An evenhanded work of deep scholarship that clearly elucidates a largely hidden piece of U.S. foreign policy.
A powerful account of “extensive U.S. meddling” in a foreign government, “a habit it perfected in the Congo.”
The plot hatched by the CIA under the Eisenhower administration to rid the newly independent Congo of its elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was considered a “model” intervention at the time. As Reid, an executive editor at Foreign Affairs, shows, the Congo proved to be the first “theater” in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union transformed the Cold War “into a truly global struggle.” In this carefully nuanced study, the author underscores how ill-advised American officials were at the time about Lumumba and his supposed communist intentions. Fears of a communist takeover were perpetuated by the CIA’s station chief in the Congo at the time, Larry Devlin, and others who failed to fully grasp the significance of many African nations’ long struggles to decolonize. On June 30, 1960, the Congo tentatively declared itself free from Belgian rule, and UN peacekeeping forces were stationed there to aid the transition. However, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, wary of the newly elected Lumumba, who he thought “was being used by leftist Africans and the Soviet Union,” refused his plea for more aid to help quell a military mutiny and secessionist worries. When Lumumba turned to the Soviets for help (Nikita Khrushchev was largely noncommittal), the Americans sprang into action. Reid grippingly narrates the horrific tale of Lumumba’s imprisonment, torture, and execution by the henchmen of then-army chief Joseph Mobutu, a former Lumumba protégé and eager recipient of American cash. Sifting through significant new documentation, the author casts tremendous clarity on this important period and how essentially the world looked away. “The rest of the world seemed to decide [that] in the Congo, occasional barbarity was the price of stability.”
An evenhanded work of deep scholarship that clearly elucidates a largely hidden piece of U.S. foreign policy.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781524748814
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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