This review of James Heartfield, Unpatriotic History of the Second World War, London, Zer0 Books, 2012, a socialist’s deep dive into the real history of the Second World War appeared on Amazon today.—A.G.F
As an editor and bibliophile, I agree with the many critics of this book’s infelicities (typos, organizational issues, lack of index, and so forth). Nevertheless, I thank God James Heartfield wrote it, that he spilled his cornucopia of insights out of his head and onto paper. Let some publisher step forward to polish its contents so it passes conventional muster. Until then, however, students of this endlessly fascinating subject should benefit from the author’s vast knowledge of how things hung together eighty and ninety years ago—I say this even though the underlying worldview is not mine.
The author of other meaty historical tomes (for example, Britain’s Empires: A
History, 1600–2020, 2022; The Blood-Stained Poppy: A critique of the politics of commemoration, 2019; and The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 2016—to cite a few), Heartfield gives off no whiff of the Olympian stuffiness of many academics, as we expect of the lecturer we find on YouTube. I recommend watching his 2016 talk on C.L.R. James and the Left’s opposition to taking sides in the Second World War and the ethical issues that opposition posed. Heartfield’s reference (on page 151) to James’s 1940 penny-pamphlet “My Friends” A Fireside Chat on the War—written under the pseudonym “Native Son” (which momentarily confused me, since in 1940 Native Son’s author, Richard Wright, was still a “The Yanks Aren’t Coming” Stalinist)—led me happily to the tattered copy available on archive.org.
Capitalist pig that I am, I found myself delightfully caught up in Heartfield’s retailing of the dialectic of industrial and military labor: the strike threat versus the Nazi threat—even if opportunities to avoid global conflagration were missed. Brits at the battlefront, Heartfield notes, well understood why those on the home front might withhold their labor from their industrial employers to wrangle out of them more favorable terms. (I’m just not crazy about commandeering the property of others to prevent equally hungry workers from taking the strikers’ place. Nor about the dehumanization of the would-be replacements as “scabs,” but we can’t debate that here.)
I was trained in philosophy, but it has been the historians I’ve known, not the philosophers, who have struck me as “omniscient.” (I first got this impression when working for—don’t laugh—Herbert Aptheker. Feel free to search <Anthony Flood C. L. R. James Herbert Aptheker>.) Historians can talk seemingly non-stop about events from centuries ago as if they were current. And that’s how Heartfield’s grasp of his material strikes me.
I’m not used to socialists making me review my grasp of history, but always happy to praise those who do that. Heartfield is one of them.
His courage and oratory are almost enough to explain how he came to lead the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). We must not, however, overlook his profession: he was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, an academically trained preacher in the Baptist tradition. Such titles bestow an odor of sanctity. They didn’t deflect the assassin’s bullet—ultimately set into motion by whom, we may never know
When the truth is being obscured, one may make an exception to the nil nisi bonum rule.
