AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Thursday, March 08, 2018

March 8, 2018 Tomgram: James Carroll, An American Reckoning

March 8, 2018
Tomgram: James Carroll, An American Reckoning

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: When my kids were little and had trepidations about doing something I knew they would end up liking, I would offer them what I called “the Engelhardt Guarantee.” It always worked. Now, let me offer that same guarantee on a book that had me raptly reading beginning to end: James Carroll’s new novel, The Cloister. It’s the story of a priest and a Jewish Holocaust survivor in modern New York City, woven together gracefully with a vivid retelling of the medieval love story of Abelard and Héloïse, itself set against the grim backdrop of the Crusades. (Read Carroll’s post below on that subject!) Novelist Maxine Hong Kingston called his novel “an enlightening, vitally important book, a necessity for our time” and Publisher’s Weekly, “a sweeping, heartbreaking blend of history and fiction... a very magnetic, satisfying novel.” Consider it a tale of paths not taken into the modern world. Carroll has agreed to send personalized, signed copies of The Cloister to any TomDispatch reader who donates $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.) to this website. In this case, your generosity, which makes all the difference to us, comes with the Engelhardt Guarantee. Check out our donation page for the details. Tom]

Here’s a thoroughly humdrum figure from the post-9/11 world: this February an estimated 1,294 people were killed in Iraq and another 266 wounded, including ISIS militants, numerous civilians, Iraqi security forces, Kurds, and Turks. Few of them died in major combat, just low-level incidents, suicide bombings, and bodies found in mass graves. And keep in mind that that’s what passes for a peaceful month in the country George W. Bush invaded and occupied in March 2003. Since then, the violence there has never ceased, amid insurgencies, religious strife, the rise and fall (and rise) of terror groups, acts of ethnic cleansing, and other horrors without end. A number of Iraq’s major cities, including Fallujah, Ramadi, and its second largest urban area, Mosul, are little more than rubble today. Hundreds of thousands of its people, many of them civilians, have been killed and more wounded. In the last few years, an estimated 1.3 million Iraqi children have been displaced in the war against ISIS, even as the country remains deeply riven and without access to the funds necessary to truly rebuild.

And that, of course, is just one ruined land in the Greater Middle East, a region from Afghanistan to Libya increasingly filled with failed states, terror groups, and ruins as, almost 17 years after the attacks of 9/11, the Trump administration once again ramps up the war on terror (which should long ago have been renamed the war for terror). Today, TomDispatch regular James Carroll, a former columnist for the Boston Globe, leaves Donald J. Trump in the dust and returns to the fateful moments when all of this first began, when President George W. Bush launched what would be, to choose a word that has long been on Carroll’s mind, a “crusade” not just against terrorism but, as it turned out, against much of the Islamic world. Carroll, whose new novel The Cloister, is set against the age of the original crusades, takes in its enormity so many years later. Tom

God Wills It! The War on Terror as the Launching of an American Crusade By James Carroll America may be sinking ever deeper into the moral morass of the Trump era, but if you think the malevolence of this period began with him, think again. The moment I still dwell on, the moment I believe ignited t…