Re: [Marxism] Don DeBar:US waging war against Syria in conjunction with ISIL

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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Don Debar thinks the rise of Trump is a good thing. He is pro-Trump because
Putin is #NeverHillary

http://www.mintpressnews.com/trump-clinton-danger-us-liberals/214819/
https://youtu.be/Q08X3gEVQG0

#NeverHillary==POTUSTrump just as surely as True == .not. False because
there are only 2 possible outcomes on 8 Nov.  /its simple binary logic

I take support for Don Debar very seriously because he was a very vocal
Gaddafi supporter and propagandist while Libyans I had come to care for and
respect were being murdered by Gaddafi and his supporters like Debar.

I have a whole folder of Debar propaganda videos for Gaddafi. He's a big
liar and I'm not surprise he wants people to vote against Clinton [and for
Trump]


Clay Claiborne, Director
Vietnam: American Holocaust 
Linux Beach Productions
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 581-1536

Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 


On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 6:34 PM, Andrew Stewart  wrote:

> Meet yours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
>
> Marxists for neoliberalism, how cute
>
> 
>
>
> Meet you new friend:
>
> http://en.alalam.ir/news/1650590
>
> American journalist Don DeBar says the United States is in fact waging a
>> war against the government and people of Syria in conjunction with the ISIL
>> terrorist group
>>
>> Don DeBar, an anti-war activist and radio host in New York, made the
>> remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday while commenting
>> on the recent purported beheading of American citizen Abdul-Rahman Kassig
>> by ISIL militants.
>>
>
> All the Pro-Putin mouthpieces will be in the Never Hillary camp. #
> *NeverHillary* 
> =POTUSTrump
>
>
>
> Clay Claiborne, Director
> Vietnam: American Holocaust 
> Linux Beach Productions
> Venice, CA 90291
> (310) 581-1536
>
> Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 
> --
> Best regards,
>
> Andrew Stewart
>
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[Marxism] For A Class-Struggle Workers Party

[bonnieweinstein via Marxism]

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For A Class-Struggle Workers Party

No support to the Democrats, Republicans, or any party of the bosses

International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, Local Union No. 10

Whereas the bosses have two parties to represent their class while the millions 
of working people have none, and

Whereas the Democratic president Barack Obama sent the U.S. Coast Guard to 
enforce scabbing against the International Longshore and Warehouse Union during 
the 2013-14 lock-out of northwest dock workers, and

Whereas the Democratic governor Kate Brown opposed and undercut the movement 
for a $15 minimum wage across Oregon, and

Whereas in 2014 Democrats in Congress joined with Republicans to pass a 
disastrous pension “reform,” allowing the bosses to escape their obligations 
and cheat our retirees, and

Whereas the two presidencies of the Democrat Barack Obama have been eight years 
of unending war in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, causing untold human 
suffering, millions of refugees, and attacks on our democratic rights at home, 
and

Whereas the Democratic Party in power has deported some five million 
immigrants, a record, and

Whereas across the country, from Oakland to Baltimore, police under Democratic 
mayors regularly murder Black men and women with impunity, and

Whereas the 2016 presidential election offers us the “choice” between a raving, 
bigoted clown and a career representative of Wall Street, and

Whereas the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Virginia governor Tim 
Kaine, supports union-busting “right to work” laws, and

Whereas Democrats and Republicans are and have always been strike-breaking, 
war-making parties of the bosses, and

Whereas so long as the labor movement supports one or another party of the 
bosses, we will be playing a losing game, therefore be it

Resolved that IUPAT Local 10 does not support the Democrats, Republicans, or 
any bosses’ parties or politicians, and Resolved that we call on the 
International Union to repudiate its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for 
president, and Resolved that we call on the labor movement to break from the 
Democratic Party, and build a class-struggle workers party

Approved at the August 17, 2016 Regular Meeting of the Membership

Sign the Petition

On August 17, Painters Union (IUPAT) Local 10 in Portland, Oregon, passed a 
resolution calling for the building of a “class struggle workers party.” This 
call is especially important today, when the corporate mouthpiece Hillary 
Clinton, and the racist demagogue Donald Trump are presented as the only viable 
options for president. No matter which of these is elected, workers and youth 
will need to fight the coming attacks. To do this, we will need a political 
party of working class people, one which will unite, organize and mobilize all 
working class people to fight for our interests. That’s why we should help 
spread the word of this call of Local 10 and take the first concrete steps in 
that direction. Please sign and help pass around this message of support, which 
will be sent to Local 10.

Support the call of Painters Local 10 for a working class party!

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/IUPAT10

International Union of Painters and Allied Trades

Local Union No. 10

11105 N.E. Sandy Blvd.

Portland, Oregon 97220

www.iupatdc5.org 
Phone: (503) 257-0589 , Fax: (503) 
262-5358 , Oowl: (503) 262-5347 

 
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Re: [Marxism] Don DeBar:US waging war against Syria in conjunction with ISIL

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Meet yours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y

Marxists for neoliberalism, how cute



Meet you new friend:

http://en.alalam.ir/news/1650590

American journalist Don DeBar says the United States is in fact waging a
> war against the government and people of Syria in conjunction with the ISIL
> terrorist group
>
> Don DeBar, an anti-war activist and radio host in New York, made the
> remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday while commenting
> on the recent purported beheading of American citizen Abdul-Rahman Kassig
> by ISIL militants.
>

All the Pro-Putin mouthpieces will be in the Never Hillary camp. #
*NeverHillary* 
=POTUSTrump



Clay Claiborne, Director
Vietnam: American Holocaust 
Linux Beach Productions
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 581-1536

Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 
-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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Re: [Marxism] Don DeBar:US waging war against Syria in conjunction with ISIL

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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Meet you new friend:

http://en.alalam.ir/news/1650590

American journalist Don DeBar says the United States is in fact waging a
> war against the government and people of Syria in conjunction with the ISIL
> terrorist group
>
> Don DeBar, an anti-war activist and radio host in New York, made the
> remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday while commenting on
> the recent purported beheading of American citizen Abdul-Rahman Kassig by
> ISIL militants.
>

All the Pro-Putin mouthpieces will be in the Never Hillary camp. #
*NeverHillary* 
=POTUSTrump



Clay Claiborne, Director
Vietnam: American Holocaust 
Linux Beach Productions
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 581-1536

Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How the left is losing credibility over Aleppo | TRT World

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/28/16 5:40 PM, Clay Claiborne wrote:

This is certainly true of the Green Party, which doesn't even mention
"Syria" once in its party platform.

Do they oppose Putin on anything?


This from a guy who wants us to vote for a candidate who approved 99 out 
of a 100 Predator drone attacks, voted for the wars in Afghanistan and 
Iraq that cost the lives of a million Sunnis, and who was an architect 
of the coup in Honduras that led to wide-scale death squad attacks on 
workers and activists, including Berta Cáceres.


I'm sticking with Jill Stein who is only guilty of 1 bad position out of 
100. One day there might be a Nuremberg trial for the people who turned 
Iraq and Afghanistan into a living hell. Not being as bad as Donald 
Trump will not be an adequate defense.

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[Marxism] Syrian Refugee Saves The Day

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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Inevitably, there is some self-congratualtion among Canadians over our response 
to refugees, although we have taken only a small number (eg. compared to 
Germany).
I hope this feel-good story will help friends in the US and elsewhere who want 
to open doors to refugees.
ken h

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/09/27/syrian-refugee-bride-zipper_n_12217154.html
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How the left is losing credibility over Aleppo | TRT World

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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This is certainly true of the Green Party, which doesn't even mention
"Syria" once in its party platform.

Do they oppose Putin on anything?

Clay Claiborne, Director
Vietnam: American Holocaust 
Linux Beach Productions
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 581-1536

Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 


On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 1:05 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *
>
> A Facebook post by Idrees Ahmed going viral on social media exposes how
> left-wing anti-war activists are contradicting their own principles through
> their silence on the Syrian regime bombardment of eastern Aleppo.
>
> http://www.trtworld.com/mea/how-the-left-is-losing-credibili
> ty-over-aleppo-195746
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[Marxism] Fwd: How the left is losing credibility over Aleppo | TRT World

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A Facebook post by Idrees Ahmed going viral on social media exposes how 
left-wing anti-war activists are contradicting their own principles 
through their silence on the Syrian regime bombardment of eastern Aleppo.


http://www.trtworld.com/mea/how-the-left-is-losing-credibility-over-aleppo-195746
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[Marxism] Fwd: I, Daniel Blake | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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If Ken Loach’s “I, Daniel Blake” had a subtitle, it could well be “Why 
Jeremy Corbyn became Labour Party leader”. Focused on the Kafkaesque 
ordeals a 59-year old widowed carpenter puts up with to get health 
allowance benefits after suffering a heart attack, it is an indictment 
of an entire social system in which Britain’s most vulnerable are being 
thrown overboard by a cold and cost-conscious bureaucracy that received 
its marching orders from the combined forces of New Labour and the Tories.


As the film begins, we only hear the voices of Daniel Blake and his 
petty official interrogator who is asking him a series of questions 
about his health status: Was he able to lift his arms above his head?; 
Could he walk 50 meters from his home?; Was he having problems with his 
bowel movements? After each question, he responds by saying that it is 
heart preventing him from work, not his hands, feet or ass. His 
physician has told him that he must receive benefits for another month 
before he can be cleared to go back to work, something that he wants 
more than anybody including the penny-pinching bureaucrats. This is of 
no importance to his interrogator who deems him fit to work.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2016/09/28/i-daniel-blake/
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Re: [Marxism] Shimon Peres - war criminal finally kicks the bucket

[Jeff via Marxism]

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On 2016-09-28 17:37, Dennis Brasky via Marxism wrote:




Thanks.

I just unsubscribed from Juan Cole's newsletter after being subjected to 
this:


http://www.juancole.com/2016/09/israeli-believe-solution.html


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[Marxism] Here’s the Bomb Russia Is Using to Flatten Aleppo

[Jeff via Marxism]

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What has been reported by BBC (but this article isn't so specific) is 
that the use of this "bunker buster" bomb in Aleppo means that 
underground shelters and hospitals, that used to have some degree of 
protection being in basements, are now vulnerable and being targeted, 
contributing to the huge death toll there over the last week. BBC also 
referred to a barrel bomb which punches a hole in the top of building 
before falling into it and decimating the entire structure, which seems 
to be distinct from the bomb described here. All very grim :-(

- Jeff

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/26/heres-the-bomb-russia-is-using-to-flatten-aleppo/amp/


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[Marxism] Shimon Peres and South African nukes

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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The man who brought nuclear weapons to the Middle East and also tried to
sell them to Apartheid era South Africa has died.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons
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[Marxism] The Late Great Planet Earth

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/39385-earths-co2-passes-the-400-ppm-threshold-maybe-permanently
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[Marxism] Shimon Peres - war criminal finally kicks the bucket

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Peres’ most important task, to which he was entrusted by Ben Gurion, was
developing in secret – and over US opposition – Israel’s nuclear weapons
program through the 1950s and ’60s. To that end, he recruited the
assistance of France, Britain and Norway.


http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-28/obituary-israels-elder-statesman-shimon-peres/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Marx deflated – International Socialism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Alex Callinicos reviews Gareth Stedman Jones's stupid bio of Marx and I 
say that without having read it. So there.)


In 1972 the Cambridge historian Gareth Stedman Jones wrote a foreword to 
the English edition of Werner Blumenberg’s useful biography of Karl 
Marx. Here he criticised Blumenberg’s “Social Democratic 
interpretation”, complaining that for Blumenberg “Marx’s importance 
today stems not from his creation of a new revolutionary theory, but the 
grandeur of his humanism and the wealth of insights scattered throughout 
his works”.1


Yet, nearly 45 years later, Stedman Jones, in his own massive and 
already highly praised biography of Marx, argues that “Karl” (as he 
rather shy-makingly insists on calling Marx) was at his most politically 
effective when he forged a “new social-democratic language in the 
mid-1860s” through his role in the First International, and supposedly 
distanced himself from his revolutionary communist youth.2 Whereas in 
1972 Stedman Jones criticised Blumenberg for accusing Marx of 
mythologising the Paris Commune of 1871, now he agrees that The Civil 
War in France was “in part an imaginary projection” and regrets the 
political isolation from British progressive opinion to which his 
defence of the Commune condemned Marx.3


full: http://isj.org.uk/marx-deflated/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Art of the Possible: Peter Frase’s “Four Futures” - Los Angeles Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Peter Frase is a Jacobin editor. He was also a Marxmail subscriber years 
ago. The book is reviewed by the ubiquitous Jedediah Purdy.


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/art-possible-peter-frases-four-futures/
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[Marxism] Can We Have a ‘Party of the People’?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NYRB, OCTOBER 13, 2016 ISSUE
Can We Have a ‘Party of the People’?
Nicholas Lemann

Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century
by Daniel Oppenheimer
Simon and Schuster, 403 pp., $28.00

The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and 
Fractured America

by Steve Fraser
Basic Books, 291 pp., $27.50

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Metropolitan, 305 pp., $27.00
Thomas Frank

As a reviewer of political books, I get a lot of them unbidden in the 
mail. I remember vividly, one day in 2003, opening a package from a 
publisher, finding Arianna Huffington’s anticorporate screed Pigs at the 
Trough, and thinking: finally, after all these years, somebody has moved 
from right to left! Through the 1990s, Huffington had been a fairly 
dutiful Republican—at one point, even a Republican political wife. She 
enthusiastically supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton. As late as 
2000 she was presenting herself as a kind of militant, 
pox-on-both-your-houses centrist. But now, as usual, her timing was 
impeccable. Soon she had founded The Huffington Post, which has amassed 
an online audience on the left that exceeds that of almost all the 
mainstream news organizations.1 (And it may be a harbinger of something 
else, I’m not sure what, that Huffington has just announced she will be 
leaving Huffington Post to run a “corporate and consumer well-being 
platform” called Thrive Global.)


For most of the three decades preceding Huffington’s conversion, moving 
from left to right, or at least from left to less left, was far more 
common than the other way around. Ex-Communists used to ask, “What was 
your Kronstadt?,” referring to the 1921 uprising against the Bolsheviks 
that presented one of the first occasions to become disillusioned with 
them, to be followed by many others. American domestic liberalism 
provided people looking for Kronstadts with a long series of 
opportunities, beginning in the mid-1960s. These included, for example: 
the Black Power movement, for those who thought Martin Luther King Jr.’s 
“I Have a Dream” speech fully and exclusively represented the thinking 
of black America; and the crushing defeat of George McGovern’s 
presidential campaign in 1972, for those who planned to run for office 
(like Bill and Hillary Clinton). Also, after the fall of the Soviet 
Union and the rise of Silicon Valley at home, many liberals began to 
think of capitalism in a far more broadly positive way than had been 
typical in American liberalism. That wasn’t as dramatic a change as 
moving from right to left, but because it involved many more people, it 
had a large effect on the location of the political consensus.


Elected officials are still wary about calling themselves “liberal,” but 
this year the momentum seems to be strongly in the direction that 
Huffington sensed was coming. The big surprise of the Democratic primary 
season was how well Bernie Sanders did, and Hillary Clinton has moved a 
couple of notches to the left in response, for example in turning 
against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and in proposing a very generous 
new federal program to reduce tuition at public universities. But “left” 
is not a neat category. Donald Trump and Sanders share a number of 
positions and rhetorical gestures, including opposition to free trade 
agreements and harsh criticism of Wall Street. (Indeed, Trump’s 
nomination seems to be a Kronstadt for many conservatives.) In his 
acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, Trump predicted that 
Sanders’s supporters will vote for him. Sounding a lot like Sanders, he 
said, “Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind 
the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged 
system in place.”


This year’s Republican platform calls for the reinstatement of the 
Glass-Steagall Act, which is the 1933 law that separated commercial and 
investment banking—signed by Franklin Roosevelt, repealed by Bill 
Clinton in 1999. This was an often-repeated Sanders position, but 
Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic platform, don’t agree. The platform 
merely calls for Glass-Steagall to be “updated and modernized.”


Countries with parliamentary systems can have social-democratic parties, 
nationalist parties, green parties, ethnic parties, business parties, 
regional parties, religious parties, feminist parties, agricultural 
parties, and so on, which can fall into and out of coalitions with one 
another. The United States has a peculiarly durable two-party system 
that makes this process invisible because it takes place behind a 

[Marxism] Divide and divide and divide and rule

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(In my review of "Ruins of Lifta", I mentioned that historian Hillel 
Cohen was among those interviewed and alluded to his book "1929: Year 
Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict" that appears to be an important 
contribution to "revisionist" literature.)


LRB, Vol. 38 No. 19 · 6 October 2016
Divide and divide and divide and rule
by Yonatan Mendel

1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Hillel Cohen, 
translation by Haim Watzman

Brandeis, 312 pp, £20.00, November 2015, ISBN 978 1 61168 811 5

Ten minutes into Elia Suleiman’s film The Time That Remains, the 
Palestinian city of Nazareth officially surrenders to Israeli military 
forces on 16 July 1948. In the town hall, the Israeli commander reads 
out the bill of surrender to the gathered Arab-Palestinian notables. 
It’s in Hebrew and they don’t understand a word. The commander tells the 
mayor to sign the document, and then to join his soldiers for a 
‘historic photo’. A military cameraman points his camera at the 
soldiers. But when the black and white photo appears on screen it isn’t 
the soldiers we see: it’s the puzzled group of Arab-Palestinian figures 
at the other end of the room, ordinary people, onlookers. They, and 
others like them, are central figures in the work of Hillel Cohen. 
Neither the conventional ‘winners’ nor the stereotypical ‘losers’, they 
play a part in the grand political story which, though crucial, is often 
overlooked.


Cohen was born in 1961 into a National Religious family; his father was 
of Jewish Afghan origin, his mother of Jewish Polish descent. As a 
teenager he lived in a settlement in the West Bank. He left school at 16 
and began to explore the neighbouring Palestinian villages. He made 
friends, learned Arabic, and by being there found out about the lives of 
Palestinians under the occupation. He worked as a floorer before 
beginning his academic career. He reads the Bible but no longer 
considers himself ‘religious’. He goes ‘more often to Hebron than to Tel 
Aviv and more often to Bethlehem than to Haifa’. He believes in a 
one-state solution (at least in the long term) and supports Israeli 
human rights organisations such as Anarchists against the Wall and 
Hamoked, which works with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories whose 
rights have been violated by Israeli policies. He writes in Hebrew – 
unusually for an academic, he doesn’t have an international audience 
primarily in mind. In half a dozen scholarly books covering the history 
of Palestine and Israel from 1929 to 1967 and beyond, he has 
consistently written about ordinary people, something no other Israeli 
historian has managed to do.


Cohen identifies 1929 as the year that gave birth ‘to the Zionist 
military ethos’. The Arab-Israeli conflict probably doesn’t have a ‘year 
zero’ – its roots go back at least as far as the 19th century – but 1929 
should certainly be seen as a landmark. Between 23 and 29 August that 
year, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were killed. Hundreds more were injured. 
The worst violence was in the Old City of Jerusalem and near the Cave of 
the Patriarchs in Hebron. Cohen shows how the violence was connected to 
the threat – real or imagined – of a change in the status of a religious 
site that served as a symbol of political hegemony. In the 1920s, the 
Western Wall in Jerusalem was a Jewish prayer site in an Arab area where 
‘Jews were allowed to pray … on the condition that they not disturb the 
residents of the neighbourhood, and on the understanding that they not 
claim title to the site.’


On 15 August 1929, following months of tension, Jewish demonstrators 
marched to the Wall, raised the Zionist flag, sang the Zionist anthem 
and claimed ownership of the site. The effect on relations between Jews 
and Arabs was dramatic. There was an Arab counter-demonstration the next 
day, which within a week had escalated into full-blown anti-Jewish 
riots. (More recent violence in Jerusalem has also been a consequence of 
Israeli attempts to change the status of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple 
Mount site. The Second Intifada was sparked in 2000 by Ariel Sharon’s 
decision to visit the site to prove Israeli sovereignty; and the latest 
cycle of violence in Jerusalem follows 15 meetings at which the Interior 
Committee of the Knesset discussed changing the site’s status to allow 
Jews to pray there.)


Drawing on a wide range of sources, in Hebrew, Arabic and English, Cohen 
argues that neither side includes in the history it tells itself the 
massacres and murders committed by its own members. He juxtaposes Hebrew 
and Arabic accounts of particular incidents – for example, the murder of 
the Palestinian ‘Awn 

[Marxism] Enter Hamilton

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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LRB, Vol. 38 No. 19 · 6 October 2016
Enter Hamilton
by Eric Foner

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor
Norton, 704 pp, £30.00, November, ISBN 978 0 393 08281 4

The racism, xenophobia and violence of Donald Trump’s presidential 
campaign is widely seen as an aberration, as if reasoned debate had been 
the default mode of American politics. But precursors to Trump do exist, 
candidates who struck electoral gold by appealing to exaggerated fears, 
real grievances and visceral prejudices. Among Trump’s predecessors are 
the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings of the 1850s, white supremacist 
politicians of the Jim Crow era, and more recent hucksters and 
demagogues including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. Not to mention 
more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ 
offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over the gains of 
the Civil Rights movement. (That ‘respectable’ and ‘Nixon’ can be 
included in the same sentence illustrates how far our political 
standards have evolved since the 1970s.) Violence isn’t unknown in 
American political history. The 19th century saw fistfights in Congress 
and riots at election time in major American cities. Until well into the 
20th century, Southern blacks who wanted to exercise the right to vote 
faced violent retribution from the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups.


Where does all this originate? In American Revolutions, Alan Taylor 
offers a surprising answer: the struggle for independence itself. 
Racism, violence, scurrilous attacks on opponents: all, he argues, were 
part of American political culture from the outset. Taylor breaks 
decisively with a trope of Cold War propaganda which has worked its way 
into historical scholarship: the idea that unlike the ‘bad’ French and 
Russian Revolutions, which degenerated into violent class conflict, a 
united American people rebelled against British overlords with restraint 
and decorum. In fact, as he makes clear, the American Revolution was a 
bitter, multi-sided conflict that pitted Loyalists against Patriots and 
white Americans against blacks and Indians. Hence the plural in his title.


Taylor rejects the common view of the colonial era as essentially a 
prelude to independence. In the 18th century, he points out, colonists 
throughout British North America were drawing closer to the mother 
country, not further away. They ‘rejoiced in the British constitution’, 
celebrated military victories over France and idealised the king as 
their champion against Catholic enemies. Economically, too, they became 
more and more closely tied to Britain while leaders of different 
colonies had more contact with London than with one another. When the 
First Continental Congress convened in 1774, John Adams reported that 
the delegates were ‘strangers’, unfamiliar with each other’s ideas and 
experiences.


What then explains the road to independence? While most accounts of the 
coming of the Revolution focus on protests in eastern cities against 
British efforts to tax the colonies and to elicit greater obedience to 
imperial authority in general, Taylor is more interested in what was 
happening in the West (in the colonial era, this meant the region beyond 
the Appalachian mountains). Victory in the Seven Years’ War led to the 
end of the French Empire in mainland North America and gave Britain 
control of the trans-Appalachian region. It was quickly followed by the 
Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited settlement there in order to 
avoid constant warfare with Indians. Instead, London urged colonists who 
wanted land to look to other areas acquired from France and Spain: 
Canada, East and West Florida, and a number of islands in the Caribbean. 
Few Americans were interested. The colonists ‘expect now to do as they 
please’, one British official wrote in 1768. By 1774, 50,000 settlers 
lived beyond the Proclamation line, and violence between settlers, 
Indians and land speculators was endemic. The British found themselves 
in an impossible situation, inviting opposition to their supposed 
tyranny by attempting to stop settlement and contempt for failing to 
enforce the policy and seeming to side with Indians who resisted white 
intrusions onto their land. By 1775, Taylor writes, ‘the British Empire 
had lost all credibility and influence’ among Western settlers.


Taylor doesn’t ignore the more familiar story of the growing crisis over 
British taxation, from the Stamp Act of 1765 through the Boston Tea 
Party and Intolerable Acts ten years later, and on to war and 
independence. But he also examines the increasingly violent divisions 
among the