All the Troubles: Terrorism, War and the World After 9/11
By Simon Adams
Fremantle Arts Centre Press 2004
412 pages $24.95
REVIEW BY BARRY HEALY
"Weapons and technology may help win wars, but it is only ideas that have the power to truly change the world", writes Simon Adams in All the Troubles, which is a "background briefing", an introduction to the history behind many of the seemingly inexplicable global crises that dominate headlines.
Eminently readable, it unravels fact from official propaganda, distinguishing the historical roots of our reality. The book's sub-title highlights post-9/11 events but its sweep is much broader.
Adams is foundation dean of arts and associate professor of politics and history at Fremantle's Notre Dame University but he had some interesting experiences before academic life, experiences that inform his writing. For a start, he attended high school in the US and he lectured in that country immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attack, witnessing the sometimes corny attempts by the media to cope with the enormity of what had happened ("Even the beer commercials had gone all patriotic...").
More tellingly, he witnessed the harnessing of the honest confusion of ordinary Americans into a racist and jingoistic fever to strike back first at Afghanistan and then at Iraq. He explains that "it is worth remembering that today's 'evil doers' (as President Bush calls them) were yesterday's heroes". And he incisively exposes all of the Bush gang's lies and nonsense.
This book is a broad canvas. Adams not only analyses post-9/11 US power politics, but Australia's manoeuvrings in its direct imperialist patch (East Timor in particular) and glances at a wide range of other issues as well. Along the way he visits the impact of the Crusades in shaping Muslim responses to the West, the AIDS crisis in Africa, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and the history of the struggle in Northern Ireland.
The ambitious project works well because Adams not only brings a professional historian's rigour to his writing but also the deft stroke of a storyteller. These personal touches deepen the impact of the history and highlight the actuality of people's suffering.
The subtext is this — real responses are required.
This book, despite its quiet tone, issues a call to arms. Every one of the book's four major sections, each containing individual essays, is introduced with a personal overview. Such events as Adams' aunt's assassination (in error) by the IRA weaves through his essay on the Northern Ireland peace process. Another relative, a Protestant in-law, was murdered by a Unionist paramilitary group for the crime of having married a Catholic.
Adams is clearly not dispassionate but neither is he unbalanced. He yearns for the peace process, such as it is, to succeed, but he remains dry-eyed. "[C]ommunication and dialogue are at an all-time low in North Belfast", he writes. In fact, "the painful crawl towards a better future in Northern Ireland has seen an increase in residential segregation, not a reduction".
His account of the Bush administration's fanatical anti-Castro campaign is suffused with memories of his own time in Cuba. After high school, Adams turned his hand to carpentry, becoming an apprentice and a member of the Building Workers Industrial Union. The BWIU funded him to participate in a work brigade in Cuba in the late '80s.
Not all readers are rapt in this book. The West Australian's Saturday book review section is edited by Rod Moran, a campaigning neo-conservative. Moran's previous claims to fame are that he was once a member of the Socialist Labour League before moving into the Spartacist League; he can smell a radical when he encounters one!
To smear All the Troubles, Moran assigned the review to an arch reactionary called John Coe. This "geopolitical activist handbook" which is "none-too-subtle" repulsed Coe. He looked down his nose to observe: "All the Troubles stems from the pen of an obviously humane man, committed to a cause and prepared to blur the distinction between academia and political activism."
Too right! Australia needs more historians of Adams' ilk — honest, forthright and humane. That All the Troubles causes neo-cons to choke on their wheaties is reason enough to read this book.
From Green Left Weekly, May 25, 2005.
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