BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: The Storm is Here: America on the Brink
By Luke Mogelson
Published by Partisan Books, 2022 rrp £25
REVIEW BY KAY GREEN
In The Storm is Here, US-born journalist Luke Mogelson starts out, surrounded by the heavily armed members of various self-instigated militias, talking to a barber who defied lockdown over ‘the right to a haircut’. It’s not entirely clear who is there defending what from whom, although the New World Order, the Russians, the Chinese, the devil and chem trails are all regularly mentioned — but then something happens that grabs the attention of most of the world, so he’s soon walking through a burning, looted high street to stand outside the remains of the police station that was the workplace of the cop who knelt on George Floyd.
George Bernard Shaw called the USA and the UK “two countries divided by a common language”. Two campaigns I’ve been involved with went trans-Atlantic at around the same time erupting into rows about what is ‘left’ and what is ‘right’, who was ‘progressive’ and who ‘regressive’. The highly distinct uses of the same words on each side of the Pond made the arguments all but impossible to resolve, and that’s why I picked up a copy of Mogelson’s book, hoping it would illuminate the strange territory of US activism.
A WHIRLWIND OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND REBELLIONS
Mogelson, an award-winning war correspondent with experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, was living in France when the Covid lockdowns began, and could not help but be puzzled by news reports from his native country. He had seen West Africans efficiently and co-operatively respond to the far more terrifying threat of Ebola, and was now seeing people in most of the countries in Europe responding co-operatively to Covid. Meanwhile in the USA, the response appeared to be a whirlwind of conspiracy theories and rebellions.
Mogelson went home to observe, and followed a variety of chaotic and overlapping movements from the defenders of the rebel barber in Michigan, through the gatherings of mourners and protesters responding to George Floyd’s murder to the January storming of the Capitol, and on to the ‘Stop the steal’ rallies that followed Trump’s election defeat.
I was surprised at what a page-turner this book was. Mogelson intersperses his stories of rallies and gatherings in the US with his own war zone memories and illuminating episodes from US history. I got the impression he needed all the courage, sympathy and quick-thinking of a front-line war reporter to gather those close up tales, especially where he finds himself in the Senate Room in Washington on January 6 and the only cop in the room tells the rioters “well, there’s ten of you and only one of me in here.” Mogelson realises that he’s either going to have to expose himself as a journalist or risk whatever the security forces have in store for the armed invaders.
Was he at risk from the cops though? He notes throughout his observations that the effects of both media and establishment voices tended to reinforce the beliefs of Patriots, White Supremacists and the various conspiracy-theorists who saw BLM and ‘the left’ as the real danger. Judging by the imbalance he witnessed in the security forces’ relentless quelling of BLM protestors versus their apparent unpreparedness to respond to the Capitol invaders, the police and the army had also got that message.
TAKING UP ARMS IN DEFENCE OF DELUSIONS
We in the UK should be warned. Whilst Mogelson has huge sympathy for all the people he talks to, he concludes with the thought that, in his time, he’s spoken to fighters and protesters in some of the world’s most notorious trouble spots, in battles both with and against government and revolutionary forces. Whether or not he shared the culture or world-view of those fighters, he acknowledged that they were fighting because of something that had happened – whereas in the USA, with the exception of those who came out for George Floyd, most of those who took to the streets appeared to be taking up arms in defence of delusions.
After the struggles of all those black and brown people Mogelson tells of, from Michigan to Mosul, the most memorable horror I’m left with is all those US ex-servicemen pining for that feeling of being a well-armed member of a unit on a mission. Perhaps it didn’t matter so much whether they were hunting anti-Trump vote-riggers, vaccine-spikers or people who were really lizards from outer space. They just wanted comrades around them, and a common enemy to rally against.
Let us not go down the same road. Let us give some serious attention to critical thinking, and the search for viable evidence, and think about who’s sitting back getting rich while we’re struggling – especially let us work that out before taking to the streets to defend ourselves or, worse, to attack ill-defined enemies.
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