Books on the topic 'Left-wing art'

This chapter examines how Toomer's interest in class-conscious radical politics was at best transitory and immature. Drawing on his early left-wing journalism, correspondence, handwritten 1936 autobiography, and psychoanalytic records from the late 1940s, the chapter argues that Toomer not only held strongly left-wing views during the Cane period but also remained in some respects a man of the left throughout his life. It also proposes that his social constructionist view of race, usually attributed to his situation as a light-skinned black man able to “pass,” is also traceable to his awareness of race as a product of capitalist exploitation and state-sanctioned racial violence—ideas that are allegorically displayed in his poem Banking Coal.

In the (often left-wing) writings on the Spanish Civil War, the idea of sacrifice (both transitive and intransitive) is intertwined with theories and practices of class conflict. The secular bent to much left-wing thinking did not preclude using associations with religious sacrifice to characterize the war’s fatalities; the bombing of Guernica and Madrid, for example, were both described as ‘martyrdoms’. Even in those views of the war that emphasized the importance of dialectical materialism, there is often an inherent logic of self-sacrifice—particularly for those middle-class and intellectual members of the Communist left whose commitment to revolution included a commitment to the supersession of their own individuality in the name of the party. This chapter examines how such ideological figurings of sacrifice are presented in lyrical and elegiac poems by poets such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Clive Branson, George Barker, Margot Heinemann, and Cecil Day Lewis.

This book focuses on the issue of why people radicalize. This issue includes the question of why sometimes Muslims or those who identify with right-wing or left-wing politics engage in violent extremism and are sympathetic to terrorist acts. The book argues that part of the answer to these important yet complex and multifaceted topics lies in people perceiving certain things in their world as profoundly unfair. For example, they feel that their group is being treated in blatantly unfair manners, or they judge crucial moral principles to be violated. The book makes the case that these unfairness judgments threaten people’s sense of who they are and jeopardize their beliefs about how the world should look. Furthermore, these judgments are not merely perceptions, but instead feel real and genuine to those who constructed them. As a result, these unfairness judgments can fuel people’s radical beliefs, extremist behaviors, and support for terrorist acts. This book explains how this fueling process takes place. In doing so, the book provides in-depth insight into Muslim, right-wing, and left-wing radicalization. The book draws novel conceptual conclusions and suggests usable practical implications. The book was written based on the author’s expertise as fairness researcher and his experiences of giving advice on radicalization (and associated issues of extremism and terrorism) to the Dutch government. Based on this expertise and experiences, the book conveys an engaging line of reasoning to a broad audience of scientists, practitioners, and others who are interested in radicalization, extremism, terrorism, and unfairness.

Chapter 2 discusses relevant instances of Muslim, right-wing, and left-wing radicalization, extremism, and terrorism, particularly as they pertain to people’s perceptions that things are not fair. The chapter also introduces how people’s feelings of threatening personal uncertainty and rigidity of people’s thoughts are known to impact instances of radicalization, extremism, and terrorism. The chapter argues that when we really want to be able to prevent and counter violent extremism and terrorism, we should systematically analyze how radicalizing persons interpret the world. We also should respect the observation that people value the experience of fairness so much because they want to be taken seriously as full-fledged members of society whose views are genuinely valued. Importantly, taking people seriously implies that we should point people not only to their rights but also to their responsibilities and their duties, which go together with being a mature grown-up and full-fledged citizen of society.

García Márquez’s writing is a literary order that will continue to be read, studied, and learned so long as there are practitioners, students, and lovers of literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude, of course, is admired by millions across the world, from high school students to major novelists such as Salman Rushdie and the late Toni Morrison. The Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez takes a broad overview of the life and oeuvre of “Gabo” (as he is affectionately known throughout Latin America) and examines them thoroughly. The volume incorporates ongoing critical approaches such as feminism, ecocriticism, Marxism, and ethnic studies, as well as signaling such key aspects of García Márquez’s work as his Caribbean-Colombian background; his use of magical realism, myth, and folklore; and his left-wing political positions. Thirty-two wide-ranging chapters by a diverse and international group of experts deal with the bulk of the author’s writings—both major and minor, early and late, long and short—as well as his involvement with film. They also give due attention to the central roles played by romantic love, by his prose style, and by the various kinds of music in his literary art. Particularly worthy of mention are the contributors’ extensive discussions of the worldwide artistic impact of García Márquez—on established canons, on the Global South, on imaginative writing in South Asia, China, Japan, and throughout Africa and the Arab world. More than a Latin American author, he truly qualifies as a global phenomenon. This is the first book on García Márquez that places the Colombian within that wider context.

How do we make social democracy? Should we seize the unknown possibilities offered by the future, or does lasting change really occur when we focus our attention on the immediate present in which we live? These arguments are fundamental to the divisions within left-wing politics in particular. The modernist vision of revolution suggests that the present is precisely the time that needs to be surpassed. But can society change without putting today’s experience of social injustice at the heart of our programme?This book asks how, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, socialists in France tried to follow a democratic commitment to political voices in the present. The debate about time and modernity that emerged in French socialism sat beneath the surface of political arguments within the left. Socialists reflected on how political programmes of change connected with social experience. But how did this focus on the present relate to the tradition of revolution in France? And in particular, what did socialism have to say about the human experience of the present?The book examines French socialism’s fascination with modern history, through a new reading of the multi-authored project to write a ‘socialist history’ of France since 1789, led by Jean Jaurès. Then, in four interlocking biographical essays, it analyses the search for a new timeframe of social transformation, by uncovering the reformist and idealist socialism of the Third Republic, long side-lined in the historical literature. With an intimate and emotional focus on the present-times of Benoit Malon, Georges Renard, Marcel Sembat and Léon Blum, a personal history of socialist thought emerges that allows us to revisit the story of left-wing intellectual life and modern socialism through the ‘human scale’ of time—that of the present.

This chapter sets out the specific historiographical basis for a new study of the French socialist movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that one particular framework—that of the reluctant relationship of socialism with power in the capitalist state—has dominated our approaches to writing the history of French socialism, and suggests that a new focus on temporalities, particularly exploring the clash between revolutionary, future-focused socialism, and present-minded socialism, opens up a new range of cultural, intellectual, and biographical sources for understanding the French socialist movement. It provides the specific intellectual context for understanding how historians in France today are seeking to rethink their intellectual inheritance from left-wing writers of earlier generations.

This chapter examines new paradigms of civic participation among Mexico City's youth. In recent years, international human rights organizations have stressed the need for participative democratic change in Mexico City. In response, the Federal District's left-wing administration has enacted a series of laws, including the Federal District Act for the Rights of Boys, Girls and Adolescents and the Act for the Federal District's Youth in 2000, a law to foster citizen participation in 2004, and the act for the prevention and eradication of discrimination in 2006. However, a gap still exists between the legal sphere and the implementation of social policies that manage and provide democratic spaces for the real practice of citizenship. This chapter discusses the demographics of youth activists in Mexico City as well as their educational trajectories, families, organizations they are involved in, social identities, motivations for engagement, social awareness, and political ideas.

This chapter presents a view of the role played by politicians within the British democratic regime in the period since 1800. It ponders some important recent trends in the writing of political history, and welcomes signs that the ‘crisis’ of political history appears to be passing. From there, the chapter discusses the nature of the system in which politicians operated, and, by extension, the way in which politicians were compelled to act. Moreover, it presents a way of thinking through the problem of political history that is somewhat at odds with the left-wing interpretations that have tended to shape the field. It concludes by expressing the hope that younger scholars will reclaim the disciplinary pre-eminence that political history once enjoyed.

These four short essays, written over a twenty-year period, are pièces de circonstance, each one linked to a specific occasion: the publication of a book by a young author, an op-ed piece for a daily newspaper, a symposium on Israel organized by left-wing Jewish intellectuals, the appearance of a film that would become revered around the world. Beauvoir’s essays here are modest efforts, in two cases simply brief prefaces to a much longer work; but read consecutively, they offer an excellent glimpse into the evolution of French public discourse about the Holocaust and about Israel. They also show Beauvoir’s own unwavering commitment to thinking about the implications and consequences of the major atrocity of the twentieth century, as well as her personal interest in the Jewish state....

The chapter shows how anti-immigrant sentiment and welfare support influence the voting behavior of natives and foreign-born citizens in Europe. The results indicate that both sets of attitudes are strongly related to party support, and that, in combination, they do not lead to very welfare-critical political coalitions. On the one hand, parts of the US setup are present in many European countries: anti-immigrant votes go nearly exclusively to the Extreme Right and the mainstream-right, whereas foreign-born voters predominantly support left-wing parties. On the other hand, the political landscape with regard to welfare that emerges from these alignments is far less likely to foster retrenchment than the political landscape we find in the US. Extreme Right Parties (ERPs) especially, as the party family benefitting most from the anti-immigrant vote, are deeply divided by the heterogeneous welfare stance of their supporters.

Typically in sociology and political science, the radical right has been addressed through so-called breakdown theories, while left-wing radicalism has been analyzed from the perspective of mobilization theories, which are widespread in social movement studies. The chapter uses concepts taken from social movement studies in order to provide an overview of some scholarship on the contemporary radical right, looking first of all at the organizational structure in the radical right milieu and considering the complex interplay among various actors linked to each other in cooperative as well as competitive interactions. Second, it suggests that these networks use a broad repertoire of collective action. Third, and in line with the “cultural turn” in social movement research, we consider the frames through which the collective actors involved in the radical right construct and communicate their (internal and external) reality.

Lionel Bart created musical theatre works from a uniquely British working-class perspective. Rather than having an academic training he relied on instincts developed from a working-class East End Jewish upbringing, the London pop music industry, and his early theatrical experiences at Unity and Theatre Workshop. From these diverse influences he produced what is arguably one of the best-loved British musicals of all time, Oliver! Subsequently, Blitz! and Maggie May also achieved commercial and critical success in Britain, but did not transfer to Broadway. Building on his background and theatrical context, Bart spoke in a vernacular musical and lyrical language that retained a gritty urban realism and a left-wing political ideology. Although the small number of his works that are regularly revived demonstrates that he wrote of and for his time, his influence and that of his collaborator, set designer Sean Kenny, has been pervasive and profound.

This final chapter applies the analysis of misogyny to the 2016 presidential election, in which Hillary Clinton was defeated by Donald Trump, despite the latter being vastly underqualified and temperamentally and morally unsuited to the position. There was also a great deal of misogyny directed toward Clinton not only by Trump and others on the right but also from left-wing sources. It is argued that much of this misogyny and even the outcome were to some extent predictable, on the basis of evidence of misogynistic biases against women who compete for male-dominated leadership positions. Research in social psychology shows that, when a woman cannot be judged less competent than her male counterpart in such contexts, many people will hold that, although they are equally competent, she is less likable than he is. Women are just as likely as men to reject high-achieving women in this manner, due to ego-protective mechanisms.

Whether as a consequence of colonialism or more recent international migration, ethnic diversity has become a prominent feature of many contemporary democracies. Given the importance of ethnicity in structuring people’s identities, scholars have sought to incorporate ethnicity in their models of people’s political behavior. Studies focusing on individual support for group interests among ethnic minority members find that higher socioeconomic status generally leads to a reduced emphasis on ethnicity in forming individual political opinions. However, this relationship is often considerably weaker among ethnic minorities with frequent experiences of discrimination, pessimistic assessments of equal opportunities in a country, and social pressures from group members to comply with group norms. Research also shows that, in comparison to majority populations, members of ethnic minorities are generally less active in politics, more likely to use contentious forms of political action, and support left-wing political parties that promote minority interests. Key explanations of differences between ethnic minorities and majorities in Western democracies focus on the importance of individual and group resources as well as political empowerment via representation in policymaking institutions, usually enabled by higher shares of minority populations within electoral districts.

The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (1910–1985) was a trailblazing social activist, writer, lawyer, civil rights organizer, and campaigner for gender rights. In the 1930s and 1940s, she was active in radical left-wing political groups and helped innovate nonviolent protest strategies against segregation that would become iconic in later decades, and in the 1960s, she cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW). In addition, Murray became the first African American to receive a Yale law doctorate and the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Yet, behind her great public successes, Murray battled many personal demons, including bouts of poor physical and mental health, conflicts over her gender and sexual identities, family traumas, and financial difficulties. In this intimate biography, Troy Saxby provides the most comprehensive account of Murray’s inner life to date, revealing her struggles in poignant detail and deepening our understanding and admiration of her numerous achievements in the face of pronounced racism, homophobia, transphobia, and political persecution. Saxby interweaves the personal and the political, showing how the two are always entwined, to tell the life story of one of twentieth-century America’s most fascinating and inspirational figures.

This book tells the story of William Blake’s literary reception in America and suggests that ideas about Blake’s poetry and personality helped shape mythopoeic visions of America from the abolitionists to the counterculture. It links high and low culture and covers poetry, music, theology, and the novel. American writers have turned to Blake in times of cataclysmic change, terror, and hope to rediscover the symbolic meaning of their country. Blake entered American society when slavery was rife and civil war threatened the fragile experiment of democracy. He found his moment in the mid-twentieth-century counterculture as left-wing Americans took refuge in the arts at a time of increasingly reactionary conservatism, vicious racism, pervasive sexism, dangerous nuclear competition, and an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the fires of Orc raging against the systems of Urizen. Blake’s America, as a symbol of cyclical hope and despair, influenced many Americans who saw themselves as continuing the task of prophecy and vision. Blakean forms of bardic song, aphorism, prophecy, and lament became particularly relevant to a literary tradition which centralized the relationship between aspiration and experience. His interrogations of power and privilege, freedom and form resonated with Americans who repeatedly wrestled with the deep ironies of new world symbolism and sought to renew a Whitmanesque ideal of democracy through affection and openness towards alterity.

Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? This book examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world—from the late eighteenth century to today—to provide important new answers to these critical questions. From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, the book finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia. From Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Algeria, Angola, Haiti, and Romania, the book explains why violent radicalism, corruption, and the betrayal of ideals won in so many crucial cases, why it didn't in some others, and what the long-term prospects for major social change are if liberals can't deliver needed reforms. A powerful account of the unintended consequences of revolutionary change, the book is filled with critically important lessons for today's liberal democracies struggling with new forms of extremism.

The causes and consequences of terrorism are matters of considerable debate and great interest. Spectacular events are recognized by their dates, including the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington and the 7/7 London bombings. Many other attacks, including those in non-Western countries, receive far less attention even though they may be more frequent and cumulatively cause more casualties. In Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to KnowRG, leading economist Todd Sandler provides a broad overview of a persistently topical topic. The general issues he examines include what terrorism is, its causes, the roles of terrorist groups, how governments seek to counter terrorism, its economic consequences, and the future of terrorism. He focuses on the modern era and how specific motivations, ranging from nationalism/separatism to left- or right-wing extremism or religious ideals, and general conditions, such as poverty and inequality or whether a country is democratic or authoritarian, affect the frequency and costs of terrorism. The diversity of terrorist groups and type of attacks can be overwhelming, and Sandler provides a unifying framework to generate insight: strategic interaction. That is, like other organizations, terrorist groups organize to pursue goals and respond in an optimal fashion to a risky environment that can influence the group's size, its diversity of attacks, its regional location, its host country's characteristics, and the group's ideology. Terrorists also responded to enhanced security measures by altering their tactics, targets, and location. As such, they are formidable opponents to their stronger government adversaries. Governments, in turn, pursue various costly strategies to prevent terrorism, including passive barriers and active attacks against terrorists, their resources, and those who support them. Terrorism covers numerous questions on the subject and sheds lights on a wide-range of theoretical and empirical research.

This collective monograph is a comprehensive study of the causes, evolution and outcomes of complex processes in the contemporary history of the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe, and aims in particular to identify common and special characteristics in their socio-economic and political development. The authors base their work on documentary evidence; both published and unpublished archival materials reveal the specifics of the development of the political landscapes in these countries. They highlight models combining both European and nationally oriented (and even nationalist) components of the political spheres of particular countries; identify markers which allow the stage of completion (or incompletion) of the establishment of a new political system to be estimated; and present analyses of the processes of internal political struggle, which has often taken on ruthless forms. The analysis of regional and country-specific documentary materials illustrates that the gap in the development of the region with “old Europe” in general has not yet been overcome: in the post-Socialist period, the situation of the region being “ownerless” and “abandoned”, characteristic of the period between the two world wars, is reoccurring. The authors conclude that during the period from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries, the region was quite clearly divided into two parts: Central (the Visegrad Four) and South-Eastern (the Balkans) Europe. The authors explore the prevailing trends in the political development of Hungary and Poland related to the leadership of nationally and religiously oriented parties; in the Czech Republic and Slovakia the pendulum-like change in power of the left and right-wing parties; and in Bulgaria and Romania the domestic political processes permanently in crisis. The authors pay special attention to the contradictory nature of the political evolution of the states that emerged in the space of the former Yugoslavia. For the first time, Greece and Turkey are included in the context of a regional-wide study. The contributors present optimal or resembling transformational models, which can serve as a prototype for shaping the political landscape of other countries in the world. The monograph substantiates the urgency of the new approach needed to study the history and current state of the region and its countries, taking into account the challenges of the time, which require strengthening national and state identity. The research also offered prognostic characteristics of transformational changes in the region, the Visegrad Four, and the Balkans.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.