Reviews and Comments

Best western I ever read

(I need some time to process this, so will rate at a later date)

Epilogue: Lotta right wing ethno-nationalism going around these days. But future is undeniably pluralist under threat of climate change. Gaza has had a big impact on the minds of the young: the vexed issue of bystanding, failure to assist victims, failure of elders. But they see more clearly “never again for anyone”

Decolonization, destruction of white supremecy, and battling ethnic-nationalism should be enough to bring together most of the work. Alas, no. Compares Zionism with White supremacism and Hindu supremacism, showing how the influences entangle. So many literary references! So righteous! The “colour line” undergirds this. We are all victims of modernity — clashing narratives of the Shoah, slavery, and colonialism.

Black- and African-Jewish relations. The premier event of the 20th C was not WW2, or the end of the Cold War, but decolonization. ”US war-making abroad, and race-making at home” adds to the strife between east and west.

From 1970s US unhealthy consumption of the Holocaust, then became primary producer of Shoah memory, which pulled it Right. Jewish replacement theory on the one hand, but pro-Israel on the other. Paradox? Hypocrisy? Israel as a leader in “civilization vs barbarism” which Christian Right follows. Decolonization is still happening today, and is a threat to Western powers and Israel.

Writes the terrible stuff Jews endured during the war, about attitudes towards Jews at the time and how they flipped. Holocaust remembrance became entry ticket to EU. German “phylosemitisim” lead to “a special preferential relationship without Israel seeing itself as obligated to reciprocate” same for US et al. Points out no war guilt towards the 100s of thousands of Africans that died in German colonies.

Part 1: PM examines the Shoah and Israeli identity, how it changed to a sort of muscular victim. He talks about the sway of Zionism in pre-/post-colonial Asia, when nationalism flared. Like PM’s other books, he comes down hard on the hypocrisy of the West and its racial double standard. The danger is racist Ethno-nationalism, which reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s argument in The Message.

Really enjoyed this one. The challenge he set up for himself in writing about this battle, with all the intertwined stories and characters, and the execution were bang on.

This is the final book in the First Law trilogy, which I can’t stop recommending to people. The way it all wraps up, coiled tightly like a spring in a watch, powering the most intricate hands round-and-round as it tells the story. Brilliant!

In order to flourish as individuals and a society we must free ourselves from the strictures of standardized testing, industrialized education, “accelerated learning”, technocratic utopianism, solutionism, longtermism, white supremacy and eugenic thinking, the carceral state, credit scoring and the “ordinal society” (See Fourcade and Healy), and more! It is hard to be imaginative when we are oppressed… but we have to be imaginative to overthrow the oppressors. In an ultimately hopeful argument, Benjamin provides example after example of real projects where humans work together to protect one another and lift one another up. She argues for “radical interdependence” and building a safe, equitable society to further our collective “radical imagination.”

Ch: Blind spot is mis-interpretation of Rawls. Although he tried to unite positive & negative liberty, he actually prioritized the negative: autonomy depends on well-governed state; not everyone will engage with politics, ie political equality is merely a good competing with other goods. This gave neolibs their opening, and the people permission not to use their voice. Ends by saying she is not going to fix Rawls.

Prologue: Recent political outcomes have not matched political beliefs. We're “surprised” by a blind spot. Need a new justice-focused political economy that allows for human flourishing: "power-sharing liberalism". Political equality protects justice; justice achieved by democracy. Identifies with fallibilist, corrigibilist democratic eudaemonism. (Kinda Deweyen pragmatism. Speaks of “non-domination”… Anarchism?)

Abandoned at 25%. Just not enjoying it… so many other books out there that need reading!