By JM Berger

Can legal codes and court rulings function as extremist ideological texts? 

Academics usually define extremism as a set of beliefs that fall outside the norms of the society in which they are situated, but entire societies have at times been organized around recognizably extreme beliefs. This paper will examine the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (1856), more commonly known as the Dred Scott decision. Widely considered the worst Supreme Court decision of all time, the opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decreed that Black people, whether enslaved or free, could never become citizens of the United States and that they had no rights under the Constitution. 

This paper will analyze the Dred Scott decision to consider whether and how it implements and institutionalizes many widely recognized tropes of extremist ideology. The paper will conclude with a discussion of empirical frameworks that can enable and empower the study of lawful extremism. 

United States, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Montery. 2023, 57pg

By Katrin Frisch

Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis have all, to varying degrees, been the subject of studies that explore their ideology. All too often, however, these studies have not tackled the issue adequately, limiting their analytical approach to fascism or other phenomena such as anti-Semitism. Frequently, they have also sought to exculpate these writers or to normalise their political tendencies in an effort to circumnavigate the dilemma of how to address the paradox of right-wing artists who are both harbingers and opponents of the imagined trajectory of progressive modernity. This interdisciplinary study analyses the connections between literary Modernism and right-wing ideology. Moreover, it is the first academic study to explore the reception of these Modernist authors by today's far right, seeking to understand in what ways they use strategic readings of Modernist texts to legitimise right-wing ideology. By raising fundamental questions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this study ultimately challenges its readers to see their cultural practices as political. It wants to make visible and problematize the interdependencies of right-wing ideology and cultural production as well as reception in order to explain the (far) Right as a phenomenon deeply rooted in European history and cultural development. It thus lays bare the misconceptions, the gaps as well as the complicity in the debate about right-wing ideology in literature.

Berlin: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH , 2019. 378p.

By The World Rainforest Movement

Almost 30 years of UN climate negotiations have resulted in the establishment of policies and practices that facilitate the constant expansion of the fossil fuel-based economy (and its profits) while hiding its implacable negative impacts for the territories where it expands. Almost 30 years of UN climate negotiations have resulted in the establishment of policies and practices that facilitate the constant expansion of the fossil fuel-based economy (and its profits) while hiding its implacable negative impacts for the territories where it expands. Particularly, the fantasy of carbon offsetting as a solution to the climate crisis is ever more present among the methods of corporate greenwashing for expanding their businesses, despite the mounting evidence of its complete failure to reduce emissions or deforestation - as recently denounced by several organizations. However, the strategies adopted by corporations are unable to hide the oppressive and colonial essence of their advances in the Global South. Precisely for this reason, they keep encountering much resistance when they arrive in the territories of the Peoples and communities. This issue of the WRM Bulletin shares articles that can be divided in two parts. The first part exposes four initiatives that dress themselves up as ‘green’ or ‘socially beneficial’ so as to ensure that extractive and production activities carry on unhindered. After all, these are the engine of the capitalist economy, which in turn is the main cause of the problems that such ‘green’ ventures claim they help solving. The second part highlights three experiences of resistance from the territories to such corporate assault. The first article highlights the embedded contradictions of the so-called “energy transition” by exposing how “the largest green industrial area in the world”, in Kalimantan, Indonesia, will in fact lead to an increase in coal extraction in the region. At the same time, this multi-billion dollar project threatens to appropriate and destroy the livelihoods and interconnected spaces of life on land and sea from which grassroots communities depend upon. These communities are at the frontlines resisting this industrial park in order to defend life. The next two articles show the different consequences of two kinds of projects that claim to be offsetting carbon and which largely depend on community territories. One exposes the trend to expand problematic tree plantations, above all in the Global South, with the argument that the trees will “offset” the pollution emitted somewhere else. This includes the whole gamut from large-scale monoculture plantations sponsored by the pulp industry to those nicely sounding plantations promoted by investment funds by means of abusive contracts with indigenous communities. The other article reflects on the abusive contracts for establishing REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects in the brazilian Amazon region, specifically on how they compromise millennia-old indigenous practices and communities’ future generations.  The fourth article presents an overview of the perverse logic of certification schemes that over the last 30 years have given ‘sustainability’ and ‘responsibility’ seals to companies from different industries that cause destruction, such as the pulp and paper, palm oil and carbon offsets industries, among others. Such seals often completely ignore violations caused by corporations and legitimize their presence in community territories. The following two articles also expose the greenwashing of industrial monoculture plantations through certification, yet, the focus is turned to highlight the experiences of people’s resistance and organization. In Cameroon, women organized in the Afrise association have shouted a fearless and determined “Enough!” against oil palm plantation company Socapalm/Socfin, which is responsible for decades of “suffering, abuses, violations, theft, hunger, frustration and violations” of their bodies, rights and dignity. We express our full solidarity with these women who, with each others’ support, have declared that they will not tolerate the replanting of oil palm monoculture plantations in their territories. The next article reflects in an interview with Pablo Reyes Huenchumán, member of a Mapuche community in Chile, on the impacts of the violent forestry model imposed on the country which is based on large-scale monoculture plantations. But also, on the achievements and challenges of the Indigenous Mapuche to defend their communities and lives. Pablo explained how the Mapuche have been reclaiming their territories for over 20 years, showing that self-organization and resistance are key.

WRM Bulletin 268 December 2023

By Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley

“This is the absorbing personal story. of the man who rose from hoodlum, thief, dope peddler, and pimp to become the most dynamic leader of the Black Revolution. It is, too, a testament of great emotional power from which every American can learn much: But, above all, this book shows the Malcolm X that very few people knew, the man behind the stereotyped image of the hate-preacher-a sensitive, proud, highly intelligent man whose plan to move into the mainstream of the Negro Revoltition was cut short by a hail of assassins' bullets, a man who felt certain he would not live long enough to see this book…”

NY. Grobe Press. 1964. 482p.

By Daniel Feierstein

Genocide not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations, using terror as a method. In Genocide as Social Practice, Argentinean social scientist Daniel Feierstein looks at the policies of state-sponsored repression pursued by the Argentine military dictatorship against political opponents between 1976 and 1983 and those pursued by the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. He finds similarities, not in the extent of the horror but in terms of the goals of the perpetrators.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. 277p.

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By Amy Knight

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “This book tells the story of what happened to the world's most 1991 as the KGB, when the totalitarian Soviet empire that supported it collapsed. How does such an organization survive in a world where the rules of the game have changed dramatically? Why, for that matter, does it survive at all, given that the cold war has ended and Russia has embarked on a path of political and economic transformation? Does the KGB's successor organization still represent a threat to Western interests and an enemy to the development of democracy within the former Soviet Union? This account is part of the larger story of the post-Soviet political system in transition, and, although the book deals with one element of that system, its ultimate aim is to provide a deeper understanding of domestic and foreign politics in the former Soviet Union….”

Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. 1996. 328p.

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By Ruth Harris

FROM THE INTRODUCTION : “In 1902, a hairdresser's assistant, Adrien Virgile Legrand, was sentenced in the Parisian Cour d'assises to hard labour for life for slitting his six-year-old son's throat. On the surface the case appeared simple enough, as Legrand freely admitted the deed and received the harsh punishment prescribed. However, during the trial, he asserted that he had acted under the influence of a 'delirious crisis', a defence which seriously complicated the proceedings. As in many other murder trials in this period, the issue became not whether he was the author of the crime but rather if he could be punished for it. To determine his responsibility, the court sought to evaluate Legrand's defence by probing into his motivations, character, and past history…”

Oxford. Clarendon. 1989. 385p.

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By Robert Fisk

FROM THE JACKET: “During the thirty years that award-winning journalist Robert Fisk has been reporting on the Middle East, he has covered every major event in the region, from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution. from the American hostage crisis in Beirut (as one of only two Western journalists in the city at the time) to the Iran-Iraq War. from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to Israel's invasions of Lebanon, from the Gulf War to the invasion and ongoing war in Iraq. Now he brings his knowledge. his firsthand experience and his intimate understanding of the Middle East to a book that addresses the full complexity of its political history and its current state of affairs.

Passionate in his concerns about the region and relentless in his pursuit of the truth, Fisk has been able to enter the world of the Middle East and the lives of its people as few other journalists have. The result is a work of stunning reportage. His unblinking eyewitness testimony to the horrors of war places him squarely in the tradition of the great frontline reporters of the Second World War. His searing descriptions of lives mangled in the chaos of battle and of the battles themselves are at once dreadful and heartrending.

This is also a book of lucid, incisive analysis. Reaching back into the long history of invasion, occupation and colonization in the region, Fisk sets forth this information in a way that makes clear how a history of injustice "has condemned the Middle East to war." He lays open the role of the West in the seemingly endless strife and warfare in the region, traces the growth of the West's involvement and infiuence there over the past one hundred years….

NY. Alfred Knopf. 2006. 1150p.

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By Huston Smith

FROM THE PREFACE: “In the spring of 1995 I gave a course on The Religions of Man over KETC, The St.Louis educational television station. The response revealed a real hunger on the part of Americans to know the great faiths that have motivated and continue to motivate the peoples of the world. Over 1200 men and women in this one community enrolled as tuition-paying students while the viewing audience rose to the neighborhood of 100,000. The second thing the response revealed was the need for a different kind of book on world religions, a book which without sacrificing depth would move more rapidly than the usual survey into the meaning these religions carry for the lives of their adherents…”

NY. Harper & Row. 1986.

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By Edith Hamilton

FROM THE COVER: “The Classic Of Classics ...A father and husband caught up in a quarrel between gods and who finds his short sail home turning into a twenty-year journey filled with witches, storms, and one-eyed monsters. A family cursed by the sacrifice of a daughter in return for favorable sailing wnds a curse that can only be expiated in blood. A worried goddess who exacts a promise from all living things never to harm her son--but who misses one little, fatal shrub ….

"Classical mythology has long needed such a popular exposition as Miss Edith Hamilton has given us in this volume, which is at once a reference book and a book which may be read for stimulation and pleasure." -New York Times Book Review.

NY. Warner Books. 1942. 347p.

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By Sam Harris

FROM THE COVER: “In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs- even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic.

"The End of Faith is a genuinely frightening book. ... Read Sam Harris and wake up." -Richard Dawkins, The Guardian

NY. W•W• Norton. 2004. 341p.

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By Susan Jacoby

FROM THE JACKET: At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers celebrates the noble and essential secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, Susan Jacoby offers a powerful defense of more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth-century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected accomplishments of secularists who, allied with tolerant and liberal religious believers, have stood at the forefront of the battle for social reforms opposed by reactionaries in the past and today. Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Clarence Darrow--as well as once-famous secularists such as Robert Green Ingersoll, "the Great Agnostic"-Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanist champions. It is they, Jacoby shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the unique combination of secular government and religious liberty that is and always has been the glory of the American system.

NY. Henry Holt and Company. 2004. 441p.

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By Niccolò Machiavelli. Introduction By Max Lerner

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “WE LIvE today in the shadow of a Florentine, the man who above all others taught the world to think in terms of cold political power. His name was Niccold Machiavelli, and he was one of those rare intellectuals who write about politics because they have had a hand in politics and learned what it is about. His portraits show a thin-faced, pale little man, with a sharp nose, sunken cheeks, subtle lips, a discreet and enigmatic smile, and piercing black eyes that look as if they knew much more than they were willing to tell…”

NY. Random House. 1950. 587p.

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By Christopher Hibbert

FROM THE AUTHOR’S NOTE: “Although there are very many books on the lives and times of the Medici, not since the appearance of Colonel G. F. Young's two-volume work in 1909 has there been a full-length study in English devoted to the history of the whole family from the rise of the Medic bank in the late fourteenth century under the guidance of Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici to the death of the last of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Gian Gastone, in 1737. This book is an attempt to supply such a study and to offer a reliable alterative, based on the fruits of modern research, to Colonel Young's work, which Ferdinand Schevill has described as 'the subjective divagations of a sentimentalist with a mind above history'…..”

New York Morrow Quill Paperbacks. 1980.

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Edited By David Womersley

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Edward Gibbon (1737-94) published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in three instalments between 1776 and 1788. It was an immediate popular success, selling (as the delighted author put it) 'like a sixpenny pamphlet on the news of the day'. The book was immediately involved in controversy for its supposed hostility to established religion. But Gibbon's attitudes were much more nuanced, his intentions much more complicated, and his historical interests vastly more profound, than were those of any deist….”

London. Penguin Books. 1995. 97p.

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By L. Mara Dodge

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “This study explores the treatment of women in Illinois prisons from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Although it fouses on a small minority of women-convicted felons--it asks far broader questions: Who were these women? What were their crimes? How and why did patterns of criminality, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing shift over the decades? How did factors such as race, class, ethnicity, age, marital status, reputation, and social standing influence the chain of official decisions that led from arrest to prosecution to conviction and, finally, to sentencing? Once women were sentenced, what was the character of their prison experience, and how did that experience evolve over time? How were women affected by shifting philosophies of punishment and rehabilitation; by changing ideologies of prison superintendents, psychiatrists, sociologists, and parole board members? What was the nature of discipline, surveillance, and social control within women's prisons? And finally, how did women resist, subvert, or accommodate prison regimes?

DeKalb, Illinois. Northern Illinois University Press. 2002. 347p.

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By J. M. Roberts

FROM THE COVER: "This book is a stupendous achievement... the unrivalled World History for our day. It extends over all ages and all continents. It covers the forgotten experiences of ordinary men as well as chronicling the acts of men in power. It is unbelievably accurate in its facts and almost incontestable i n its judgements” - AJP Tavlor in the Observer.

'Anyone who wants an outline grasp of history, the core of al subjects, can grasp it here.” - Economist

"A work of outstanding breadth of scholarship and penetrating judgements. There is nothing better of its kind” - Jonathan Sumption in the Sunday Telegraph

London. Penguin Books. 1976. 1,021p.

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By Piers Paul Read

FROM THE COVER: “A source of enduring contemporary curiosity, the Knights of the Temple of Solomon were an order of warrior monks first founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land from infidel attack. Piers Paul Read reveals the Templars - in their white tunics with red crosses over chainmail- as the first uniformed standing army in the western world, as wel as pioneers of international banking. He examines their fall at the hands of a greedy French king, who extracted confessions of heresy and immorality by torture. And the extraordinary Middle Ages, with their blend of high religious fervour and unusual cruelty, are brought startlingly to the page. “

'He writes with great clarity, delineates character well and succinctly, and can tell a good story.” Times Literary Supplement.

London. Phoenix Press, 1999. 375p.

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By Jonathan Clements

FROM THE COVER: “Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, the Vikings surged from their Scandinavian homelands to trade, raid and invade along the coasts of Europe. Their reach stretched from Newfoundland to Baghdad, their battles were as far-flung as Africa and the Arctic. But were they great seafarers or desperate outcasts, noble heathens or oafish pirates, the last pagans or the first of the modern Europeans? This concise study puts medieval chronicles, Norse sagas and Muslim accounts alongside more recent research into ritual magic, genetic profiling and climatology. It includes biographical sketches of some of the most famous Vikings, from Erik Bloodaxe to Saint Olaf, King Canute to Leif the Lucky. It explains why the Danish king Harald Bluetooth lent his name to a twenty-first century wireless technology; why so many Icelandic settlers had Irish names; and how the last Viking colony was destroyed by English raiders.

NY. Carroll & Graf Publishers. 2005. 296p.

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By David Howarth

FROM THE JACKET: “A great many books have been written about the Battle of Waterloo but none quite like this; the reader can feel the shock of battle almost as if he were there. The first shots were fired at about 11:30 on a Sunday morning in June 1815. By 9:00 that night, 40,000 men and 10,000 horses lay dead or wounded among theBelgian grainfields,and Napoleon had fled, abandoning his army and al hope of recovering his empire-and also, it was said, a fortune in diamonds sewn into the lining of his uniform. This is the story of the men who were there. From their recollections, David Howarth has re-created the battle as it appeared to them on the day it was fought-what they saw and heard, the little that they knew of what was happening, and, above all, what they felt. The book follows the fortunes of men of al ranks on both sides-and some women too…”

New York. Atheneum. 1968. 249p.