Alan Moore is a genius who can write brilliantly constructed stories and heart wrenchingly beautiful dialogue. His outrage at the horrors of capitalism are also palpable.

Unfortunately his politics are super dodgy. Specifically, this is demonstrated by his protagonist's method of building a revolutionary organisation and more generally trying to achieve that revolution.

His method of building a revolution is to randomly find a single other person, pick them off the street, then pretend to be the government, kidnap and torture them, then yell at them "I set you free!" until they become a committed revolutionary.

Hit method of working towards a revolution is to shut down the governments surveillance computers, hack into government systems to cause widespread food shortages and power outages, then randomly blow up government buildings, hoping that the sum of these actions will cause people to get angry and overthrow the government--and if it doesn't it's because people are sheep who love being oppressed.

All in all, wonderful artistry, trashfire politics.

This epic of a book is set during and after the occupation of Greece during and after the Second World War.

De Bernières has masterfully woven a huge cast of characters and multiple plot threads through a decades-long story. Some people say the last third of the book, when time begins to skip ahead faster, is perfunctory and unnecessary, but for me this is when the setup of the first two thirds begins to pay off, when the weight of time and memories hits home. In particular, as characters and objects reappear near the end of the novel after an absence of many years, their emotional significance is able to be re-evaluated and re-contextualised in a powerful way.

The language of the book, somehow combining a heightened sense of reality, matter-of-fact statements, a fairytale quality, understatement, overstatement, naïveté and comical sesquipedalian loquaciousness, is unique and draws the reader in. The omnipotent and highly opinionated narrator is used to great effect.

The author also does a fantastic job of conveying the horrors of war in a shocking and visceral fashion. 

The main issue I have with the novel is the extreme distortion of history and the political messages that are conveyed using this distorted version of events. Without going into every detail, the following are some of the more impactful inaccuracies.

The leader of the communist resistance suggests that the Greek king George and prime minister Metaxas were fascist sympathisers. This idea is treated by the novel as evidence that the Communist rebels are liars and fanatics. However, it is simply historical fact that Metaxas was not the prime minister, but a general and a dictator. Prior to the war and with the support of the king, he rounded up members and supporters of the Communist Party, put them into camps and tortured them. His emblem was the fascist axe and a crown.

The narrator claims that the partisans (andartes) failed to provide any resistance to the Italian or German occupations, fought amongst themselves and grew fat off food stolen from the peasants (whom they frequently executed as ‘collaborators’), only emerging later to set up set up a dictatorship and concentration camps the second the Germans left Greece. This is an almost total reversal of historical fact. Whilst it is true there was some political infighting between the different groups of partisans (the Stalinist politics of the Communists led to practice that was far from perfect), the majority of their efforts were directed to fighting the occupation. This is why the Italians and Germans were only able to hold the coastal towns—the partisans had almost complete hegemony over the countryside and were supported by almost all the peasants. By the time of the Greek Civil War, the Communist partisans could count on formal support from over two million peasants. Instead it was the royalists, the Greek government (who until six weeks before had been collaborating with the Nazis) and the far-right Organisation X (and supported by the British), who swept through the countryside during the Civil War massacring peasants for supporting the Communists, setting up concentration camps for Communists and partisans, using napalm to clear partisans out of the hills, and firing live ammunition into left-wing protests in the towns.

The book claims that during the Civil War the Communists kidnapped children to brainwash them while the Queen evacuated children into holiday camps. This is at best a half-truth, and at worst another complete reversal of the facts. In reality, it seems that multiple forces, including the Queen, the Greek Government, and the Communists, all forcibly removed children and all attempted to indoctrinate them into various ideologies (the Greek Civil War is really messed up).

The narrator claims that after Mussolini was overthrown he was replaced by Marshal Badoglio as the orders of King Victor Emmanuel III, a lovely fellow who was against the war. This is a mangling of the historical record, and fails to mention several important key points. Both the King and Marshal Badoglio were fascists. It was the King who had originally placed Mussolini in power (the March on Rome being purely symbolic). General B was a rabid anti-communist who, upon taking power, carried out massacres of left-wing workers and activists, the same people who had overthrown Mussolini. The King and General Badoglio changed sides not because they had any moral disagreement with the Nazis, but because they realigned themselves with the British, who had no qualms about working alongside fascists.

It is mentioned briefly in the book that Pelagia’s daughter gets locked up by the Colonels in the late-60s-early-70s. However, no context is provided for this. It is impossible to understand the dictatorship of the Colonels without understanding the Civil War and the impact of the defeat of the Communists and the wider Left, who had the popular support of the Greek working class and peasantry. If the forces that came out on top in WWII were as wonderful as the book portrays them, why was the Greek state so right-wing in the post-war period that even small steps towards liberalisation in the 60s led to a far-right military coup and junta? It speaks to just how right-wing the Greek state was that such a small step towards liberalisation was so threatening to the establishment. The book fails to portray the political climate between the Civil War and the Junta, as well as failing to portray the brutal reality of the Junta itself, and the heroic struggles of students and workers who finally managed to overthrow the Colonels.

Multiple times in the novel, it is conveyed that Mussolini and the Italian Generals are mad and incompetent, and that it is madness and incompetence that are the causes of all the horrors of the war. If Mussolini wasn’t insane and tactically inept, according to the book, he would never have gone to war, or at least would have carried it out in a more sensible and chivalrous fashion—invading the right countries at the right time, instead of overextending his forces on failed invasions. (Meanwhile the war crimes carried out by the Nazis are explained by their inherently too-logical Teutonic nature.) In reality, both Mussolini and Hitler had very sensible reasons for carrying out the war—their countries had entered the imperialist race late compared to Britain, and therefore in order to grow their economies they needed to grow their empires to try and rival Britain’s globe-spanning empire. This is obviously not to excuse the crimes of the fascists or the horrors of war, quite the opposite—it is to understand that fascism and war are not the result of the character traits of individual leaders, but due to the system of capitalism. Similarly, the author clearly conveys their belief that the British and Americans, despite events such as bombing fleeing Italian troops or the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were the “good guys” of the Second World War, and were fighting against fascism. However, the British and US ruling classes, including Winston Churchill and the British Royal Family, were totally supportive of fascism, very happy with its killing of Jews, fighting communism and crushing working class resistance to capitalism. Their reasoning for fighting the war was to stop Germany from growing its empire. Both sides of the imperialist conflict wanted to make sure at the end of the war their slice of the carved-up globe was the biggest. The only heroes of the war were the partisans and anti-fascists in each country who actually opposed fascism, and small groups that opposed the war. To get rid of war and fascism, it is necessary to get rid of capitalism.

The message of the book seemed to be that terrible things just happen because some people are simply insane or incompetent, or that they simply happen for no reason, but that we can still enjoy life if we focus on the good things and not the bad things. I think this is a bad lesson to learn.

The horrors of The Second World War were not inevitable. The real lesson to learn of this period is the failures of the Stalinised Communist parties that failed to oppose the war. While the First World War was ended when revolutions in Russia and Germany led to their armies refusing to fight and their workers downing tools and bringing the war industries to a halt, this didn’t happen in the Second World War. The Stalinised Communist Parties also failed to take advantage of the radical upsurges of the 60s and 70s, often holding back the struggles of students and workers.

The lesson to learn is summarised by these quotes from two leading revolutionaries during the First World War, who suggest that the beauty of life can be appreciated while at the same time working to end the system of capitalism which creates its horrors.

Firstly from Leon Trotsky: “Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

And from Rosa Luxemburg: “To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life ‘on the giant scales of fate’ if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.”

A wonderfully complex and thoughtful exploration of politics, environmentalism, war, culture, superheroes and the comic book form itself. Feels brilliantly but uncomfortably topical today. Not perfect but nearly.

Real good

An engaging and insightful look into women's oppression. Big recommend to everyone.

It is often assumed that Australia’s armed forces are mainly involved in ‘humanitarian peacekeeping’, and that they only head off for war because they are dragged into it kicking and screaming by the US.

This detailed history of Australia’s armed forces shows that quite the opposite is true. From the very start, Australia has been enthusiastic about invading and colonising neighbouring islands; Australia has begged and pleaded with first Britain and now the US to both allow Australian troops to join in their imperialist adventures, and to start wars on our behalf—Vietnam was mainly Australia’s idea in the first place that the US was reluctant to get involved with; and far from being motivated by humanitarianism, Australia’s ‘peacekeeping’ has been to ensure stability for Australian imperialism and profit-making at the expense of the local populations , and has usually activated situations rather than resolving them.

While Monbiot's manifesto of a "new politics" has some very good sections and is well written enough to remain engaging throughout, the political analysis it lays out is pretty rubbish.

The book is a mishmash of liberal and social-democratic clichés, with a smattering of utopian schemes on top.

Monbiot displays the incredibly limited imagination typical of a liberal. While he cals for 'revolutionary' changes to the political system, these never amount to anything more than tinkering around the edges of capitalism. In his ideal world, there is still racism, nations, very rich and very poor communities, exploitation, war, weapons manufacturers, bourgeois parliaments and right-wing demagogues. There will still be totalitarian dictatorships. People must still flee their countries looking for asylum from persecution. The very rich still retain their power. We will still be needing to constantly be on guard to save liberalism from illiberal threats. We can't try and do too much, because if we try too hard, that will just lead to tyranny, apparently. His vision, intended to inspire hope and change, is "what if the world was just like it is now, but a tiny bit nicer".

He is also explicitly for keeping capitalism intact, for example suggesting economic crises are not endemic to capitalism and only caused by a rampant financial sector; and that we still need the state in order to protect us from ... the state.

His prescriptions for a nice world include such utopian reveries as bringing back the commons (through a complex scheme of rewriting property laws), placing the home in an equal economic position of importance as the workplace (by wishing it there), valuing the environment more (by adding it to economic diagrams), having people have more input into the economy (and forcing the government to abide by their decisions by... well that was never specified). Monbiot is incredibly idealistic, in the sense that he believes that what is necessary to change the world is not structural change, but simply for people to change their ideas.

Finally, he is explicitly electoralist. The book is designed as a series of policies to implements, and for others to vote for. His plan for implementing his disjointed set of prescriptions comes down to mass phone banking for Bernie Sanders-type social-democrats, and politely asking politicians (and remember, right-wing politicians are humans too, so be nice!) He is explicitly against industrial organising, believing instead in involving the precariat and the jobless in community organising, such as neighbourhood gardens and film nights. A recent statistical analysis of democratisation movements showing that those led by industrial workers are most likely to success shows just how wrong Monbiot’s politics are.

However, not everything in the book is totally terrible. A section early on in the book about human nature is excellent, cutting through the common sense argument that people are naturally competitive and violent, and arguing strongly that humans are naturally cooperative and benevolent, and that it is our social environment that breeds competition. It would have been good if this thread were weaved throughout the book, but on many later occasions he falls back into the trap of common sense anti-human arguments, for example a terrible section on how people vote that pre-supposes that everyone is stupid and can never vote in their own interest.

Another good section is the two chapters covering neoliberalism and Keynseamism, which lay out the horrific history of the former and the inherent shortcomings of the latter. Unfortunately, Monbiot draws incredibly confused conclusions—despite the obvious conclusion that should have been drawn from the information he presents being that capitalism is an inherently contradictory, unequal and crisis-prone system that can never be reformed, he instead concludes that all that is needed is an intellectual like him to come along every few years to provide a statement of a “new politics” for everyone to get behind and provide them with “hope” and everything will be fine and dandy.

So while there are good sections, they are unfortunately few and far between. His book is intended to inspire hope. Instead, it ends up being incredibly dispiriting.

Wonderful, magical, magnificent and spirited, this tale of heroism has the charm of Harry Potter but with the added bonus of not being written by a right-wing scumbag. Can’t wait to read the rest of the series!

If you’ve ever thought nuclear power was a good idea, just read this book and you’ll be dissuaded. It is horrifying, killing people right now in the most horrific ways, and will be killing people for generations to come—some of the birth defects won’t start to manifest until another 40 or 50 generations.

While we protest against coal, oil and gas, we also need to protest against nuclear energy.

Honestly one of the best books I've ever read. No other book has come close in terms of elucidating the relationships between class, party, factory committee and workers' council. Gluckstein draws important lessons of organisation and strategy from the successful Russian example, as well as from the heroic but ultimately unsuccessful examples of Glasgow, Germany and Turin.