Customer Reviews

Zapatistas: Making Another World Possible: Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Sometimes I review books I'm not familiar with, including those that I believe make a positive contribution to a worthwhile cause, or those that I feel are serving militarists and/or corporatists.
John Ross' "Zapatistas" certainly falls in the former category. I have read his book "The Annexation of Mexico" and that gave me a much deeper understanding of Mexican history, and interventions by the US and other nations. I also heard Ross speak at a bookstore regarding his earlier book on the Zapatistas, "The War Against Oblivion."
I found him to be well-informed, and a very pleasant person. Not "filled with bile" and so forth as another reviewer suggests. It seems some become filled with bile when the aggression of the Israeli government is criticized. The violence does go both ways between Isrealis and Palestinians, just as it went both ways between Apartheid rulers and black South Africans. Ross' sympathies lie squarely with the Palestinians who are currently experiencing an Apartheid-style oppression. Ross is also clearly (and understandably) sympathetic toward the Zapatistas and other grassroots movements against the economic warfare and cultural colonization of neoliberal economics and state militarism.
He has my support and appreciation for his many important works, including his most recent writings, the subject of which (suffering people of southern Mexico) deserves a much more considerate review than a one-star dismissal.

Ross follows the Zapatista movement blow by strangely poetic blow, through five years of growing local autonomy up to Mexico's stolen 2006 election. He records the words and acts of Zapatista leaders without presuming to explain their minds. The book covers a period when the Zapatistas turned from launching nationwide appeals for Indian rights, to giving up on the system and just building their own institutions, like the Solidarity movement in Poland did.

Through it all, Ross oscillates between spitting outrage and whimsical appreciation for these brave, comical, savagely abused people. As an increasingly loopy Subcomandante Marcos quips on the ever-mobile Radio Insurgente, "We have heard that somewhere there is a better world. We didn't get that from Carlos Marx or even Groucho Marx. These are not the words of El Che or the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. The author of this subversive phrase is none other than B.B. King!"

As respectful and even adoring as he is about the Zapatistas, that's how
hateful he is when speaking of the Israelis. They have done every wrong!
His total bias against Israel and his lack of fairness in not speaking of any wrongs perpetrated against them by the Palestinians - yes it does goes both ways! - makes me wonder about his reporting in general. There is no fairness here and his bile against the Jews made me ill.