Being Captured Is beside the Point

No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner. David Gilbert. Montreal: Abraham Guillen Press and Arm the Spirit, 2004.

David Gilbert's NO SURRENDER is a collection of essays written over a 20-year period. Most are book reviews (between 1992 and 1997 alone, Gilbert had more than 100 book reviews published in Downtown and Agrarian Review). However, these are not book reviews in the traditional sense. Rather, Gilbert uses the book review as a vehicle for advancing a series of ideas he considers critical to the white left in the United States, and by extension elsewhere in the First World.

In reviewing his book, I intend to take much the same approach. Rather than attempting to offer the reader an overview of what Gilbert says in each of the close to 70 essays in this book, or even in the 14 chapters into which they are divided, I instead intend to examine critically what I believe to be the core set of ideas around which all of Gilbert's work is organized in light of the political situation in which we currently find ourselves. In so doing, I will give only scant attention to entire chapters of the book, including his writings on the criminal justice system, AIDS, imperialism, national liberation movements in the Third World, and the environment, as well as sections devoted to humor and children's stories.

Gilbert has a basic programmatic proposition, and he is masterful in shaping his message to the material he is examining. In an essay entitled "Looking at the White Working Class Historically," Gilbert says, "No movement can be revolutionary and successful without paying full attention to national liberation, class struggle, and the liberation of women" (64). And those, indeed, are issues that Gilbert returns to time and again from a variety of angles in diverse essays in this book.

In an introductory essay, as well as in the seven essays that make up chapter 13, Gilbert examines his own history, first as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), then as a young activist at Columbia University and in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and finally in the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and the Revolutionary Armed Task Force (RATF). These writings provide the reader with the necessary background for contextualizing Gilbert's essays.

Gilbert entitles chapter 13 "Lessons to Help Liberate the Future." Before examining these lessons, it would perhaps be fruitful to examine the issues Gilbert and his associates hoped to address by their actions. In an "Opening Trial Statement" from August 8, 1983, Gilbert defines the enemy, imperialism, and particularly U.S. imperialism. The impact of this imperialism: "40 million people—half of them children—die of malnutrition and starvation every year. That is seven times the number of people who died in all the Nazi concentration camps, a holocaust every year because of imperialism. Five hundred seventy million people are suffering from malnutrition; 1.5 billion people have little or no access to medical care; 800 million adults are illiterate; 250 million children do not attend school." To this he adds, "it is not so much that the U.S. tends 'to back the wrong side in the Third World'—rather the U.S. is the wrong side" (28).

To these general problems, he adds the massacre and colonization of native people, the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, the conquest of northern Mexico, the invasion of Puerto Rico, the illegal use of napalm in Vietnam, cluster bombs in Beirut, and the disappearances of left activists in Latin America (29-30). On this basis, Gilbert argues that the primary responsibility of the white left in the United States is to align itself with anti-imperialist struggles, particularly the struggles of the colonized nations within the United States itself.

In explaining the collapse of the anti-war movement in the mid-1970s, Gilbert argues, "When 'Black Power' came out, it helped...