Just Finished Reading: The Coming Self-Destruction of the U.S.A by Alan Seymour (FP: 1969)

With the war coming to its final and climactic end the unnamed ‘Editor’ is putting his great history of the conflict together in the hope that someone, somewhere, will publish it for posterity – if there are any survivors that is. The White forces have already used tactical nuclear weapons against several Black cities are having issued their long awaited ultimatum: if the Black forces do not pull back they will drop Hydrogen bombs on the three largest occupied cities. After years of fighting it has finally come to this – make or break. But how did it start all those years previously – slowly, as these things do, and with the emergence of a softly spoken leader who holds in his hands and in his mind the fate, the future of the Black race in America. Binding together the already existing disparate forces he forges them into an instrument that can actually achieve things. He thinks big and he thinks 50 years not just 50 minutes ahead. He gathers the best and brightest around him, he builds up his arsenals, trains his lieutenants and most importantly eliminates his enemies. Before the White powers know what is happening they don’t just have a revolt on their hands but an honest to goodness Revolution. When areas are taken and held and then joined with other areas the country begins to divide on racial grounds. Before the Whites can react they are presented with a de facto Civil War and the forces facing each other are surprisingly well balanced. Now it’s a fight to the finish and a fight to the death.

This was yet another book I picked up ages (probably decades) ago and left on my bookshelf to gather dust. It was, on reading it, one of the strangest, disturbing and distasteful books I’ve ever managed to finish. Taking the subject matter – a racial conflict that become a continent wide Civil War – and the time it was written in, the late 1960’s – I shouldn’t have been that surprised by its contents. There was, as you might expect, a lot of violence, racism, swearing, sex and sexual violence and much else besides. I have a fairly strong stomach for this sort of thing (not that I go out of my way to encounter it) but even so it often approached my limits and probably overstepped them more than once. I found myself reading it looking as if a particularly bad smell was coming off the pages. In many ways that’s exactly what was happening. If it had been much more than it’s meagre 255 pages I might have given up without finishing it. Even though it still took me the best part of a week to slog through it – considering that a previous book at over double the length was devoured in a long weekend! As you might imagine I can hardly recommend this as any kind of entertaining read (even if you can track down a copy) although it’s possible that it might be worthy of study as part of a PhD on 60’s racial or revolutionary literature.