian. Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959 (Duke University Press, 2009).
• Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Viking Penguin, 1985).
• Richardson, Ben. Sugar: Refined Power in a Global Regime (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
• Richardson, Ben. Sugar (Polity Press, 2015).
• Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Sheridan, Richard. Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies (Caribbean Universities Press, 1974).
• Sitterson, J. Carlyle. Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950 (University of Kentucky Press, 1953).
• Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944]).

The three images above are found on the website Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora.

My bibliography on slavery is here.

British Imperialism in India: Economics, Politics, and Ideology

          
My brief reading guide on British imperialism in India is now available for viewing (or download in pdf format) here.

It joins a number of other compilations related in one way or another to India, both its past and present:

• B.R. Ambedkar
• Communism in India
• Constitutionalism in India
• The Life, Work, and Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi
• Hinduism
• Indian/Indic Philosophies
• Jainism
• The Varna & Caste System in India

Please note: I also have a fair number of bibliographies on my Academia page (listed in alphabetical order) about various dimensions of Islam and the lives of Muslims with material on this or that aspect of Islam and Muslim life in India.

       

Finally, here is a perhaps idiosyncratic list I put together on “many-things-Indian,” from history and economics, to politics and culture, which should serve by way of a sophisticated introduction for those fairly new to the “wonder that was” and wonder that is, India.

• Alam, Fakrul and Radha Chakravarty, eds. The Essential Tagore. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Anderson, Perry. The Indian Ideology. London: Verso, 2013.
• Arora, Namit. Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. Gurgaon, Haryana, India: Penguin Viking, 2021.
• Bardhan, Pranab. Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Bass, Gary J. The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan. New York: Vintage Books, 2013.
• Berenschot, Ward. Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Bilgrami, Akeel. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal, eds. Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013.
• Choudhry, Sujit, Madhav Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Dalrymple, William. The Last Mughal—The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
• Desai, Meghnad. The Rediscovery of India. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011 (Allen Lane, 2009).
• Desai, Radhika. Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics. New Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2004.
• Dhar, P.N. Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Drèze Jean and Amartya Sen. An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
• Frankel, Francine, et al., eds. Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Ganguly, Sumit and Rahul Mukherji. India since 1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Gidla, Sujatha. Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
• Guha, Ramchandra. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. New York: Ecco, 2007.
• Guha, Ramchandra, ed. Makers of Modern India. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Habib, Irfan, ed. Akbar and His India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Hansen, Thomas Blom. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe. Religion, Caste and Politics in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe, ed.  Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Jayal, Niraja Gopal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds. The Oxford Companion to Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Jenkins, Rob. Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Kihlnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• Kohli, Atul, ed. The Success of India’s Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Larson, Gerald James. India’s Agony Over Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995.
• McLeod, Hew. Sikkhism. London: Penguin Books, 1997.
• Metcalf, Barbara D. and Thomas R. Metcalf. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2^nd ed., 2006.
• Moosvi, Shireen. Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994.
• Nikam, N.A. and Richard P. McKeon, ed. and trans. The Edicts of Aśoka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Robins, Nick. The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational. London: Pluto Press, 2^nd ed., 2012.
• Robinson, Francis. The Mughal Emperors and the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran, and Central Asia. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
• Ruparelia, Sanjay, Sanjay Reddy, John Harris, and Stuart Corbridge, eds. Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? London: Routledge, 2011.
• Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India. Penguin, 2007.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of Hindu Nationalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
• Strong, John S. The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. New York: Oxford University Press, revised ed., 1998.
• Vanaik, Achin. The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India. London: Verso, 1996.
• Varshney, Ashutosh. Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Warder, A.K. Indian Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 3^rd ed., 2000.          
• Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 6^th ed., 2000.

The USS Kitty Hawk “mutiny” as part of greater antiwar resistance among sailors from 1970-1972

During the American war in Vietnam on the night of October 12/13, 1972,* a racial conflict between white and black sailors aboard the United States Navy aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk escalated into a “mutiny” or “riot” or “rebellion,” presumably led by African American sailors (‘The ship’s complement consisted of 4,483 sailors, aircrew, and Marines, 302 of whom were black.’). Accounts vary as to what precisely precipitated the mutiny (and various conditions contributed to the proximate causes), one stating it began when Marines attempted to disrupt a protest meeting of black sailors. The meeting had been called in response to what occurred when the warship was in Subic Bay, the night before its scheduled departure:

“…[S]erious fighting erupted at the Subic Bay men’s club, the San Paquito. On the evening of the twelfth, after the first full day of combat in the Tonkin Gulf, the ship’s intelligence investigator exacerbated still smoldering tensions by calling in only black sailors for questioning and possible criminal action related to the brawl at Subic. Outraged at what they considered blatant discrimination, over one hundred blacks gathered for an angry meeting on the mess deck at approximately 8 P.M. The ship’s Marine detachment was summoned to suppress the meeting, and an explosive situation soon developed. Commander Benjamin Cloud, the executive officer and a black man himself, entered the area and attempted to restore calm by ordering the blacks and the Marines to separate ends of the ship. Moments later, however, Captain Marland Townsend, the commanding officer, arrived and issued conflicting orders. As confusion spread, the blacks and the armed Marines encountered each other unexpectedly on the hangar deck, and a bitter clash quickly broke out. The fighting spread rapidly, with bands of blacks and whites marauding throughout the ship’s decks and attacking each other with fists, chains, wrenches, and pipes. [….] Finally, after a 2:30 A.M. meeting in the ship’s forecastle, the fighting subsided. The uprising left forty whites and six blacks injured. Of the twenty-five sailors arrested for the incident, all were black.” (David Cortright)

Twenty-nine sailors–all but three of them black–eventually were charged with crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and 19 were found guilty of at least one charge.

The “mutiny” should be viewed as part of widespread antiwar protests within the US armed forces, in this case, as part of the movement called SOS (Stop Our Ships/Support Our Sailors). H. Bruce Franklin provides the requisite historical context which should preclude us from reducing this incident to solely racial tensions and provocations:

“In 1970 and 1971, ships had been sporadically forced out of action by outbreaks and even sabotage by crew members. Occasional inconspicuous newspaper articles allowed perceptive members of the general public to get inklings of what was happening to the fleet. An early example was the destroyer Richard B. Anderson, which was kept from sailing to Vietnam for eight weeks when crew members deliberately wrecked an engine. Toward the end of 1971, the sailors’ antiwar activities coalesced into a coherent movement called SOS (Stop Our Ships/Support Our Sailors) that emerged on three of the gigantic aircraft carriers crucial to the Tonkin Gulf Strategy [and later, Operation Linebacker]: the USS Constellation, the USS Coral Sea, and the USS Kitty Hawk. (One early act was a petition by 1,500 crew members of the Constellation demanding that Jane Fonda’s antiwar show be allowed to perform on board.) On these three ships alone that fall, thousands of crew members signed antiwar petitions, published onboard antiwar newspapers, and supported the dozens of crew members who refuse to board for Vietnam duty.

In March 1972 the aircraft carrier USS Midway received orders to leave San Francisco Bay for Vietnam. A wave of protests and sabotage swept the ship, hitting the press when dissident crewmen deliberately spilled three thousand gallons of oil into the bay. In June the attack carrier USS Ranger was ordered to sail from San Diego to Vietnam. The Naval Investigative Service reported large-scale clandestine movement among the crew and at least twenty acts of physical sabotage, culminating in the destruction of the main reduction gear of an engine; repairs forced a four-and-a-half month delay in the ship’s sailing. In July the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was prevented from sailing by a major fire deliberately set by crewmen, which caused millions of dollars of damage to the captain’s and admiral’s quarters of the ship. In September and October the crew of the Corral Sea, which had been publishing the antiwar newspaper We Are Everywhere for a year, staged renewed protests against the war, with over a thousand crewmen signing a petition to “Stop Our Ship.” It was forced to return to San Francisco Bay, where crew members held a national press conference and helped organize rallies and other demonstrations. Almost a hundred crew members, including several officers, refused Vietnam service and jumped ship in California and Hawaii. In September crew members of the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga organized their own “Stop It Now” movement, and navy intelligence tried unsuccessfully to break up the SOS movement on the showpiece carrier USS Enterprise, home of the antiwar paper SOS Enterprise Ledger. A bloody September battle between groups of marines on the amphibious landing ship USS Sumter in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam was not made public until the following January.”

Franklin proceeds to note the outbreak that took place on the Kitty Hawk—“where organized antiwar activities (including publication of the antiwar paper Kitty Litter) had continued during its eight-month tour off Vietnam”—only to be followed several days later by fighting on the Kitty Hawk’s oiler, the USS Hassayampa. “The Kitty Hawk was forced to retire to San Diego, whence it sailed to San Francisco in early January, where it underwent a ‘six-month refitting job.’ The sailors’ movement had thus removed this major aircraft carrier from the war.”

That “Black Power” ideology and political praxis was making inroads among African American soldiers in the antiwar movement is evidenced in what is described as the “largest and most significant” of these antiwar protests and rebellions, namely, one that took place aboard the USS Constellation in early November 1972, and “has been aptly described as ‘the first mass mutiny in the history of the U.S. Navy.’”

Friends and family of Kitty Hawk SOS sailors wait at Fleet Landing in San Diego to distribute copies of the ‘Kitty Litter,’ the sailors’ anti-war underground newspaper. Photo by Norman L. Bleier

“In October, during training operations off the Southern California coast, black crew members formed an organization called the ‘Black Fraction,’ with the aim of protecting minority interests in promotion policies and in the administration of military justice. Throughout October the group held several meetings, including one attended by the ship’s executive officer, where programs were developed to defend blacks subjected to court-martial proceedings and to examine the ship’s records for evidence of discrimination in non-judicial punishment. As the organization grew in strength, the command, on November 1, singled out fifteen leading members of Black Fraction as agitators and ordered that six of them be given immediate less-than-honorable discharges. At approximately the same time, a notice appeared in the ship’s plan of the day announcing that 250 additional men were to be administratively discharged. Fearing that most of these punitive releases would be directed at them and angry at the command’s apparent efforts to suppress their activities, over one hundred sailors, including a number of whites, staged a sit-in at the after mess deck on November 3 and demanded that the ship’s commander, Captain J.D. Ward, personally hear their grievances. The captain refused to acknowledge them, however, and the dissidents continued their strike throughout the day and into the early morning hours on November 4, refusing a direct order to report for muster on the flight deck. As tensions aboard the ship mounted, a series of high-level consultations were held among Captain Ward, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Zumwalt in Washington, and other senior naval commanders. To avert another Kitty Hawk, the officials reluctantly decided to cut sea operations short and return the rebels to San Diego as a ‘beach detachment.’ Captain Ward pulled the ship into the harbor on the fourth and allowed more hand one hundred thirty men to go ashore. The Constellation returned a few days later to pick up the dissidents, but the men refused to board ship, and on the morning of November 9 staged a defiant dockside strike—perhaps the largest act of mass defiance in naval history. Despite the seriousness of their action, not one of the one hundred thirty sailors was arrested. Several of the men received early discharges, but most were simply reassigned to shore duty.” (David Cortright)

* The date is sometimes given as Oct. 8, as that is when the USS Kitty Hawk was docked at Subic Bay, in the City of Olongapo, the Philippines, wherein racial segregation was enforced. On that evening, a black sailor went on stage at the enlisted men’s club [the EM Club] and shouted “Black power! This war is the white man’s war!” A glass was thrown that hit him in the head, and a fight between blacks and whites broke out. “Around 12:30 am on October 9, another incident occurred when a black airman, Dwight Horton, was en route to the ship. He was arrested for fighting with two white petty officers, though he contested that they beat him, arguing he could not fight back because his arm was in a cast. When he returned to the Kitty Hawk, the airman told the other black sailors about what happened, which further agitated them.”

References:

• Cortright, David. Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2005 (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975).
• Fanklin, H. Bruce. Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
• Freeman, Gregory A. Troubled Water: Race, Mutiny, and Bravery on the USS Kitty Hawk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• Sherwood, John Darrell. Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet during the Vietnam War Era. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

Relevant Bibliography: The Vietnam War (or, the ‘American War’ in Indochina)

Reading Books in Prison

“A Canon for the American Prisoner”

John J. Lennon in conversation with Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Review of Books, Oct. 5, 2021

Everyone needs to escape sometimes—in their minds. But to read involves examining the deeper way people live their lives. That is happening in fiction in a way that it’s not on television (except in the best kind of TV drama). There’s something that books do for us that we just can’t get anywhere else. This is critically important for people in prison because so much of prison is trying to master the art of becoming: Who do you want to become?

*          *          *

I went to prison a kid, and books literally saved my life.

*          *          *

This is what Freedom Reads is about. It’s creating opportunities for the conversation that goes: ‘Yo, you should check this book out: Paradise Lost.’ ‘Nah, I ain’t trying to read that.’ ‘Yo, John wrote the intro. Check that joint out, man! He actually mapped it out. This is about what we dealing with.’ When we read a book in community, your reaction may be: ‘I think the book means this.’ To which, I’m saying: ‘I don’t know, man; maybe it doesn’t mean that. Maybe it means this.’ And voicing your opinion about that gives the book room to become something else, and gives us room to become something else.

In 2001, Reginald Dwayne Betts was about five years into a nine-year sentence in a Virginia prison for a carjacking he’d committed at age sixteen. That was the year that I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street, when I was twenty-four years old. I am now twenty years into a sentence of twenty-eight years-to-life. In that time, I’ve become a journalist writing from prison. Since his release, Betts has become an acclaimed poet and attorney. His 2018 article for The New York Times Magazine about his journey from teenage carjacker to working lawyer won the National Magazine Award. His most recent collection of poetry, Felon, explores the post-incarceration experience; just last month, he was appointed one of the 2021 MacArthur fellows (an award commonly known as the “genius grant”).

I currently live in Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison set in New York’s Catskill Mountains. It was a creative writing workshop in Attica, of all places, that led me toward my vocation. In 2019, I wrote a review of Felon and Betts saw it, responding in a tweet: “I’m certain no one has written anything about my writing and life that has hit me so hard in the gut.” With this connection, Dwayne and I subsequently became friends. (Currently, in his capacity as a lawyer, he is pursuing a clemency petition for me, among others.)

Through Betts, I have become involved in the initiative he created in 2019, Freedom Reads, to curate microlibraries and install them in prisons and juvenile detention centers across the United States and Puerto Rico. It’s a project close to his heart.

“I did time where knowledge was always obtained a book at a time,” Betts told me, when I called him recently, “and a lot of the knowledge was bootleg, things I’d later discard as absurd, things that sowed hate or envy or just misinformation.”

Dudley Randall’s anthology The Black Poets and John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers were two books that came around on the cart when he was in solitary confinement. Those two will likely be among the titles in the five-hundred-book collections that Freedom Reads is putting together, the first to be installed in Massachusetts’s Norfolk (where Malcolm X once served time) and Concord, with five by the end of 2021, and Louisiana’s Angola soon to follow.

When Betts got out of prison, in 2005, he enrolled at Prince George’s Community College and took a job at Karibu Books, a bookstore in Bowie, Maryland. He started a book club there, aiming to encourage boys to read, which soon brought in groups of kids aged between six and sixteen on Sunday afternoons to talk about writers from August Wilson to Walter Dean Myers.

Betts went on to the University of Maryland at College Park and earned his bachelor’s degree, then got an MFA from Warren Wilson College and began his writing career. Before long, he was a published author: his books include A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (2009) and the poetry collections Shahid Reads His Own Palm (2010) and Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015). Now he’s pursuing a PhD at Yale Law School.

Today, I can be sure that whenever I call from the prison yard, Dwayne will always pick up. We talk about the magazine pieces we’re writing, the solo theater piece he’s working on. We’ve become writing partners, keeping each other honest with identical due dates for our book manuscripts. And, of course, we talk about the Freedom Reads library. His latest inspiration for the project has been to enlist an array of journalists, novelists, and poets to write new forewords, in the form of letters, for sixteen classics that Freedom Reads will publish under its own imprint as new editions for the collection.

Nicholas Dawidoff is writing a letter for Great Expectations, Jamaica Kincaid is contributing one for Jane Eyre, as is George Saunders for Dubliners. The list of contributors also includes Nikole Hannah-Jones, Marlon James, Laila Lalami, and Kiese Laymon. (I am writing a letter for Paradise Lost, so resonant with themes of envy, pride, disobedience, and redemption.) Betts’s hope is that these new editions, along with access to many other well-chosen books, will lead people in prison to read these classic works of literature and find a way to the imaginative freedom great writing offers. What follows is an edited transcript of our recent conversation about what reading in prison can mean. [….] The transcript of the conversation (the remainder of the essay) is here.

See too this piece from Mother Jones, “Books Have the Power to Rehabilitate. But Prisons Are Blocking Access to Them,” by Samantha Michaels (with photos by Carlos Chavarría), January/February 2020.  

Recommended:

• Bernstein, Lee (2010) America is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Brottman, Mikita (2016) The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s New York: HarperCollins.
• Chevigeny, Bell Gale, ed. (1999) Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years of Prison Writing. New York: Aracade.
• Coyle, William J. (1987) Libraries in Prisons: A Blending of Institutions. New York: Greenwood Press.
• Davies, Ioan (1990) Writers in Prison. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
• Desai, Ashwin (2014/Unisa Press, 2012) Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
• Franklin, H. Bruce (1978) The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Franklin, H. Bruce (1998) Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America. New York: Penguin Books.
• Fyfe, Janet (1992) Books Behind Bars: The Role of Books, Reading, and Libraries in British Reform, 1701-1911. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• Harlow, Barbara (1992) Barred: Women, Writing and Political Detention. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
• James, Joy, ed. (2003) Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• James, Joy, ed. (2005) The New Abolitionists: (neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Johnson, Paula C. (2003) Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison. New York: New York University Press.
• Karpowitz, Daniel (2017) College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Kornfeld, Phyllis (1997) Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe (2016) Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison. New York: New Press.
• Melville, Samuel (1972) Letters from Attica. New York: William Morrow and Co.
• Miller, D. Quentin, ed. (2005) Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
• Monroe, Gary (2009) The Highway Men Murals: Al Black’s Concrete Dreams. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
• Peltier, Leonard (Harvey Arden, ed.) (1999) Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
• Sachs, Albie (1990) The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. London: Paladin/Grafton Books.
• Salinas, Raúl (Louis G. Mendoza, ed.) (2006) raúlsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon is My Pen. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
• Scheffler, Judith A., ed. (2002) Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings, 200 [CE] to the Present. New York: Feminist Press.
• Schorb, Jodi. (2014) Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700-1845. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Barbara, ed. (1992) A Snake with Ice Water: Prison Writings by South African Women. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers.
• Suttner, Raymond (2001) Inside Apartheid’s Prisons: Notes and Letters of Struggle. Melbourne: Ocean Press/Pietermaritzburg, SA: University of Natal Press.
• Sweeney, Megan (2010) Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Waldman, Ayelet and Robin Levi, eds. (2011) Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s Books and Voice of Witness.

Related Bibliography: Punishment and Prison

The F Test

In the late 1960's and early 1970's I was coaching debate and teaching a variety of courses including Argumentation (also The Rhetoric of Black America, Group Discussion, Beginning Public Speaking, and Persuasion)  at San Fernando Valley State College - now CSU at Northridge. I became interested in Adorno's discussion of the authoritarian personality (discussed in my last post). So far as I am aware there was no human subjects committee and I had no empirical training (still do not).  

I decided to embark on an experiment. I had my students fill out Adorno's F test at the beginning of the class without their name and without an explanation of what the test was about. The class assignment was to give two well researched speeches (accompanied by outlines) arguing for and against the same proposition. At the end of the class, the students took the test again (unsigned and unexplained again). In the two classes I did this (not in the same year), there was a significant class shift away from the authoritarian personality.

The methodology of the test has been criticized; it surely could have been better constructed. Seana Shiffrin has argued that actors tend to take on aspects of roles they play. Here the change could be explained by the times the test was administered, by the students catching on to the test's purpose and the like. But I think the act of arguing both sides of the same question helps to undermine the authoritarian personality. At the same time I wonder what the effect of law school is on the personality of a law student - understanding it will have various effects - still there may be a general direction for most.

Trump and Fascism

The Summer issue of Dissent contains an article by Udi Greenberg, an Associate Professor of European History at Dartmouth. A principal theme of the article is to ask whether it was accurate or useful to pin the label fascist on Donald Trump. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Madeline Albright thought so, and so did Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. Obviously, there were similarities (racism, sexism, plutocracy, disrespect for law). Among the differences between fascism and Trump, Greenberg argues is that fascism was strongly supported by impoverished youth; Trump was most strongly supported by the propertied old, anxious to preserve their privileges. Fascism sought imperial military mobilization; Trump was a draft dodger who claimed to reject military adventures.

I want to underscore an aspect of Trumpist appeal that was shared by Hitler. Here, the Republican leaders are irrelevant. They can be believers or opportunists. I am focusing on the followers. The appeal I have in mind involves aspects of the authoritarian personality (See Adorno’s F scale). I do not claim it of all Republican supporters by any means.

The Republican playbook has been to play the race card and to paint the Democrats as anti-religious, socialist or lefty, elitist, anti-conventionalist softies (they portray Democrats as thinking they are too good to respect societal norms). Trump represented the anti-liberal emotional leader with the masculine strength to fight off these minorities who think they are better than law respecting white people. Yes, this does not fit with the assault on the capital. But, if the election is being stolen, revolution is thought to be appropriate – I think this fits Scalia’s vote in Bush v. Gore. 

More on the authoritarian personality soon.

What does it mean to be “pro-life”?

Political slogans are not meant to enlighten but to motivate (and perhaps polarize, intentionally or not), whatever part of the political spectrum from which they originate. In fact, they are often more obfuscatory than revelatory with regard to meaning and reference, serving largely as political signals and markers of political identity that drawn hard and fast lines between “us” and “them.” Arguably, political slogans on the Right exemplify these few salient facts better than those originating from the Left. To take one example, consider the “pro-life” rhetoric of right-wing evangelical opponents of abortion (and sometimes euthanasia) and their fellow travelers (many Catholics and putative conservatives). How is it that people who are, generally speaking (hence we can find exceptions to the rule), fanatic activists for “gun-rights,” perfervid militaristic patriots (they can be counted on to support all manner of militaristic adventurism and war), religious (and often ethnic) nationalists (ethno- and religious nationalism being the most dangerous and violent species of contemporary nationalism), against the Welfare State (whatever form it takes, the liberal version in the U.S. the weakest and stingiest of the available forms), against COVID vaccinations and preventative public health measures (the wearing of masks the most conspicuous and effective example of same), for the death penalty, and so forth and so on (when it comes to foreign policy, they prefer ‘dirty hands’ to clean ones). In brief, the slogan “pro-life” encompasses very little of what we might naturally or intuitively (and often should) think constitutes pro-life and thus not its converse, which it conceals and which in fact better symbolizes or represents a political worldview orientation that is relentlessly regressive and anti-democratic.

Thus pro-life rhetoric might be considered to incarnate and exemplify ideology ridden with contradictions and debilitating psychological phenomena for individuals and groups along a spectrum exhibiting episodic denial and self-deception, to chronic illusions and delusions (or simply pathological phantasies), some of these emblematic of psychosis. Without going into Freud’s controversial argument for a “death drive,” which is more suggestive and provocative than it is precise and explanatory (be it for mental repetition or human aggression), it does seem to be the case that what is ostensibly “pro-life” is, all things considered, “pro-death,” or exemplifying something akin to a death-drive (Trieb), be it analogically or metaphorically rendered. Loosely, the following mental states, emotions, and activities are said in one way or another to be suggestive of the death drive: a fear of falling apart or fragmentation or disintegration; destructiveness, including self-destructiveness (e.g., self-harming and suicide), intransigent hostility to the outside world or “reality;” envy; sadism; and strong, especially or peculiarly aggressive libidinal desires. Thus this death drive can be directed inward and/or outward, separately or simultaneously. This may amount, in the end, to a universal (unconscious or subconscious) wish or desire for the “the solace of dissolution” (Stephen Frosh). The death drive cannot be reduced, however, to a “lust for destruction and hate” if only because it enables if not moves us to think more about “those things cannot easily be wished away, but keep returning to plague us until we find ways of [satisfactorily] dealing with them—sadness and loss, failure and trauma, war and unbearable suffering,” as well as less dramatic cognitive and psychological phenomena from cognitive dissonance to dispositional vices (or ‘deadly sins’) and “the passions.” In Freudian terms, “pro-life” should mean what Freud conceptualized as the life drive or Eros,* having to do with the force of love, that is, the “libidinal energy that elaborates life and fuels the capacity of humans to come together to create and procreate,” and which “can be harnessed in opposition to destructiveness.”

I should add that one should not attempt to infer my views about abortion from this post, as these are shaped by Buddhism and do not line up with either of the typical expressions of “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” while acknowledging the law is not always appropriate for the enforcement of morality or ethics, despite conceding that abortion involves the taking of a life (and thus often but not invariably is an immoral or ‘evil’ act, one that includes mitigating factors) and thus has karmic consequences. I hope to post more on this later but should one be curious, please see Peter Harvey’s discussion in the chapter on “abortion and contraception” in his book, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 311-352.

* See, for example, Jonathan Lear’s Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990) as well as a slightly different take on “love” in Freudian psychoanalysis proffered by Ernest Wallwork’s Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991).

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