Eric Lee

If you had asked me a week ago what I thought of this book, I'd have answered -- "It's much more readable than Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.

That's not what I think now.

Writing books debunking religion is a good thing, and there are many of them. But I was hoping for a more powerful and effective book by Hitchens, who certainly knows how to write well.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is not a long book and there are certainly parts of it that are powerful.

But Hitchens has a tendency to ramble, particularly towards the end.

And in his noble effort to be equally brutal with all religions -- the job he does on Hinduism and Buddhism is particularly effective -- the effect lessens somewhat when you actually know a thing or two about the religion in question.

Like Hitchens, I am an atheist and have been so my entire life. Indeed, I wouldn't use the term "atheist" to describe myself -- that's like calling oneself an "infidel" or "non-believer". It's defining oneself in religious terms, by what one does not believe. I prefer to describe myself philosophically as all Marxists do -- as a materialist.

Unlike Hitchens, I am not totally unsympathetic to certain elements of the religious faith embraced by most of my people. And because of that, I was struck by how limited Hitchens' own knowledge of that faith could be at times.

One example will suffice: In writing about the Jewish holiday of Hannukah, Hitchens says:

"For once instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with 'Christmas' ..."

This may well be the experience that Hitchens knows, having presumably spent some time with American Jews. But it is not the experience of Hannukah for Israeli Jews, where the holiday borrows nothing from Christianity and has a unique character all its own. (It is not, for example, the holiday where Israelis give gifts to their children.)

As a celebration of the uprising of an oppressed people against a vicious empire, it has long appealed to left-wing Jews. And to many of us, the bit about the Hannukah "miracle" -- the burning of the oil for 8 days -- is the least interesting part of the holiday. Hannukah is about the survival of a a feisty nation facing overwhelming odds.

In Hitchens' account of the holiday, the Romans are clearly cast in the roles of good guys, the carriers of Athenian philosophy and enlightenment, and the rebellious Jews as the worst sort of ignorant, oppressive religious fanatics. Maybe a better approach would have been to support neither Rome nor Jerusalem, but to call for a Third Camp?

That having been said, it's a minor quibble. Most of the book makes the case well.

The problem is, are any religious people going to read it?

Posted by Eric Lee at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For some time now I have been a student of the decades long secret war between Russian revolutionaries and the tsarist police. (Attentive readers of this website will be aware that my research culminated a decade ago in a book about the possibility that Stalin had been a tsarist polie agent.) From time to time, new books come out about the Okhrana, though these are usually aimed at academic audiences. Not so Richard Pipes' 2003 volume, The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia.

From its very cover, you can tell that Pipes (or his publisher) was aiming a larger audience. The text on the back cover is what enticed me to pick this one up yesterday.

"Those who knew and admired Alexander Pell at the University of South Dakota never guessed that he was actually [Sergei] Degaev, a revolutionary who had reinvented himself as a quiet mathematics professor."

Pipes, the author of several dozen books, in this short volume aimed to look at the two personalities -- the danger Russian double agent who eventually murdered his police controller and the quiet mathematics professor -- but really, the book is almost entirely about the former and about the underground war that raged in Russia in the late 1870s and early 1880s between the Party of the People's Will (these guys had great imagination in their names) and the tsarist regime.

Pipes makes one or two guarded references to terrorism in general and considers the People's Will to be the first terrorist organization ever. But any hint that there is some kind of historic link between the Russian revolutionaries of that time and Islamic terrorism today should be dismissed at once. The forerunners of Al Qaeda are not to be found in the secular and idealistic fighters against tsarist oppression but, perhaps, in earlier times, among fanatics who gave the world the term "assassins".

That having been said, Pipes writes clearly and his research is comprehensive. (He even photographed the toilet in the apartment Degaev used to murder his police boss in 1883.)

What struck me was how old was the tsarist police strategy of "provocation" really was. We tend to associate this strategy -- which involved "turning" genuine revolutionaries not only into informers, but actually to use them to gain control over revolutionary organizations -- with a later period, during the struggle against the SRs and Bolsheviks.

But apparently as early as a quarter century before the notorious cases of Azef and Malinovsky, the police were already playing a dangerous game. Pipes seems convinced that with all its danger, the game actually worked. The Party of the People's Will, its very cool name notwithstanding, couldn't stand up the onslaught and withered away.

In some senses, it makes one question whether such a strategy would work today. Following Pipes' own assertion that there is some kind of continuity in terrorism, should the West be infiltrating groups like Al Qaeda, "turning" its members into informers, and seeking to sow mistrust within its ranks? Is this something that is already taking place?

It is also a warning that this is indeed a dangerous game. Lt. Col. Sudeikin, Degaev's victim, had himself hatched an incredible scheme that involved making himself indispensable to the tsar by arranging the murder by terrorists of key tsarist officials. A generation later, the Okhrana would be doing this as a matter of course, and its super-moles like Azef would play a double and triple game of informing while simultaneously carrying out a terrorist campaign against the regime.

A very readable volume (I love short books) and a real contribution to our understanding of the decades-long war in the shadows between the tsarist regime and its opponents.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:23 AM | Permalink

That's what you get when you send an unencrypted email. It's like sending all your messages by postcard, without an envelope. Of course if you don't mind governments, employers, corporations, and ISPs reading your emails along the way, feel free. But, if you want to send me encrypted email, use the PGP public key below.

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Posted by Eric Lee at 10:14 AM | Permalink

A decade ago, South Korean workers used the Internet to produce live reports (including video) about their general strikes. At the time, they were way ahead of the rest of the world in maximizing the use of the new communications technology. They still are.

A union organizing workers at a company called KORENO (a subsidiary of Samsung and a Japanese corporation) set up an online group in October last year and signed up 110 members. The group was hosted by one of the largest Korean internet service providers, Daum Communications.

So far the story is not unlike what many of us have experienced. Many unions use online tools such as Yahoo Groups to help on organizing campaigns.

The company management at KORENO did not like the online group, so they brought legal action against the union. They claimed that the union had "injured the company's honor" by publishing "false content" online.

At the same time, they wrote to the internet service provider demanding that they shut down the union's web presence.

Daum Communications promptly did this, not only denying the union a platform but also denying them access to details about individual workers who had used the site to express their interest in joining the union.

The union and its supporters are furious, claiming that this is all a form of censorship. They point out that there has been no court ruling regarding the company's claim that the site is libelous.

Daum says that its own policy forbids it from hosting any content which is subject to a legal dispute.

There are certain lessons to be learned here by unions anywhere which are trying to use the net to organize workers.

First of all, backup. The Korean union needed to keep an offline backup of all the contacts it had collected through the website. It is staggering to think that they do not have access to contact details of those who wished to join a union because these were kept by the internet service provider.

Second, more backup. Every website should be backed up on the union's local computers, ready to be moved to another internet service provider when and if needed. This is not only important in cases like KORENO where censorship is at work, but more typically when a union needs to change internet providers to save money or get better service. The LabourStart website, for example, is now on its fourth hosting company -- meaning that on three separate occasions in less than ten years we have had to move all our content.

Third, we should not over-rely on free online tools. Things like Daum's network of "cafes" or Yahoo Groups may seem quite tempting, but can obviously be easily taken away from us. And again, not only in cases of censorship, but simply because companies that give online services away for free can change their policy at any time and start charging, or restricting what we do, or even shut down completely. We need to use our own sites hosted on our own servers where possible.

And finally, we should not underestimate the opposition. It's all well and good to delight in the new-found freedom we have online, with our ability to launch instant campaigns and build global networks at virtually no cost. But companies are not necessarily stupid. They may well be aware of what we are doing and look for ways -- including legal action and threats made to internet service providers -- to slow down and even stop our use of these powerful new technologies.

A decade ago, Korean unions were showing unions around the world our future -- we were seeing how web pages could be created in real time and global solidarity built online. Today we're seeing what happens next -- a corporate counter-attack that may become increasingly sophisticated and effective.

Posted by Eric Lee at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)