BOOKS

...Jim Cook owns a hardware store...

...They have too generously included me in their list as an "excluded expert...

...military might in Saudi Arabia have displaced narco-terrorists on page one...

...Many readers of The Progressive will not need convincing on this point...

...Why are some people who are killed barely recognized as victims of "human-rights violations" while others are mourned as victims of "international terrorism...

...support of Israel or continued intervention in the Third World, however...

...Terrorists" oppose existing governments, attempt to impose their will by force, and hate "democracy...

...22.95...

...For the past several years, terrorists have often been replaced by Latin drug lords as the prime threat to the United States...

...The locals got an influx of transients willing to work for the measly wages offered, willing to live in the eight-by-ten-foot "sleeping rooms" offered in a weatherbeaten building on the edge of town...

...It legitimated the buildup of a permanent arms economy, a national-security state, and domestic spying by defining "us" as God-fearing, freedom-loving people threatened by "them," the godless totalitarian communists...

...Davidson also goes to meetings of the hate groups that flourish in the region...

...How fungible are our fears of political demons...

...To analyze media coverage of terrorism, Herman and O'Sullivan classify experts as right-wing or moderate establishment figures, or as dissidents...

...The history, sociology, and economics are all here, but take a back seat to scores of Iowans who told Davidson their stories as he tried to make sense of our rural ghetto, where ten million Americans live in poverty...

...Anticommunism silenced political and cultural dissent and drove radicals (not just communists) out of trade unions, Hollywood, and the infant television industry...

...And as I write, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the buildup of U.S...

...It will take more democracy...

...The year was 1932, and Horton, himself the son of a Tennessee sharecropper, could hardly have expected his simple plan of pragmatic idealism to be taken seriously...

...Rich Life THE LONG HAUL by Myles Horton with Judith and Herbert Kohl Doubleday...

...To a surprising extent, the right-wing experts are themselves former intelligence officers, or linked to the Moonies or paramilitary outfits, or active supporters of reactionary violent groups...

...A related weakness of the book is the authors' top-down analysis...

...Wisely, the Kohls decided to edit the material into a first-person narrative that Horton then reviewed and modified...

...Neither have yet replaced Soviet communism definitively, but not for want of trying...

...But the book is not attentive enough to the reasons why the government and media shift their attention from one demon to another...

...He was busy but not hurried, insistent but not impatient, precisely because he was able from the 1930s onward to see his work as a lifetime commitment...

...Why are the relatively small number of people killed by terrorists given much more attention than the hundreds of thousands of people killed by pro-Western states...

...15.95 paperback...

...There were no short cuts, no quick fixes...

...thus is the systematic violence of colonial and neo-colonial rule denied...

...The moderate and right-wing experts constitute a multinational industry with branches in government, private think tanks, policy centers, and a complex of far-right, anticommunist organizations...

...Government officials were quoted 123 times, right-wing private-sector experts were quoted seventy-one times, and dissidents were called upon four times...

...conservative Protestants and Catholics join the fight against secular humanism...

...The result is a breezy and colloquial autobiography that sounds like the man talking...

...There was only the long haul, and he pursued it with serenity and humor...

...Thus, immediate personal fears can be mobilized to garner political support for U.S...

...Kathy Bolin's dog dies the morning the sheriff is coming to sell off her foreclosed-on farm...

...It is the people who are having problems...

...People are at the heart of this book by an Iowa writer who contributes often to The Progressive...

...consistently taken top billing as the major threat to U.S...

...But they will find informative the book's historical account of how "terrorists" came to be defined as a primary enemy and its tables clarifying the number of victims of political violence—the few killed by "terrorists" compared to the many killed by states or movements officially supported by the United States...

...Supporting this vision is a selective and slippery semantics...

...this is vintage Horton, and it's a pleasure and an inspiration to read...

...Over the past decade, nonwhite, non-Western terrorists have Allen Hunter is a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of theA.E...

...They do not ask why this kind of propaganda succeeds in refashioning the understandable, if not laudable, predispositions of the well-off white people who produce and consume the elite media...

...Are drugs really less of a problem today than a few months ago...

...In a chapter on "Roots of the Farm Crisis," Osha Gray Davidson takes as epigraph the words of a rural sociologist: "Agriculture is not the problem...

...They simultaneously act as ideologues against small-scale terrorism and as fundraisers and cheerleaders for large-scale liquidations...

...Even more remarkably, Myles Horton remained closely associated with the school until his death at the age of eighty-four last January...

...As a companion piece to two fine studies of Highlander published earlier (Unearthing Seeds of Fire, by Frank Adams, and Highlander: No Ordinary School, by John M. Glen), The Long Haul completes an important trilogy on one of the most remarkable American reformist institutions of the Twentieth Century...

...A more important contribution of the book is its detailed description of the institutional complex that created and sustains the propagandistic definition of terrorism...

...citizens and Western values...

...new demons were found in Arab terrorists and Latin drug lords...

...Herman and O'Sullivan's basic model explains how the West is presented as an embattled innocent, unfairly preyed upon by barbarians because of its commitment to the rule of law...

...BOOKS Terrorism and Propaganda THE 'TERRORISM' INDUSTRY: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror by Edward S. Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan Pantheon...

...These people are more likely to travel on planes in Europe, luxury liners in the Mediterranean, and buses in Israel—and less likely to have family or friends in El Salvador, the West Bank, or Angola...

...State violence regrettably mobilized in defense of "democracy" is not terrorism...

...In and out of government, conservative and far-right networks have projected an image of the world as threatened by an international league of terrorists, often Soviet-supported...

...still safer to be a U.S...

...The authors also describe how the media call upon the creators of the terrorism myth to serve as "neutral experts" on the subject...

...Now, in The "Terrorism " Industry, Herman has teamed up with free-lance writer Gerry O'Sullivan to expose the institutional networks that raise the specter of terrorism before the U.S...

...The nation was mired in the worst depression in its history, and the South was at the bottom of the bottom...

...As the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam split the Cold War liberal consensus, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and George Wallace attacked liberals as pro-black, pro-feminist, and partial to sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, thereby gaining electoral support and legitimacy for conservative economic and social policies...

...as the auctioneer's voice drones on, all she can think about is, "Where do you bury your dog after you've lost your farm...

...His idealism is there, his pragmatism, his humor...

...Carlos (not Pinochet) and Arafat (not Sharon) are "terrorists...

...In a sample of 135 television and newspaper stories about terrorism from 1978 to 1986, U.S...

...Yet images of unshaven Arab terrorists far surpassed images of General Motors or Guatemalan death squads as potent symbols of danger...

...he regularly comes close to fisticuffs with neighbors who drive to Cedar Rapids to shop in discount dens instead of "buying local...

...With rare exceptions, the experts the media turn to for analysis and information about terrorism are establishment figures, right-wing counterinsurgency experts, or former intelligence officers who have gone into the security business, selling their antiterrorist services to the well-heeled...

...policies that many of these same people would reject if they were presented as baldly as the offending acts of terrorists...

...John Egerton (John Egerton, a free-lance writer in Nashville, has written widely on the South and on education...

...21.95...

...It was altogether characteristic of this indefatigable social activist and self-styled "radical hillbilly" that he was proofreading The Long Haul and planning his 1990 agenda when cancer finally stopped him...

...No ordinary school, it would be a place where poor people, drawing on their own life experiences, could learn how to make decisions, solve problems, and improve society...

...In earlier collaborations with Noam Chomsky and Frank Brodhead, Edward S. Herman has shown how the media consistently present elite political propaganda as news...

...When he was twenty-seven years old, Myles Horton made a school for working adults in the rural South...

...The naming of terrorists is highly political...

...When rhetorical devices fail to distinguish "our" violence from "theirs," crude selectivity is employed...

...How readily can fear of and anger at terrorists be redirected at drug pushers and redirected again at an aggressive Third World political figure...

...Healing our "Broken Heartland," Davidson concludes, will take much more than economic growth...

...This last point suggests that democratization of the media is important...

...citizen passing through the Rome airport than a Guatemalan peasant tilling the soil...

...Labor and capital joined in battle against un-American communism...

...Politicizing cultural divisions among whites did not garner public legitimacy for U.S...

...The "Terrorism" Industry argues that "the designation of terrorist is a highly political choice" which presents the West as victim even though it "inflicts far more terrorism than it endures...

...Shared political demons help forge political coalitions by creating sharp boundaries between "us" and "them," thereby blurring differences among "us...

...International terrorists, drug lords, Saddam Hussein, secular humanists, 2 Live Crew, Robert Mapplethorpe, the underclass, the deficit, the savings-and-loan profiteers...

...Yet it is core members of the terrorism industry—the likes of Ray Cline and Michael Ledeen, themselves involved in destabilization efforts—rather than such critics as Herman or Chornsky who are the darlings of the talk shows...

...There is no guarantee that a rainbow in the pressroom would improve reporting, but it might mean greater attention to the concerns of a broader audience and greater regard for the diversity of the victims of political violence...

...A fourth volume, based on oral-history interviews with dozens of people who have been involved with the school, is due to be published next year...

...Now, ten Presidents later, Highlander is still an active center of progressive adult education in another Tennessee precinct east of Knoxville...

...He had only one job, and he knew that it would be impossible to finish...

...Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change...

...Herbert and Judith Kohl, noted for their volumes on educational and economic reform, first set out to write a book about Myles Horton's educational and philosophical ideas...

...Even at the height of airline terror, it was still safer to fly to Europe than drive an automobile...

...206 pp...

...Franklin Roosevelt had not yet completed his first triumphant run for the White House, and George Bush was an eight-year-old Connecticut schoolboy...

...231 pp...

...The West responds to, never initiates, terrorism...

...Instead, what emerged most strongly from the hours of interviews and other materials they accumulated was Horton's own voice, telling in his informal and anecdotal style the story of his long and eventful life...

...With a few like-minded friends, Horton started the Highlander Folk School at a donated site near the village of Monteagle, Tennessee...

...To reach the basement meeting room at the Colony Village Restaurant," he writes, "you must first run the Norman Rockwell gauntlet" of shelves crowded with souvenirs on sale to travelers passing through on Interstate 80— and then he notes that the meeting under way puts him in mind of a different Rockwell, the American Nazi Party's George Lincoln Rockwell...

...Who helped U.S...

...it is retaliation or counterterror...

...Central American death squads, the Nicaraguan contras, and the South-African-supported guerrillas in Mozambique become "freedom fighters" whose actions may resemble those of terrorists but are really just unavoidable human-rights abuses...

...And he explores what happened to the town of Columbus Junction when IBP, the giant meatpacker came to town...

...After World War II, Harry Truman, Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and their fellow travelers assiduously demonized the Soviet Union...

...by Allen Hunter The collapse of the Cold War and the decline of anticommunism raise the stakes: Who will be our next national objects of fear and loathing...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY A People Crisis BROKEN HEARTLAND: The Rise of America's Rural Ghetto by Osha Gray Davidson The Free Press...

...public...

...More attention to the class and race biases embedded in the definitions of terrorist and victim is needed...

...citizens focus their fears on terrorists...