Reviewed by Bob Thomson, retired founder of Fair Trade Canada
In his overview of several decades of hemispheric sojourns, Doug Murray describes his own and other activists’ actions across a range of campaigns, struggles and acts of solidarity, ranging over civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, women’s liberation, the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions, the Chilean Coup, the Salvadoran Civil War, South African anti-Apartheid campaigns, the struggle for Mayan cultural survival, human rights initiatives, and other pursuits of both a better world and holding evil-doers to account The range of these struggles and actions is broad to say the least. He describes individual journeys of optimism, their rejection of despair, the horrors of US political and military interventions in Latin America and both successes and failures in the complex world of activism. Some of the individuals are conscientious objectors within the American military service, some NGO solidarity staff and volunteers, some social gospel activists, some government employees or academics, some living in communes, some owners of farms or social investment promoters committed to better workers’ lives. Their experiences cover a wide range of issues: race and gender politics, legal teams chasing war crimes, human rights violations and environmental disasters, and stopping or healing threats to individual and community health. Examples include legal documentation and pursuit of Salvadorean generals and death squad leaders living in the US who were behind civil war atrocities which killed thousands and caused some 20% of the Salvadoran population to flee the country, many to the US. They were eventually found responsible and expelled from the US and the victims, also living in the US, were awarded millions of dollars. Other activists joined the Venceremos brigades, working to build Cuban childcare centres, witnessing advances in education and health and enjoying Cuba’s famous Copelia ice cream. They also documented false CIA propaganda about supposed Cuban wartime violations in the Angola struggle and the contributions made by Cuban doctors to health and disease eradication not only in Cuba but throughout Africa and other parts of the ‘Third’ world. Others exposed US government support for the Nicaraguan Contras, medical researchers worked with indigenous peoples in Chiapas to strengthen community health in the face of chemically intensive agriculture and other ‘modern’ threats to their ancient indigenous cultures, a Canadian government employee [me] leaked cables exposing ‘his’ Ambassador support for the brutal 1973 military coup in Chile. He lost his job, but catalyzed ongoing church, union and human rights actions to bring thousands of refugees to Canada. The Chico Feminist Women’s Health Centre in California organized a health clinic to fill a vacuum created by local physicians unwilling to take a feminist approach to health, much less abortion prior to the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision. American draft resisters not only worked against the Vietnam War but also got involved with the post-traumatic stress treatment of veterans. Others launched Working Assets as a vehicle to pursue social investments supporting low-income housing, unionized workplaces and rejecting oil and gas conglomerates and the military-industrial complex. This included organizing economic boycotts and legislation opposing public pension investments in corporations doing business in and with South Africa— for example, the 20% of the California Public Employee Retirement System invested in South Africa. Murray introduces these stories personal histories as examples of his own and other individual actions, evolving and shaping their lives, awakening and then acting through efforts to escape the classical ‘all American’ narrative of religion, politics, race, gender, military service and the draft, the corporate industrial complex, etc., etc. Having left this ‘bubble’ and worked in Nicaragua for five years and then ‘evolving’ as a progressive university professor and fair trade activist, Murray links these individual stories to not only show that a better world is possible, but in the hope that a new generation of activists will take heart from these examples to tackle the new threats of wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, and the heat waves from global warming from fossil fuels. We need to recognize that, despite recent election setbacks and overwhelming neglect of these crises in the mainstream press, the pursuit of a better world is indeed possible, as shown by these examples of his (and my) generation. In his introduction to the book he notes: ‘Today we see a disturbing resurgence of right-wing and authoritarian celebration of a history purged of everything from the Holocaust and racial injustice to women’s struggles for reproductive rights’. He notes that Walter Benjamin observed that ‘history is written by the victors’, and hopes that ‘the followers of our generation will take encouragement from these struggles, to carry forward to even greater visions of a just, humane and sustainable world’. A book well worth reading for those wishing to carry forward this vision of change.