[Marxism] Les Payne, Journalist Who Exposed Racial Injustice, Dies at 76 - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/obituaries/les-payne-journalist-who-exposed-racial-injustice-dies-at-76.html
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[Marxism] Me, My Parents and Red Scares Long Gone

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/16/me-my-parents-and-red-scares-long-gone/
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[Marxism] Historians and economists clash over slavery

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THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
Shackles and Dollars
Historians and economists clash over slavery
By Marc Parry DECEMBER 08, 2016  PREMIUM

For Edward E. Baptist, the scandal was a gift. It had taken the Cornell 
University historian over a dozen years to produce a study tracing the 
creation of American capitalism to the expansion of slavery. It took 
less than one day for a short book review to turn his 400-page narrative 
into a cause célèbre.


The inciting review appeared in The Economist magazine. It faulted 
Baptist’s study, The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic Books, 2014), for 
exaggerating the brutality of bondage based on the questionable 
testimony of "a few slaves." Baptist fired back in Politico and The 
Guardian. The magazine’s critique, he wrote, "revealed just how many 
white people remain reluctant to believe black people about the 
experience of being black." The Economist, widely denounced online, 
published an apology.


The controversy stimulated both public discussion of slavery and sales 
of Baptist’s book. Within academe, though, some think it had another 
effect: to squelch debate over The Half Has Never Been Told. Skeptical 
scholars may have been wary of criticizing its arguments for fear of 
being perceived as apologists for slavery.


That silence is breaking. In a series of recent papers and scholarly 
talks, economists, along with some historians, have begun to raise 
serious questions about Baptist’s scholarship. Their critiques echo 
parts of the Economist review, only this time backed up by reams of 
economic research. The attack is notable because it has expanded beyond 
The Half Has Never Been Told to assail the wider movement to which that 
book belongs.


Over the past several years, a series of books has reshaped how 
historians view the connection between slavery and capitalism. These 
works show the role that coercion played in bringing about a modern 
market system that is more typically identified with freedom. At a 
moment of rising frustration with racial and economic inequality, they 
have won a level of attention and acclaim that academics dream about but 
almost never get. Some think the books’ forensic accounting of how slave 
labor was stolen may buttress the case for reparations.


What the economists are now assembling amounts to a battering ram aimed 
at the empirical foundations of these studies, which include Walter 
Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom 
(Harvard University Press) and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global 
History (Knopf). The critics, whose own scholarship stakes out similar 
turf, say the new histories are riddled with errors, make overblown 
claims, or distort evidence to suit their story lines.


"The shocking thing is how far they have deviated from the traditional 
strengths of history, in terms of using evidence and evaluating 
arguments," says Paul W. Rhode, who chairs the economics department at 
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and until recently served as 
co-editor of The Journal of Economic History.


The clash is a reckoning for two disciplines that have long developed in 
isolation. Some researchers believe that economic history would gain 
strength if historians and economists worked together. By September, 
though, the sniping over slavery had gotten so nasty that one scholar 
trying to build bridges between the camps, Caitlin Rosenthal, described 
herself as "kind of terrified." Rosenthal, a historian at the University 
of California at Berkeley, was about to visit Dartmouth College to speak 
at a public debate in which Baptist would confront the economists face 
to face. "I have no idea what’s going to happen," she said, adding, 
"It’s possible that it’s going to just be a huge fight."


The best way to understand this fight is to take a closer look at the 
book that has caused the most friction, The Half Has Never Been Told. 
When you think about the slave trade, what probably comes to mind are 
the voyages that brought some 600,000 to 650,000 African captives across 
the Atlantic to the territories that would eventually become the United 
States. The heart of Baptist’s study is a different slave migration, one 
that took place within those states.


Between about 1790 and 1860, traders and owners moved some one million 
enslaved people from older states like Virginia and Maryland to newer 
territories within the South’s dynamically expanding cotton economy. The 
slaves were marched in chains or shipped on boats to lands the U.S. had 
acquired from other empires and cleared of native peoples. At first, 
they ended up in Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carol

[Marxism] There’s a bitter new battle over whether slave torture was the foundation of the American economy - The Washington Post

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/12/theres-a-new-bitter-battle-over-whether-slave-torture-was-the-foundation-of-the-american-economy/
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[Marxism] I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/obituaries/peter-g-peterson-dies-power-from-wall-st-to-washington.html?hpw
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[Marxism] The Resistance needs better heroes!

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://www.nationofchange.org/2018/03/20/the-resistance-needs-better-heroes/
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[Marxism] Cambridge Analytica and Russian Bots Used the Same Strategy

[MM via Marxism]

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One of the big stories over the weekend was about the fact that the Trump 
campaign’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica, stole the Facebook data of millions 
of people in order to psychologically profile them for targeting.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy 
Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the 
promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and 
influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products 
work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more 
than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge 
employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in 
the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the 
private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, 
developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign 
in 2016.

I’ll have more to say about all of that later, but in digging into this story, 
I found a very interesting connection. What Mueller and his team of 
investigators will be interested in is whether or not there was a connection 
between this voter profiling with the kind of intrusion into social media he 
has already included in recent indictments of Russians.

One clue that might merely be coincidence is the timing. Here is what we learn 
from the indictment:

Starting at least in or around 2014, Defendants and their co-conspirators began 
to track and study groups on U.S. social media sites dedicated to U.S. politics 
and social issues. In order to gauge the performance of various groups on 
social media sites, the ORGANIZATION tracked certain metrics like the group’s 
size, the frequency of content placed by the group, and the level of audience 
engagement with that content, such as the average number of comments or 
responses to a post.

According to Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who is 
the main source for the article linked above, he met Steve Bannon in the fall 
of 2013 and by 2014 their work was underway.

But there is another confluence of events that is even more interesting. Back 
in October 2016, just days before the election, Joshua Green and Sasha 
Issenberg did some reporting on the Trump campaign and the work of Cambridge 
Analytica in particular. Here is how they described their strategy at the time:

Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink 
it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior 
official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: 
idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans…

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio 
stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style 
animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using 
audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: 
“Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be 
delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark 
posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as 
Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to 
depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the 
official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

Those Facebook “dark posts” seem to be a favorite tool used by Parscale and the 
Cambridge Analytica consultants. I’d bet that we haven’t even seen the tip of 
the iceberg in terms of how those were used during the campaign. But compare 
the above to what the Mueller investigation included in their indictment of the 
Russian bots.

In or around the latter half of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, 
through their ORGANIZATION-controlled personas, began to encourage U.S. 
minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote 
for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate.

In other words, in the final stages of the 2016 election, both the Trump 
campaign and the Russian bots engaged in a voter suppression strategy with core 
Clinton supporters. Is it possible that was merely a coincidence? You tell me.


https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/19/cambridge-analytica-and-russian-bots-used-the-same-strategy/
 


___

[Marxism] East Ghouta: Should socialists call for US intervention?

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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"The widespread confusion about the respective motives and affiliations of
the key players in the Syrian conflict, from the Americans to the Russians
to the Turks and the Kurds, is not surprising. Part of the explanation is
an entirely misplaced reflex reaction by sections of the left of defence of
the Russian gangster regime against US imperialism, an indefensible
nostalgic overhang from the Cold War days; but it is also due to the
confused and constantly shifting situation itself.

Just as US imperialism at one time supported Saddam Hussein, using him as a
surrogate in his war with Iran, and later turned against him and waged
full-scale war to destroy his regime; just as it bombed Gaddafi in the
1980s, targeting him personally and branding him the fount of all
subversion, then made him its accomplice in the practice of extraordinary
rendition, and finally intervened militarily to overthrow him; so too US
imperialism has switched eclectically from one zig-zag to another in
relation to the Assad regime. Along with Israel, it opposed Assad as an
ally of Iran and the godfather of Hezbollah; then it gratefully used his
services (along with Gaddafi’s) as a favourite torture rendition agent;
then, as in Libya, it exploited the revolt against him; now it is giving
him tacit support in the current civil war, largely through its support of
the Kurds. And yet in 2012 it was openly preparing to intervene militarily
against Assad, and was prevailed upon to draw back only when the British
parliament voted against collaborating with it. Now, however, while fearing
the enhanced influence of Russia and Iran under Assad’s regime, there is no
doubt that the USA is once again tactically supporting him as the best
defence against revolution, as well as against the Islamic State.

“Regime Change”?
It is a lazy reflex default position on the left to assume that US
imperialism’s prime objective is the removal of Assad, and that all reports
of atrocities in the Syrian civil war can be discounted as black
propaganda, like Saddam’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction”. Perhaps
also some on the left have a vague memory of the sharp turn of Assad senior
in the 1970s to state ownership of the entire economy, and are unaware of
the current regime’s switch to wholesale privatisation. Finally, the
horrific antics of the fascist Islamic State – so much more luridly
publicised than the monstrous, virtually genocidal acts of Assad’s bombing
campaigns – only helped blur scrutiny of the true nature of the Syrian
government.

The question is now raised of whether or not to call for military aid to
the Syrian resistance from capitalist governments. This is especially being
pressed due to the slaughter being carried out by the forces of Assad and
Putin in E. Ghouta.

In one form or another, this is a question that arises repeatedly in all
but those rare and brief periods when the proletariat is conscious enough
and organised enough to intervene directly on the historical stage.

Of course, it is all too easy to issue pious “Marxist” platitudes from afar
while workers are facing extermination. Nevertheless, it does no harm to
start by restating first principles. Imperialism, after all, is the
problem, not the solution. There have been countless cases of military
interventions from outside which may initially have appeared to offer
immediate relief to mass suffering, but which actually solved nothing. It
has been shown again and again that calls for intervention in local or
regional conflicts by world imperialism (whether under the flag of the
United Nations or otherwise) have been misplaced. There are several
parallels within living memory of military interventions from outside which
initially appeared to provide immediate relief to mass suffering, but which
solved nothing and often led to more intractable forms of oppression.

Northern Ireland
When an uprising began on the part of the oppressed Catholic minority in
Northern Ireland in 1969, the Catholic population initially welcomed the
arrival of British troops, expecting them to rescue them and protect them
from Loyalist persecution. It didn’t take long before they were bitterly
resisting what soon turned out to be a hostile occupying army"

Read full article
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/03/20/east-ghouta-support-us-intervention/


-- 
*“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone
willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine
sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us
thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” *Sophie Scholl,
executed by the Nazis 2/22/1943. She was 21 

[Marxism] Vandals may have defaced John Brown statue, but they can't scar Quindaro's signfiicance

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article205909209.html
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[Marxism] Revealed: Trump’s election consultants filmed saying they use bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians – Channel 4 News

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigation
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[Marxism] Backgrounders on Chris Wylie

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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For those who are following this story.
ken h


Facebook whistleblower pushed data-mining boundaries
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wylie-cambridge-analytica-liberals-1.4583810 


Victoria man at centre of international political thriller 
http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/victoria-man-at-centre-of-international-political-thriller-1.23206550
 


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Re: [Marxism] (3) Falling heroes: War on Confederate heritage in US - YouTube

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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Well, that was weird. Especially given that some of the protest footage
that was aired involved PSL/WWP-affiliated groups that were doing the
kicking, who are normally apologetic of Putin and Russia.

Amith R. Gupta
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Re: [Marxism] (3) Falling heroes: War on Confederate heritage in US - YouTube

[Ismail Lagardien via Marxism]

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Hi
Does anyone have a copy of this that is not behind a paywall. Or a cut and 
paste-job, that they can share, please?
Opinion | Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country


| 
| 
| 
|  |  |

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| 
|  | 
Opinion | Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country

Sinan Antoon

Let’s stop calling the invasion of Iraq a “blunder” and call it what it is: a 
crime.
 |

 |

 |





Ismail Lagardien
Nihil humani a me alienum puto
 

On Tuesday, 20 March 2018, 14:50:07 GMT+2, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
 wrote:  
 
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RT fretting over movement against Confederate monuments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuiYCoDEFdM
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[Marxism] Iran: sedition, revolt, revolution and social disintegration | People and Nature

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/article-store/iran-sedition-revolt-revolution-and-social-disintegration/
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Re: [Marxism] Is the U.S. Trying to Start a Hot War with Syria? | Alternet

[mkaradjis . via Marxism]

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"Is the U.S. Trying to Start a Hot War with Syria?"

Did Prasad write this piece around September 2014?

It says March 2018, but I'm sure the date is wrong, otherwise it would
be a little hard to account for this:
https://airwars.org/news/raqqa-a-city-destroyed-then-forgotten/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksN8LWwM6DY


On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:32 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism
 wrote:
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>
> (Glad that we have a moderate like Bashar al-Assad rooting out those
> extremists. After all, it takes strong medicine like bombing hospitals to
> prevent an outbreak of shariah law.)
>
> Vijay Prashad: It had appeared at the start of this year that the
> possibility of an American attack on Syrian government targets— a serious
> possibility in 2013 and 2014—was now off the table. It appeared that the
> Syrian government, with Russian and Iranian support, would soon take the
> last remaining strongholds of the opposition, now mainly reduced to one form
> of extremist or another.
>
> https://www.alternet.org/world/america-trying-go-war-syria
>
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[Marxism] Marx's essential contribution to ecosocialism | International Socialist Review

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://isreview.org/issue/108/marxs-essential-contribution-ecosocialism
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[Marxism] (3) Falling heroes: War on Confederate heritage in US - YouTube

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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RT fretting over movement against Confederate monuments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuiYCoDEFdM
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[Marxism] Marielle Franco: From Rio official to global symbol

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The Washington Post
March 20, 2018 Tuesday

From Rio official to global symbol
BYLINE: Anthony Faiola; Marina Lopes
DATELINE: RIO DE JANEIRO

RIO DE JANEIRO - Before stepping into her Chevrolet Agile at 9:04 p.m. 
last Wednesday, Marielle Franco had just done what she did best: fire up 
a room.


"Let's do this," the 38-year-old politician with the cascading Afro had 
said as she wrapped up a speech at Rio's House of Black Women calling 
for black empowerment.


Brazil needed it, she said. Across this troubled metropolis, police 
brutality and extrajudicial killings were ravaging the slums. Elected 
last year as the only black woman on Rio's 51-member city council, she 
had gone after those responsible while reframing the debate in an 
uncomfortable new way.


In a society that has long seen itself as post-racial, Franco argued, 
the slaughter was not just a war on the poor. It was also a war on blacks.


Thirty minutes after the gathering, two vehicles approached her white 
Chevy. "Huh?" she said, according to the testimony of an aide riding in 
her car, as gunfire crackled. Then nine police-issue bullets bored into 
her, including four shots to the head.


But if the point was to silence a fast-rising black politician who had 
taken on corrupt police officers, Franco's apparent assassination has 
done the opposite. In the days since, Latin America's largest nation has 
watched in awe as a figure once little known outside Rio has been 
transformed into a global symbol of racial oppression.


Franco has been honored on the floor of the European Parliament. Crowds 
have protested her killing and celebrated her life on the streets of New 
York, London, Paris, Munich, Stockholm and Lisbon. A vigil will be held 
for her in Madrid on Tuesday.


"Marielle Presente" (Marielle Is Here) has garnered millions of mentions 
on Twitter and Facebook. From Berlin to Miami to Montreal, mourners who 
never heard of Franco before last week are borrowing a line from the 
Black Lives Matter movement: #SayHerName.


"COME ON BRAZIL STAND UP," tweeted the British model Naomi Campbell.

But at home, her death is being viewed in divergent ways, underscoring 
the racial divisions that many Brazilians contend do not exist here.


Her killers have not been caught. But the federal prosecutor's office in 
Rio says that the evidence, including the highly professional killing, 
points to a hit by corrupt police officers. The bullets, authorities 
say, came from police ammunition stocks. A representative for the civil 
police would not comment beyond saying the investigation is ongoing.


In some circles, particularly within Brazil's white elite, the killing 
is being viewed as a heinous act driving home the problem of runaway 
graft and violence in a city that has long served as the face of Brazil. 
But it is not being seen as an issue of race.


"Her bloodshed can't be used as an opportune moment to talk about hate," 
said Ana Amélia, a Rio state senator, who is white. "When you talk about 
a black-white divide, you are contributing to this division."


But some black and left-wing activists here call that attitude part of 
the problem. They say it reflects a belief system that pretends race is 
unrelated to the disproportionate violence suffered by Brazilians of 
color - especially at the hands of law enforcement.


Underpaid and under pressure, police here are also under threat: At 
least 120 officers were killed in 2017, including many in confrontations 
with drug traffickers, according to the Rio-based Igarapé Institute. But 
last year, 1,124 people died at the hands of police, the highest number 
in a decade, the institute reports. In recent years, nearly 80 percent 
of those killed by police were black or mixed-race.


White male politicians here have also sought to bring corrupt police 
officers to justice. But Franco was targeted, her backers insist, 
because taking the life of a black woman is less risky in Brazil, 
especially in a state where only 1 in 10 homicide cases results in a 
conviction.


As a black, left-wing lesbian, Franco represented an intersection of 
movements that are coalescing as a result of her slaying. Tens of 
thousands of Brazilians of every color have taken to the streets in the 
aftermath of her death.


Some hope that the killing will mark a turning point for black activism 
- a concept that has struggled to take off in Brazil. The storm of 
outrage is also carrying more overt racial overtones than Brazilians are 
used to, including a flurry of tweets under the hashtag #genocidionegro 
(#blackgenocide).


"A black woman was speaking out and calling for rights, and she was 
killed beca

[Marxism] Cancer, George Monbiot and Nuclear Weapons Test Fallout

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Monbiot has prostate cancer. Did nuclear weapons testing cause it? 
Unfortunately, causation is virtually impossible to establish unless you 
were working on the radium dials of wristwatches in the early 20th century.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/20/cancer-george-monbiot-and-nuclear-weapons-test-fallout/
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[Marxism] Special Report: In Puerto Rico, a housing crisis U.S. storm aid won't solve

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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100s of thousands of Puerto Ricans are homeless because they can't get 
FEMA subsidies to repair or rebuild--a result of living in "informal" 
housing that lacks a deed to qualify them. Supposedly, they can qualify 
if they can provide sworn witnesses to back them up but FEMA is 
arbitrarily denying many of them.



https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-puertorico-housing-specialreport/special-report-in-puerto-rico-a-housing-crisis-u-s-storm-aid-wont-solve-idUSKBN1FQ211
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[Marxism] (3) The Lost Tapes: Malcolm X (Full Episode) - YouTube

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7MP_h3eQ1o
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[Marxism] Cambridge Analytica as the Matrix: Information Dominance and the Next Level of Fake News | Informed Comment

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A useful summary of how this operated.

https://www.juancole.com/2018/03/cambridge-analytica-information.html
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[Marxism] Trump’s trade tantrums – free trade or protectionism? | Michael Roberts Blog

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Anyway, Trump’s claimed objective to ‘make America great again’ by 
boosting steel production and other traditional industries means rolling 
back the advance of technology to recreate smokestack industries.  It 
can’t and won’t happen.  Trump’s claim that American workers have been 
losing jobs in traditional ‘smokestack’ industries because of unfair 
trade by other countries is bogus.  The loss of US manufacturing jobs 
has been replicated in other advanced capitalist economies over the last 
30 years.  This decline is not due to nasty foreigners fixing trade 
deals.  It is due to the inexorable attempt of American capital to 
reduce its labour costs through mechanisation or through finding new 
cheap labour areas overseas to produce.


full: 
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/03/19/trumps-trade-tantrums-free-trade-or-protectionism/

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Burton on Bjerk, 'Julius Nyerere'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: March 20, 2018 at 5:15:35 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]:  Burton on Bjerk, 'Julius Nyerere'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> Paul Bjerk.  Julius Nyerere.  Athens  Ohio University Press, 2017.
> 168 pp.  $14.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8214-2260-1.
> 
> Reviewed by Eric Burton (Universität Wien)
> Published on H-Socialisms (March, 2018)
> Commissioned by Gary Roth
> 
> Paul Bjerk's short political biography of Tanzania's first and
> long-time president Julius K. Nyerere (1922-99) is a highly welcome
> and urgently needed addition to the historical literature on African
> politicians. It appears in the series Ohio Short Histories of Africa
> which has already brought forward brief volumes on political figures
> such as Steve Biko, Haile Selassie, Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba,
> and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. For few of them do we have well-researched
> biographies, and the same has been true--with the exception of his
> early years--for the case of Nyerere.[1]  Well written and accessible
> to a broad audience, Bjerk's contribution charts Julius Nyerere's
> rise from being one of many sons of a chief in rural Tanganyika (as
> the country was called before its union with Zanzibar in 1964) to
> becoming a leader of the nationalist movement which made Tanganyika
> the first independent country in East Africa by 1961. As Bjerk
> emphasises, this was a notable strategic achievement, as independence
> was still thought to be decades away in 1958 and was eventually
> achieved without bloodshed or any major conflicts with the British.
> 
> Following a slightly unfocused introduction ("Mwalimu Nyerere: A
> Study in Leadership"), Bjerk takes the reader through five chapters
> following Nyerere's life chronologically, beginning with his early
> years in Tanganyika and educational journeys to Uganda and Scotland
> ("Coming of Age in an African Colony, 1922-53"). The second chapter
> shows how Nyerere paved his country's road to independence and
> mitigated threats to the sovereignty of the young nation from within
> and without ("TANU and Tanzanian Independence, 1954-64"). The
> succeeding chapters detail Nyerere's turn to authoritarianism as he
> tried to implement a home-grown socialist model of development
> ("Ujamaa and the Race for Self-Reliance, 1965-1977"), his failure to
> recognize the effects of the failing economic policies on the fabric
> of society ("Confronting a Continent in Crisis, 1978-1990"), and his
> activities as an elder statesmen of regional importance ("An Unquiet
> Retirement, 1991-1999").
> 
> Pressed between the covers of a book of 150 pages, the crucial
> question is how Bjerk approaches a life as rich and influential as
> Nyerere's. The answer is: through national politics. Bjerk treats
> Nyerere "as a symbol of leadership and its perils," as an example
> that shall "serve as a case study of an African country confronting
> the challenges of its independence, as seen through the life of one
> of the era's most creative and thoughtful politicians" (p. 10). To be
> sure, the book does point out repeatedly Nyerere's regional and
> global roles as a pan-Africanist supporter of liberation movements
> and champion of nonalignment who struggled for the unity of the poor
> global South against the rich global North, wanting to change the
> rules of the world economy. For the most part, however, the biography
> places Nyerere in Tanzanian debates, tensions, and dynamics--which,
> in turn, were so much shaped by him. The book thus also serves as an
> introduction to Tanzania's postcolonial politics, albeit one that,
> quite understandably given the limited space, privileges the
> president's views and mentions other Tanzanian politicians or social
> and cultural aspects only in passing.
> 
> Every biographer renders a verdict, and Bjerk is careful to base his
> judgement on several factors. Nyerere is portrayed as a benevolent,
> even humanist dictator whose power relied more heavily on ideology
> than on intimidation or violence. His major faults, in Bjerk's view,
> related to his stubbornness and an inadequate understanding of
> economic issues and their impact on society. Bjerk finds that Nyerere
> responded to the economic crisis "as a moralist" by blaming
> individuals for their misbehavior rather than adjusting flawed
> policies (p. 107). As president, he failed to come up with viable
> alternatives to the recommendations of the International Monetary
> Fund and showed little understanding for the creative strategies of
> Tanzanians to make ends meet when b