Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Kestel, Laurent

170 Reviews 
noir, could, that most French settlers in Algeria were not the owners of large 
agricultural estates but modest members of the working class. In truth, Camus 
had long been a more articulate critic of French colonial rule than Sartre or 
most of the Parisian left. Indeed he quit the Communist Party after two years 
in the late 1930s in protest against its general indifference to colonial issues. 
But Camus could not get past the violence of the National Liberation Front 
(FLN). The man who had courageously denounced the savage French repres- 
sion at Setif in 1945 could not, a decade later, appreciate that FLN violence had 
almost always been proceeded and exceeded by that of the French. Camus had 
been ahead of his times in protesting the abuses of colonial rule; what ulti- 
mately escaped him was that the problem lay in the colonial system itself. 
Sartre, for all his periodic blindness, understood this perfectly. 
Aronson's insistence that the rupture between Sartre and Camus was a 
tragic product of the Cold War is well argued. Yet it is entirely possible that 
some parting of the ways would have happened anyway. Camus was notori- 
ously thin skinned. Sartre and his companion Simone de Beauvoir had always 
been slightly miffed that, despite the genuine fhendship that existed between 
the three in the 1940s, Camus was never prepared, as so many of their acolytes 
were, to be part of the couple's adoring "famille" on the Rue St. Germain. It 
cannot have been easy for Sartre, the senior by eight years and the most pres- 
tigious normalien of his generation to be considered the equal of a man with 
the hnctional equivalent of an MA from a provincial university and to have 
received his Nobel prize seven years after his younger colleague. And, as both 
men were avid womanizers, it cannot have escaped Sartre that the infinitely 
more handsome Camus enjoyed a substantial advantage in that department. 
Nonetheless this is an important book. Aronson is at ease with the philo- 
sophic nuances of both men's writing; he is also comfortable with the histori- 
cal context. His writing is lucid and delightfully free of jargon. Although a 
great deal has been written about the post-1945 intellectual history of France, 
this book is high on the list of "must reads." 
William D. Irvine 
York University 
Herman Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home. France in the Global Age 
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 
Those who are interested in the cultural identity of twentieth-century France, 
and more precisely in the struggle for the legitimate cultural identity of France, 
cannot avoid Herman Lebovics' scholarship. After, among other works, True 
Left History 10.1 171 
France The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (1994), the author of 
Bringing the Empire Back Home tackles the period of the Fifth Republic and 
several milestones in its history: the farmers' protest movement of the Larzac 
region, the reconstitution of French ethnography, and the impact of Jean-Marie 
Le Pen on the debate over French cultural identity. The author is right to remind 
the reader that contrary to Samuel Huntington's highly questionable theories, a 
national cultural identity is not one-dimensional, nor does it refer to universal 
values (Christianity, for example); on the contrary, it develops from the ten- 
sions existing between the various stakeholders within a society (groups, social 
classes, etc.). 
Lebovics' book could be summed up in a few words. To understand pres- 
ent-day France, one must explore, in his view, three historical vectors: first, the 
power of Paris in the history of republican France; second, the narrative and 
impact of regional aspirations and movements; third, at the intersection of the 
two vectors previously mentioned, the colonial and postcolonial Empire of 
France. 
The provocative thesis of this book is that relations between Paris and its 
colonies were reproduced in metropolitan cultural policies towards the regions 
of France. This reproduction was mainly due to the redeployment of former 
colonial officials who possessed a certain "hands-on know-how" (180) as 
regional administrators following decolonisation. This practice was introduced 
by Andrt Malraux, the Minister of Cultural Affairs (1959-69), and it sparked 
significant resistance from local movements. The mobilisation of farmers from 
the Larzac region in the 1970s was a good example that Lebovics explores. 
The author shows that the success of the Larzac farmers was due, in part, 
to their ability to garner support from unexpected quarters. Against Michel 
Debrk (former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense at the time) who, as did 
virtually all contemporary political and economic elites, supported modernisa- 
tion (of the Army, for instance), the farmers broadened their audience by sup- 
porting a wide variety of causes such as "anti-colonialism, anti-militarism, the 
struggles for local power against a central domination, a new internationalised 
regional consciousness, ecology as a political force, and new-media-sawy 
strategies of resistance" (17). The Larzac area saw a convergence of people as 
diverse as: nationalist leaders from Caledonia (Kanak) and Corsica; Occitans; 
Japanese farmers; IRA sympathisers; Cheyenne native American activists; 
retired generals; journalists; Roquefort cheese producers; intellectual left-wing 
activists working in factories (the ktablis); social Catholics encouraged by the 
liberal politics of Rome after Vatican 11, and so on. The only common charac- 
teristic between these disparate groups was that they were "allied - however 
uneasily - against the State and its army" (35). Pioneers of new forms of mobil- 
isation (squatting, media actions, etc.), the Larzac farmers' success was all the 
more remarkable given that France, hit hard by the economic crisis of the 
172 Reviews 
1970s, looked to a sanitized mythical past for a sense of stability and identity 
- a past where produits du terrozr had no place. 
The success of a handful of farmers against the power of an omnipotent 
central government is a singular one. Nonetheless, the leaders of this move- 
ment do not lend themselves readily to the image of farmers as traditionally 
conceived. As was shown by Anthony Obershall in Social Conflict and Social 
Movements (1973), the leaders of a movement such as this one possess traits 
which are clearly distinct from the groups for which they are the purported 
spokesmen. As regards the attempt to explain the mobilisations of these vari- 
ous groups (especially the "2tablis") who were pitted against the government 
and the economic modernity that it embodied, Lebovics explicitly refutes Max 
Weber's theory according to which such radical mobilisations are the product 
of an upheaval of the structure and social mobility of a given society (23). It is 
perhaps this point that deserves closer inspection. Several scholars, including 
Raymond Boudon, have suggested that it was the bloated system of education 
in France that lay at the origin, at least in part, of the student revolt of May 
1968. Moreover, the devaluation of academic qualifications resulting from this 
distending of the education system led to surprising patterns among the hold- 
ers of said qualifications such as the formation of hippy communities. Jost 
BovC, one of the leaders at the forefront of the French farming opposition, per- 
fectly embodies this phenomenon: the son of university educated parents, and 
himself educated for a time at Berkeley College, he became a producer of 
Roquefort cheese in the Larzac region following a chaotic academic career. 
Apart from and beyond the fight between central government and local 
political opposition groups, the quest for a legitimate cultural French identity 
is linked back to the role which each of these groups play(ed) in the social 
structure. Between a man like Michel Debre and the farming leaders there also 
lies the question of the legitimisation of social and political elites. Lebovics, in 
True France, made this same observation when analysing the radical opposi- 
tion between Louis Marin, the champion of French conservative social science, 
and Paul Rivet, a member of the anthropological school of Durkheim and 
Mauss. Behind conflicting visions or paradigms of the world there also lies a 
battle for legitimacy. 
Laurent Kestel 
Paris-I, Sorbonne University 


Herman Lebovics — Bringing the Empire Back Home. France in the Global Age

Koos, Cheryl A.

Left History 10.1 173 
Kristen Stromberg Childers, Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914- 
1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 
In the past several years, the coinciding histories of fatherhood and masculini- 
ty have become of increasing interest to historians working in the fields of gen- 
der and social history. Modem French history has long needed a study devoted 
to the subject of fatherhood, especially given the many excellent studies deal- 
ing with motherhood and its importance to the formation of Third Republic and 
Vichy social policy and cultural attitudes about women. Kristen Stromberg 
Childers has filled this gap with a fascinating and thought-provoking book on 
fathers, men, masculinity, and social policy in early twentieth-century France. 
Childers' book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on gender 
and the Vichy regime which has mostly focused on the regime's construction 
of female gender roles and its deployment of motherhood as the one true vision 
of womanhood. It draws on an impressive array of sources including official 
governmental propaganda and policies, internal governmental correspondence 
and documents, social commentary from a wide range of political, cultural, and 
religious "experts," as well as advertising and legal documents to build her case 
for the centrality of fatherhood and the family to conceptions of the French 
State between the years of 1914 and 1945. While Childers sets up her discus- 
sion of Vichy with chapters dealing with paternity and state law prior to 1940 
and discursive representations of the p6re de famille in the interwar period, the 
book's true focus is Vichy France's treatment and construction of fatherhood 
and its attempts to place the father and the family at the center of the state and 
legal apparatus. The Vichy regime represented the pinnacle of efforts to 
"enshrine fatherhood as a litmus test of good citizenship" (3). Childers argues 
that while the patriarchal and paternalistic Vichy leaders sought to enact their 
reactionary domestic program, the National Revolution, with fathers and 
fatherhood central to its promotion of the family, it largely failed to install leg- 
islation that fundamentally prioritized either. 
French social policy architects within and outside governmental structures 
were concerned with both the biological and social aspects ofpaternitk. As we 
learn in Childers' book, both the biological and social functions of fatherhood 
were of vital importance in the creation of social policy, but they were not one 
and the same. It seems these conflicting meanings ofpaternitk were at the root 
of the problems of especially the Vichy government's ideological intention to 
install fathers - p6res de familles - at the heart of the regime's National 
Revolution. Perhaps it was also a result of this definitional confusion that the 
government did not succeed in its efforts, inexplicably half-hearted, to follow 
through on its intentions and the aims promoted by a host of natalist-familial- 
ists to integrate fatherhood into the fundamental design of French citizenship. 
Childers maintains it was the tension between the imagined ideal father and the 
174 Reviews 
real-life one, an oftentimes much more problematic figure who was quite like- 
ly to be a POW in Germany as well as seriously conflicted about his own famil- 
ial role and paternal duties, that contributed to Vichy's inability to enact meas- 
ures that advanced the cause of the p2re de famille. In addition, Childers con- 
cludes that Vichy's advancement of state authority collided head-on with its 
efforts to shore up paternal authority in the home; a strong state conflicted with 
strong fathers' individual authority and were seen to be, as she states, "an 
impediment to greater state involvement in private life" (184). This collision 
ultimately limited the effectiveness of Vichy's patriarchal ideology and ulti- 
mately paved the way for a social welfare state that would prioritize children 
and their mothers as aid recipients, not their fathers as most pre-war and Vichy- 
era family advocates had wanted. 
Childers' argument is much stronger on the footing of policy issues and 
where the Vichy regime failed to hlfill its promises for fathers by enacting 
measures that would have placed them as the main benefactors of the expand- 
ing social welfare state. By focusing on propaganda and policy rather than the 
lived experiences of fathers and their reactions to Vichy's goals and inaction, 
she is on less sure ground when she asserts that one reason they failed to suc- 
cessfully advance their vision was that "few men could live up to such expec- 
tations about their masculinity and their fatherhood" (3). One could argue that 
the same could be said about the contrast between Vichy propaganda on saint- 
ly motherhood and the daily lives of women. Although she states clearly that 
the book is about "public rather than private manifestations of fatherhood in 
civic society," and asserts that "the examples of 'real-life' fathers and their 
lived experiences would not get at the ultimate meaning in the governmental 
debates, the popular representations and legal controversies surrounding the 
very essence of paternity in early twentieth-century France" (1 l), it is impor- 
tant to note that sources documenting the lived, daily experiences of fathers 
during the Occupation are critical to the book's contention that Vichy failed to 
translate rhetoric and propaganda into measures and actions that succeeded in 
enshrining fathers and fatherhood as the ultimate definition of citizenship 
because of, primarily, the conflict between ideal and living fathers. It would be 
interesting to know more about how fathers who were not mobilized because 
of age and thus remained in their homes to face the many privations that con- 
fronted all French citizens, received the Commisariat Giniral de la Famille $ 
mixed messages about their place in French society. 
Childers also holds that while pronatalists were key in advancing the cause 
of fathers and fatherhood in the late Third Republic and Vichy, that pro-family 
organizations made of up social Catholics must not be underestimated in their 
influence on the Vichy government in particular. Here, like the social Catholic 
familialist official Robert Talmy, who wrote one of the earliest histories of the 
pro-family movement, Childers oversimplifies the difference between prona- 
Left History 10.1 175 
talist and pro-family activists. If she would dig deeper, Childers would find that 
these groups' memberships often overlapped and that their official propaganda 
was quite similar at times, especially concerning gender issues and in promot- 
ing a gendered vision of the state based on fatherhood and motherhood. While 
natalist and familialist groups were quite different in the period preceding the 
Great War, they often joined forces and shared the same leadership in the inter- 
war period and Vichy. Talmy's artificial distinction between the two camps 
obscures this fact and is made, perhaps, for his own political purposes in rela- 
tion to his position with the National Union of Family Associations at the time 
of his book's publication in the early 1960s. Further research into the organi- 
zations and the men behind them (often fathers of large families themselves) 
and less reliance on secondary sources such as Talmy's would have gone far in 
correcting this and other generalizations about those in and out of government 
who advanced the cause of fathers, large families, and the birthrate. 
These minor critiques aside, Fathers, Families, and the State in France 
remains an important book and provides a significant and path-brealung cor- 
rective to the historiography of both the Vichy regime and the late Third 
Republic; it does indeed show how gendered constructions of fatherhood and 
masculinity indelibly shaped notions of citizenship, political participation, and 
social value and should be of great interest to European historians interested in 
questions of gender, family, the state, and social politics. 
Cheryl Koos 
California State University, Los Angeles 
Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, eds., Right-Wing Women: From 
Conservatives to Extremists Around the World (New York: Routledge, 2002). 
Like many other areas of history, studies of the right have largely overlooked 
women's participation. While we might secretly wish for women in the Ku 
Klux Klan, or Pauline Hansen, founder of Australia's extreme right One Nation 
Party, to remain "hidden from history," the editors of Right-mng Women warn 
that we neglect right-wing women at our peril. Unlike earlier studies of women 
on the right that portrayed such women as "dupes of men" suffering from false 
consciousness, more recent work, including the essays in this volume, stresses 
that women are active participants in these movements who knowingly support 
right-wing agendas. The editors make clear accordingly that their main purpose 
in compiling this volume is to understand the right's appeal to women and the 


Kristen Stromberg Childers — Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914-1945

Smith, Nathan

206 Reviews 
Chad Montrie, To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to 
Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (Chapel Hill and London: University of 
North Carolina Press, 2003). 
To Save the Land and People studies the movement to abolish or control sur- 
face coal mining that gained national attention in the United States during the 
late 1960s and early 1970s. Lucidly written, the book addresses what histories 
of the modern environmental movement in the United States have largely failed 
to address: the environmentalism of ordinary people. "The campaign to abol- 
ish stripping," says Chad Montrie in the introduction, "was primarily a move- 
ment of farmers and working people of various sorts, originating at the local 
level, and writing its history brings attention to the role played by common folk 
in the conservation, preservation, and environmental movements" (3). In this 
regard, he finds that they shared many concerns with the mainly urban middle- 
class environmental movement, such as preserving natural beauty and ecolog- 
ical integrity, and conserving natural resources. However, they placed greater 
emphasis on the link between environmental degradation and the threat to eco- 
nomic sustainability, as well as on the preservation of their homes. 
The first chapter of the book provides some social, economic, and envi- 
ronmental background to this upland region. Later chapters follow the course 
of organized opposition to surface coal mining from its first expressions in 
Ohio and West Virginia in the 1930s, to its increasing importance in the state 
politics of Pennsylvania and Kentucky in the 1960s, by which point the move- 
ment was pushing for the abolition of strip mining altogether. The social basis 
for banning or controlling 'stripping' (as surface coal mining, or strip mining, 
was often called) began among locally affected farmers early in the twentieth 
century. By the 1960s in some states, such as Pennsylvania, existing organiza- 
tions such as the Grange, Farm Bureau, or the United Mine Workers of 
America were part of efforts to achieve regulation. In more mountainous areas, 
especially eastern Kentucky, industry-based organizations were weak, and 
"small farmers, active and retired deep miners, homemaker wives and mothers, 
as well as some middle-class professionals and business leaders banded togeth- 
er for the specific purpose of fighting the menace of surface coal mining" (6 1- 
2). As students and environmental activists became involved, opposition grew 
nationally. 
Opponents of stripping had limited success in enacting regulatory meas- 
ures, and they never achieved any outright bans. To bolster regulation and pre- 
vent the constant attempts by companies and their political allies to repeal and 
alter legislation and undermine its enforcement mechanisms, federal legislation 
was sought. This resulted in The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act 
of 1977, which set minimum standards of regulation that states were required 
to meet, and empowered the federal government to both approve state enforce- 
Left History 10.1 207 
ment programs and take them over if they failed (177). Reaction to drafts of the 
law followed a pattern similar to state regulatory laws. Coal operators sought 
concessions, and when the law passed they made court challenges to it (losing 
in this case). Environmentalists complained that it was too weak, and sympa- 
thetic politicians, President Carter among them, agreed, but argued that it was 
the best that could be done at the time. Local residents were also unsatisfied 
because broad form deeds that gave coal operators access to the resource on 
privately held land were not abolished, nor was the consent of land owners 
required for coal operators to begin stripping. As regulation of surface mining 
developed in the following decades it was generally accepted that some feder- 
al law in the area was better than none, but it was also admitted that it hadn't 
done nearly enough to save the land or the people. 
The description of efforts to achieve regulation of surface coal mining 
moves ffom state to state, in roughly chronological order, and comprises eight 
chapters - the large majority of the book. Acts of industrial sabotage, the some- 
times violent confrontations of opponents and strippers, and the voices of 
Appalachian residents enliven the story. Revealed more often, though, is the 
tedium and frustration of fighting an increasingly organized 'coal lobby', 
armed with enormous bank accounts and expert lawyers, and a multi-leveled 
state with its various branches, divisions of powers, and legal requirements. 
The complexity of the problem is partly what defeated opponents of surface 
coal mining, and this seems connected to the problem referred to in the con- 
clusion as "having to fight the whole system" (201). It is important, then, that 
this complexity be illustrated, but the book suffers from excessively detailing 
the history of negotiations over proposed bills, the changing attitudes of admin- 
istrations, and developments in the bureaucratic approaches to regulation 
enforcement. 
The author discusses at various points some of the underlying patterns that 
gave rise to strip mining, and supported its perpetuation. Examples of such fac- 
tors are: Appalachia's position as a resource hinterland in a capitalist economy, 
the enormous growth in demand for energy, the role of the Tennessee Valley 
Authority in meeting this demand, and the problem of regulating the exploita- 
tion of a resource in multiple jurisdictions. The broad form deed is among the 
most important aspects of the history of strip mining that the author includes, 
but the examination of the nature of and debate about such deeds seems too 
limited. These deeds partly enabled surface coal mining, caused h o u s  protest 
and much litigation, and are evidence of the capitalist orientation of American 
society. Land companies aiming to control mineral rights were the main pur- 
chasers of these deeds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and 
courts continued to find in favour of their legality long after their original pur- 
chase. While the landowner remained liable for taxes, the broad form deed con- 
ferred upon the holder the right to access minerals under the surface, and often 
208 Reviews 
also granted the right to dump all forms of waste on the land (66). Montrie's 
discussion of ideology is limited to popularly held notions of the rights of cit- 
izens, but the extraordinary privileges held in broad form deeds, and the fact 
that they were state sanctioned, suggests that the ideology of the free market 
and laissez faire also warrants inclusion. 
To Save the Land and People is strongest when it explains the basis for 
opposition to strip mining. Removing vegetation cover and topsoil to mine coal 
deposits near the surface was enormously destructive. Strip mining deforested 
land, caused erosion of slopes that led to landslides (some of which destroyed 
homes and villages), the silting and acidification of streams, muddying of 
wells, and when blasting was done it endangered nearby buildings by cracking 
foundations and sending rock downhill. A variety of surface mining methods 
were used, and their effects varied, but in virtually all cases, no matter where 
or when, operators made little or no attempt at reclamation. Supporters of strip 
mining minimized its negative influence on the environment, and argued that 
better methods were improving its environmental record. Against charges that 
stripping destroyed natural beauty, they responded that this was a fair price for 
creating jobs and sustaining the local economy. The last argument was a potent 
weapon in a region that was chronically underdeveloped, but Montrie demon- 
strates that opponents of surface coal mining understood that it was facetious. 
By the latter half of the twentieth century surface mining was mechanized, 
requiring relatively little labour, so its value as an employer was limited. In 
addition, the practice contributed little in terms of taxes since it was transient 
and because in removing the productive capacity of land, it lowered land 
assessments. 
Clearly, the environmental and economic reasons for opposing strip min- 
ing overlapped considerably, and in many cases the reasons for opposing oper- 
ators were felt viscerally because they affected people so directly. Montrie 
argues that an essentially political ideology held at the grassroots shaped pop- 
ular anger, and gave the movement to oppose stripping the impetus to act, jus- 
tifying its objectives, and providing it with arguments to use to advance its 
cause. Citing historians of American political traditions, he claims that this ide- 
ology was a mix of the Lockean natural right to oppose tyranny, with the repub- 
lican faith in the institution of private property as the key to good social order 
and individual welfare (5). There is ample evidence throughout the book for 
this characterization, provided by readings of local newspapers, records of 
meetings and correspondence of various kinds, and interviews. Religion was at 
least one other resource for opponents of strip mining, as one petition to the 
Governor of Kentucky in 1960 showed when it condemned stripping "in our 
steep mountains" for all of its negative effects on farming and daily life, and 
because it destroyed "the natural beauty which God has so lavishly placed in 
our region" (65-6). 
Left History 10.1 209 
It seems that stripping was seen by its opponents as an attack on the home, 
strictly and broadly defined. Strip mining sometimes literally threatened hous- 
es, but it could also alter a whole community, causing economic and social 
hardship in the long-term. Non-residents of Appalachia could also see the prob- 
lem in terms of community, using the idea of citizenship as meaning ownership 
of the natural heritage of the whole country, and the idea of the nation as a 
community of shared interests in which the plight of people threatened by sur- 
face coal mining was important for all Americans. Future studies of the histo- 
ry of strip mining will hopefully build on Montrie's efforts, expanding on its 
social dimensions and on how environmentalism was conceived by different 
social groups. 
Nathan Smith 
University of Toronto 
Peter Hegedus, Inheritance: A Fisherman b Story (First Run 1 Icarus Films, 
2003). 
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West moved quickly to prove that lais- 
sez faire economics could transform the moribund satellite states of Eastern 
Europe from decrepit relics of Cold War exploitation into profitable members 
of the global capitalist system. Western companies rapidly filled the vacuum 
left by Soviet withdrawal. For such companies, the benefits of investment were 
enormous: the communist system had left an industrial infrastructure, built 
without expensive mechanisms to ensure environmental protection or worker 
safety, a mass of cheap labour ignorant of the value of their work in a Western 
context and eager for employment, as well as an almost complete absence of 
environmental legislation to hinder their efforts. 
Such conditions were inherently profitable - they were also fraught with 
the potential for catastrophe. In early 2000, a premature thaw caused an earth- 
en dam to break near a gold mine operated by an Australian and Romanian con- 
glomerate. The flooding waters cascaded through the company's nearby (and 
poorly constructed) waste ponds releasing 100,000 tons of cyanide into the 
Tisza River. What followed was the worst environmental disaster in Europe 
since Chernobyl. The documentary Inheritance: A Fisherman b Story, portrays 
the consequences of this disaster through the eyes of one Hungarian fisherman, 
Balazs Meszaros. 
Less concerned with the impact of the disaster on the environment, the 
documentary focuses its attention on how it transformed one man's relationship 
to the river and his place in the local community. We watch Balazs, a stubborn 


Chad Montrie — To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia

Ellis, Catherine

Left History 9.2 22 1 
the 1970s and 1980s to focus attention on the motives and likely impact of 
American disinvestment. High points out that this was a somewhat erroneous 
explanation of the forces behind deindustrialization, but the particular myth of 
nation served workers and their unions well. Their movement against plant 
shutdowns culminated in a wave of plant occupations during the 1980s, the 
spread of national anxiety among the general population and political leaders, 
and significant assistance from the federal government. 
High explains, however, that Canadian workers failed to stop the plant 
closings. They were no more successful in this respect than Americans and this 
makes his comparison of national unionization rates somewhat puzzling. He 
suggests that the divergence between the two countries, starting in the 1950s 
and now reflected in Canada's 41 percent rate of unionization, nearly double 
the level in the United States, is due to a greater capacity to resist plant clos- 
ings and concessions. Perhaps this is true in part - following from the contin- 
ued vibrancy of organized labor, the greater respect it shares among workers 
and the general public, and more hesitance among employers to attack unions. 
But there are many other reasons for the pitiful performance of organized labor 
in the US and much stronger showing in Canada. 
High also suggests that Americans would have fared better if they rose "in 
defence of community based on nation" (166). It is not clear, however, how 
American workers would have used the same strategy as Canadians to suc- 
cessfully protect their interests, considering that Canadian nationalism seemed 
to work because it was anti-American. In the end, it seems, neither set of work- 
ers had a viable strategy for resisting plant shutdowns which, put in their prop- 
er context, are actually part of a new global mobility of capital. But High's 
book goes a long way in helping us to understand some of the more recent 
struggles in North America against that phenomenon. 
Chad Montrie 
University of Massachusetts Lowell 
John Saville, Memoirs from the Left (London: The Merlin Press, 2003). 
John Saville's accomplishments are many. He was the founder (with E.P. 
Thompson) of the Reasoner and the New Reasoner, editor of the Dictionary of 
Labour Biography and the British volumes of the Dictionnaire biographique du 
movement ouvrier international, long-time editor (with Ralph Miliband) of the 
Socialist Register, and one of the founders of the Society for the Study of 
Labour History. As Chair of Economic History at the University of Hull, 
Saville was instrumental in establishing an impressive labour history archive 
and he published over 100 books and articles in a prolific career spanning the 
222 Reviews 
second half of the twentieth century. He knew many of the major figures of the 
postwar British left, as well as a diverse cast of characters ranging from Philip 
Larkin to Tariq Ali. Such a long and interesting life should produce an engag- 
ing book, but Saville's memoirs are a disappointment. More episodic than sus- 
tained narrative, they leave the reader with a long list of Saville's activities and 
acquaintances but little enlightened about his socialist convictions or the wider 
trajectoly of the modern British left. 
Saville's story begins in the days of "two sausages and chips for sixpence" 
(l), when he entered the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1934. 
Although Saville cannot recall having any strong political views before mov- 
ing to London, by the end of his first term he had joined LSE's Socialist 
Society and Marxist Society, and had become a member of the British 
Communist Party. The reasons for his political commitment are not clear. 
Saville admits that he had "only a basic understanding of Marxism," but felt he 
belonged "to a world movement dedicated to an unyielding opposition to injus- 
tice and oppression" (1 1). His earliest and most enduring influence at LSE was 
Harold Laski; he immersed himself in Marx and Engels, John Strachey and the 
Daily Worker. Saville made friends with "students who were politically on the 
Left: middle-of-the-road Labour to communists" (3), demonstrated against 
Oswald Mosley's fascists in the East End of London and dined with R.H. 
Tawney, who was apparently impressed by the young student's knowledge of 
revolutionary China. 
What we do not learn until halfway into the first chapter is that John 
Saville started life as Orestes Stamatopoulos. He was the son of a Greek engi- 
neer and a working-class woman from Lincolnshire who had met when his 
father came to England just before the First World War. Saville speculates that 
their marriage must have been deeply disapproved of by his father's family, 
upper-class Greek royalists "no doubt with the usual snobbery" (21). His father 
returned to Greece for military service shortly before Saville's birth in 1916 
and was killed a few months later. His mother refused his father's family's offer 
to take the boy (alone) to Greece, leaving him instead in the care of friends and 
relatives while she supported herself as a domestic servant. Perhaps the origins 
of Saville's political commitment lie in this experience, although he does not 
say so. His stereotypical, but no doubt sincere, description of the working-class 
"Mammy" who first cared for him reflects his life-long admiration for the char- 
acter and intelligence of working people: "She was midwife to the street, the 
support of all the women round her, . . . gentle but tough-minded, immensely 
competent" (22). In 1922, Saville's mother found a position working for a wid- 
ower named Saville, whom she eventually married. Orestes joined his mother, 
became a scholarship boy at the local grammar school and enjoyed a comfort- 
able adolescence. It was not until the end of his university studies that he 
changed his name, adopting his stepfather's surname and choosing a new first 
Left History 9.2 223 
name, John. 
Some of Saville's prewar adventures would be amusing were the earnest 
innocence of their hero not so palpable. He had a summer vacation job with the 
Workers' Travel Association, escorting British tourists around the Continent. 
Based in Paris for several months, Saville took the opportunity to attend a 
Socialist Party rally and hear debates over LBon Blum's non-interventionist 
policies in Spain. He also accompanied male travellers to Le Sphinx, a well- 
known brothel. Saville insists that he spent these evenings "sitting with 
Madame's assistant" and occasionally chatting with the "workers": "I regret 
now that I was not more sociologically inquisitive about their own lives, but 
these were the days long before I ever heard of oral history" (15). He later 
founded the Oral History Society. 
Saville's formal education ended with his degree from LSE. He applied 
unsuccessfully for graduate scholarships but ended up working as a research 
economist for British Home Stores. Much more significant in the late 1930s 
was his political work, chiefly with the National Unemployed Workers' 
Movement (NUWM). Saville observes (inaccurately) that the NUWM's activ- 
ities have been overshadowed by the Jarrow Marchers and he seeks to fill this 
lacuna with some stories of his own, such as his role in distracting the police 
with false information about the location of NUWM demonstrations. Saville 
also discusses British communists' growing sympathy towards the Soviet 
Union in the late 1930s, emphasizing the appeal of Stalin as an anti-fascist, 
anti-appeasement figure while seeking to avoid becoming an apologist for 
~tafin's abuses, the full scope of which only began to emerge in 1956. 
Saville presents himself as nothing if not principled. He was called up for 
military service in the spring of 1940. Although the Communist Party encour- 
aged its members to accept commissions if they were offered, Saville disagreed 
with the party line and refused three times, finishing the war as a gunnery 
instructor in India, where he developed close contacts with Indian 
Communists. The rejection of a commission enabled Saville to learn more 
about the lives of ordinary working-class men who thought he was "a snotty 
bastard" (38). The real victim of his decision was his wife, Constance, who had 
been a fellow Communist at LSE and was left to live in war-torn London with 
a young child on a very meagre separation allowance while Saville had, on the 
whole, a pretty good war. Indeed, Saville had a habit of leaving Constance in 
less than optimal circumstances - first during the war, when she was bombed 
out three times and he "was shocked and upset at her appearance" (76) upon 
his return in 1946, and then when Saville first accepted a lectureship in Hull 
and decided that it would be best for Constance and their son to remain alone 
in London for a further year. 
Constance remains almost invisible in the rest of the book, "always help- 
ful and wholly supportive" (108), but reappearing only briefly as a dedicated 
224 Reviews 
fundraiser for the Daily Worker, an Aldermaston marcher (there is no indication 
that Saville joined her), and caregiver not only for their four children but also 
for the various students and hangers-on who used the Savilles' home as a base. 
The women Saville worked with, particularly Joyce Bellamy with whom he 
edited the Dictionary of Labour Biography, receive perfunctory praise. Saville 
notes that although Bellamy's own research was "lacking in theoretical under- 
standing," "[slhe never complained and this was among her many virtues" 
(137). While it would be unfair to castigate Saville for reflecting the customs 
and attitudes of his upbringing, his account reinforces the tensions surrounding 
women and feminism in the labour movement and in socialist thought. This is 
not a topic to which he devotes any comment. Saville's heroes are working- 
class men: ordinary infantrymen, striking dock workers, and bright (male) 
adult education students, some of whose careers he traces in detail. 
The centrepiece of the book is a chapter devoted to 1956. Kruschev's rev- 
elations about Stalin at the Twentieth Congress placed British Communists in 
a difficult position. Saville is highly critical of the CPGB's slow response, call- 
ing the party's leaders "remarkably obtuse" (102) and recording his growing 
frustration with their refusal to facilitate open debate. Saville takes credit for 
realizing the implications of Kruschev's speech immediately and contacting 
Harry Pollitt to express his concern. It was around this time that Saville got to 
know Edward Thompson, a friendship that led to the publication of three issues 
of The Reasoner. Although Thompson and Saville insisted that their goal was 
to promote discussion, not division, and they had strong supporters such as 
Doris Lessing, the Communist Party accused them of factionalisrn and they 
resigned. 
Resignation was politically problematic for Saville, as it was for other 
British Marxists. He rehsed to join the Labour Party because he felt it was not 
sufficiently committed to fighting the "dogged conservatism"(ll8) that domi- 
nated the politics of the left. Saville realized "the achievement of socialism was 
never going to come about without a seriously organised opposition" with "a 
tighter discipline than that of the Labour Party" (1 13), yet he refused to accept 
the discipline of the Communist Party. Moreover, The Reasoner and its suc- 
cessor, The New Reasoner, contributed (as he admits) to the very divisiveness 
that he laments in the British left, encouraging the development of the New 
Left and the eventual merger with the Universities and Left Review to create 
the New Left Review. 
Saville is critical of many aspects of modern Britain. He reserves particu- 
lar disdain for the conservatism of the academic world: students, lecturers and 
policy-makers. From the outset, he accuses his colleagues of failing to be the 
kind of intelligentsia that takes any interest in "the wider cultural or political 
issues in the world beyond their stone or redbrick buildings" (1). In the 1960s, 
Left History 9.2 225 
Saville was disappointed (though unsurprised) by his students' lack of political 
awareness or radicalism, and by the brevity of student protests. Saville feels 
that his political views often made him unwelcome on university committees, 
although he insists that he was always in the right and trumpets his own accom- 
plishments with somewhat dull regularity. He is an inveterate name-dropper 
and his constant character assessments become wearing, even patronizing: "He 
was also fairly stupid" (44); "A very agreeable man, much liked" (115); "the 
most interesting and intellectually lively of any working-class militant I have 
ever met" (120). To his credit, Saville is not a conspiracy theorist, despite the 
fact that he later realized his home and family had been watched by an M15 
agent in the early 1960s. Saville makes no reference to Harold Wilson's simi- 
lar experience. 
Since 1956, Saville has not found a political home. He votes Labour, but 
unhappily. In a rare moment of contemplation, Saville admits that he does not 
have a prescription to cure the ills of the left: 
I have remained a Marxist in my understanding of the world 
we live in. But the most difficult problem . . . is the question 
of organisation, and the extent to which intellectual leader- 
ship can move down to the rank and file of the membership, 
and remain acceptable. I remain unclear on a number of 
issues relevant to this central question, but at the same time 
I am fully aware that only a disciplined organisation can 
expect to offer the serious challenge to the powerful order of 
capitalist society that is so urgently needed (165). 
It is surely ironic, then, that one of Saville's strongest criticisms of Britain's 
current government is that its internal discipline is too strong. According to 
Saville, Tony Blair's victory in 1997 was proof of the recent "decline of the 
many kinds of socialist thought and activity" (155). Saville argues that Blair 
lacks any understanding of Britain's labour movement while his "smoothness 
with words has been continuously used to camouflage his conservative/liberal 
ideas and policies" (185). Saville is, of course, highly critical of Britain's dec- 
laration of war against Iraq. He concludes that Britain is now in an unprece- 
dented political situation, facing popular political discontent without effective 
opposition parties. Saville remains pessimistic about the future, but he is cer- 
tain that "Blair will very properly be damned by history" (186). He may be 
right. 
Catherine Ellis 
Ryerson University 


John Saville — Memoirs from the Left

Henderson, T. Stephen

Lives by the Left: Biography and Materialist History

Gordon, Alan

Left History 10.1 181 
formance of "symbolic aggression," it was real (125). It would have been use- 
ful to hear more from the women who took their drunken husbands to court for 
non-support, from children who suffered abuse, or even to have taken the nar- 
ratives of members of Alcoholics Anonymous more seriously. Problem 
drinkers are a minority, but there are more of them than Heron wants to admit, 
and there are valid reasons to be concerned about the harm they do to them- 
selves and to others. Compared to his terrific work on drinking cultures and 
policy, Heron pays less attention to the history of alcohol research and treat- 
ment, although he makes a compelling case for how badly many treatment pro- 
fessionals dealt with working-class drinkers. More than once, Heron mentions 
that moderate alcohol consumption has health benefits, but he pays relatively 
little attention to contemporary research on the costs of alcohol consumption 
including disease, family disruption, violence, and accidents. He dismisses the 
"total consumption model," used by the Addiction Research Foundation of 
Ontario, but I would argue that the evidence that harm increases as total con- 
sumption increases is actually quite compelling, at least in certain drinking cul- 
tures. The World Health Organization recently determined that four percent of 
the global burden of disease is caused by alcohol - about the same percentage 
as tobacco. 
These minor concerns aside, Heron has created a lively world of drinkers, 
temperance supporters, and workers. Heron should be applauded for taking on 
such an ambitious project, and adding so much to our knowledge of drinking, 
masculinity, and worlung-class culture. Cheers! 
Catherine Carstairs 
University of British Columbia 
Marlene Shore, ed., The Contested Past: Reading Canada 5 History (Toronto: 
University of Toronto Press, 2002). 
The Contested Past performs a service to the Canadian historical community. 
Aside from providing excellent notes for doctoral students approaching their 
comprehensive exams, it assembles the essential points of nearly 80 years of 
Canada's leading historical journal. The book comprises 69 article excerpts 
accompanied by commentary by Marlene Shore. These excerpts are divided 
into four mainly chronological sections and then subdivided by theme within 
those periods. No explanation of the selection criteria is given, but presumably 
the choice was based on informed personal impressions. This book could 
anchor an undergraduate historiography class, as it reveals how some of the 
main trends and issues in the study of Canada's past have changed, or not 
182 Reviews 
changed, with the passing decades. But more explicitly, the editor's introduc- 
tion also offers a concise history of the Canadian Historical Review (CHR), the 
premiere historical journal in Canada. Here, although Professor Shore has pre- 
viously written on similar subjects, the introduction falls a bit short. 
My complaint is that the introduction is a simple narrative, revealing few 
glimpses of discussions behind the scenes. Perhaps the CHR's double-blind 
assessment process prevents revealing too much, but surely this could be 
accommodated. Simply put, the introduction glosses over contentious issues 
and is largely uncritical. As one example, although Shore repeatedly informs 
the reader that the editors tried to bridge the divide between French and English 
Canadians, it is difficult to perceive just how this was tried prior to the Quiet 
Revolution. The CHR remained firmly English in its conception, only awak- 
ening to the other solitude in the 1950s under John Saywell. Its first French- 
language article, appearing in 1962, was a curiously political choice - Femand 
Ouellet's analysis of the historical roots of QuCbecois separatism - that reflect- 
ed Anglophone apprehensions about Quebec and Canada more than French- 
language scholarship of the day. All of this receives little comment from Shore. 
There are other examples that reflect, not so much a contested past, but an 
exercise in consensus building. This is not the fault of Marlene Shore. It would 
have been irresponsible to portray, for instance, a tradition of bilingualism 
where none really existed. But silences can be deafening, and informative. 
Where were the rebels and outsiders in this story? Were there no dissatisfied 
contributors? The CHR may be open to new methods today, but it is unfortu- 
nate that Shore does not explore the politics behind editorial decisions of the 
past. Editors and editorial boards sometimes have agendas (as might reviewers) 
and the rejected might reveal more than the published. An analysis of the rea- 
sons given for rejecting submissions, or perhaps some figures on the kinds of 
papers and authors most often turned down, might have revealed a greater but 
hidden contest to frame our collective memories. This is not investigated in the 
book Marlene Shore has given us. Instead we are shown a past contested, but 
only within the general consensus of mainstream academic historians. 
Alan Gordon 
University of Guelph 
David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the 
Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge and 
London: Harvard University Press, 2002). 
David Brandenberger's National Bolshevism focuses on history and historical 
narrative as key to understanding how a particular national identity was creat- 


Marlene Shore, ed. — The Contested Past: Reading Canada's History

Burke, Andrew

Left Histoly 10.1 203 
cloaks their work. Still, his book represents an invaluable contribution through 
surveillance of the past to promoting alertness for the present and future. 
Steve Hewitt 
University of Birmingham, UK 
Paul Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against 
Iraq (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 
Although it is now commonplace to observe the way in which politics is 
increasingly reliant on marketing strategies to deliver its message, rarely is 
such an observation so rigorously and compellingly pursued as it is in Paul 
Rutherford's Weapons of Mass Persuasion. Rutherford provides a bracing 
account of the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq and details how the Bush 
administration packaged and sold the war with great success to the American 
public. Bush's address to the nation in March 2003, just days before the actual 
invasion began, was less a report to the citizenry on matters crucial to the 
nation than the culmination of the elaborate promotional campaign designed 
specifically to transform the idea of war against Iraq into a desirable product. 
By the time the bombs starting falling on Baghdad, enthusiasm for the war 
had reached a fevered pitch among certain sectors of the American public, and 
all that was left for the Bush administration to do was to deliver this product to 
eager consumers. The news media served as the ideal distribution mechanism 
for this. Whatever the opportunities the Intemet provided to assemble a dis- 
senting or dissonant account of the events in Iraq, television retained its privi- 
leged place as the primary source for information about the war. Rutherford is 
at his most incisive and illuminating in detailing the experience of "real-time 
war" as broadcast on the trinity of twenty-four-hour news channels that control 
the American market: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. But such a "real-time 
war" could not have occurred without the Pentagon serving as its CO-producer, 
not simply in terms of actually waging the war that served as the raw material 
for television reports, but by investing in all manner of media technology to 
ensure that it would be the primary content provider for the media's coverage. 
The quirks of advanced technology came to define a Pentagon house-style. 
Ranging from the greenish hue of the footage gleaned from night cams 
attached to soldiers' helmets to the perpetually disintegrating pixellated images 
bounced from desert to satellite to newsroom, these stylistic tics served to 
authenticate the reports filtered, processed, and often completely assembled by 
the Pentagon that the news channels fi-equently conveyed without question or 
commentary. 
204 Reviews 
Rutherford evades the temptation to portray the working relationship 
between the news media and the Pentagon in terms of overt conspiracy or cal- 
culated collusion. Instead, he suggests that the military and the media are 
"locked into a symbiotic relationship" that is more a result of converging inter- 
ests than deliberate scheming (77). Such an interpretation does not deny that 
the Pentagon attempted at every level to manage how the war was represented 
in the media, but rather points to how willing the media were to comply with 
the accounts of the war offered by the Bush administration. The media's acqui- 
escence reveals how invested (libidinally as well as financially) they were in 
providing the product which they played a crucial part in promoting. Such 
compliance ultimately veered toward complicity. Rutherford provides the best 
example of this when he analyzes how rapidly the media embraced the vocab- 
ulary manufactured by the Pentagon for the war. The incessant repetition of 
phrases such as "shock and awe" and "decapitation strike" (voiced by anchors 
with no small measure of erotic charge) was the surest sign that the media had 
relinquished any effort to report on the war directly, and instead had chosen to 
serve as a mere conduit for the military's fabrications. Likewise, the embedded 
journalist became a symbol of the symbiotic relationship between the media 
and the military. After what the Pentagon had viewed as the renegade and rogue 
reporting of Vietnam, and also to a lesser extent of the first Gulf War, the prac- 
tice of embedding journalists was devised as a way to return to the Ernie 
PylelWWII tradition of war reporting. The major media outlets brushed aside 
accusations of compromise or partiality primarily because they craved access 
to the images that only the Pentagon could provide. As a consequence, the 
embedded journalist functioned less as a reporter of ongoing events than as a 
proxy for the viewer at home, bound and constrained by the homosocial cama- 
raderie of the unit. 
However striking the images that emerged from Iraq, Rutherford is alert to 
the central role that narrative played in the ongoing management of the war. 
Emblematic in this regard is the story of Private Jessica Lynch, whose rescue 
from capture by a special-forces term, Rutherford notes, "was made to order 
for the propaganda machine" (68). The Pentagon carefully drew on an exten- 
sive set of fictional precedents, from the imperial adventure story to Hollywood 
action film, to craft the story, but ultimately the tale was a victim of its own 
success. The media were so excited to have a story that was the stuff of 
Hollywood that exaggerating it proved too much a temptation. Even when 
reporters from the BBC and the Toronto Star discovered that the actual rescue 
bore little resemblance to the Saving Private Ryan-type escapade into which 
the American media had transformed it, many outlets stuck doggedly to the 
fantasy they had concocted while most others tried to salvage it to some degree. 
Rutherford makes reference throughout to the domain of popular culture, 
and rightly notes that America's understanding of the rest of the world is fil- 
Left History 10.1 205 
tered through narrative archetypes and situations primarily derived from 
Hollywood. His appeals to cinematic examples are never as abrasive or explo- 
sive as, say, Slavoj Zizek's are in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004), but they 
nevertheless do provide a catalogue of America's fantasies about its adventures 
in the world. Rutherford's text, however, stops short of discussing how the col- 
lective fantasies articulated through conventional narratives can operate at an 
unconscious as well as conscious level. Such a consideration would further an 
understanding of how the media can insist on their independence and objectiv- 
ity even in the face of obvious capitulations and compromises. That those at the 
Pentagon are to a certain degree conscious of the narrative conventions upon 
which they draw is indisputable, but the extent to which the news media dis- 
avows its reliance on narrative formulas gleaned from the crassest of 
Hollywood spectacles is a good deal more disturbing. 
Rutherford's dissection of the symbiotic relationship between the media 
and the military in the United States is complemented by his analysis of how 
the comrnodty they produce and distribute is consumed elsewhere. He assem- 
bles a citizens' panel of twenty in order to assess the impact that the ubiquitous 
media coverage of the war had on those who stand just outside the target mar- 
ket. Talking to Canadians, Rutherford discovers that they looked with varying 
degrees of scepticism on the Bush administration's claims and imperatives and 
reacted with varying degrees of aversion to the patriotic enthusiasms that were 
offered by the major news networks. Whatever reservations one may have 
about Rutherford's hastily assembled panel - the comment that he drew his 
panellists from among "the articulate public" seems particularly unfortunate as 
it appears to consign those beyond the academy and professional classes to 
inarticulacy - it does afford a chance to think about structuring fantasies of 
Canadian identity as well. Nearly all of Rutherford's panellists reported a dis- 
gust or disdain with the coverage the US media offered, but many admitted that 
CNN became a guilty pleasure in times of war. The embarrassed disavowal of 
this pleasure points to a more ambivalent relation to the US media than 
Rutherford suggests here. Canadians may not be the precise demographic tar- 
geted by either the Bush administration or the major American networks, but 
they do stand close enough to suffer collateral damage. The weapons of mass 
persuasion may not have struck a direct hit on Rutherford's panellists, but their 
comments do suggest that they were shaken by them. 
Andrew Burke 
University of Winnipeg 


Paul Rutherford — Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Iraq

Kinsey, Darin

Left History 10.1 209 
It seems that stripping was seen by its opponents as an attack on the home, 
strictly and broadly defined. Strip mining sometimes literally threatened hous- 
es, but it could also alter a whole community, causing economic and social 
hardship in the long-term. Non-residents of Appalachia could also see the prob- 
lem in terms of community, using the idea of citizenship as meaning ownership 
of the natural heritage of the whole country, and the idea of the nation as a 
community of shared interests in which the plight of people threatened by sur- 
face coal mining was important for all Americans. Future studies of the histo- 
ry of strip mining will hopefully build on Montrie's efforts, expanding on its 
social dimensions and on how environmentalism was conceived by different 
social groups. 
Nathan Smith 
University of Toronto 
Peter Hegedus, Inheritance: A Fisherman b Story (First Run 1 Icarus Films, 
2003). 
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West moved quickly to prove that lais- 
sez faire economics could transform the moribund satellite states of Eastern 
Europe from decrepit relics of Cold War exploitation into profitable members 
of the global capitalist system. Western companies rapidly filled the vacuum 
left by Soviet withdrawal. For such companies, the benefits of investment were 
enormous: the communist system had left an industrial infrastructure, built 
without expensive mechanisms to ensure environmental protection or worker 
safety, a mass of cheap labour ignorant of the value of their work in a Western 
context and eager for employment, as well as an almost complete absence of 
environmental legislation to hinder their efforts. 
Such conditions were inherently profitable - they were also fraught with 
the potential for catastrophe. In early 2000, a premature thaw caused an earth- 
en dam to break near a gold mine operated by an Australian and Romanian con- 
glomerate. The flooding waters cascaded through the company's nearby (and 
poorly constructed) waste ponds releasing 100,000 tons of cyanide into the 
Tisza River. What followed was the worst environmental disaster in Europe 
since Chernobyl. The documentary Inheritance: A Fisherman b Story, portrays 
the consequences of this disaster through the eyes of one Hungarian fisherman, 
Balazs Meszaros. 
Less concerned with the impact of the disaster on the environment, the 
documentary focuses its attention on how it transformed one man's relationship 
to the river and his place in the local community. We watch Balazs, a stubborn 
210 Reviews 
and naive yet intelligent fisherman, go through a period of denial and exasper- 
ation, followed by an attempt to understand how and why the event took place, 
eventually channeling his passion for fishing the river into a quest for social 
justice. We see him come to the understanding of what the river meant to him 
and a realization that he too is part of a system both dependent upon and sub- 
ject to forces outside of his control. 
It is, perhaps, the nature of documentary to be myopic. Yet, this film leaves 
out important contextual information on the state of the environment prior to 
the fall of the Soviet regime. For a half a century factories in the Soviet Union 
and Warsaw Pact nations released millions of tons of chemical toxins and 
nuclear waste into the environment. Specifically, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, 
and Hungary poured tons of pollutants into the Tisza and its tributaries. None 
of this is mentioned. This is unfortunate, because it leaves the viewer with the 
impression that Westem-style corporate avarice is completely responsible for a 
disaster which polluted a supposedly "pristine" environment. The important 
role played by the lingering effects of an ubiquitous environmental indifference 
in Eastern Europe is completely discounted. The filmmaker, instead, has cho- 
sen to portray all of his subjects as victims: the Hungarian government, the 
river itself, the fish, and the fisherman. Cast as an innocent, almost noble peas- 
ant, the fisherman has lived in harmony with the environment - his life com- 
pletely entwined with the river - only talung what he needs to maintain his 
livelihood. With ample evidence of Hungary's poor environmental record and 
the global impact of over-fishing such a portrayal is disingenuous. While far 
from benign, Western corporate influence is hardly the sole determinant of 
environmental degradation in Eastern Europe, or anywhere else around the 
globe for that matter. 
The most troubling aspect of the film, however, is how the filmmaker (one 
presupposes the role of a documentary filmmaker as that of observer) crosses 
the line to become an agent in the story itself. The eradication of the fish in the 
river has completely destroyed Balazs' economic power. Unable to pay his 
bills, or come up with money to feed himself or his girlfriend, he is only able 
to pursue his quest for understanding and justice as a consequence of the finan- 
cial assistance of the filmmaker. To be fair, the filmmaker professes his own 
reservations about this. Yet, one wonders if this assistance was given merely to 
enable Balazs to finish what he started out of sympathy, or to ensure that the 
documentary could come to its "logical" conclusion. There is little doubt that 
Balazs' rapid transformation from a subsistence fisherman into a Westem-style 
environmental activist would have been rather unlikely without this financial 
and intellectual intervention. 
At one point, Balazs becomes obsessed with preserving a stork which was 
electrocuted on the power lines near his home. Eventually, with hnds from the 
Hungarian government, he is able to get it stuffed and mounted in a plastic 
case, whereupon he offers it to the local elementary school so generations of 
children can study it. Whether conscious or unconscious, the vignette is an alle- 
gory for Balazs' relationship with the filmmaker. Balazs is, like the stork, also 
a victim of a changing Eastern European world introduced to Western technol- 
ogy, Western ideas of progress and economics, and most importantly Western 
ambivalence; he, too, is a curious subject to be preserved in plastic for later 
study. 
One hopes that Hungarian schoolchildren will have access to this film, 
because despite its flaws, it provides a critical look at an environmental catas- 
trophe that has gone largely unreported and unexamined by the West. 
Ultimately, however, it may have more to say about Eastern Europe's embrace 
of Western values and the process of popular disenchantment with the promis- 
es of capitalism than it does either about the consequence of environmental dis- 
aster on the life of one unfortunate man, or about Western "globalization." For 
poor subsistence fishermen, like Balazs and his neighbors, who for generations 
scraped out an existence from the Tisza, their real inheritance is not the river, 
but the capitalist system. As the disaster reveals, in terms of its relationship to 
the environment, that system has not proven superior to the communist one it 
replaced. 
As Stalin, a man as vicious to his country's physical environment as to his 
own people, once quipped, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a 
statistic." As is evident in this documentary, much the same may be said about 
how we choose to document and interpret the accidental, or purposeful, poi- 
soning of the environment: the destruction of one man's way of life is a tragic 
loss worth lamenting and documenting, but the deaths of millions of fish - an 
entire aquatic ecosystem - are mere statistical data to be used by scientists and 
environmental crusaders alike. In that regard, this documentary could serve as 
a valuable and illuminating tool, particularly for those teaching environmental 
history, to introduce students to the inherent complexity of telling stories about 
the landscape. 
Darin Kinsey 
UniversitC du Quebec B Trois-Rivikres 


Not a member yet

Herman Lebovics — Bringing the Empire Back Home. France in the Global Age

Kristen Stromberg Childers — Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914-1945

Chad Montrie — To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia

John Saville — Memoirs from the Left

Lives by the Left: Biography and Materialist History

Marlene Shore, ed. — The Contested Past: Reading Canada's History

Paul Rutherford — Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Iraq

Peter Hegedus — Inheritance: A Fisherman's Story

"Hell Witches in Toronto": Notes on Lesbian Visibility in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada

Robert Korstad — Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South

1,044

1,130