An Activist Returns To The Novel

 

by Randeep Ramesh

 

Published on Friday, March 9, 2007 by The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) Distributed by Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0309-09.htm

 

MANY HAD WRITTEN off the chances that Arundhati Roy would return to the world of fiction. Her astounding first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker in 1997. Ten years and 6 million copies later there was still no repeat of the lyrical, whirling debut. Instead Roy turned to lobbing literary Molotov cocktails at Enron, George Bush's war on terror and the World Trade Organisation in the form of incendiary polemics. No one could accuse her of having writers' block: she churned out six books, collections of her essays with titles such as Power Politics and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.

 

Dispensing with story-writing, she pursued a career in social activism, appearing at anti-war rallies and using her celebrity to raise the profiles of unfashionable causes - Kashmiris on death row, the rights of tribal communities in India, hardscrabble suicides in the country's farming belt.

 

But recently the 45-year-old quietly announced that she would be stepping back from the public stage to write her second novel. The last person to know, apparently, was her agent, David Godwin, who had negotiated for her a million-dollar advance for The God of Small Things. "David rang me saying, 'Why did you not tell me? I have had hundreds of calls from publishers.' I thought it was so funny, I mean let's have a bidding war for a non-existent book," Roy says.

 

Sitting in her Delhi rooftop flat, whose dark tiled and light wood-lined interior the former architecture student designed, Roy says she has already begun writing the new novel but has no idea when it will be finished. The whisper was that it would be about Kashmir, the revolt-scarred Himalayan state, but Roy shakes her head sending ripples through her grey-flecked curls. "It is not true. My fiction is never about an issue. I don't set myself some political task and weave a story around it. I might as well write a straightforward nonfiction piece if that is what I wanted to do."

 

A clue about where Roy is heading may be gleaned from her current reading. On her coffee table rests a book by Bono, while at her bedside are works by the radical American founding father Thomas Paine and Victorian novelist Charles Dickens. What these two writers share is their defence of the French Revolution, and an empathy with the lower classes who pulled down the ruling elite. "In so many ways Paris then could be Delhi now. It is a conceit to think that all that we say is new and original."

 

Roy says India today, like pre-revolutionary France, is poised "on the edge of violence". As she sees it, the country of her birth is not coming together but coming apart - convulsed by "corporate globalisation" at an unprecedented, unacceptable velocity. "The inequalities become untenable."

 

Roy says she is not taking refuge from her politics in the world of literature. She answers her own door and makes guests tea herself, remarkable in a country where even middle-class households have servants. She is still married to filmmaker Pradip Krishen but the flat is "her space". He lives in another house.

 

"Living with my own contradictions is hard enough - forcing my political views on someone else, on their lifestyle and the choices they make is not something I want to do. It distorts a relationship beyond redemption. So, I decided to have my own place."

 

Roy's dire predictions about India have left her isolated when mainstream opinion seems convinced that the country, with its nuclear bombs and slick Bollywood movies, is the next superpower-in-waiting. Roy says some parts of the country, such as the western state of Gujarat - the scene of a bloody pogrom against Muslims five years ago - are off limits to her because of her campaigning.

 

A few years ago she was briefly imprisoned for contempt of court while protesting against the country's controversial Narmada Dam project. The God of Small Things produced obscenity charges and a court case that ran for a decade, only to be dismissed last month.

 

She first shot to prominence in 1994 with a scathing film review entitled The Great Indian Rape Trick, about the movie Bandit Queen, in which she questioned the right to "restage the rape of a living woman without her permission".

 

Roy has been consistent in her view that writers have a responsibility to their subjects. She says she could not read the blockbuster Maximum City, a portrait of Mumbai by expatriate Indian writer Suketu Mehta, because the book contains a passage in which the writer is a bystander while people in custody are beaten and tortured by the city's police.

 

"When you witness torture you are seeing someone humiliated. In front of you. It is not a neutral act. Certainly you have the permission of the torturer, but you do not have the permission of the tortured (to record it)."

 

Unlike other Indian-born writers who have relocated to the US and Europe, Roy is determined to remain a thorn in the side of the establishment in India. "Here you see what's happening. People are driven out of villages, driven out of the cities, there's a kind of insanity in the air and all of it held down by our mesmeric, pelvic-thrusting Bollywood movies. The Indian middle class has just embarked on this orgy of consumerism."

 

But she admits that the kinds of non-violent protests she has taken part in for a decade have failed in India, a republic founded on the Gandhi-ite principles of peaceful resistance. "I am not such an uninhibited fan of Gandhi. After all, Gandhi was a superstar. When he went on a hunger strike he was a superstar on a hunger strike. But I don't believe in superstar politics. If people in a slum are on a hunger strike, no one gives a shit."

 

Roy says activists have been "exhausted" by their attempts to influence the courts and the press and now says she does not "condemn people taking up arms" in the face of state repression.

 

"It would be immoral for me to preach violence unless I were prepared to resort to it myself. But equally, it is immoral for me to advocate feelgood marches and hunger strikes when I'm not bearing the brunt of unspeakable violence. I certainly do not volunteer to tell Iraqis or Kashmiris or Palestinians that if they went on a mass hunger strike they would get rid of the military occupation. Civil disobedience doesn't seem to be paying dividends."

 

Instead of the Indian state caving in to the moral righteousness of the numerous causes Roy supports, she says it merely moved to co-opt its adversaries. The power of argument, even in the world's biggest democracy, has been shrunk by the argument of power.

 

Roy says she was aghast to learn that a fellow Indian environmental campaigner accepted a million-dollar award from the transnational metals firm Alcan, which has been accused of grabbing tribal land in eastern India. The tentacles of big business have learned to embrace non-government organisations. The result, she claims, is that the charitable trusts of Tata, India's largest private company, fund "half the activists in the country".

 

She feels frustrated by the state's ability to brush aside non-violent resistance movements. "This has sapped the energy from people's movements. The very Gandhian Narmada movement (the grassroots group which campaigned against big dams in India) knocked on the door of every democratic institution for years and has been humiliated. It has not managed to stop a single dam from going ahead. In fact the dam industry has a new spring in its step."

 

Roy says she had given ideological opponents a handy hate figure. "In India I'm portrayed more as a hysterical, lying, anti-national harridan.

 

"In this adversarial game that goes on, you can get pinned down to spewing facts and numbers, but those are not the only truths ... I've done that. I've fought that battle," she says. "But the distillation of those things into literature is a different kind of intervention."

 

Copyright (c) 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald

 

(c) Copyrighted 1997-2007 www.commondreams.org

____________________

 

 

 

Turks acquitted over Chomsky book

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/6198021.stm

 

Story from BBC NEWS:

 

Four Turks have been acquitted of insulting "Turkishness" in their translation of a book by prominent American writer Noam Chomsky.

 

Publisher Fatih Tas was found not guilty, along with a translator and two editors, of contravening article 301 of the penal code.

 

The European Union has pressed Turkey to reform the code, which it views as a bar on freedom of expression.

 

It followed the acquittal of another author, Ipek Calislar, on Tuesday.

 

Ms Calislar had been accused of insulting modern Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, by writing that he had once fled disguised as a woman.

 

The law has also been used against dozens of writers and journalists, including acclaimed novelists Orhan Pamuk - this year's Nobel laureate for literature - and Elif Shafak.

 

Most have been acquitted.

 

Fatih Tas had published a Turkish version of Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

 

It examines what part the media play in setting social agendas, and criticises Turkey's treatment of its Kurdish minority.

 

Editors Omer Faruk Kurhan and Taylan Tosun, and translator Ender Abadoglu were also acquitted as the judge ruled there was no case to answer.

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Gore Vidal Breaks US Blockade on Cuba

http://tinyurl.com/ya2tew (Prensa Latina)

 

Havana, Dec 11

 

I came to Cuba with my broken knee to help break 40 years of embargo, said US writer Gore Vidal, who will be visiting Havana until December 14, after referring to the distortion of information about the Island by his country s media.

 

He told Cuban journalists upon his arrival at the Jose Marti international airport that he had been invited several times to come, but the trip was always postponed for one reason or another.

 

I lost one of my knees the last time and I almost sent my knee to you, and it would have been more interesting than myself, he said ironically, but I have an artificial one, and was able to come here to see the beginning of the end of colonialism in the Western Hemisphere.

 

Born in 1925, Gore Vidal (81) is used to specifying that he has lived three quarters of the 20th century and a third of US history, the course of which he has assessed in inquiring essays, novels, and interviews characterized by his critical lucidity.

 

Without hesitation he told Prensa Latina his opinion about the most worrying symptoms of the US future political panorama: The collapse of the Republic. We have lost habeas corpus and the Constitution that we inherited from England 700 years ago. Suddenly, we were robbed of it.

 

The current regime has done it, and the legal bases of our Republic have gone with it, and as I am one of the historians of that Republic, I am not happy.

 

Retaking the distortion of the Cuban reality, he said that they never told us why we should hate the Cubans, and in his opinion, his compatriots were motivated by vanity.

 

At that time, he said, my friend John F. Kennedy was running for president, and about this country, Cuba, he did not agree and turned it into something boosted by vanity.

 

"When we invaded Cuba in 1898 it was only a pretext to start the war against Spain and end up taking the Philippines, as we did in the end."

 

I hate to say it, but you were just a step for the United States to reach Asia, although we always had our eyes on the Caribbean.

 

He recalled how when World War II had just ended in 1945, US President Harry Truman began to say: "the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming."

 

With 20 million dead Russians, he said ironically, there was barely anybody to come. Even so, the decision was made: the only way to rule the country is by terrorizing everybody.

 

A large delegation is accompanying Vidal, including his nephew Burr Steers, a Hollywood film director; Saul Landau, a professor at American University; Dennis Ferrera, San Francisco Attorney General- elect; and Matt Tyrnauer, editor of the magazine Vanity Fair.

 

One of his closest friends, former Senator James Abourezk; Kimiko Burton, a lawyer from the Attorney General s office, and others are also in the delegation.

 

The writer of "Homeland and Empire" will fulfill a program in Cuba that includes meetings with Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, Culture Minister Abel Prieto, and Cuban National People s Power Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon.

 

He will meet, in parallel, with university students and teachers, and will tour the Information Technology University, the Latin American School of Medicine, and the National Fine Arts Museum.

 

At the airport, he was welcomed by Culture Vice Minister Ismael Gonzalez and Book Institute President Iroel Sanchez.

____________________

 

 

Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10505/finkelstein.pdf

(from the introduction, by Finkelstein)

"I began this introduction recalling the From Time Immemorial hoax, since a main reason so much controversy swirls around the Israel- Palestine conflict is the vast proliferation of sheer fraud masquerading as serious scholarship. Although imperfect, a mechanism for quality control nonetheless exists in intellectual life. In practice it usually takes the form of a sequence of skeptical questions. If someone quotes a book putting forth an altogether aberrant thesis, he or she is usually asked, "Where does the author teach?" or "Who published the book?" or "Who blurbed the book?" or "What sorts of reviews did it receive (in the main professional journals)?" The answers to these questions generally provide a more or less accurate gauge of how much credence to put in the publication. It is one of the egregious features of the Israel- Palestine conflict, however, that these mechanisms of quality control function barely, if at all.(34) The book's author can teach at a first-rank university, and the book itself can be published under a prestigious imprint, receive lavish blurbs as well as reviews in prominent mainstream publications, and yet still be complete nonsense. The most recent addition to this genre and the subject of the second part of this book is the best seller The Case for Israel by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.(35) It can fairly be said that The Case for Israel surpasses From Time Immemorial in deceitfulness and is among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Indeed, Dershowitz appropriates large swaths from the Peters hoax. Whereas Peters falsified real sources, Dershowitz goes one better and cites absurd sources or stitches evidence out of whole cloth. The core chapters of the present book juxtapose the findings of all mainstream human rights organizations about Israel's human rights record in the Occupied Territories against Dershowitz's claims. I demonstrate that it's difficult to find a single claim in his human rights chapters or, for that matter, any other chapter of The Case for Israel that, among other things, doesn't distort a reputable source or reference a preposterous one. The point, of course, is not that Dershowitz is a charlatan. Rather, it's the systematic institutional bias that allows for books like The Case for Israel to become national best sellers. Were it not for Dershowitz's Harvard pedigree, the praise heaped on his book by Mario Cuomo, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Elie Wiesel, and Floyd Abrams,(36) the favorable notices in media outlets like the New York Times and Boston Globe,(37) and so on, The Case for Israel would have had the same shelf life as the latest publication of the Flat-Earth Society."

34. Revealingly, this caveat applies to the field of “Holocaust studies” as well. For pertinent criticism by Raul Hilberg, dean of Nazi holocaust scholars, see Finkelstein, Holocaust Industry, p. 60.

35. All references in this book are to the first hardback printing of The Case for Israel, published in August 2003 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Almost immediately after publication of The Case for Israel I publicly charged, and provided copious evidence, that it was a fraud (see www.NormanFinkelstein.com under “The Dershowitz Hoax”). In the first paperback edition of his book, published in August 2004, Dershowitz entered some revisions.

36. See their laudatory comments for the book posted on www.Amazon.com.

37. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Ethan Bronner praised Dershowitz for his “intelligent polemic” and ability “to construct an argument” and for being “especially effective at pointing to the hypocrisy of many of Israel’s critics” (“The New New Historians,” 9 November 2003). Bronner sits on the Times’s editorial board, where he’s its “expert” on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the Boston Globe, Jonathan Dorfman waxed rhapsodic about how Dershowitz “goes after Israel’s enemies . . . with the punch and thrust of courtroom debate” and praised the author for having “restated some obvious truths about Israel—truths its friends need to convey, its enemies need to confront, and the chattering classes need to learn before they venture forth with pronouncements about Israel that are simple, easy—and wrong” (“Dershowitz makes the ‘Case,’” 26 November 2003). Both these reviews appeared well after evidence had been widely disseminated demonstrating that Dershowitz’s book was rubbish.

 

Source: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10505/finkelstein.pdf

____________________

 

 

 

 

David Barsamian interviews Gore Vidal

 

http://progressive.org/mag_intv0806

 

 

Gore Vidal By David Barsamian

August 2006 Issue

 

Gore Vidal is a gold mine of quips and zingers. And his vast knowledge of literature and history—particularly American—makes for an impressive figure. His razor-sharp tongue lacerates the powerful. He does it with aplomb, saying, “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” He has a wry sense of noblesse oblige: “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” Now eighty, he lives in the Hollywood hills in a modest mansion with immodest artwork. I felt I was entering a museum of Renaissance art. A stern painting of the Emperor Constantine was looking down upon us as we sat in his majestic living room. A Buddha statue from Thailand stood nearby. But all was not somber. He had a Bush doll with a 9/11 bill sticking out of it on a table behind us.

 

His aristocratic pedigree is evident not just in his artistic sophistication but also in his locution. In a war of words, few can contend with Vidal.

 

“I’m a lover of the old republic and I deeply resent the empire our Presidents put in its place,” he declares.

 

Vidal moved gingerly and was using a cane. A recent knee operation left him less mobile. He says, “The mind is still agile but the knees have grown weak.” We sat in upholstered chairs. On a nearby table I saw the galleys of his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation. It will be out this fall. His earlier one, Palimpsest, came out in 1995.

 

Prolific does not even begin to describe Vidal’s literary output. He’s the author of scores of novels, plays, screenplays, essays. In 1993, he won the National Book Award for his collection of essays, United States. His recent books (he calls them “pamphlets”)—Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War, and Imperial America—have sold in huge numbers. When I asked him what was the point of his work, he said, “I am chronicling America.” The prose, whether polemical or fictional, is elegant.

 

Distantly related to Jackie Kennedy, he does not romanticize JFK. “He was one of the most charming men I’ve ever known,” says Vidal. “He was also one of the very worst Presidents.”

 

He’s been a Democratic candidate for the House from New York and for the Senate from California. Today, he ridicules the Democrats for supineness.

 

He sees a certain continuity in U.S. foreign policy over the last fifty years. “The management, then and now, truly believes the United States is the master of the Earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown,” he says. “We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense.”

 

I talked with him on a hot afternoon in mid-April.

 

Q: In 2002, long before Bush’s current travails, you wrote, “Mark my words, he will leave office the most unpopular President in history.” How did you know that then?

 

Gore Vidal: I know these people. I don’t say that as though I know them personally. I know the types. I was brought up in Washington. When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what’s going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it’s trouble. Monkeys make trouble.

 

Q: Bush’s ratings have been at personal lows. Cheney has had an 18 percent approval rating.

 

Vidal: Well, he deserves it.

 

Q: Yet the wars go on. It’s almost as if the people don’t matter.

 

Vidal: The people don’t matter to this gang. They pay no attention. They think in totalitarian terms. They’ve got the troops. They’ve got the army. They’ve got Congress. They’ve got the judiciary. Why should they worry? Let the chattering classes chatter. Bush is a thug. I think there is something really wrong with him.

 

Q: What do you think of the conspiracy theories about September 11?

 

Vidal: I’m willing to believe practically any mischief on the part of the Bush people. No, I don’t think they did it, as some conspiracy people think. Why? Because it was too intelligently done. This is beyond the competence of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They couldn’t pull off a caper like 9/11. They are too clumsy.

 

Q: Today the United States is fighting two wars, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, and is now threatening to launch a third one on Iran. What is it going to take to stop the Bush onslaught?

 

Vidal: Economic collapse. We are too deeply in debt. We can’t service the debt, or so my financial friends tell me, that’s paying the interest on the Treasury bonds, particularly to the foreign countries that have been financing us. I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That’s the end of our wars.

 

Q: You’re a veteran of World War II, the so-called good war. Would you recommend to a young person a career in the armed forces in the United States?

 

Vidal: No, but I would suggest Canada or New Zealand as a possible place to go until we are rid of our warmongers. We’ve never had a government like this. The United States has done wicked things in the past to other countries but never on such a scale and never in such an existentialist way. It’s as though we are evil. We strike first. We’ll destroy you. This is an eternal war against terrorism. It’s like a war against dandruff. There’s no such thing as a war against terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

 

But our media has collapsed. They’ve questioned no one. One of the reasons Bush and Cheney are so daring is that they know there’s nobody to stop them. Nobody is going to write a story that says this is not a war, only Congress can declare war. And you can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids. Nothing makes any sense, and the people are getting very confused. The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

 

Q: You’ve called the country “The United States of Amnesia.” Is this something in our genes?

 

Vidal: No, it’s something in our rulers. They don’t want us to know anything. When you’ve got a press like we have, you no longer have an informed citizenry.

 

I was involved somewhat with Congressman Con-yers on what happened in Ohio during the last Presidential election.

 

Conyers is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and he went up there with a bunch of researchers. They went from district to district, and they found out how the election was stolen. He wrote a report that was published by a small press in Chicago. To help out, I said I’d write a preface for him on how the election was stolen. We were thinking that might help. But The New York Times and The Washington Post were not going to review the book about how we had a second Presidential election stolen. They weren’t going to admit it.

 

A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don’t know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.

 

It’s so stupid, everything that they say. And the media take on it is just as stupid as theirs, sometimes worse. They at least have motives. They are making money out of the republic or what’s left of it. It’s the stupidity that will really drive me away from this country.

 

Q: When were the media better?

 

Vidal: They’ve never been much good. They belong to the people who own them. But they were better, the level was higher. There used to be foreign correspondents in other countries. There’s nobody abroad now. The New York Times gave up being anything except a kind of shadow of The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post is the court circular. What has the emperor done today? And who will be the under-assistant of the secretary of agriculture? As though these things mattered.

 

Q: What do you think of the public advertising of one’s faith among political leaders? They make a show of going to church and participating in ceremonies.

 

Vidal: Personally I find it sickening, and very much against what our Founders had in mind. Remember that the country was mostly founded by Brits, and England’s always gotten credit for having invented hypocrisy. So we are reflecting our British heritage when we hypocritically talk about how religious we are.

 

Q: Is the U.S. more like Sparta than Athens?

 

Vidal: We’re not so good as either. We certainly are not warlike. Spartans were based upon military service. We don’t want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans. We didn’t want to go out and conquer other countries. We wanted to corner wheat in the stock market or something sensible like that. So we are very unbelligerent. We were dragged screaming into World War I. Well, we were slightly enthusiastic about that, but we were very innocent farm people in those days. In World War II, we fought to stay out of that war. And every liberal figure in the United States from Norman Thomas on was anti-war. They were isolationists in the old populist tradition. So we never had a chance of being Sparta.

 

Q: Talk about the role of the opposition party, the Democrats.

 

Vidal: It isn’t an opposition party. I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party—the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

 

Q: What can people do to energize democracy?

 

Vidal: The tactic would be to go after smaller offices, state by state, school board, sheriff, state legislatures. You can turn them around and that doesn’t take much of anything. Take back everything at the grassroots, starting with state legislatures. That’s what Madison always said. I’d like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.

 

Q: Do you see any developments on the horizon that might suggest an alternative?

 

Vidal: Newton’s Third Law. I hope that law is still working. American laws don’t work, but at least the laws of physics might work. And the Third Law is: There is no action without reaction. There should be a great deal of reaction to the total incompetence of this Administration. It’s going to take two or three generations to recover what we had as of twenty years ago.

 

David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado. His latest book is “Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics.”

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Rumpole author claims UK is selling out to fascism

 

PHIL MILLER, Arts Correspondent

The Herald, August 17 2006

 

Britain is in danger of "selling out to fascism" in the way it is dealing with the threat of terrorism, according to John Mortimer, the QC and popular author.

 

Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which is sponsored by The Herald and Sunday Herald, the creator of the Rumpole of the Bailey series of books criticised the government's response to terrorism.

 

Mortimer said his next book was to be called Rumpole and the Reign of Terror and would feature Rumpole defending a suspect, a hospital doctor accused of being a terrorist.

 

"The book's about terrorists, but it's not really about terrorists - it's about this wonderful government, who have given away all our civil liberties," he said.

 

"They've cancelled the Magna Carta, they've stopped trial by juries, and removed the presumption of innocence just because the terrorists are around, which is a certain way of changing our life - which is what the terrorists want to do.

 

"One of the things that Rumpole inveighs against is that his client does not know the charges against him.

 

"The changes have put us back way before 1215 AD, Mr Blair has removed us back to the Dark Ages. God knows who advises him on legal matters: although he is very near to God apparently."

 

He also disapproved of the use of "summary justice" he felt was part of the government's legal policy.

 

"If you get the policemen being judge and jury then you've really sold out to fascism," Mortimer added.

 

Earlier in the day, the lauded Irish writer John Banville, who won last year's Booker Prize for The Sea, at an event in the festival's main RBS Theatre.

 

Asked by a member of the audience who he thought would win this year's Booker Prize, the long list of which was revealed this week, he admitted he had not read any of the books on it.

 

He said winning the £50,000 prize was often down to chance. "It's a lottery, and someone on the day will just say: 'Oh, just give it to him.' Which is exactly what happened last year."

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Sliming a Famous Muckraker: The Untold Story

 

http://tinyurl.com/y5opm3 (editorandpublisher.com)

 

 

By Greg Mitchell

 

(January 30, 2006) -- This is the story of a recent Los Angeles Times "scoop" that was error-ridden and misleading and resulted in a hysterical rightwing attack, led by Jonah Goldberg, on a famed author nearly 40 years after his passing.

 

It all began a little over a month ago, on Dec. 24, with an article in the metro section of the L.A. Times by Orange County reporter Jean O. Pasco, headlined, "Sinclair Letter Turns Out to be Another Expose." It revealed that a Newport Beach attorney named Paul Hegness had finally gotten around to exploring the contents of a box of dusty old papers sitting in a closet that he had purchased at an Irvine auction for $100.

 

A letter postmarked Sept. 12, 1929, caught his eye. It was addressed to lawyer John Beardsley. The return address read: Upton Sinclair, Long Beach.

 

Sinclair, of course, was one of the original muckrakers, a Pulitzer Prize winner, famed author of dozens of novels including "The Jungle"--which sparked overdue reform in the food industry-and a tireless activist. As author of a 600-page book about his nearly-successful 1934 campaign for governor of California, I know a thing or two about the man, one of the most fascinating, if often maddening, figures of the 20th century. I'm even familiar with Beardsley.

 

So what did the 1929 letter contain that was so interesting that it warranted a 1200-word Los Angeles Times report and the attentions of syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg?

 

In it Sinclair informed his lawyer that he had met with Fred Moore, identified by Pasco as attorney for the legendary anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were executed in 1927 for killing two men during a robbery in Braintree, Mass. Their trial and execution drew worldwide protests, mainly from the left side of the dial. Sinclair would write an epic novel based on the case called "Boston," one of his best-known and well-regarded books.

 

Alone in a hotel room with the lawyer, "I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote in the 1929 letter. Moore "then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."

 

The last paragraph of the note read: "This letter is for yourself alone. Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story."

 

The Pasco article strongly suggests that Sinclair was a hypocrite and liar, for he went on choosing to believe that Sacco and Vanzetti were railroaded, wrote a novel mocking the trial, and supposedly never told anyone about the chat with Fred Moore. The article calls Sinclair's letter a "confession" and later "a confessional."

 

Strong stuff. But right after publication, one warning flag appeared: The Times had to run a correction for three fairly small errors in the story. It didn't take long, however, for conservative writers to jump on the "revelation."

 

A California assemblyman named Chuck DeVore declared in Human Events magazine that the Pasco piece "lays bares Sinclair's true role in promoting left-wing myths in America." He urged readers to think of this the next time they "see the heirs to this shameful legacy with their banners and bumper stickers trying to break our resolve in the face of evil."

 

But leave it to Jonah Goldberg, writing in his syndicated column (and at National Review Online), to tie the Sinclair letter to George Clooney.

 

Goldberg opened his Jan. 5 column by citing a recent quote from Clooney, in which the actor said he didn't know any time in history that liberals stood on "the wrong side of social issues." Now that Goldberg had read the Sinclair story, he was ready to ridicule this notion.

 

He declared that the article revealed that Sinclair "knew" Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty - their lawyer had told him the "unvarnished truth" -- and then "quite simply, lied" about it to sell books and protect the leftwing movement.

 

The Sacco and Vanzetti episode, of course, was just one in a long line of misguided liberal causes, Goldberg added, from defending Alger Hiss to declaring that Matthew Shepard was killed because he was gay (rather than being "a drug addict caught up with other drug addicts"). Now George Clooney has "unilaterally beatified" Edward R. Murrow, when the fact is, Murrow "was just another journalist."

 

Fear not, Jonah does get around to mentioning, inevitably, Hillary Clinton, citing her youthful offer to help a lawyer for the Black Panthers.

 

Even when liberals know they are on shaky ground, their view, according to Goldberg, is: "It matters not. Print the legend." That's why it's hard to find a liberal "martyr-saint" who has not been "burnished by deceit." It seems that when they reach "icon status, the facts get inconvenient."

 

Well, the facts prove a bit inconvenient for Goldberg and Pasco, as well (even beyond the corrected errors in the original L.A. Times piece).

 

For one thing, Goldberg claims that it was Sinclair's "The Jungle" that provoked Theodore Roosevelt to coin the term "muckraker." Sorry, it was a series of 1906 magazine articles by David Graham Philips.

 

More critically: Pasco describes Moore as "the men's lawyer" (meaning Sacco and Vanzetti). In fact, when he met with Sinclair, he was their former lawyer-fired over key disputes on how to handle the case. Goldberg repeats this error. Would this make Moore, perhaps, more likely to turn on the men?

 

Next, the whole Sinclair-Moore conversation is hardly a scoop. It is recounted, for example, in the main Sinclair biography to date, "Upton Sinclair: American Rebel," by Leon Harris, published in 1975. That book finds Sinclair-- mirroring the newly-found letter-- telling a correspondent precisely what Moore said in that same 1929 meeting. He asks leftwing writer Robert Minor to keep the Moore charges quiet for the time being as he wants to finish his novel and he feared there was a real possibility "that some anarchist might think it is his duty to keep me from finishing the book."

 

Now, getting to the real meat of the matter: Last Thursday, a Reuters article by Arthur Spiegelman appeared. He took the trouble to consider Sinclair's entire letter-which, it turns out, was three pages long, typed. Pasco either didn't see the whole thing, or looked at it and chose to ignore key parts of it (or her editor deleted it). Spiegelman, also unlike Pasco and Goldberg, explored how Sinclair actually portrayed the Sacco and Vanzetti case in "Boston." Did he indeed "lie" about what Moore told him, or make proper use of it in a popular novel?

 

Spiegelman wrote that Goldberg "might have been better served if he had read the entire letter instead of the excerpts printed in the Times." In a copy of the full letter made available to Reuters, Sinclair explains that soon after he talked to Moore he began to have doubts about him: "I realized certain facts about Fred Moore. I had heard that he was using drugs. I knew that he had parted from the defense committee after the bitterest of quarrels. ... Moore admitted to me that the men themselves had never admitted their guilt to him; and I began to wonder whether his present attitude and conclusions might not be the result of his brooding on his wrongs."

 

Sinclair had even questioned Moore's former wife, who worked with the lawyer on the case, and she "expressed the greatest surprise" saying he had not expressed thoughts that the men were guilty before. All left out of the Pasco, and Goldberg, articles.

 

In the letter, he also vowed his novel "Boston" would tell all sides, focusing not on the question of innocence but the lack of a fair trial-putting him on very firm ground in that pursuit, most historians agree. The two anarchists may, indeed, have been guilty-- but the trial was an outrage.

 

Further, Anthony Arthur, whose new biography of Sinclair will be published this June, provided excerpts from the book to Spiegelman. They show that in other letters, Sinclair quotes Moore as not even being sure both men were guilty. "Moore said neither man ever admitted it to him," Arthur writes.

 

In other words, it was only Moore's opinion: hardly the "unvarnished truth," as Goldberg presents it. Yet Goldberg charged that Sinclair "knew" that the pair were guilty and "quite simply, lied."

 

And, finally, what about the charge that Sinclair ignored Moore's insights to save his lefty cred? In fact, "Boston" is a nuanced novel (rare for Sinclair) that introduces many reasons to question the defendant's innocence, and focuses on the question of the trial itself and the evils of the death penalty. In the same letter to Robert Minor, Sinclair explained that despite the troubling views expressed by Moore-and other debunkers--he could still write the novel "on the basis of certainty that they did not have a fair trial."

 

In the end, the heroine of his novel was patterned on himself: believing in the pair's innocence at the beginning and ending not knowing quite what to believe.

 

Arthur, the biographer, told Spiegelman that Sinclair's decision to end "Boston" on a note of ambiguity concerning Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt subjected him to "a torrent of abuse from the left." It came from Communists, anarchists and others on the left-in other words, the kind of people Jonah Goldberg loves to target. Robert Minor called Sinclair "a hired liar, a coward and a traitor."

 

Once blasted by the left for his handling of the case, Spiegelman concludes, "Now he is being hit from the right." In each case, unjustly.

 

Greg Mitchell (gmitchell at editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P. His book, "The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics," won the Goldsmith Book Prize in 1993. It was made into a PBS documentary and now a stage production.

 

gmitchell at editorandpublisher.com

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Finkelstein's "Beyond Chutzpah" Nixed by Cowed Bookstores

 

http://www.counterpunch.com/farley08132005.html

 

August 13 / 14, 2005

 

Too Hot for Harvard

Finkelstein's "Beyond Chutzpah" Nixed by Cowed Bookstores

 

By JOHN FARLEY

 

CounterPunchers are already aware of the attempts by Alan Dershowitz to stop publication of Norman Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah with threats of a libel suit. When Dershowitz failed, that seemed to be the end of the story, but it wasn't: The effort to suppress the book continues in new ways. Bookstores normally host events to introduce new books, but at least two bookstores have now rescinded invitations to previously scheduled events for Beyond Chutzpah.

 

The Barnes and Noble bookstore at DePaul University cited the "controversial" nature of the book. Since controversy helps to sell books, the Barnes and Noble decision is really a euphemism for a cave-in to outside pressure. Pressure exerted by whom? One guess: the same Barnes and Noble bookstore is holding an event for Dershowitz's new book, The Case for Peace, which boasts of a blurb by General Ariel Sharon himself. There is certainly no controversy here!

 

The Harvard bookstore also rescinded an invitation to an event for Beyond Chutzpah, stating that it feared "economic retaliation". This raises the very interesting question of just exactly who is threatening "economic retaliation?" Obviously it can't be Dershowitz acting alone: an individual professor just doesn't buy that many books.

 

Dershowitz is the public spokesman for a larger group, which is making an organized effort to suppress Beyond Chutzpah, using a new form of censorship: making threats to choke off the distribution channels.

 

John Farley lives in Henderson, Nevada. He can be reached at: johnwfarley@yahoo.com

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

For interesting background, see Jon Wiener's review of this sordid affair:

 

The Nation July 11, 2005 issue

 

Giving Chutzpah New Meaning

 

By Jon Wiener

 

What do you do when somebody wants to publish a book that says you're completely wrong? If you're Alan Dershowitz, the prominent Harvard law professor, and the book is Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, you write the governor of California and suggest that he intervene with the publisher--because the publisher is the University of California Press, which conceivably might be subject to the power of the governor.

 

Schwarzenegger, showing unusual wisdom, declined to act. The governor's legal affairs secretary wrote Dershowitz, "You have asked for the Governor's assistance in preventing the publication of this book," but "he is not inclined to otherwise exert influence in this case because of the clear, academic freedom issue it presents." In a phone interview Dershowitz denied writing to the Governor, declaring, "My letter to the Governor doesn't exist." But when pressed on the issue, he said, "It was not a letter. It was a polite note."

 

Full: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20050711&s=wiener

 

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