I’ve been meaning to share some info about books I’ve read lately, especially after the responses from Thinking Liberty fans to our recent book recommendation contest.

I haven’t read every page of all of these, and obviously my agreement with them varies, but they are all interesting.

Gary Chartier, The Conscience of an Anarchist
I now have a go-to book for introducing anarchism, and this is it.

Jan Tomasz Gross, Polish Society Under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement, 1939-1944
Part history and part sociology, this study of Polish society under German occupation offers a number of insights on occupation, insurgency, and underground society.

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Excellent description of mass murder under Hitler and Stalin.

Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, Coexistence
This well-written examination of Hamas includes discussion on how social connections and social power were used to amass political power behind a radical ideology.

Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide
Compelling narrative of the author’s travels and thoughts as he attempts to comprehend genocide by Europeans.

Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights
A critical view of civil rights politics in the US.

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Moyn argues that an ideology of Human Rights became in the 1970s the last utopian program as other utopias failed to deliver.

Edward Said, The Question of Palestine
Somewhat dated, but certainly relevant introduction to Palestinian grievances.

Segev, Tom. One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate
Detailed work that conveys the excitement of empire and nation building without glorifying it.

Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
Detailed analysis of how Palestinians became refugees.

Michael Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Well-written political and military history.

Itamar Rabinovich, The War for Lebanon, 1970-1985
Can be dry, but describes conflicts within Lebanon and how the country became a center of regional conflict.

Jackson Spielvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany
Good textbook overview of Nazi Germany. New editions are expensive, but they do claim to have integrated recent scholarship in several areas.

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century
Discusses the troubles of Europe in the Twentieth Century (I’ve only read the first two chapters as of this post).

David Crew (editor), Nazism and German Society, 1933-1945
The essays authored by Bartov, Mallman and Paul, Kershaw, and Browning are excellent writings that challenge some common views of the Nazi order. I expect that the essays that I haven’t read are also worthwhile.

Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life
I’ve as yet only read the chapter “Young people: mobilisation and refusal,” which is a fascinating examination of how the Nazis gained and lost power among German youth.

Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe.
Well-written 600 pages of how Nazi Germany conquered and ruled. Contains a detailed index.

Peter Carlson, Roughneck: The Life and Times of “Big Bill” Haywood.
Exciting biography of the larger-than-life union organizer.

Joseph R. Conlin, Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement.
Contains less detail on Haywood’s life than Carlson’s book, but more analysis of related labor issues.

Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger (editors), Feminist interpretations of Emma Goldman.
A number of essays examining Emma Goldman in feminist contexts.

And a couple of books that looked interesting and I intend to read:

Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works

John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860-1931.

George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements

I’m posting some particularly interesting articles on revolts in Egypt and Libya. If you have other suggestions, please share.

How to Help Libyans Stay On the Internet Despite Government Restrictions

Libya: protesters vow to march on Gaddafi’s palace

Roots of the Egyptian revolutionary moment

Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere

The Secret Rally That Sparked an Uprising

Made in America: Mubarak’s Most Brutal Thugs Trained With FBI

Behind the Arab Revolt is a Word We Dare Not Speak

The Arab world is on fire: dialogue with a Syrian anarchist

Here are some books that readers of this blog might find useful.

The Russian Anarchists by Paul Avrich is a great source on anarchism in Russia from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

I haven’t yet read any of Nestor Makhno’s accounts of the revolution and civil war in Ukraine, but I presume they will be excellent.

The Russian Revolution by Sheila Fitzpatrick is an excellent short overview of the events of 1917.

Agorists in particular might be interested in Chapter 6 of Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain. In Kotkin’s narrative, the “shadow economy” in Stalinist Russia is a sphere of freedom and source of basic goods for the individual, but is also a mechanism by which Stalinist projects were able to be sustained.

Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, by David Remnick, is an excellent account of the collapse of the Soviet Union from an American journalist inside the USSR.

It has been said that the internet, or any text format, is not a good medium for discussion. But writing can be as good or better than verbal communication, particularly verbal communication where the other person is not seen (such as phone or radio). Of course, the internet also allows for long distance video chat, which would include visual cues, but even if text is the only medium it can be an effective medium if people want it to be.

Writing allows for a detailed and thorough arrangement of points. If you look over a message and see that a point is not made as effectively as it could be (and will thus be communicated in a less effective manner) you can edit the writing. If text is entered real-time, there is usually the advantage of seeing exactly what you just said, which is not possible with verbal communication. This will better enable you to make corrections or clarifications to your own statements or to the other person’s statements.

Many online conversations are not impacted by anonymity. With blogs or social networking sites, there is usually a distinct identity attached to each piece of writing. Even if a pseudonym is used, internet handles often remain constant. A stranger you exchange words with online is no more anonymous than a stranger you discuss issues with in person.

So why does internet conversation often fail? Trolling and sarcasm take place offline, so they aren’t to blame. Internet conversation often fails because people (not all, but a significant number) don’t write well, don’t read well, or don’t generally communicate well.

Can you imagine Thomas Paine, George Orwell, Howard Zinn, or other well-known writer responding to a critic by saying “you couldn’t see my facial features or hear my intonation when you read that”? Not everyone needs to write as well as they did, but acknowledging one’s own limits is a lot more honest and conducive to self-improvement than referring to imaginary external limits.

Sometimes the style of writing that people use is not appropriate to the situation. The internet is often used as a substitute for casual personal interaction. This is fine, but do understand what is going on. Think about the setting and how the other people in the discussion are acting. And if you can’t get your message across in under 140 characters, Twitter is probably not the best place to write it.

Readers are often uncharitable. They should consider the professionalism of the writer and the setting. How formal is the setting and how much detail would one expect from it? Why not ask for details instead of assuming the worst? A blog might be an open journal or notebook. An op-ed designed for wide circulation might only have space to gloss over specifics. A Facebook comment might be a question from a curious uninitiated reader. It’s fine to expect an overview to take no more than a paragraph or a page, but one should be willing to read more than an overview before making a detailed critique.

When online, people communicate with different sorts of people than they often do in person. Those who are not good at writing or are operating without guidelines might be difficult to understand. But someone who is a representative of an organization should be able to represent it skillfully in writing.

It is always difficult to convince someone who has little or no interest in what you are saying. This person will not read in detail. Similar things occur in verbal communication when people only hear the part of a conversation that supports their assumptions.

Writers should realize that they can’t always have as much of another person’s time as they want. In the verbal realm, speeches are limited in time, the audience question time is limited, and you can’t force a speaker to attend your response speech. If you are unable to get someone’s interest in the beginning of your essay, they are less likely to consider your writing a worthwhile use of their time.

If your focus is on “defending a position” you aren’t necessarily open to considering other views. There is an appropriate time for this, like when there is an audience you are trying to convince, but not every instance of communication is an appropriate time. Even when it is appropriate to take a combative approach, you have to engage with the opponent – actually understand what he or she is saying — to accomplish more than ridiculous posturing.

It is true that when communication is not done face-to-face there can be a lack of empathy for the other person. However that means that during in-person exchanges, empathy can substitute for a convincing argument. People may be emotionally inclined to get along instead of continuing the discussion or looking for rational common interest. It also means that charisma and intimidation will play more of a role when communicating in person. If you can’t motivate someone without relying on your physical presence, you might be okay at getting your message across in person but not as good at arguing rationally.

Perhaps the most crucial impediment to online communication is the refusal to take it seriously. What happens on the internet is part of real life. The more you abstract away from “RL” the less real you will be.

Internet communication is unlikely to fulfill the emotional needs that communicating in person can fulfill. But for understanding and discussing arguments it is as capable as the users are.

A new pamphlet, Against Borders, has been posted on libertyactivism.info. It includes a 1-page individualist anarchist view on state borders, my Center for a Stateless Society commentary Escalating the War on Freedom, a New Jersey Alliance of the Libertarian Left statement, and a Nation article by Jacqueline Stevens. Download, print, fold, staple, subvert!

One of the people I had the pleasure of meeting at the New York Anarchist Book Fair was Scott from Firestorm Cafe and Books in Asheville, NC. It’s an anarchist space with a heavy mutualist influence.

There’s also a growing Local Exchange Trading System in Asheville.

I hope Firestorm and Asheville LETS become successful contributors to a consensual community, and I hope they help inspire folks elsewhere to move forward making liberty.

LibertyActivism.info has the latest issue of ALLiance available for web viewing or downloading as a pdf. It includes a short essay by myself concerning elections. I look forward to reading the rest of the issue.

Kevin Carson’s Making the State Irrelevant commentary is another good read on the topic of political action.

Says Wikipedia:

The Blyskawica (Lightning) was a submachine gun produced by the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, a Polish resistance movement fighting the Germans in occupied Poland. A successful construction, it was most probably the only weapon designed and mass produced covertly in occupied Europe.

Lessons gained from Open Source Ecology could be useful for a variety of libertarian projects.

Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid “resilient communities.” By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and “evolve to freedom.”

HT: Shawn Wilbur on Facebook.

“Power” or even specifically “political power” should not be the target for anarchists to attack. The enemy is what the current political power is based on: authority, the notion that some people have the right to command others due to their rank.

Solidarity and principled opposition to authority can form the basis of a different type of political power. To topple the current political power, we must create an environment of individual empowerment. Empowered individuals must rely on each other and the commitment to liberty in order to to live without authoritarian political powers and then replace authority. The social power of solidarity, and the economic power of the counter-economy can provide political power that undermines authority, instead of having a symbiotic relationship with it.

Because the goal is not to seize the reigns of authority but to sever the bonds, our actions should always work toward the goal of building a free world. Things will need to be seized and subverted, but the creation of a libertarian society is the guiding star.