review:
Henry Ford Never Envisioned This:
A Review of Mike Davis' Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
(Verso 2007)
cont'd....
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12474
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excerpts:
Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
By Mike Davis
In a revelatory examination of urban terror, MacArthur Fellow Mike Davis
-- dubbed by the British Independent, "the Raymond Chandler of urban
geography" -- charts the car bomb's evolution from obscure agent of
mayhem to lethal universality. First used by Italian anarchist Mario
Buda, who loaded his horse-drawn wagon with dynamite and exploded it
near New York's Wall Street in 1920, car bombs have since spread like a
virus across the globe and realigned the battlefields of the 20th and
21st centuries. Far from being an ineffective and inarticulate weapon,
the car bomb, Mike Davis argues, is instead the "hot rod of the
apocalypse."
Stealth weapons of surprising power and destructive efficiency -- able
to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize
populations of entire cities -- car bombs are often blaring
advertisements for a cause, leader, or abstract principle. They are, to
borrow words from Regis Debray, "manifestos written in the blood of
others." These "manifestos" -- inexpensive to produce and able to garner
tremendous attention -- have allowed formerly unknown and near-powerless
terror groups to make their inglorious debut on the world's stage. As
Mike Davis writes, car bombs constitute the "poor man's air force."
Building on Planet of Slums ("A brilliant book." -- Arundhati Roy), in
which he charts the economic and social changes that have led to
worldwide urban poverty, Mike Davis eschews accepted opinion and
examines the connections between the world's new majority -- the urban
impoverished -- and the First World's devastating "War on Terror."
Buda's Wagon is a disturbing and penetrating exploration that is bound
to prove once more that Mike Davis is one of the most innovative and
incisive historians working today.
This history of the car-bomb began as a two-part series at Tomdispatch:
Part 1: The Poor Man's Air Force
Part 2: Car Bombs With Wings
A two-part Tomdispatch interview with Mike Davis (part of Mission
Unaccomplished) can be read at:
Part 1: Humanity's Ground Zero
Part 2: The Imperial City and the City of Slums
cont'd....
http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/davis
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interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpitX5TEwao