WOLF MOON, the platonic ideal of Antifa in literature

WOLF MOON
JULIO LLAMAZARES (tr. Simon Deefholts, Kathryn Phillips-Miles)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A tense, lyrical novel of life on the run in Franco's Spain that offers a bold, timeless challenge against fascism and authoritarianism.

FOR FANS OF ROGUE MALE: A literary thriller full of action and dramatic landscapes, and the first novel to break the national pact of silence after Francisco Franco’s death.

1937. Having lost the Civil War in Spain, four republican soldiers lead a fugitive existence deep in the Cantabrian mountains. They are on the run, skirmishing with Franco's soldiers, knowing that surrender means execution. Wounded and hungry, the hold-outs are drawn from the safety of the mountains into the villages they once inhabited, not only risking their lives but also the lives of anyone caught helping them. Trapped in the lonely mountains, with their harsh winters and unforgiving summers, it is only a matter of time before the Fascists hunt them down.

Living in caves, barely surviving on scraps provided by the villagers they dare to make contact with, Ángel and his friends are tortured by heat, cold, damp, hunger and above all, fear—fear for themselves, and for those still willing to help them. And if they do survive, what kind of country will there be left to live in?

First published in 1985, Wolf Moon was the first novel to break with the Pacto de Olvido, a political and cultural amnesty in Spain, following Franco's death in 1975, which provided cover for the regime's supporters. Brimming with tension and violence, it is a testament to enduring loyalty: to a cause, to justice, and to brothers-in-arms.

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My Review: Fascism's end is a terrible, trying time: how does a society disfigured from within reckon with the reality that some subset of the population liked this evil, supported it, didn't want it to end while another (probably larger) subset did little or nothing to oppose the way things were? France after WWII, Spain after Franco...they chose to do only a little to reckon with the evils recently departed. It's always interesting to learn about the people who opposed the slide into fascism, as we do here, in the context of reckoning with the way it happened.

A novel about factual events published ten years after Franco's death, this story highlights the tragic terror of night falling across the rural beauty of Spain's Asturias region. Four young Republican soldiers spend nine years resisting Franco's fascist government, abetted by the peasants whose lives are materially worse under this government...until as the Falangistas figure out who's probably doing what to help the men, they're brutalized into acquiescence. That's the end of these Maquis, a name the Deep Space Nine fans are noticing with delight and yes this is where it came from.

Ángel, our narrator, is a schoolteacher. It's how the author gets away with putting in so much beautiful language:

Since we got here I’ve scarcely felt the terrible moaning of the beast in the depths of my stomach, which bayed despairingly so many times in the final months of the war. It was even worse during the five days when we did not eat at all as we fled across the mountains, in the rain, from a more physical beast, more human and bloodthirsty, which pursued us implacably. It is as if the dampness and cold of the cave have penetrated my bones and my soul, imprisoning me here, lying beside the fire day and night with no interest in eating and talking or even peering through the mouth of the cave to look at the hard, overcast sky.

It's evocative. It's lovely, at least it is to me, and it says exactly what you need to know at that point in the plot: they're hunted, they're cold, they frequently have trouble finding food. All without saying that, but talking evocatively about the sensations of it. It's a great technique for keeping a richly satisfying story under 200pp.

As this tale is based on the real experiences of several men it's not necessary for the author to pretend the ending is a surprise. As he was the very first to break the "pact of forgetting" after Franco's death, it was wise for him to stare the law down not try to waffle around it, cutting a bit, refocusing stuff...just put it out there, let the chips fall where they may. (It doesn't hurt that he was only 30ish when it came out, with only two poetry collections before this short novel.)

It's quite the debut, being sad, infuriating, outrageously knowing in that "we're all in on the joke" way that can fall flat, ruining a story's impact on your feelings; this iteration does not. It makes old-man-read-it-before here doff his hairpiece to this talented tyro. Many are the stories flattened and rendered anemic by a misjudged or badly executed tonal choice like this one.

It's a case of biblio-Stockholm Syndrome. Author Llamazares became the moon that lit me over his story's trails, and the brighter suns of later writers on the topic (eg, Javier Cercas' Soldiers of Salamis) merely cause me reader's sunburn.

Get one soonest, because this story will play out again in our lifetimes.

CLINCH: The Stockholm Trilogy: Volume One, bisexual Swedish boxer turned enforcer has a bad day

CLINCH (The Stockholm Trilogy: Volume One)
MARTIN HOLMÉN (tr. Henning Koch)
Pushkin Vertigo
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Dashiell Hammett meets Raymond Chandler in this ultra-gritty piece of contemporary Swedish noir, set in a decrepit, highly atmospheric 1930s Stockholm

The writing's on the wall for Harry Kvist. Once a notorious boxer, he now spends his days drinking, and his nights chasing debts amongst the pimps, prostitutes and petty thieves of 1930s Stockholm. When women can't satisfy him, men can. But one biting winter's night he pays a threatening visit to a debtor named Zetterberg, and when the man is found dead shortly afterwards, all eyes are on Kvist.

Determined to avoid yet another stint in prison, Kvist sets out to track down the only person who can clear his name. His hunt will lead him from the city's slums, gangster hideouts and gambling dens to its most opulent hotels and elite nightclubs. It will bring him face to face with bootleggers and whores, aristocrats and murderers. It will be the biggest fight of his life.

Blending noir with gritty violence, Clinch is a visceral, compulsive thriller that packs a punch and leaves you reeling.

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My Review: This one was a surprise to receive the year I got it. I had it on my list, and whaddaya know, in it came. I wasn't expecting to get a really dark, pretty nihilistic read but really feel glad I did.

Male bisexuality is all but invisible in all parts of our culture. No matter how much progress gets made, this is true. Gay guys are deeply suspicious of and fairly hostile to bi guys; straight women prefer their fantasy men either straight or gay, no spectrum tolerance there, either. I've never heard a lesbian express an opinion on the matter.

Harry is a rough-and-tumble guy. He's got the marks of a life in boxing on his body; he's got the marks of a beginning that leads a man into boxing on his being. He's on hard ground in his life because he's been in prison for fucking who he pleases instead of who society says to.

It's not like Sweden in the 1930s was the socialist paradise, however alloyed it may be, that it is today. Society was more aligned with the Nazi German model. Neutral Sweden provided a lot of raw materials to the Nazis and never helped the Jews...that was piecemeal, individually made decisions, not real help despite some of its diplomats doing their best. It's complicated, as what is not? Go look at Lise Meitner's experiences in Sweden, Othering was alive and well.

Harry, found guilty of sodomy, is shoved further down the social hierarchy until he arrives at loan-shark debt collector. It's here the action begins...his latest collection effort is found dead the day he comes to make good. Well, this ain't good. Harry's guaranteed to go back to prison if he gets convicted of the crime, and who the hell will make any effort to get him a fair trial rather than just pin the crime on him and go on with their day? Only Harry...so who saw him? Oh no, only a whore and a man in a snazzy sports car who tried his sexual luck with Harry. Not great choices.

Author Holmén, whose debut novel this is, creates a believably complex Harry, a pragmatic earthy survivor who loves animals and kids, helps anyone who needs it when he can (Lundin, his landlord the undertaker, is one), and satiates his needs as he experiences them however is available to him. He knows the deck is stacked against him so he doesn't hesitate to use violent means to get what he needs, to protect himself and others from predators, and even to become a predator when he must.

That flexibility and willingness to do what needs doing is what enables him to solve the murder he's wrongly accused of. It's a very dirty business that started him off on this search...it's not getting cleaner the further up the social hierarchy he goes. There are the usual noir novel twists, a resolution to the crime that requires a gigantic double-cross, and a setting where cold does the narrative job that heat does in Southern noirs: keeps everyone on edge, keyed up, on the point of suffering dire consequences.

It's a wonderfully gritty tale of an ugly side Sweden doesn't show the world. Voluntarily, anyway. Deeply satisfying.

FATEFUL HOURS: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, a political analysis of a difficult transition

FATEFUL HOURS: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic
VOLKER ULLRICH (tr. Jefferson Chase)
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$35.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times best-selling historian, the riveting story of the Weimar Republic—a fledgling democracy beset by chaos and extremism—and its dissolution into the Third Reich.

Democracies are fragile. Freedoms that seem secure can be lost. Few historical events illustrate this as vividly as the failure of the Weimar Republic. Germany’s first democracy endured for fourteen tumultuous years and culminated with the horrific rise of the Third Reich. As one commentator wrote in July 1933: Hitler had “won the game with little effort. . . . All he had to do was huff and puff—and the edifice of German politics collapsed like a house of cards.” But this tragedy was not inevitable.

In Fateful Hours, award-winning historian Volker Ullrich chronicles the captivating story of the Republic, capturing a nation and its people teetering on the abyss. Born from the ashes of the First World War, the fledgling democracy was saddled with debt and political instability from its beginning. In its early years, a relentless chain of crises—hyperinflation, foreign invasion, and upheaval from the right and left—shook the republic, only letting up during a brief period of stability in the 1920s. Social and cultural norms were upended. Political murder was the order of the day. Yet despite all the challenges, the Weimar Republic was not destined for its ignoble end.

Drawing on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources, Ullrich charts the many failed alternatives and missed opportunities that contributed to German democracy’s collapse. In an immersive style that takes us to the heart of political power, Ullrich argues that, right up until January 1933, history was open. There was no shortage of opportunities to stop the slide into fascism. Just as in the present, it is up to us whether democracy lives or dies.

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My Review: This is a complicated subject...how a democracy dies...and, as a result, a complex read. There were a lot of moving parts to the death of the Weimar Republic. It was not inevitable, a foregone conclusion; the economic disasters wrought by the vengeful Treaty of Versailles were even surmountable, as proved by Hjalmar Scacht; given the authority to control hyperinflation, he did so by staying outside the control of the politicians. The personalities, in other words, of the players in the government were largely to blame for that very government's demise.

A hearty share of the blame for the fall was on the Communist Party's plate. Their strong base of disaffected workers and sailors, reeling economically from the kaiser's stupid management of the economy in the war,was frittered away in insistence on Purity and perfect adherence to untested (and, it would turn out, unwise) Soviet policies. This resulted in an uncompromising, self-destructive inflexibility. Doom in politics is always inflexibility. Their rigidity and refusal to support a more center-left candidate led to Paul von Hindenburg, an old-line reactionary, being elected president in 1925. Quite simply, the destruction of the Weimar Republic was inevitable then. Right-wing ultranationalist parties had a friend in high office, one who refused to countenance the suppression of their terrorism.

Army veterans and the moneyed classes weren't innocent in the fall of the republic. Anger and hatred at the vicious Treaty of Versailles' immiseration of millions of ordinary Germans made a fertile breeding ground for paramilitaries, for well-funded but ineptly led coups against the government, and for the ultimate rise of Hitler and his National Socialist party. (You clocked that last word, right? The post-WWII US rebranded them as "Nazis" because can't have anything remotely resembling socialism getting attention.) The greedy classes were delighted to fund Hitler, in no small part because Hjalmar Schacht...the one banker who succeeded in reducing war reparations payments...was a hero among them and he said to. Sadly, all those "wise heads, leadership material" men wildly miscalculated their influence over Adolf and Co. They were never more than opportunistically interested in Hitler's plans. Rearming Germany was, to them, a way to make immense profits; the war that followed was suicidal on economic terms.

Democracy is fragile. It is always under attack from within by authoritarians, because they can make more money and get their sick fantasy high-control rocks off. The Nazi book-burnings are branded, in the US at least, as burnings of Jewish and dangerous books.

Jewish, for sure; the "dangerous" books, the ones that were "polluting German youth," were Magnus Hirschfeld's works in the Institute for Sexual Science. Weird how you were never taught that, isn't it. And isn't it just so coincidental that the current scum in power are ramping up the rhetoric against sexual and ethnic minorities. Book burning, before some annoying little twidgee says a word, looks a lot worse to people than banning, so they have learned some lessons...but the effect is the same.

A timely read. Not comfortable, not easy, but very very much a book for these times.

And the future, if we can claw one out of "Their" hands.

THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R., unnerving real history

THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.
JULES ARCHER
Arcade Publishing
$10.97 ebook editions, available now

$1.99 on Kindle! (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Many people might not know that in 1933, a group of wealthy industrialists working closely with groups like the K.K.K. and the American Liberty League planned to overthrow the U.S. government and run F.D.R. out of office in a fascist coup. Readers will learn of their plan to turn unhappy war veterans into American brown shirts,” depose F.D.R., and stop the New Deal. They asked Medal of Honor recipient and Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to work with them and become the first American Caesar.” Fortunately, Butler was a true patriot. Instead of working for the fascist coup, he revealed the plot to journalists and to Congress.

Archer writes a compelling account of a ploy that would have turned FDR into fascist puppet, threatened American democracy and changed the course of history. This book not only reveals the truth behind this shocking episode in history, but also tells the story of the man whose courage and bravery prevented it from happening.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history—books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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My Review: The wonder of History as a study is how much of what sounds new and apocalyptically nightmarish to you is, in fact, the latest of many iterations of the same bull. Humans seek patterns, and novelty; "this is unprecedented! and it's just like this thing that happened way back when!" sums it up.

Author Jules Archer (1915 – 2008) was a prolific popular writer on history for all ages. He grew up in New York City during times of great changes and the fomenting of radical opposition to the status quo. He saw, firsthand, the causes of the New Deal's legislation. He spent a lot of time in later life using the free college education that New Yorkers of sufficient academic achievements were at that time entitled to explaining the country, and history itself, to others.

This book was published first in 1973, in the soft, rotten middle of the Watergate hearings. The timing, and the subject, were chosen carefully. Remembering your history, younger-than-50s, you'll recall we as a country were in the throes of indicting and removing an actual criminal from the presidency, as well as losing a war in Asia. That war left the country with a lot of badly damaged men and no jobs for them when they returned to civilian life.

Any of this ringing some bells?

So Jules Archer, explainer extraordinaire (seriously, go look at his bibliography!), reached into his own past for an analogous passage of disastrously concatenated events and found World War I, the Bonus Army, and the very little spoken-of Businessmans' Coup of 1933. "We have been here before," said Archer, "and the country survived."

The hero of this piece is a man of whom I guarantee you have not heard. General Smedley Darlington Butler is one of those figures that appear all too seldom, the Man of Conscience whose principles are strong and whose moral compass, whether or not it's calibrated as is one's own, is clearly aligned with honor on every axis. The plotters of this heinous act of subversion as Archer details it chose exactly and precisely the wrong man to execute their plot. (Goddesses please accept our thanks that they didn't approach Douglas MacArthur!) He blew so many whistles and did so with such enormous credibility and evidence that the entire plot had to be abandoned.

Not to say the idea went away. We've seen that in our own time. This Peter Arno cartoon could've been drawn in 2010 and been about Obama, or 2020 and been about Biden:

After reading this book, your illusions about this unique moment in history being absolutely the awfulest, most scum-ridden, darkest passage in the US will perforce vanish. But you'll also, I hope, read it and think, "this isn't the first time?! Holy maloley, we'd better pay attention!" Because I'm entirely sure that was the aim of Jules Archer's project in writing many explanatory books about history over many decades.

HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, traitorous fascist sympathizers aren't new

HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States
BRADLEY W. HART
Thomas Dunne Books
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II.

Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.

Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee.

We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's always been a failing of the left-wing political folk to see the Apocalypse in each and every thunderation from the Christo-Fascist Right as the ongoing battle for the USA's soul continues. There are now, there were in the 1950s, there were in the 1930s and 1940s, traitorous scum whose personal vision of a Perfect World contains only people like them, who are willing to do anything legal or not to enforce their will on the eternal majority who don't want that. In an article in The Nation, the author of the think piece I've linked to comments most saliently on the Red Scare years' school-textbook battles, book burnings, and other such performative outrage with this pithy remark:

Most Americans don’t think that proponents of critical race theory are secretly spreading “Marxism” in the schools, either, or that woke corporations are somehow supporting the same evil project. The people who make such claims are a small minority, just as they were in the 1950s.

The fact is that our country's been under some form of internal attack from fascist and/or authoritarian right-wing rabble since Day One. So has every other political structure. Let's not forget the fate of Periclean Athens. It's the eternal project of greedy, selfish control freaks to get everything they can into their own hands and to control what they can't possess.

Author Hart made a well-researched and -written alarm call against calm, resigned acceptance of the culture coup attempted during the 45th president's term in this book. He uses the well-documented and clearly overcome existence, activities, and failures of Nazi sympathizers in the US. It is an effective technique; it uses as its organizing principle a simple structure: Each chapter is dedicated to a single organization active in promoting German/Nazi interests in the US, and gives some crucial details about how and why this choice was made. It also characterizes and puts into timely context the people who made up the institution in question. This avoids a common trap in histories of zeitgeists or social movements, the dreaded alphabet soup of initialism and too-similar or too-often-repeated names. That admittedly more synthetic approach can weave a tapestry of details. It more often than that causes severe MEGO disease.

The most disturbing take-away of this entire loudly rung tocsin is that these forces of anti-democratic rage failed because they lacked a credible, powerful leader. Today's versions, it is very frightening to realize, do not suffer from that lack. It isn't that Author Hart is unaware of this, it's that he seemed to feel he shouldn't make as much of the echoes I heard in each chapter of current events as I would've preferred. There is something to be said for taking off the gloves and hitting the enemy within hard. It's something "they" do a lot of (see my review of The Obama Hate Machine) and with a lot less factual basis than Author Hart presents.

Why this book only gets four stars from me is the quite startling number of uncorrected typos that made it from the DRC I read into the library copy I checked out. Scandalous! And, in the end, there were moments that I found myself not quite satisfied with the case the author made for some person or organization's motivation for opposing the US entry into WWII. Mixed motives are more common than pure ones on every gradation of the ideological spectrum, as (for example) morally based pacifism is present among right-wingers, too.

Perhaps the most telling thing that I noticed go underremarked was the utter ineffectuality of Hoover's FBI in going after right-wing terrorism. Red Scare propaganda against our nominal allies the Soviets was rife. How telling that is...British intelligence informed the US government better about domestic threats than Hoover's FBI.

I was still angered and unsettled and unnerved by this read. I am recommending it to all and sundry who think the Right's victory in the 2022 midterm elections is somehow inevitable. We who do not wish to have our country scourged by the hypocrites and religious nuts of this book's modern counterparts should heed Author Hart's dictum: "{U}nfortunately, the merchants of hate always seem to have someone to listen to them." Let's plug the holes in our national awareness. It can only help the side dedicated to the rights and duties of citizens against the Right's attacks on them.