This is a must handbook for private study and group discussion by all progressive and radical activists. Today's defense depends on our knowledge of yesterday's repression. The message: the political police haven't forgotten us--we can't afford to forget them and their methods.--Philip Agee, former CIA agent
During the presidency of Richard Nixon, homegrown leftist guerrilla groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army carried out hundreds of attacks in the United States. The FBI had a long history of infiltrating activist groups, but this type of clandestine action posed a unique challenge. Drawing on thousands of pages of declassified FBI documents, Daniel S. Chard shows how America's war with domestic guerrillas prompted a host of new policing measures as the FBI revived illegal spy techniques previously used against communists in the name of fighting terrorism. These efforts did little to stop the guerrillas—instead, they led to a bureaucratic struggle between the Nixon administration and the FBI that fueled the Watergate Scandal and brought down Nixon. Yet despite their internal conflicts, FBI and White House officials developed preemptive surveillance practices that would inform U.S. counterterrorism strategies into the twenty-first century, entrenching mass surveillance as a cornerstone of the national security state. Connecting the dots between political violence and "law and order" politics, Chard reveals how American counterterrorism emerged in the 1970s from violent conflicts over racism, imperialism, and policing that remain unresolved today.
Born in Kandahar in 1978, Sultan fled to the United States at age five with her family. Raised in Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens, Sultan saw her life change when she was married by arrangement at the young age of seventeen to a virtual stranger fourteen years her senior -- a marriage she struggled to maintain and then hastily fought, eventually (after three years) being granted a divorce. This very divorce would become one of the first in her close-knit Afgan community, where the subject is considered rare and taboo. Sultan went on to graduate from college summa cum laude with a degree in economics, and in July 2001, she returned to Kandahar, to explore her family roots and find herself. There she met her relatives and surveyed the conservative provincial town where she was born. on return visit to afganistan, she discovered the tragic death of her relatives at the hands of American troops and began to seek answers. My War at Home is her memoir of self-discovery, family tradition, and life as a Muslim and feminist with political ideals. It speaks to the younger generation of Muslims in America as they struggle to resolve the ever-present inner conflict about what it means to be an American and a Muslim, while also examining the Muslim-American identity at both personal and political levels.
While numerous analysts have discussed, and decried, the geopolitical ambitions of the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies, the attention to America's imperial posture overseas has turned eyes away from a crucial dimension of belligerent foreign policy: the domestic politics of war. Frances Fox Piven, one of the most celebrated US social scientists, raises questions others have not. She examines the ways the War on Terror served to reinforce the Bush administration's political base and analyzes the manner in which flag-waving politicians used the emotional fog of war to further their regressive social and economic agendas. Always in the past, US governments that made war sooner or later tried to reward their peoples for the blood and wealth they were forced to sacrifice. During World War II, tax rates on the wealthy rose to 90 percent; toward the end of the Vietnam War, 18-year-olds were given the right to vote.
A Guardian Best Book of the Year “A gripping study of white power...Explosive.” —New York Times “Helps explain how we got to today’s alt-right.” —Terry Gross, Fresh Air The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Returning to a country ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of Vietnam veterans and disgruntled civilians who shared their virulent anti-communism and potent sense of betrayal concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. The command structure of their covert movement gave women a prominent place. They operated with discipline, made tragic headlines in Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, and are resurgent under President Trump. Based on a decade of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right. “A much-needed and troubling revelation... The power of Belew’s book comes, in part, from the fact that it reveals a story about white-racist violence that we should all already know.” —The Nation “Fascinating... Shows how hatred of the federal government, fears of communism, and racism all combined in white-power ideology and explains why our responses to the movement have long been woefully inadequate.” —Slate “Superbly comprehensive...supplants all journalistic accounts of America’s resurgent white supremacism.” —Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian
The War at Home brings together some of the state’s leading historians to examine the connections between Arkansas and World War I. These essays explore how historical entities and important events such as Camp Pike, the Little Rock Picric Acid Plant, and the Elaine Race Massacre were related to the conflict as they investigate the issues of gender, race, and public health. This collection sheds new light on the ways that Arkansas participated in the war as well as the ways the war affected Arkansas then and still does today.
Introducing readers to women whose Civil War experiences have long been ignored, Judith Giesberg examines the lives of working-class women in the North, for whom the home front was a battlefield of its own. Black and white working-class women managed farms that had been left without a male head of household, worked in munitions factories, made uniforms, and located and cared for injured or dead soldiers. As they became more active in their new roles, they became visible as political actors, writing letters, signing petitions, moving (or refusing to move) from their homes, and confronting civilian and military officials. At the heart of the book are stories of women who fought the draft in New York and Pennsylvania, protested segregated streetcars in San Francisco and Philadelphia, and demanded a living wage in the needle trades and safer conditions at the Federal arsenals where they labored. Giesberg challenges readers to think about women and children who were caught up in the military conflict but nonetheless refused to become its collateral damage. She offers a dramatic reinterpretation of how America's Civil War reshaped the lived experience of race and gender and brought swift and lasting changes to working-class family life.
When your soldier returns home to you, it should be a happy and joyful time. You are glad your spouse is safe and sound back home and can't wait to get your life going again. Everything should be great! But what if the homecoming is anything but great? What if suddenly you can't connect, or you feel worlds apart? What if your vet is no longer interested in going out or being around other people? Maybe your spouse isn't sleeping well, or worse, becoming violent while asleep. Your vet may not be reconnecting with the kids and may seem uninterested in any new additions to the family. What if your spouse gets angry at small things or even becomes violent? What do you do? Do you ignore it and keep thinking it will get better if you give it more time? In February 2003, Shawn Gourley's husband, Justin, returned home from his tour in the Middle East where his ship was deployed to assist Operation Enduring Freedom. Cracks were already showing in his personality, cracks that would widen dramatically into full-on fractures by the time he returned home in June 2004 from his third tour that marked the end of his military career. For the next 4 1/2 years their relationship was very difficult, and at times, downright terrifying for her and the children. It wasn't until January 2009 that Justin was able to get treatment. He was finally diagnosed with PTSD in August 2009. Those are the broad strokes of their story, but the details of how Shawn fought to save her family will leave you transfixed until the end.
A portrait of the strains of a military marriage and meditation on what it means to be left behind—a brave account of the challenges facing the wife of a Naval fighter pilot. When she fell in love with her brother’s best friend, Rachel Starnes had no idea she was about to repeat a painful family pattern—marrying a man who leaves regularly and for long stretches to work a dangerous job far from home. Through constant relocations, separations, and the crippling doubts of early parenthood, Starnes effortlessly weaves together strands from her past with the relentless pace of Navy life in a time of war. Searingly honest and emotionally unflinching—and at times laugh out loud funny—Starnes eloquently evokes the challenges she faces in trying to find and claim a sense of home while struggling to chart a new path and avoid passing on the same legacy to her two young sons. At once a portrait of the devastating strains that military life puts on families and a meditation on what it means to be left behind, The War at Home is a brave portrait of a modern military family and the realities of separation, endurance, and love that overcomes. “Rachel Starnes’s The War at Home navigates the joys, fears, compromises, and casualties that create the terrain of marriage. And if you are a military spouse, her memoir will reveal thoughts you never even knew you had. This is a wise and fearless book.” —Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone “One of the most honest and genuine memoirs I’ve ever read, as well as one of the most finely written. There’s not a false note in these pages. Rachel Starnes’s story is at once both singular and emblematic. . . . The War at Home is that rare thing: a book about the here and now that promises to last well beyond next month or next year.” —Steve Yarbrough, award-winning author of The Realm of Last Chances and Safe from the Neighbors