Customer Reviews

In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire

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I am a big fan of Mike Davis. He is smart, well-informed and politically astute, and he 'pays attention to that man behind the curtain.' He is also edgy, and sometimes his incisive, biting humor is brilliant.


This collection of essays confirms those judgments (at least by my lights). But there are a disappointingly large number of essays that are simply too old to be of any obvious relevance. Some of the essays published prior to 2004 still have bite and purchase: the essay about SUVs, the revival of nativism and the political utility of the most recent wave of anti-immigration sentiment to right-wing Republicans, and Davis's prognostications about the implications of the Democrats' failure to confront the tactics of the repellent Grover Norquist, for example. And I greatly enjoyed the reprise of the tales of the Sunset Strip riots in 1966-68 (Davis on LA social history is always a treat).

But the commentary about Bush, Inc. produced early in the Bush administration, observations about the self-defeating antics of the Democratic presidental nominee wanna-bes prior to the 2004 campaign, and assessments about the likely fate of Gray Davis in the recall election....well, those are more exercises in publication vanity than reader enlightenment. Sadly, the proportion of older essays of less-than-obvious relevance is quite high.

I'm not sorry I bought (or read) the book. But I was disappointed.

Mike Davis is an interesting thinker (and good writer) with a popularist point of view steeped in history and political awareness. This is a survey (or sampling) of his commentary in recent years, which covers a gamut of topics organized around the idea that a faltering American imperialism is undermining its culture(and legal system)to the point of near collapse. The current neocon administration seems to be proving Davis' point for him on a daily basis, which only makes "In Praise of Barbarians" that much more relevant. A good, quick read.

Bob Philbin

Historian and socialist activist Mike Davis presents In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire, a caustic collection of radical essays hurling blistering attacks on perceived yearnings for empire and other potentially fatal flaws within modern-day America. Chapters discuss social ills ranging from California's increasingly crowded prison system (due to the "Three Strikes" laws that add an ever-growing number lifetime convicts who committed nonviolent offenses), to a commemoration of "anarchist avengers" of the 1890s, to a stinging condemnation of the Pentagon as "Global Slumlord" and much more. Passionate, unapologetic, and relentless in calling out the ruthless side of industrial capitalism, In Praise of Barbarians deserves to be carefully considered as a compelling warning of worsening social ills, regardless of whether the reader agrees with the author's political ideology.

"In Praise of Barbarians" compiles a large amount of essays and articles written by prominent left-wing author and activist Mike Davis, one of my favorite contemporary writers of nonfiction. Most of these are pieces written for the Socialist Review, the paper of the British SWP (no association with the American SWP), parent party of the International Socialists. Nonetheless these are just as readable and generally accessible as the articles written for The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and similar periodicals.

Davis covers a wide spectrum of issues from a left-wing perspective here, from the Iraq War to American prisons and from New Orleans to Greenland. As is to be expected with him, the style is engaged and indignant, with a strong historicizing context - he is after all professionally a historian. This is what Davis does well, time and again, and this collection is as such no exception.

It must be noted though that as other reviewers have pointed out, some of the articles are somewhat dated, and the large amount of topics addressed and the imbalance between them gives the whole a scattered and uneven impression. All of the essays/articles are interesting to read, but they have little in common besides Davis having written them, which does not work as well as Davis' cogent and powerful accusatory books do. This collection is recommended but by no means essential.

If you want to get a sense of what a wider discussion of history and current events would sound like in our mainstream discourse, this is the book to read. Davis covers everything from 9/11 to the Anarchist Avengers to the real reasons behind the Sunset Strip teenybopper "riots" of the 60s. I was curious to learn more about Spain's Durruti, who is described as a real life Robin Hood. Davis' interview on the history of the Anarchist movement is mesmerizing, if only for the sheer number of names and events I ended up looking up just to learn more about. There is a beautiful history in America, and not just of the Robber Barons, technology, and War... Davis chronicles the lives of people forgotten by history ... it's losers. But these are people we need to learn about simply because we're not supposed to know they even existed.

There are about 44 articles/essays packed into 331 pages of this book. It is difficult to think of a better radical leftist essayist than Mike Davis. This book was published in 2007 and most of the essays appear to be from the 2003-2006 period. Davis has a very active and probing mind into all sorts of topics relating to current events and the result is great edification for the reader.

The first part of the book features substantial discussion about electoral matters. Most prominent is an essay in response to Thomas Frank's book "What's the Matter with Kansas." Davis sees the electoral demographics of Democrat defeat highly colored by the unwillingness of Democrats to undertake substantial efforts to mobilize their working class base by fashioning their electoral message in ways that address the problems of that class. The Democrats, of course, have no desire to reverse the increasing economic inequality of recent decades. Davis writes that Democrat elites are primarily concerned about appealing, not to the working class, but to the avatars of the New Economy like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as well as Hollywood moguls, the financial sector, etc. Under the DLC inspired rightward drift of the Party, it is assumed that union activists, minorities and other traditional Dem voters have no choice but to vote Democrat. Democratic elites assume such voters will keep coming back to the Democrats no matter how much the Party screws them with policies like NAFTA. The result of such a mindset was on display during the 2004 election. Gore lost the traditional Democratic bastion of West Virginia in 2000 and Kerry lost it by an even greater margin in 2004. Davis notes that in the southern part of the state, the impoverished coal counties voted solidly Democratic. However voter turnout in these counties was only 30 percent. Meanwhile, Karl Rove's machine stimulated a high turnout for the Republicans in the relatively wealthy Potomac Highlands region in the northeastern part of the state. According to Davis, exurbs (like Potomac Highlands) were key to Republican victory in 2004.

Davis writes a great deal in this book about issues relating to California, the state of his residence. In a 2003 article, he writes that California, the sixth largest economy in the world, has 43 percent of its children near or under the poverty line. Among the states, California ranks first in billionaires but 37th in terms of quality of the lives of its children, according to a study cited by Davis. The state's once proud school system is ruined, helped along by various factors including the passage of Prop-13 in 1978. The real estate bubble provided Governor Schwarzenegger with some of the tax revenue to launch his Keynesian spending program in his second term. However, Davis presciently notes that the housing bubble was a very unstable source of revenue for Schwarzenegger's spending spree. Davis argues that this spending would leave California in much greater debt than before when the housing bubble finally crashed. Substantial progressive reform of the tax structure in California is not on the agenda of the state's Democrats or Republicans, Davis notes.

Davis also has a great deal to say about foreign policy related matters. He has an essay about some war crimes by the American military, including the Tiger Force brigade killings of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. As reported in the award winning expose by the Toledo Blade, the members of Tiger Force not uncommonly took souvenirs in the form of ears or other body parts of their helpless victims. He notes that Nick Turse and Los Angeles Times reporter Deborah Nelson uncovered a Pentagon document produced in the aftermath of the Winter Soldier investigation. Pentagon investigators substantiated the truth of war crimes charges in 320 cases during the Vietnam War while not confirming or denying another 500 alleged atrocities. Davis also discusses the initial years of the British occupation of Iraq. As the British took control of Iraq and its oil after World War I, the British army used massive and often indiscriminate violence to pacify Iraq. The British made heavy use of air power to destroy allegedly rebellious Iraqi villages. Winston Churchill, the Colonial Secretary in the early 20's, fervently pushed the use of poison gas against rebellious Iraqis and other Middle Easterners under British domain. The violent repression inspired some criticism including from TE Lawrence and senior Labour Party leader George Lansbury. Sometimes the Royal Air force attacked villages that weren't rebellious but hadn't paid their taxes. Davis writes that one tribal group in Iraq's Samarra region, suffering severe poverty and starvation, was bombed numerous times by the RAF in late 1923 and early 1924 on the ground that they hadn't paid taxes. The RAF recorded 144 people, including "women and children", killed in the bombings against this tribe.

He writes a great deal in this book about Hurricane Katrina, its aftermath and context, including the decision of the Bush administration to substantially slash funds from the Army corps of Engineers flood control projects for New Orleans. Other subjects alluded to or focused upon in the essays include Carey McWilliams, Cesar Chavez, California prison scandals, the Russian Army during WWII, the IWW, the struggles of indigenous people in Greenland, European anarchist terrorism, the influx of Americans into Mexico, anti-immigrant talk radio demagogues and the "teenybopper riots" on the Sunset Strip, 1966-67. Some of the subjects upon which Davis has produced books are also covered in these essays. One is the subject of urban poverty in the third world. Quoting UN estimates, Davis writes that several billion people will live in urban slums across the world by 2030. He sees neoliberal capitalism as the cause of this phenomenon.

I didn't know, before reading this book, of the notion that Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated William McKinley in 1901, was bent on revenge for the Lattimer massacre of 1897. The massacre occurred in Latimer Pennsylvania, when sheriff's deputies shot dead 19 striking coal miners.

Mike Davis's book "In Praise of Barbarians" uses a lot of distorted facts in history in order to support his claims. His use of rhetoric and misplaced circumstances appear borderline propaganda. He seems to believe it is the responsibility of the individual to totally ignore all culture and spiritual accountability in oneself. He believes an individual's drive to succeed and work-hard is trumped by the self-entitlement mentality of a socialist. He will call me racist, brainwashed, and intolerant when he reads this, however; I firmly believe if you look at the realities of the world in places like Europe, South America and Asia our system is far more successful and desirable than any. He may have some points about the Middle East, but extremely polarized and distorted to his mentality. A must read for the socialist.