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Book Reviews
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Dancing in the Shadow of Tyranny:
An Activist’s Guide to Inner Disarmament
by Neriah Lothamer
(Midpoint Trade Books Inc; May 2005)
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Dancing in the Shadow of Tyranny is a moving social testament for our times. The author has been involved in many forms of activism, from the Kent State student protests to the Vietnam war to the most recent marches opposing the Iraq war. He has videotaped and documented the outrage felt by many activists.
What makes this book unique is that Lothamer does not simply turn the searchlight on corporate corruption and government folly. He turns an equally probing eye on himself. He asks, where do the roots of such social behavior lie, and he is shocked to find echoes of it resounding in his own behavior, toward his children, his wife, his business partners. He realizes that externalizing such behavior in order to confront it in “the other” may be little more than a distraction from the work at hand: confronting the inner bully and tyrant. Written in deeply moving and lyrical prose — sometimes searing, sometimes singing — Lothamer’s moving story of heartbreak and radical inner reconstruction is full of insights and compelling contemporary wisdom.
Several million people worldwide have marched to protest the Iraq war over the past two years. The size of the protests is greater than any similar series of mass demonstrations since the Vietnam War. What are the factors motivating so many people in the United States and other countries to give up their precious free time, pile into buses, and assemble in public spaces to speak out against a war they consider unjust and unnecessary, rather than just grumbling about it in private?
Rather than being powerless bystanders to history, protesters, he shows, can do many concrete things in their own lives to counteract the forces that produce violence and bloodshed in the world.
He points out that activists like himself often have internally violent thoughts and sometimes behave badly to others, and that confronting external tyranny is incomplete without confronting those same impulses in our daily mental landscape. “As I deal with my childish bully boss inside, and I see the childish leaders of the world addressing the issues of power, I can see many similarities,” he says. His journey has led him to confront his own tendencies toward alcoholism and domestic violence, and through such “internal activism,” he has been able to bring much greater power, focus and clarity to his external activism.
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