Fergal reviews

Ramor Ryan. 'Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile'

“......the only thing that works is memory. Collective memory, but also even the tiniest, most insignificant memory of a personal kind. I suspect, in fact, that one can barely survive without the other, that legend cannot be constructed without anecdote” - Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Clandestines consists of a series of stories and reflections culled from Ryan’s experience of over twenty years of activism. The result is an entertaining and readable mixture of memoir, political essay, travelogue and literature. Clandestines then is not your standard political tract but rather a form of political picaresque documenting Ryan’s adventures as a wayward radical with an uncanny ability to find himself in interesting and often tricky situations everywhere from the mountains of Kurdistan to jungles of Chiapas. Ryan has certainly been around the block and the book includes a number of eyewitness accounts of events of major political and historical importance such as the massacre of mourners at a Republican funeral in Belfast by Michael Stone in 1988 and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990.

However, Ryan is at his best when he is observing the everyday and the marginal rather than the epic and grandiose and much of the book is taken up with Ryan's descriptions of various encounters with people at the edges of history. These memorable character sketches, by turns affectionate and exasperated, often ironic and occasionally derisive, fill and enliven the pages of Clandestines. Ryan wanders amongst this motley crew-the generous and riotously joyful Berlin squatters, the Zapatista peasants, the disaffected Cubans, a drunk Croatian war veteran, the Central American gang members, a charismatic Venezuelan punk singer, the self indulgent hippies at a Rainbow Gathering and a host of others- observing, conspiring, joking and drinking and ultimately turning these encounters into a series of amusing and interesting tales without ever stretching the reader's credulity too far.

A Bullet Fired for Every Palestinian Child
"Did You Two Squabble?"
By YITZHAK LAOR

This trenchant essay by Israeli novelist Yitzhak Laor was originally submitted to the London Review of Books, which in the past has frequently published Laor's writing. But they refused to run this skewering of the Israeli Left with the LRB's editor chiding Laor that "in my editorial judgment (to be pompous) this piece won't help anyone." CounterPunch is honored to publish it. AC / JSC

One of the times I was detained (it was after a demonstration), I shared a cell with a young burglar, all blood and broken teeth, beaten twice. The first time was when he tried to escape, as detectives came to arrest him, since attempted escapes had become a sort of free license for police violence. The second time was a bit later when he was taken to hospital to stop his bleeding. Handcuffed he entered the ER, chained to a cop, and the doctor asked them both: "Did you two squabble?" The burglar did what he had to do: he spat his blood right into the face of the enlightened MD, and of course was beaten again, right there, still handcuffed, under the indifferent eyes of the medical staff. I liked my cellmate, I cannot forget his story, nor his pride. From that day on, June the 8th 1982, the question "did you two squabble?" became for me the image of the real description for the bystander.

Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement, edited by Eddie Yuen, Daniel Burton-Rose and George Katsiaficas (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004)

Christina Gerhardt
From the upcoming edition of Faultlines

Confronting Capitalism, an updated version of The Battle of Seattle, takes stock of what has shifted in the movement in the four years since the Seattle WTO protests in 1999. In his astute introduction, Eddie Yuen (one of the volume’s editors) adeptly lays out not so much a linear history, but rather a constellation of concerns and tactics.

Arguing that “the potential of a deepening global network of workers, students, farmers, youth, indigenous people, immigrants, and ‘marginals,’ is the greatest source of hope today” (vii), Yuen shows the commonalities that draw together a global movement. Yet he also pinpoints how the battle in the north contrasts with that of the south.