BiblioVault - Books about Subversive activities

Crimes of Power & States of Impunity

The U.S. Response to Terror

Welch, Michael

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Since 9/11, a new configuration of power situated at the core of the executive branch of the U.S. government has taken hold. In Crimes of Power & States of Impunity, Michael Welch takes a close look at the key historical, political, and economic forces shaping the country's response to terror.

Welch continues the work he began in Scapegoats of September 11th and argues that current U.S. policies, many enacted after the attacks, undermine basic human rights and violate domestic and international law. He recounts these offenses and analyzes the system that sanctions them, offering fresh insight into the complex relationship between power and state crime. Welch critically examines the unlawful enemy combatant designation, Guantanamo Bay, recent torture cases, and collateral damage relating to the war in Iraq. This book transcends important legal arguments as Welch strives for a broader sociological interpretation of what transpired early this century, analyzing the abuses of power that jeopardize our safety and security.

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Red Scare

Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas

By Don Carleton

University of Texas Press, 2014

Winner of the Texas State Historical Association Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History, this authoritative study of red-baiting in Texas reveals that what began as a coalition against communism became a fierce power struggle between conservative and liberal politics.

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Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark

Corporate and Police Spying on Activists

Eveline Lubbers

Pluto Press, 2012

The exposure of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy in the eco-activist movement revealed how the state monitors and undermines political activism. This book shows the other grave threat to our political freedoms - undercover activities by corporations.

Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark documents how corporations are halting legitimate action and investigation by activists. Using exclusive access to previously confidential sources, Eveline Lubbers shows how companies such as Nestlé, Shell and McDonalds use covert methods to evade accountability. She argues that corporate intelligence gathering has shifted from being reactive to pro-active, with important implications for democracy itself.

Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark will be vital reading for activists, investigative and citizen journalists, and all who care about freedom and democracy in the 21st century.

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See It Now Confronts McCarthyism

Television Documentary and the Politics of Representation

Thomas Rosteck

University of Alabama Press, 1994

Seeks evidence from media artifacts to reveal aesthetic, cultural, ideological, generic, and historical dimensions from classic television broadcasts

See It Now, Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly’s early documentary television program, has come to be recognized as the exemplar of nonfiction television. One important element in its reputation is a series of four telecasts directly dealing with abuses of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. This book is about those programs, but it is also about the early 1950s in America, the troubled era in which these programs were broadcast. This book is, then, both cultural history and media analysis.

As media analysis, this book seeks to understand the symbolic form, the aesthetic construction, and the subsequent experience that these four programs offered viewers. This sort of critical analysis is a development of recent vintage in American media studies. Whereas a decade ago television and the media were studied largely through an empiricist social scientific paradigm, now humanistic approaches to media discourses engage the interest of scholars in history, rhetoric and communication, political science, anthropology, and American studies. As case study, then, this book bridges classical humanist and contemporary mass media approaches, and as we go, I shall essay the utility of humanistic methods for the understanding and explication of mass media that is primarily visual in nature.

As cultural history, this book seeks to illuminate a unique era in the recent American past. My aim is to understand the programs as articulations of public “common sense” and as artifacts that help convey this common sense. Thus, a second theme of this book will be to locate-through the analysis of public discourse cast in the television documentary form—an American ideology: a set of “templates” that both ground the programs and reveal the cultural assumptions of the historical period.

In addition, from a slightly different historical perspective, our increased understanding of these See It Now broadcasts gives us an appreciation of the development of the television industry and the genre of television documentary. Coming at a time when few Americans had television sets, these See It Now programs coincided with an exponential increase in television ownership and popularity. As an elaborate defense of free speech for the medium, these documentaries may have helped to establish autonomy and a direction for a nascent broadcasting industry. More specifically, as the paradigm for the television documentary and as the first regularly scheduled documentary series, these See It Now programs shaped expectations and set the benchmark to which all nonfiction television, from Twentieth Century to White Paper to Sixty Minutes, has been compared. Thus, a third theme will be the implications of these seminal programs for media institutions and for the genre of television news documentary.

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Subversives and Mavericks in the Muslim Mediterranean

A Subaltern History

Edited by Odile Moreau and Stuart Schaar; preface by Edmund Burke III

University of Texas Press, 2016

Subaltern studies, the study of non-elite or underrepresented people, have revolutionized the writing of Middle Eastern history. Subversives and Mavericks in the Muslim Mediterranean represents the next step in this transformation. The book explores the lives of eleven nonconformists who became agents of political and social change, actively organizing new forms of resistance—against either colonial European regimes or the traditional societies in which they lived—that disrupted the status quo, in some cases, with dramatic results. These case studies highlight cross-border connections in the Mediterranean world, exploring how these channels were navigated.

Chapters in the book examine the lives of subversives and mavericks, such as Tawhida ben Shaykh, the first Arab woman to receive a medical degree; Mokhtar al-Ayari, a radical Tunisian labor leader; Nazli Hanem, Kmar Bayya, and Khiriya bin Ayyad, three aristocractic women who resisted the patriarchal structures of their societies by organizing and participating in intellectual salons for men and women and advocating social reform; Qaid Najim al-Akhsassi, an ex-slave and military officer, who fought against French and Spanish colonial expansion; and Boubeker al-Ghandjawi, a nearly illiterate trader who succeeded, though his diverse connections, in establishing important relations between the Moroccan sultan and the representative of the British government. Although based on individual and local perspectives, Subversives and Mavericks in the Muslim Mediterranean reveals new and unrecognized trans-local connections across the Muslim world, illuminating our understanding of these societies beyond narrow elite circles.

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