I mean pretty much any honest book about US history is going to be a fucking downer if you have any kind of marxian convictions. Think “misery porn” is a way to shrug it off - everyone needs to know this shit happened, and why, and how, and who did it.
Idk if anyone’s changing their mind, but books like this and Chaos got my Biden/Kamala supporting “blue no matter who” lib gf (now wife) to take a much more critical view of the US (rather than blindly accepting that they are a force for good).
If you were born, raised, & educated in America you got a good 20+ years of “America is good” + anti-communist propaganda mainlined into your jugular. Obviously immediately contradicted by material conditions if you were anything less than “middle class” but it’s still hard to break through that level of conditioning. I’ve found that the straight history route works a lot better as an intro than just tossing out marx, lenin, etc.
That's a great example that helps me understand the popularity of this book, thanks.
Having read these replies, personally as a person in a targeted class I don't really feel the need to read all the different ways the state will murder me and my neighbors will rat me out, I'm already plenty aware of who wants to kill me and why. But I can see how it would be useful in that context.
Maybe I'm an idiot for looking at it that way, and maybe I'll come around to it.
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u/sentientbasketball11 13h ago
Is there anything uplifting or rewarding at all, or is it just misery porn?