Housmans Blog

John Tirman, The Death of Others: the fate of civilians in America’s wars
Oxford University Press, 2011, 416pp, £18.99

Click here to buy from Housmans
Review by Ian Sinclair
This review was originally published in Peace News

A big book in every sense, The Death of Others looks at the fate of civilians in American wars since 1945 – focussing on the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

John Tirman, executive director of the Center for International Studies at MIT and the person who commissioned the 2006 Lancet study on deaths in Iraq, argues that the American public is indifferent to the suffering of civilians in the wars their tax dollars pay for – just as the US military has little concern for civilians in the warzone itself.

The basic mortality figures, though contested, are deeply disturbing – perhaps three million Koreans dead from 1950-3, two to four million Vietnamese dead, and the Lancet study showing 655,000 Iraqi deaths by 2006.

However, it is the detail that is most shocking. In Korea, one US Eighth Army directive stated: ‘all civilians seen in this area are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly’.

In Vietnam, a 1972 Newsweek report of a US mission found just 748 weapons among supposedly 11,000 enemy dead. Subsequent investigations concluded there were over 5,000 civilians killed in the operation.

Tirman gives three reasons for the US public’s indifference – good old-fashioned racism, a dominant frontier myth that sees violence as both morally regenerative and entwined with democratic values, and something called ‘Just World Theory’.

The latter idea, borrowed from social psychology, seems best summarised by the playwright Arthur Miller: ‘Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.’

He is quick to dismiss the belief that the supine corporate media negatively influences Americans’ knowledge and opinion of foreign wars, stating ‘greater information about the event does not change the dynamic of indifference’.

For this reviewer, this assertion is the only false step in a hugely important, extensively footnoted, tour de force. Because if Americans don’t care about the civilian victims of US military power, why does the US expend so much money and time on wartime public relations?

As Noam Chomsky has said about ‘citizens of the imperial power’: ‘I think they do care, and I think that’s why they’re the last to know’.

In fact, if public opinion is so impervious to information about the suffering of civilians, what’s the point of being an activist? Indeed why write a book on the subject at all?

A little plug for our friends at Amnesty International’s Hornsey and Wood Green group

What’s in the breeze?’ An exhibition by Katy Fattuhi opens on Thursday 10th May7-9pm at The Haberdashery, 22 Middle Lane, Crouch End, London N8. Proceeds from sales will go to support Amnesty International’s Hornsey and Wood Green group.

In the centenary year of the infamous Bread and Roses strike, theAlliance of Radical Booksellers (of which Housmans is a member) is proud to announce the winner of the first annual Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. David Graeber’s ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ clinched the prize in the final hour, following a reported deadlock between the guest judges.

Nina Power making the announcement

Although academic in its scope and scale, the judges commended Graeber for the quality of the language, and effort to make the ideas accessible and readily comprehensible.

Graeber’s book narrowly came through after judges struggled to pick a winner between it and Nicholas Shaxson’s ‘Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the men who stole the world’, which they commended for its thoroughness of research, and ‘usefulness’ in the current political climate.

Although based in London and holding the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, David Graeber was unable to collect the prize as he is currently on a research trip in the United States. Bill Godber from Turnaround distributors collected the award and the prize money of £1,000 on his behalf.

Bill Godber accepting the prize on David Graeber's behalf

The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing aims to promote the publication of radical books, to raise the profile of radical publishing, and to reward exceptional work. Without being too prescriptive in defining ‘radical’, the shortlisted books are informed by socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns, and primarily will inspire, support or report on political and/or personal change. They may relate to global, national, local or specialist areas of interest. To be eligible books must have been published in 2011, and the author’s or editor’s primary residence
must be in the UK.

This year’s Bread and Roses award was judged by children’s novelist and poet Michael Rosen, lecturer and feminist author Nina Power, and Festival Director of Liverpool’s annual Writing on the Wall Festival, Madeline Heneghan.

Tim Gee, author of the shortlisted book 'Counterpower', with friend.

Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, editors of shortlisted book 'Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt's Revolution as it Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made it'

Nik Gorecki of Housmans Bookshop, guest judge Nina Power, and Mandy Vere of News From Nowhere bookshop.

The crowd go wild!

Starhawk, The Empowerment Manual: a guide for collaborative groups
New Societies Publisher, 2012, 285pp, £20.99

Click here to buy from Housmans
Review by Emily Johns
This review was originally published in Peace News

Think of those occasions in a group when it feels like you are collectively crashing into rocks or going round and round in a dreary, draining eddy. Starhawk is the Wise Woman of activism who you want to turn to for a magic spell to make it all better.

While she doesn’t give a magic bullet, she does offer an analysis of how groups can work most productively. She gives tools to embrace conflict rather than avoid it, recognising that the strength of a group is in nurturing its capacity to deal with difficulties intelligently and sensitively and to turn disagreement into a strength.

Starhawk has 40 years of experience in North American collaborative groups and activism. She was an organiser in the Seattle WTO demonstrations, Hurricane Katrina solidarity, Gaza Freedom March and last year’s Occupy camps. I have found her writings on power some of the most enlightening and useful I’ve read.

This current book deals, in part, with leadership and horizontal organisations. A healthy group is what she calls ‘leaderful’, where leadership is a set of roles to be stepped into and back from.

Be warned that Starhawk herself points out that some people will find some of her Californian pagan culture too ‘woo-woo’, but it is quite easy to leave aside or adapt the purposes of the ritual/meditation exercises. All groups would benefit from this book even those committedly un-West Coast.

Please find below information about a great series of events taking place to celebrate the centenary of the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912. Housmans is involved in its capacity as a member of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers (ARB), and will be helping in hosting the prize giving for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2011. I’d like to personally invite you along to the award ceremony – you’ll find the invitation with all necessary information at the bottom of this poast. We hope to see you there!

A Festival of Resistance -
100 Years Since the Bread and Roses Strike
Centenary Film Festival, Talks, Music, Poetry, Outreach & Exhibitions

To celebrate the centenary of the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912, studioSTRIKE are proud to present a programme of free events including: film screenings, book launches, workshops, performances and talks across a range of venue including studioSTRIKE’s Bread and Roses Cinema, Clapham Common Bandstand, Brixton Youth Centre, Picturehouses, Rich Mix and the Science Museum.

Highlights include:

• The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2011 prize giving ceremony
• Two book launches from Verso Publishers and Here Press
• UK Premiere: The Uprising of ’34 “one of the ten best activist films ever made” (Bill Moyer)
• Exclusive live scoring & archive screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Strike!
• Exclusive, Nick Broomfield’s Behind the Rent Strike and conversation with Prof Colin Young
• Kim Longintto screening and Q&A at an inner city women’s centre
• Special screening of Oscar®-nominated documentary If a Tree Falls
• Film screenings at Clapham Common bandstand, London’s oldest and largest surviving bandstand
• Brixton Youth Centre’s Festival Takeover
• Workshops: Film media as a tool of repression and resistance in protest and policing, Digital activism and Violence and Conflict resolution.
• BBC Writersroom new screenwriting call out
• Exhibition of Prof Anna Fox, Ben Roberts’ Occupied series & Poster Collective
• Flash mob reciting the Bread and Roses protest song

The Bread and Roses Centenary


The Bread and Roses Strike in Massachusetts USA saw 20,000 textile workers, who between them spoke 45 different languages, came together to strike for better pay and human dignity: “for bread, and for roses too”. On January 1 1912 the Massachusetts State Legislature ordered mill owners to reduce the working week from 56 to 54 hours. On January 12, the owners complied, but also cut wages and speeded up production rates to compensate.

Workers across the town immediately went on strike, defying the mill owners’ attempts to sow dissension among their ranks. What followed can only be described as a war, with the strikers carefully planning their campaign and the owners reacting with intimidation, threats, and actual force. Strikers were arrested and jailed for 12 months for throwing snowballs. The son of a former mayor of Lawrence planted dynamite on three of the strikers in an attempt to discredit the strike. Agents were hired to masquerade as strikers and attempted to start riots, but the strikers were disciplined and refused to resort to violence.

On March 12 the mill owners caved in to all the strikers’ demands, and the strike ended on March 14 1912.

The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2011

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers will be announcing the winner of the first annual Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. With a prize of £1,000 for the winning author to be announced on the 1^st May 2012, the Bread and Roses Award aims to promote the publication of radical books, to raise the profile of radical publishing, and to reward exceptional work.

Without being too prescriptive in defining ‘radical’, the shortlisted books are informed by socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns, and primarily will inspire, support or report on political and/or personal change. They may relate to global, national, local or specialist areas of interest. To be eligible books must have been published in 2011, and the authors or editors primary residence must be in the UK.

The Bread and Roses Award will be awarded by a panel of judges including children’s novelist and poet Michael Rosen, lecturer and feminist author Nina Power, and Festival Director of Liverpool’s annual Writing on the Wall Festival, Madeline Heneghan.

The award ceremony will take place on the evening of 1^st May (International Workers’ Day) at the Bread and Roses pub in Clapham. The venue not only shares the name of the prize, but also the politics, in that it has been set up by Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Union council as part of The Workers Beer Company project.
http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/

The Film Festival

The Bread and Roses Film Festival will open 6pm Friday April 27th. Other festival highlights include themed days: Family unite, Law & Disorder, Strike, Arab Spring, Worker Past & Future, Unpaid internships and casual labour and Promises & Lies. Films encompass documentary, fiction (from sc-fi to archive films from the London Screen Collection), shorts and ethnographic films.

• For full programme and to reserve places at screenings and events visit www.studiostrike.com
• For further Press Information contact: press@studiostrike.com
• For Box office/Ticket info: www.studiostrike.com

The Bread & Roses Free House

The B&R is the only pub in London owned by the trades unions. It is owned by Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Union Council (est 1895) a south west London arm of the national TUC. Bread and Roses is extremely proud to be a part of the up-coming film festival. We see the festival as a way of promoting international solidarity in the on-going struggle for economic and social justice within the Clapham community and the surrounding areas. The B&R offers a wide range of services from fine food and drink to live music, sport and comedy nights. It enjoys the involvement of the many community groups who use the varied facilities of the B&R.

http://www.breadandrosespub.com/
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The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2012

Prize Giving Ceremony – Tuesday 1^st May, 7.30pm till late

The Bread and Roses Trustees request the pleasure of your company to celebrate the first The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2012. Guest judges, Madeline Heneghan, Nina Power and Michael Rosen, will be announcing the winner of this year’s prize and awarding the chosen author with a cheque for £1,000 and a commemorative trophy.

The shortlisted books are:
‘Counterpower: Making Change Happen’ by Tim Gee (New Internationalist)
‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ by David Graeber (Melville House)
‘Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as it Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It’ edited by Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns (OR Books)
‘Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class’ by Owen Jones (Verso)
‘Magical Marxism’ by Andy Merrifield (Pluto Press)
‘Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of Dissent’ by Laurie Penny (Pluto Press)
‘Treasure Islands : Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World’ by Nicholas Shaxson (Vintage)

Music and drinks from 7.30pm, with the prize announced at 8.30pm.
Taking place upstairs at the Bread and Roses pub, 68 Clapham Manor Street, London SW4 6DZ
Disabled access is difficult, please contact nik@housmans.com for details
Click here for map

Look forward to seeing you.

R.S.V.P. by email to nik@housmans.com

Our colleagues at online journal Stir to Action have just published their latest issue. This issue includes an article by Anne Beech from Pluto Press on the future of radical publishing. Anne will be joined by the Guardian’s Suzanne Moore and anarchist blogger Ian Bone at Housmans in May, to discuss what makes good radical writing – see our event page for more info.

Also in this fifth issue:

‘Our Demonstration’ is an exhibition occupying the Guardian’s News and Media Gallery for six weeks (12th April – 1st May 2012) in reaction to the need for, as well as effects of, art in protest.

They are presenting a collection of both established and emerging artists whose works represent a culmination of their attempt at deciphering a well rounded view of the public’s opinions on art and protest as two separate entities and how they inform one and other. Using the Guardian’s photo archive as a starting point, this exhibition not only displays photographs of the history of protest, but also challenges the adopted modes of activism – how art can be the positive catalyst essential to initiate change.

As part of the ‘Our Demonstration‘ exhibition,  Housmans has teamed up with the Central Saint Martins organisers to host an event at The Hub in King’s Cross, to discuss the relationship between art and protest in our society. The discussion at The Hub will be a means to engage in a conversation with a panel of artists, activists and theorists, as well as open up a debate with the audience, about art in political protest and the role it plays in current and historical, socio-political movements. The focus will be on recent protests including the anti-capitalism, anti-war and climate change demonstrations, in context with historical examples of activist art from the 60’s until now.

On the discussion panel are, artist and activist Noel Douglas, journalist and film-maker Leah Borromeo, artist and activist The Vacuum Cleaner, and  artist and writer Dean Kenning.  ’Discussing the creative resistance’ aims to bring about a collective awareness of the need for art in protest in order to advocate social/political change. Anyone with an interest in the function of art within current social and political contexts should come along.

For more info please visit http://www.housmans.com/events.php

From the 15th May to the 2nd  June, south London theatre Ovalhouse will be staging a new feminsit piece based on the histories of three female pirates. Housmans are offering the opportunity to win a pair of tickets for the show, all you need to do is answer the question at the bottom of the post. Here’s some info about the play:

“Fanciful stagings of the escapades of Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and Ching Shih – swashbuckling female pirates of the past – combine with intimate stories of personal piracy in the performers’ own lives.

See these bloodthirsty damsels out-sail, out-think, and out-fight every man on the high seas. How did they do it? How does a slip of a girl subdue a ship of salty sea dogs? Could she still do it today? Has her 21st century counterpart got the guts to stick a dagger between her teeth, fire a broadside and make off with the booty?

By stepping into the shoes of a seventeenth century Irish or eighteenth century Chinese pirate, the three female performers set out on a quest to discover something about being a woman in 2012. Playing out scenes about the rarely recorded cases of women who managed to become pirates, often passing themselves off as men, will lead us to consider female identity and the ambition and confidence that we as women do or do not possess in our contemporary lives.”
More info on the Ovalhouse site here

In order to win a pair of tickets just answer this question:
Which female Cantonese pirate commanded a fleet of 1800 ships?

Send your answers to nik@housmans.com by the 7th May
Good luck!

A Haunting Tale of Bleak Lives – A Nod to Dickensian Camden

A Free Show produced by Phantasmagoria Events (Puppet Show prelude by Athena Vassilakis)

Imagine an audience with Fagin, Mrs Sarah Gamp and Jeremiah Cruncher. What tales they could tell about Victorian Camden? Celebrating the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth and the author’s deep rooted connections with the borough, the performance joins the formidable threesome as they find themselves guests on a TV magazine programme.

7.15 pm to 8.30 pm (doors open 6.45pm)

Thursday 19th of April 2012 and Friday 20th April 2012

At Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, 2nd Floor, Holborn Library,

32-38 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8PA

(To reserve a seat, email: londonparanormal@gmail.com)

“There is nothing like dissecting to give you an appetite”

Scalpels and Gamps, Doctors and Nurses in Dickens

A Free Talk by Kevin Brown, Medical Historian

7pm (doors open 6.30 pm)

Thursday 26th of April 2012

At Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, 2nd Floor, Holborn Library, 32-38 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8P A

A request from our colleauges at PPS-UK (Project for a Participatory Society UK).
PARECOMIC is a graphic novel about something that affects us all: the system we live in – what’s wrong with it, and how we might be able change it for the better!

Written by Sean Michael Wilson, and drawn by Carl Thompson, PARECOMIC is about Michael Albert and his life’s struggle as a US left wing activist, reaching right back to the heady days of 1960’s student demos and lifestyle rebellions. From the development of the anti war movement, civil rights, the woman’s movement, and the black panthers to the establishment of alternative media like South End Press and Znet. PARECOMIC shows us Michael’s story, and at the same time the ideas and issues that influence both our society and the better alternative that we can build via the anarchist influenced system of participatory economics. Or PARECON for short – hence the title for our book, which rather started out as a joke – but has stuck: PARECOMIC.

Please help make this project a reality.

Parecomic – make a pledge