Reviews and Comments

I think, as a white person with a grounding in anarchism in North America and Europe, this book is absurdly necessary precisely because of its title. It's so easy to find information about the white men who discussed and organised under the anarchist banners, but everyone else seems to be strangely missing (from this ideology that, in many ways, is based on culturally stolen concepts that go unacknowledged).

This book highlights the ways in which anarchism (and similar ideologies) were at play in South Asia (specifically the places we know today as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) both before partition and before independence. It's incredibly interesting as an introduction and has definitely prompted me to look into many of the people discussed (and to revisit the few I did happen to know).

It's also brilliant in that it shows the ways in which anarchism is truly a global movement and that we should be practicing on more international lines. Many of the Indian anarchists and leftists mentioned in this book read and interacted with more 'famous' anarchists and visited them in the US and throughout Europe. Why is it that the names of, in this instance, Indian radicals are not as well known as those of their European contemporaries? (This is rhetorical; it's obvious.)

If you listen to the Have You Heard podcast, this book is going to be super predictable. It focuses largely on the GOP's push to dismantle US public schooling, and it focuses on Betsy DeVos more than anyone else. While DeVos definitely was responsible for harming schools, this has been a long process that has taken place over decades. It's frequently bipartisan, too.

The book has a strong liberal-conservative framework. Because of this, it smashes a lot of people into the same categories for the same reason without actually understanding the nuance behind beliefs. For example, they keep saying that people who want to dismantle public schools do so because they want to generate profit! Well, that's not true when you include people who want to dismantle public schools because they see school abolition as being part of the path to justice and freedom.

There's a lot of scare quotes around words like "system," as if we're supposed to forget that schools are part of a system. The authors want you to not view schools in that light, and I think that actually hurts their argument more than it helps.

Here are my main issues with this book:

1. The protagonist is 9-years old at the start; he's the child of a high-ranking Nazi official. Despite the fact his SISTER, who starts as 12-years old, knows what's happening, he has zero clue. Now, having worked with children, I'm about 100% certain if ONE child knows what's going on, then the OTHER child knows; it also makes no sense how he's so clueless about what his father does.

2. His lack of knowledge makes his friendship with Shmuel feel absurd, not just because of the fact that his father is a high-ranking NAZI OFFICIAL (which also makes it feel ridiculous). He's making false equivalences that, even at 9-years old, he'd know are false equivalences. "Gee, I wish I could wear an armband! No one ever gave me one!" As if he'd have no clue what the Star of David is? Or the Nazi Swastika? Have we forgotten WHO his father is? Because I'm pretty sure he'd have been pushed to be a part of this thing called, I don't know, THE HITLER YOUTH. He would have seen all of this propaganda at some point and had a frame of reference for it.

3. Both children are younger than they are. I've never met a 12 or 13-year old girl like Gretel, and I certainly haven't met a 9 or 10-year old boy like Bruno. To be fair, I've never met TODDLERS like these two characters. I'm not sure why authors can't accurately write children, but this is a spectacular fail.

4. History. All of it. There is nothing that is so little that is even remotely accurate, even for camps that WEREN'T Auschwitz. I'm not sure what version of the Holocaust he learned, but he learned one that apparently came from a Nazi apologist.

5. What is with these authors who keep doing Nazi family/person and Jewish family/person in WWII and Nazi family/person is made out to be a Good Person Deep Down? Or, in this case, also Really Naive About Everything?

6. Why is a German-speaking child confusing German words and location names for ENGLISH, especially when HE DOESN'T SPEAK ENGLISH? He even openly says that he DOESN'T KNOW ANOTHER LANGUAGE.

This book is boring, and the issues it brings up? It doesn't even address them. It's strange because this is one of those books (or collections) that is held up as being part of 'the best' of Batman.

It makes me wonder if anyone could even conceive of an interesting Batman, if that's the case.

Like, here are some issues brought up:

1. Adultery and figuring out how to deal with emotions and relationships. It's not really addressed. Only handled as a "This was going to be a secret, but I had to tell my wife because someone threatened to out my cheating." Vague mentions of the marriage counsellor. The other half -- dealing with it -- isn't even done at all; it's just the typical Men Writing Men Who Think of All Attractive Women As Objects of Sexual Desire (and not quite as people). Even by the mid-1980s, this ... plot device? Had found its way into being a trope, particularly since people refuse to actually DISCUSS how relationships evolve and change.

2. Lots of weird things like "growl from Africa." Like, what? Why would you even SAY this?

3. Scripty writing. Who let someone choose this? Granted, I recognise that disabled people were overlooked (as we still are today), but scripty writing should be avoided because HELLO, DYSLEXIC PEOPLE READ, TOO. For future reference.

Despite the fact it was published in 2013 (and there are companies mentioned that most people would've forgotten about by now -- Zynga, Zagat, and Gawker), there is still a lot in this book that can be useful for thinking about what's going on today. In fact, whole chunks of it work nicely to reflect on issues that we've already seen today (the first example that comes to mind are "fact-checking" institutions and how many people are often oblivious to the problems behind the scene, believing them to be "non-partisan" or "ideologically moderate"). More than a few times I was like "Oh, this is actually something we're seeing now."

And I'm kind of sure that's not a good thing, especially in a world where we're throwing 'advanced technology' at problems instead of trying to understand the problem. (I mean, if we were to throw any other technology at a problem, acting as if it's a panacea, people would rightfully question whether we were trying to actually do anything useful at all. "Oh, there's a lot of crime? Let's give the criminals some markers!")

There are a few issues that I take with this book. First, there's a factual error so common among white historians that it's infuriating to see someone so analytical making it: the presumption that Rosa Parks "didn't know" where she was sitting would become a "whites only" area of the bus. The fact that what she did was intentional is completely omitted in lieu of making an analogy about how her "breaking the law" (which helps change culture, it continues) would've never been possible if technology existed that could separate Black and white people without further human intervention in buses at the time. The argument could've still functioned (and probably been stronger) had he actually acknowledged that Rosa Parks' actions were an intentional act of political defiance.

Second, there are a lot of are of areas where it's assumed that we should maintain systems of governance that we have and reform them because it's the best we've got. Politically, I kind of disengaged with arguments because there were areas where he'd take shots at the wrong areas (like making generalisations around decentralisation -- there are a lot of good cases for decentralising certain aspects of our lives, and this goes out the window because he's focusing on the contradictory beliefs of right-libertarian techbros).

And the same is true of the discussion around political parties. There is no engaging with what we're actually seeing in many places and how some political parties really aren't all that different from others. Much like the people that Morozov writes about who are ignoring the problems to simply fix them with technology, he's also ignoring the underlying political and social issues of the things he 'defends'. It does make me curious where he'd fall today as a result of the atrocious pandemic response, which doesn't seem to matter which party is in power in many European or North American nations (which are the focus in this book).

Overall, not a horrible book. Some interesting ideas. Some areas needed more fleshing out (the 3 different 2-page education sections most definitely were lacking a lot of information and analysis, which I thought would've been more abundant).