Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'd heard that this was a very scary book. The French government had even jailed the members of the Invisible Committee of authors for Terrorism. I found the book incredibly naïve. The most surprising lesson I gleaned from it was that French Socialism is not very popular in France among a large number of its residents. In fact the people sharing the beliefs of the "invisible" authors hate the government system. The book reads like a committee creation. It's an illogical and "pie-in-the-sky" utopian urban myth--ridiculous beyond belief. The book itself is only136-pages long and most of it is not only boring, boring, boring but also silly. It's a reprint of a French publication and therefore reflects the warped world of absurd, obscure politics. I was surprised to learn that The MIT Press distributes it. It consists of an introduction and twelve chapters each with many sub-sections. The text is obviously written by intellectual elites who think that they will take over the world and live in small rural communes once they have destroyed the cities. They laugh at the fact that all food production is handled by only 2 per cent of the population while at the same time mentioning several times that the members of their post-revolution communes will have to raise their own food in order to survive. This particular discussion reminded me of Mao's Culture Revolution and Pol Pots driving of all Cambodians out of the cities into the countryside to become serfs while systemically killing anyone who could read, write or had professional skills. I could visualize the book's authors leading their small band of commune comrades out of the burning cities and suddenly discovering the armed farmers in the countryside weren't interested in surrendering their land to a bunch of lazy city folk. And of course, the radicals also assumed that while their revolutionaries were destroying the internet computer networks and all other modern communications and supply lines, they didn't accidentally cause a few of France's Nuclear Reactors to melt down and irradiate all of France and most of its neighboring nations. So assuming these new revolutionary communes can take the farmland away from it's owners, then they would get to farm it. So instead of 2% of the population supplying all their food, most of the commune would be needed for basics. That would mean every comrade would have to work and here's some of what the book says about work. "No question is more confused, in France, than the question of work. No relation is more disfigured than the one between the French and work. Go to Andalusia, to Algeria, to Naples. They despise work, profoundly. Go to Germany, to the United States, to Japan. They revere work." "We accept the necessity of finding money, by whatever means, because it is currently impossible to do without it, but we reject the necessity of working. Besides we don't work anymore..." These guys are going to make wonderful members of their Utopian communes after they have destroyed civilization and returned to the Stone Age. They have another subchapter entitled "Get organized in order to no longer have to work." Apparently they don't feel there will be any work involved in organizing an insurrection or revolution and then living in communes out in the countryside. Mostly this book is like reading warped, misunderstood New Age Gobbly-Gook. The authors are so fascinated in listening to themselves expound their utopian theories that only the French elites would have the patience to wade through the pools of garbage flowing out of the sewers of these visionless amateur revolutionaries. They criticize Al Gore and his global warming theories as promoting only another form of capitalism using a crisis to further tax and control. They are equal opportunity haters. They hate the French government, they hate the educational system, they hate capitalism, they hate the unions and they hate the socialists as well as the rightists. They seem to hate, hate, hate everything and simply want to bring it down without any real vision to replace it with. Even their concepts of Communes are vague and sound like temporary alliances that would be in constant flux. it's not exactly going to appeal to masses of people who would just as soon settle for a job and some respect because they have much too much time on their hands. Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" frightened me because his plan for destroying American Capitalism seems to have succeeded beyond his wildest dreams (please feel free to read my Amazon review of that manual for anarchy). One of Alinsky's biggest disciples is in the White House's Oval Office. This French revolutionary manual doesn't frighten me at all, although I can see why the French Government feels threatened by it. These malcontents are dangerous precisely because they just want to destroy, destroy, destroy. I've just finished reading Mike Dash's "The First Family: The Birth of the American Mafia." After Dash's excellent description of how the Mafia was organized in Sicily and then transported to America, I would predict that if these revolutionaries happened to live through their own violent French Revolution it would only be a matter of time before thugs organized like the Mafia would kill and enslave all of them and then the survivors would have a reason to work, if they wanted have enough to eat to barely subsist that is. These radicals would not even begin to approach the cold-blooded tactics of the Sicilian or Russian Mafia. The disorganized French anarchists would be murdered or enslaved before they knew what had happened. The mafia types aren't interested in destroying everything. They just want to make huge profits by allying themselves with the government, rich land owners and industrialists. The items that most surprised me about this book were the naivety of the book's utopian authors, the obvious widespread unhappiness with French Socialism, and some of the popular political philosophies passing for logical thinking. One subchapter reminded me of a recent White House Chief of Staff's comment. The book heading was "Make the most of every crisis." That statement scared me a little, but the rest of the book is too boring and confusing to interest, much less inspire, many other revolutionaries.