Shining and Other Paths, edited by Steve J Stern.

The Shining Path, or Sendero Luminoso, was a Maoist revolutionary movement born of Peru’s university system. It was the creation of Professor Abimael Guzman who, with fellow professors and students, saw communism as a potential liberating force for Peru’s impoverished underclass. They began by addressing the plight of highland, Quechua-speaking “Indians,” who labored long hours in poverty under a centuries-old, colonial, hacienda system. In that system, a “patron” owned the land and exercised such complete control that he was permitted to physically punish his workers. Organizing an army in the province of Ayacucho, Guzman and his cohort initiated retribution against patrons and corrupt local government bosses. The Peruvian military responded with violent attacks on Sendero villages and cadres, which began a war that lasted from 1980 to 1995 and claimed almost 70,000 lives. In the end, what defeated the Sendero Luminoso was an inflexible party dogma. By demanding that all regional produce go to the party, that traditional tribal leadership be abolished and replaced by their hierarchy and that children be conscripted for military service, they lost the support of the people they had come to liberate. The communists could not tolerate disloyalty to the party. Their response to resistance was assassination and massacre. Though the initial years of the war were dominated by Peruvian Army annihilations of Quechua-speaking communities, “by around 1988 it was the Shining Path’s massacres that populated the map of regional death” (Stern, p. 147). The military saw an opening, began arming highland (Serrano) communities, and expelled the Maoists with that support. Today, there are still a few bands of Sendero Luminoso, but the threat of revolution has passed.

Shining and Other Paths is an anthology of history and analysis discussing the rise and fall of the Sendero Luminoso. It’s five parts cover 1) The history of oppression and resistance that gave paved the way for the failed revolution; 2) The war in the highlands and Quechua life during this period; 3) The destruction of reform efforts by both the Shining Path and the Peruvian Armed Forces, 4) The different roles and political stripes of women during the war; and 5) The legacies of this war.

Frequently, an anthology will attempt to cast a wide net, representing voices of as many different political perspectives as possible. An editor covering a nation experiencing revolution, might choose to present articles written by government, revolutionary, native, reformist and reactionary individuals, to present the full spectrum of opinions. This book is distinctive in its single-point political perspective. Its writers are uniformly of a liberal-progressive stance that is to the Right of the Shining Path and to the Left of the government. Their concern is entirely with the well-being of the Quechua-speaking population, the poor city-dwellers and the Peruvian reformers, all of whom were the main victims in this conflict. According to a report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), out of a national death toll of 69,280 people, 75% spoke Quechua as their native language.** To put this in perspective, 80% of the population speaks Spanish. Only 20% of the population speaks Quechua; yet they accounted for three-fourths of the casualties.

Shining and Other Paths is a compendium of thoughtful essays elucidating the destructive impact of the Maoist revolutionaries, and the government forces, on Peruvian society. But in many ways, this volume is a both a product and a victim of history. The Shining Path lost. It is this fact that informs the analysis recorded therein. If the revolutionaries had been successful, US leftist analysis would appear more conciliatory. After all, when the Vietnamese Communist Party was victorious, many of its wartime atrocities against perceived traitors and resistant communities in the countryside were forgotten. The rigorous demands and conscriptions imposed on farming communities by the Viet Cong were seen, by many sympathetic western scholars, as a necessary evil to create the conditions for victory and the overcoming of oppression. The Peruvian authors of this volume would also represent events differently. Within a nation where a successful revolution has occurred, a different, cleaner perspective on the events is taught in the schools and advanced to the public. Few US citizens are aware of British claims that US revolutionary soldiers scalped wounded Redcoats at Concord. The excesses of any revolution are sanitized in a campaign of honoring the “visionaries” who supported revolution and a public agreement of national forgetting. Shining and Other Paths is an insightful guide to the failures and injustices of its subject organization. But the reader must not forget the events and political agendas that inform this book’s conclusions. The writers represent views far more aligned with those of Peruvian reformers, who were assassinated by the revolutionaries, than with any other group. The Sendero Luminoso could not have gained a foothold in Ayacucho without initial Quechua support. They did speak to the aspirations of some disenfranchised Serranos. Some gave their lives for the Sendero view of the future and supported the Maoists even in defeat. I wonder what they would have said.

**"CVR. Tomo VIII. Chapter 2. "El impacto diferenciado de la violencia" "2.1 VIOLENCIA Y DESIGUALDAD RACIAL Y ÉTNICA"" (PDF). pp. 131–132.

Stern, Steve J. (ed.) Shining and Other Paths. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Islamophobia, the Red Scare and Donald Trump. Inspired by Reading Murray B. Levin.

In April of 1919, US postal officials discovered thirty-six bombs had been mailed to prominent politicians and industrialists throughout the United States. On June 2, 1919, a more successful effort through the mail produced eight explosions across the US. (Levin, pp. 32-4). These bombings were presented to  the public as a foreign-inspired Bolshevik plot. (Levin, p. 1). The public was understandably alarmed. A number of politicians used the opportunity to initiate the nation’s first Red Scare. Thousands of foreigners were deported. Offices of radical organizations were raided by federal agents. (Levin, pp. 52-3). Conservative politicians like Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer (the individual who ordered the raids) attempted to increase their personal power. Palmer used the publicity to launch a bid for the Presidency of the United States. (Levin, p 72).

Sound familiar? Replace Bolshevik with Islamic, and Palmer with Trump, and you have the USA in 2015. Have we learned so little about fear? Do we automatically revert to an irrational defensive posture which violates the rights of citizens and improves the circumstances of demagogic conservative politicians? Though I am sure that I could write an article of popular opinion, excoriating Trump for his fear-mongering, the truth is that Trump would not be successful without an ignorant public who is unaware of their history, their prejudices and themselves. It’s easy to point at Trump and say that he is the problem. But these epidemics of fear occur periodically in the United States against some foreign or “un-American” source. It results in our putting safety before human rights and oppressing a class of people. This time the target is Muslims.  Yes, there are some terrorist attacks occurring by some Muslims. But a large section of US citizenry, in one of its characteristic fits of anxiety, is failing to properly assess the risk. Saying that we should prevent Muslims from entering the country because of terrorism, is like saying that we should keep library cards out of the hands of Southern Baptists because they’re just going to burn  the  books; or that we should keep white teenage boys out of high school because they’re just going to go crazy and shoot-up the place. The large majority of Southern Baptists, white teenage boys and Muslim Americans are law-abiding, rational people. Far more rational than Trump’s noisy minions.

What is needed is a dispassionate discourse, not an emotional reaction. And this is what we should be demanding of our politicians. It has been said too often that terrorism relies upon fear to win. Too often because so many citizens are not listening and the message bears repeating. If you react out of fear, they win. The losers will be innocent citizens, our Bill of Rights, and you. If we can take a collective breath and begin examining the many reasonable options for curtailing violence, we will be able to produce a plan that balances civil liberties with safety. 

We must tread carefully. We must fully examine each proposal designed to prevent attacks. If, in  the process of securing the safety of our nation, we undermine the Constitution and  violate our laws, there will be no America as we know it, to defend. For example, we currently have a no-fly list for people whom we suspect could perform terrorist acts. If this limitation is fully vetted, and found to be constitutional, then the list may have other useful safety applications. Logically, if an individual is such  a danger to the US populace that their freedom to travel by  air has been proscribed, then it is reasonable to prevent their access to the purchase of firearms, with which they could cause more public harm. The aforementioned is a limited, cautiously contemplated limitation on individual rights. It may not stand-up to intelligent dialogue; but there should be a dialogue. Compared to the infringements proposed in some quarters that we prevent further immigration by Muslims, or curtail internet access for everyone, this proposal at least not a fear-based, bigoted reaction to outsiders. But, whatever our solutions will be, they must be approached with an attitude of calm and a method which respects due process. This collective breath is square one of an intelligent conversation. The next moves determine our freedoms for the near future. Lets avoid another Red Scare.

Levin, Murray B. Political Hysteria in America. The Democratic Capacity for Repression. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. 1971.

The Guardian of Boston. William Monroe Trotter by Stephen R. Fox.

William Monroe Trotter was an early Twentieth Century radical for the cause of racial equality. Of course, what was radical in 1910 is accepted wisdom in 2015. Among his most memorable activities were his conflict with Woodrow Wilson over segregation in the federal departments of government, his agitation against the film “Birth of a Nation,” his organizing with The Niagara Movement (precursor to the NAACP) and his reporting from the Paris Peace Conference.

The main instrument for Trotter’s opinions was a newspaper that he founded in 1901 with George Forbes, called The Guardian. Publications created by and for African Americans were few, and played an important role in both informing and organizing the populace.  This newspaper was founded primarily in response to the accommodationist politics of Booker T. Washington, and remained a thorn in the side of this famous educator throughout his career. Trotter, as editor, hounded Washington for his unwillingness to address lynching (Fox, p. 27), segregation (Fox, p. 34) and the loss of voting rights for southern African Americans (Fox, p. 36). When Washington’s influence was eclipsed by the rise of the NAACP, African Americans finally had a superior advocate for their rights.

If Trotter had limited his criticism to Washington, history would have vindicated his perspective. “But he had the strong man’s flaw: his bulldog tenacity could often become a prickly stubbornness…Compromise was not flexibility, but cowardice. Other men were either manly or unmanly, with him or against him. These qualities made him an admirable spokesman for the protest tradition, but hamstrung his personal relationships.” (Fox, pp. 64-5). Trotter was unable to accept that a movement is a body with many organs that function for the well-being of the entire organism. As a result, he eventually alienated almost all of the important radicals whose perspectives he shared. WEB Du Bois, Archibald Grimke, George Forbes, Clement Morgan and William Ferris, all were one-time allies who deserted Trotter. This is a sad and frustrating theme in the book: while African Americans are losing many rights, facing a resurgent KKK and enduring an increase in lynching, Trotter is wasting movement energy on infighting.

Stephen R. Fox, for his part, does a heroic job of reporting on this important but difficult figure. He does his best to balance the editor’s valuable work and his difficult personality. But even the most saintly biographer cannot avoid editorializing about such flagrant personality deficits, as when he parenthetically discusses the activist’s “larger problem of subordinating his ego sufficiently to admit mistakes and remain on good terms with anyone whom he did not control.” (Fox, p. 118). At least one cannot accuse Fox of hagiography.

Despite William Monroe Trotter’s personal flaws there is much to recommend him. He put forth the then unpopular (now accepted) idea that African American organizations should be run primarily by African Americans in order to  empower them. Even the NAACP of his time had a majority of white men on its board. As a Harvard graduate from a well-off family, he had the opportunity for material comfort. But he “relinquished a comfortable, respectable existence” for a life that “brought him poverty…For over thirty years he genuinely put his people’s welfare above his own. And the tragedy of his life is that he died without much assurance that his dedication had been worth it.” (Fox, pp. 281-2).

Fox, Stephen R. The Guardian of Boston. William Monroe Trotter. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer by Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D Ehrman provides a carefully considered, insightful, perspective on the Bible. It is a document which he has spent a long time examining. Ehrman has been a biblical scholar and a professor of religion for over thirty years. He has written 27 books, primarily on topics related to the Bible. Since 1988, he has taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. But he does not believe in God. He defines himself as an “Agnostic.” This is a definition he chose not because the word “Atheist” is repugnant to him, but because he thinks that it is more accurate to say that he cannot disprove the existence of God. (One cannot disprove the existence of unicorns either, but that doesn’t mean we need to quibble over the possibility of their existence.) The professor’s purpose in writing this book is to have a population that questions and understands what is written in the scriptures. He’s not out to make atheists. After all, he is married to a churchgoing Episcopal woman and teaches students, the majority of whom are believers. Professor Ehrman’s view is that “the Bible lies at the foundation of Western culture and civilization…the Bible informs our thinking in more ways than we are inclined to allow” (Ehrman, p. 14). Its ethics and ideas have profoundly influenced Western civilization for better and worse. Even today, citizens of Europe and the Americas express thoughts (sometimes direct phrases) that are found in the Bible; often without being aware of their source. So, for Westerners, knowing what the Bible says permits them to be more conscious of factors that have shaped and continue to form, the societies in which they live.

God’s Problem is a methodical, chronological examination of the Bible’s many answers to the question “Why Do We Suffer.” Ehrman takes the reader from the views of the Prophets on this subject, through those of the apocalyptic Jewish sects, to the appropriately final Christian apocalypticists. This author combines a good biblical scholar’s full understanding of the text, with the incisive mind of an individualist Agnostic who is not afraid to question its wisdom or consistency. For example, Ehrman reveals the views of the Prophets who lived during a time when Israel and Judea were Jewish kingdoms. People then were distressed by famines and attacks from neighbors. They asked why they were suffering. The Prophets, almost universally, answered that the people were being punished by God for disobeying his laws. The Prophets assured that God would re-embrace his people when they returned to his laws. Conversely, after Israel and Judea fell, many Jews were being persecuted by their conquerors for maintaining their religion and obeying Jewish law. So why isn’t God returning to his people, as promised, to re-embrace them? When this generation of Jews asked why they were suffering, the apocalyptic Maccabees answered that God’s cosmic enemies and their earthly minions were battling God and harming his people. The book of Daniel, written at this time, assured that God would send a Messiah who would vanquish the Lord’s enemies and establish a heavenly kingdom on earth. So the answer of the Prophets, that God causes suffering as punishment for disobedience, directly conflicts with the apocalyptic Jewish answer, that God’s enemies cause suffering as retribution for obedience to God. These contradictions make clear that the Bible is not inspired or channeled from a Supreme Being. If it were, answers would complement each other, rather than contradict each other. Instead, the Bible is a compilation of writings by different people, at different times, answering the question based upon their situation. Ehrman’s method is to present in each chapter a different biblical answer to why people suffer, then expose the inadequacy of the answer in a final assessment.

In discussing the ways that God punishes his people, our theologian expresses his difficulty in accepting this behavior of God. He criticizes universal punishments like the Great Flood, where God drowns all of the innocent babies on the earth because people have become sinful. He criticizes the individual punishments meted-out on specific wrongdoers, like when God kills the infant of King David and Bathsheeba for their betrayl of Uriah. Clearly, God’s moral actions do not sit well with Professor Ehrman.

Though the writer is capable of complex biblical analysis and extensive, rational contemplation, regarding the question of suffering, his main criticism of the inadequacy of biblical answers derives directly from the compassionate impulses which drove him from belief to Agnosticism in the first place: today’s conditions of suffering and God’s resounding absence. Ehrman is grief-stricken by the overwhelming suffering endured by God’s alleged children: If “the God who created this world is a God of love and power who intervenes for his faithful to deliver them from their pain and sorrow and bring them salvation…Why are babies still born with birth defects? Why are children kidnapped, raped and murdered? Why are there droughts that leave millions starving…If God intervened to deliver the armies of Israel from its enemies, why doesn’t he intervene now when the armies of sadistic tyrants savagely attack and destroy entire villages…If God [fed] the hungry with the miraculous multiplication of loaves, why is it that one child…dies every five seconds of hunger?” (Ehrman, pp. 5-6). Ehrman has many religious friends and students who have posed answers based on the Bible. The most common answer is that God gave humans free-will and humans use that free will to do evil. The professor has two answers to that question: 1: “If God gave people free will as a great gift, why didn’t he give them the intelligence they need to exercise it so that we can all live happily and peaceably together?” (Ehrman, p. 13). 2: “If suffering is entirely about free will, how can you explain hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters?” (Ehrman, p. 229).

Whether one responds to Professor Ehrman’s well-reasoned analysis of the Bible’s answers, or to his personal anguish over today’s conditions of suffering, one will respond. The question of why we suffer leads one on a thought-and-emotion-provoking journey that, at some point, most thinking and feeling westerners exposed to the Bible will undertake. Inviting Bart Ehrman along on this trek, will help to clear-away some of the fog on the path.

Ehrman, Bart D. God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

Woman of Valor. Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America by Ellen Chesler.

“Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women.” She worked from “a makeshift clinic, in a tenement storefront in of Brooklyn, New York. When she died fifty years later, the cause for which she defiantly broke the law had achieved international stature” (Chesler, p. 11). Of course she did not accomplish the acceptance of birth control on her own. There were many who preceded Sanger in the effort to secure legal, reliable contraception. There were many who worked on the issue as volunteers under her, or as rivals for pre-eminence in the movement. And there were scientists and activists who followed her and expanded upon her gains. A few of Sanger’s accomplishments include several successful court rulings mitigating the Comstock Laws, thence allowing the dissemination of (formerly illegal) birth control information; creation of our country’s first network of birth control clinics; and introduction of the diaphragm into the United States. Twenty-first Century proponents and opponents of birth control agree on very little. But there is one thing historically-minded activists of these opposing movements do agree upon: Margaret Sanger is the reason why birth control is so widely accepted in the United States today.

This biography was a twenty-year-long odyssey for Ellen Chesler. The years of care have paid-off. It is a masterful, detailed and balanced study, on one of the most effective activists for social change to appear in the US. One of the strongest features of this biography is one that has the capability of being a weakness. In her introduction, Chesler cautions “this study necessarily incorporates some of the history of these sweeping developments. It veers away at points in the narrative from the woman herself” (Chesler, p. 12). True, but the veering reveals the culture, the historical evolution and the placement of Sanger in the context of her time’s political developments. It is not only necessary, but informative.

Ellen Chesler undeniably supports birth control and sees Sanger as a hero. After all, the work is entitled Woman of Valor, not Kicker of Dogs. In spite of her personal admiration, Chesler is capable of fairly portraying the difficult personality traits and unjust political perspectives of her subject. Sanger was a thorny, vain, competitive woman. Those who appreciated her company were thick-skinned people capable of admiring a driven, intelligent, challenging friend. Additionally, the author freely depicts Sanger as a terrible parent who abandons her sons, leaving them with “an unappeased hunger for the love and approval of a mother…who lavished her exuberance on other people and causes but never found enough time for them” (Chesler, pp. 137-8).

Margaret Sanger’s racism is a well-known fact and one that Chelser unflinchingly portrays. She supported the philosophy of eugenics. In the early 1800s, eugenics began with the lofty and flawed goal of creating a better society by encouraging the best human stock to breed. Further complicating their misapprehension of humanity and genetics, eugenicists composed the economic and social elite of the US and Europe who either quietly felt or explicitly stated that theirs was the class/culture which should be breeding. Conversely, those of other classes and cultures should be breeding less. Sanger’s advocacy of birth control caused members of the Eugenics Movement to approach her with their idea that birth control could be used to prevent growth of undesirable classes. Sanger was of an immigrant Irish Catholic background. Furthermore, she had married a Jew and produced what eugenicists would think of as "mongrel children" from that marriage. She was from two groups whose reproduction the eugenicists would want to limit. Nevertheless, Sanger was nothing if not an opportunist. She was offered vocal support from an elite during a time when she had little else, and she took it. In the words of her biographer: “eugenics…became an unmitigated defense of property, privilege and race baiting” (Chesler, p.215).

Other expressions of this activist’s personal racism are a mass of confusing mixed messages, but undeniable. Clearly she was prejudiced enough to take support from the Eugenics Movement. Conversely, she employed African American doctors in her Harlem clinic when such a practice was unthinkable for a white organization. Also, she would not permit expressions of racial bigotry among her staff. Finally, she opposed “racial stereotyping” by eugenicists, “claiming that intelligence and other inherited traits vary by individual, not by group” (Chesler, p.215). However, Sanger later contradicts this claim. The reviewer has read Ms Sanger’s “What Every Girl Should Know. Part II: Sexual Impulses.” In this article, which appeared in the December 29, 1912 issue of “New York Call,” she states “the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that the police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.”** Shocking as that sounds, these were not uncommon perceptions among white people. While there may have been some free-thinking white individuals who thought that non-whites were entirely our equals in brain development and were of the same species as whites, the norm of US society was far less enlightened in 1912. Less than fifty years earlier, African Americans were slaves and even the most progressive of abolitionists believed that they were mentally inferior to whites. Racism was so endemic to early 20^th Century America that it existed on both sides of the contraception issue. Some favoring contraception blatantly supported using it to limit African American reproduction. Some opposing contraception argued just as fervently that limiting the size of white families was “race suicide” and would allow African Americans to dominate politically in areas of the country. Less well-known, and  more disturbing, is a 1926 address Sanger gave to women’s auxiliary of the  Ku Klux Klan (http://www.snopes.com/margaret-sanger-kkk/). At this point, Ms Sanger’s ignorance concerning race and the Klan approaches the surreal. The KKK is an immensely anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic organization. How this Catholic-born activist with her half-Jewish children came together with a group that hates both of those aspects of her is a mystery. But more importantly, the KKK was well-known as a hate group that most thinking people avoided. It is clear that Sanger furthered racism in her time. Despite the plethora of mixed messages, her public actions (support for eugenics, addressing the KKK and her published writings) all caused harm to the cause of African American equality.

Ellen Chesler’s portrayal of Sanger’s life is an achievement of rare quality: factual, balanced, highly readable and unafraid of controversy. Some may think that Ms Chesler is the true “woman of valor.” She never shrinks from the truth and fully, patiently examines the circumstances of the time. It is a biography that will leave the reader with a strong background on the history of the Birth Control Movement, the life of Margaret Sanger, and the zeitgeist of US society during her time period.

Chesler, Ellen. Woman of Valor. Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

**Sanger, Margaret. "What Every Girl Should Know," New York Call, December 29, 1912. The Public Papers of Margaret Sanger: Web Edition. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2015.

The Art of Forgery by Noah Charney

Noah Charney has written a well planned and colorful book that will introduce the general public to the subject of art forgery. This is not an exhaustive, academic study of the topic. It is an entertaining presentation that relies on the sensations of crime, trickery and flamboyant personalities, to seduce its audience. Nonetheless, the book contains a respectable amount of information for the uninitiated.

This author has selected an uncommon, but effective direction for his book. He first sympathizes with the popular image of forgers as “artful tricksters—often ingenious, skilful, quirky and charming.”  (Charney, p. 13). These criminals are generally perceived by the public as damaging only the reputations of arrogant art experts, and the wallets of wealthy collectors who can afford a loss. But this view evolves. Charney’s evaluation progressively pays more attention to the effects of such criminal behavior on society. “A forgery scandal…damages our understanding of the past and skews the study of history.” (Charney, p. 89). Charney later examines counterfeiters who enter historical archives posing as researchers. When inside, they insert false provenance that will be later found by buyers to validate the history of the false work being sold. This is highly damaging because “once real archives have been impregnated with fake historical evidence…every piece of documentation in the archive must be called into question.” There is no other way to tell how many records have been tainted. (Charney, p. 177). Archives must then embark upon an expensive, time-consuming process of re-examining all records to expunge the fakes and become once again trustworthy for scholars. Since most archives are non-profits with little expendable cash, this is a hardship. The theme of destructiveness progresses to the point where Charney is presenting literary forgeries like “The Donation of Constantine” which permitted the Vatican to seize large provinces of property, and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which led to numerous anti-Semitic murders and pogroms. Shifting from artworks to written forgeries, is incongruous with the rest of the book, but does illustrate the most harmful consequences of forgery.

Professor Charney purports to offer his readers the opportunity to “peer into the forger’s mind, motivation and methods.” (Charney, p. 17). While it is a dicey claim to say that one can enter the mind and motivations of another whom one has never met, using only written information, the author does make a brave attempt. His task is further complicated by the fact that he relies on the words of convicted forgers, who lie for a living. Naturally, the forgers ascribe to themselves only the most self-congratulatory explanations for their actions; and these explanations almost never involve greed. But Charney is taken-in by these professional deceivers. He claims “we might assume that money is the primary motivation for art forgery, but we see again and again that this is rarely true—although profit might be a welcome bonus. Forgers are complex psychological characters driven by many different impulses.” (Charney, p. 14). It is not certain that Professor Charney’s PhD in Art History gives him the qualifications to analyze the criminal mind. While this author primarily ignores the profit motive, he does ascribe some negative reasons for art forgery to his subjects. Chapters entitled “Pride, Revenge, Fame and Power” are headings under which individual forger’s stories are told.

One of the most interesting, contentious and mentally challenging chapters is “Genius.” Here, Charney presents the early forgery careers of famous artists. Michelangelo once carved a statue which he passed-off as an ancient Roman marble. (Charney, p. 36). Later, when famous, Michelangelo “copied drawings of the old masters…he smoked and tinted the paper to give it the appearance of age.” He was thereby able to “keep the originals and return the copies in their place.” (Charney, p. 38). This, and other examples of talented artists committing crimes, does blur the line between forger and artist. To complicate matters further, forgers do not reproduce works that are hanging in museums and galleries; they would not be able to sell their fakes as originals this way. Instead, they study the style of a master and reproduce works in that style. One might argue that they are producing an original work with aesthetic, emotional appeal. But let’s not get carried away. Most average art school graduates can copy an original work or style; that’s part of the training. This does not make one a “genius.” Concerning masters who were also forgers, one can see their original works as excellent art, while also accepting that they once created inferior derivations. Charney later challenges his own thesis with comments that “a forger’s work is inherently derivative” and that with few exceptions “forgers are largely failed artists who are missing one component of greatness.” (Charney, p. 108). The author’s chapter on “Revenge” is testimony to the failure of most forgers to produce successful original works. When they are unsuccessful in the art world, they turn to forgery for revenge and profit.

Noah Charney’s subject and presentation have the power to excite and captivate his audience. He understands his readers and appeals to what moves them. Combining the iconoclastic personalities of several forgers, with the crime drama of law enforcement’s pursuit and capture, the author spins fascinating stories while providing instruction. The Art of Forgery provides the best of opportunities for readers, to be both entertained and informed.

Charney, Noah. The Art of Forgery. London: Phaidon Press, 2015.

Symptoms of Modernity. Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna by Matti Bunzl.

Symptoms of Modernity is an anthropological, cross-cultural study concerning the conditions and progress of the LGBT and Jewish communities in Austria. Matti Bunzl is able to link these two groups because both were perceived, by the majority of citizens, as containing traits which opposed the nation’s Aryan self-image. The existence of Jews and LGBT people contradicted the dominant culture’s view of itself as Aryan men and women, having specific gender roles, within a culturally homogeneous nation.

From this jumping-off point, Bunzl presents the similar history of these groups from pre-World War II to the early 21^st Century. The reader sees an evolution from oppression and exclusion, through the inter-war Nazi period of extermination, to the post-War period of disregard. The trajectory becomes more positive in the 1970s as both groups organize publicly and begin demanding rights. One then observes increasing progress through the 1990s and into the 21^st Century, which is influenced by both demands from these two communities within the nation and modernizing transnational pressure exerted primarily by the European Union that Austria wished to join.

The chief post-war stumbling block, which prevented Austrians from making much progress around homophobia and anti-Semitism, was the nation’s self-identification as “Hitler’s First Victim.” Those familiar with the history of the Anschluss will remember that the Austrian population overwhelmingly supported the Nazi “invasion.” German soldiers were welcomed at the border with flowers and treated to parades in Vienna. After the confetti was swept-up, Austria’s citizens brutally, enthusiastically participated in the Third Reich’s program, of killing and deporting to concentration camps, their Jewish and LGBT citizens. They were “Hitler’s First Cheerleaders.” But the loss of the war made remembering this behavior inconvenient. So the victim myth was born. Unlike their relatives in Germany, Austrians remained unrepentant. While Germany began a program of classes in public schools that addressed national responsibility for the Holocaust, Austria continued its ideology of racial purity and gendered images of Aryan men and women that excluded LGBT people and Jews. By the late 20^th Century, Germany was electing leftist chancellors like Willy Brandt and rising Green Party members like Petra Kelly, while Austria was electing conservative ex-Nazis like Kurt Waldheim and rising reactionaries like Jorg Haider.

Bunzl’s work is a unique contribution to the study of Austrian history and society. His examination of the intersections between the experiences of Jewish and LGBT communities is a first. The author teaches Anthropology, as well as History. His research is based upon both historical archives and direct, anthropological field study. As a result, his perspective is on the development of the two cultures, their institutions, their connections with each other and their relationship to the dominant culture, as they politically awaken and culturally expand over time.

The language of this book is a combination of academic anthropological expression and over-thinking. Its dense professional vocabulary sometimes results in ideas sounding more original and complex than they are. For example, Bunzl will say that the two communities “share a common genealogy of cultural abjection” (Bunzl, p. 12), rather than “they are similarly oppressed minorities.” Through a novel use of terms, Professor Bunzl also argues for a thesis statement that is intellectually obtuse and linguistically awkward. The author calls the LGBT and Jewish communities “symptoms of modernity,” meaning that they were “the abject products of the nation’s reification as a fantasized space of ethnic and sexual purity, as well as the signposts of its historical trajectory” (Bunzl, p. 216). Aside from the author’s ever-present, convoluted language, the idea is flawed on its face. It’s not Jewish and LGBT people who are “symptoms.” Indeed, calling oppressed minorities “symptoms” dehumanizes them and configures them in a subservient position as indicators for the dominant culture, when they should be represented as independent peoples. It would be simpler and more accurate to say “the way LGBT and Jewish people were treated showed how the Austrian culture was changing.”

The value of Symptoms of Modernity is not only in its unique presentation of Vienna’s LGBT and Jewish communities, but also in its optimism. Bunzl shows vibrant groups overcoming a horrific past and arriving in a more liberated, culturally rich present. His images of Pride Marches, social events, Jewish museums, strong organizations and protests, are affirmative pictures of healthy growth. A particular nugget of interest is his portrait of an iconoclastic political group of LGBT Jews called Re'uth. It’s not all rosy. This anthropologist presented signs that Austria was developing new nationalist prejudices targeting non-European immigrants. These anti-immigrant sentiments are poignant to read about, as Austria and the EU face their Migrant Crisis of Syrian refugees. But by and large, Bunzl celebrates the changes that have taken place and the regenerative ability of humanity.

Bunzl, Matti. Symptoms of Modernity. Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.