A Year with Hafiz: Daily Contemplations by HafezMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
View all my reviews
Saturday, December 31, 2022
Friday, December 30, 2022
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
Review: Как убить дракона: Пособие для начинающих революционеров
Как убить дракона: Пособие для начинающих революционеров by Mikhail KhodorkovskyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I spent a month in a prison cell with Colonel Vladimir Kvachkov, a military intelligence officer and veteran of the war in Afghanistan, who became known throughout the country after being accused of the attempted assassination of Anatoly Chubais and even of organising a military coup. We’re people from different worlds and with different opinions; we are, let’s say, fierce opponents (to put it mildly). But when we discussed the question as to why our authorities and our society are afraid of our own special forces – spetsnaz – while the Americans aren’t afraid of theirs, he summed it up in a way that I still remember 15 years later:
“The American special forces’ soldier sees himself first and foremost as a citizen of the USA, and only then as being in the special forces. This is natural. If something happens to him, then he’ll be protected as an American citizen. The Russian, though, is convinced that the opposite will happen. If something happens to you, don’t expect any help from the state. The best you can hope for is that your friends and fellow soldiers will come to your aid. So our officers are special forces’ soldiers first, and citizens only after that, while for the Americans it’s the other way round.”
The Russia of my dreams will be re-established by citizens who want to organise their lives together. People for whom the national interest is more important than that of their estate, their corporation or their tribe. People who understand that it’s better to be together than being apart.
In 2014 Russia swapped one social agreement for another. To the old agreement of “stability in place of freedom”, that had been the case in Russia since 2003, the Kremlin made a significant addition: “greatness in place of justice and prosperity”. So the new social agreement runs as follows: “greatness and stability in place of freedom, justice and prosperity”. Russia’s greatness now justifies all of the regime’s villainy: despotism, corruption, cultural degradation and backwardness. All of this has to be tolerated in exchange for the possibility to attack Ukraine with impunity; to shit on “the American bastards” in Syria and Libya; and to place “our” private armies all over Africa and even, it’s rumoured, in Venezuela.
View all my reviews
Monday, December 26, 2022
Review: In Contempt
In Contempt by Christopher DardenMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
At Simpson's estate, O.J.'s blood was in his driveway and foyer, while Goldman's blood was on the glove alongside his house, and O.J.'s and Nicole's blood was on the socks in his bedroom. The blood was spattered on the socks-nineteen separate blood spots right around the ankles, where blood would likely splash as Simpson hacked at the victims and then walked through the pools of their blood. There were also blood smears at the tops of the socks, where he'd pulled them off his feet. The chance that the blood was someone else's besides Nicole's? One in 21 billion. Ron's? One in 41 billion. Pretty significant figures when there are only 5.5 billion people in the world.
In Simpson's Bronco, Nicole's blood was mixed with O.J.'s on the carpet. Goldman's blood was on the con- sole, and a mixture of the blood of all three was else- where on the console.
Tests were done at two different labs. Contamination was impossible. And in all this testing, no other blood was found. In these lakes of blood, there were identifiable traces of only three people: Ron, Nicole, and O.J. Simpson.
To be honest, I wasn't interested in getting rid of him. The trial had dragged on too long already and, at some level, there were more important things than winning this case at all costs.
View all my reviews
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Sunday, December 18, 2022
Thursday, December 15, 2022
Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Saturday, December 10, 2022
Review: Twelve From Hell 2: The Ultimate True Crime Case Collection
Twelve From Hell 2: The Ultimate True Crime Case Collection by Ryan GreenMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
When I first found about Ryan Green taking on the unrepentant psychopath Carl Panzram, I set it aside to read after watching the James Woods portrayal in film. Well, this time I didn't wait, but I did watch Carl Panzram: The Spirit of Hatred and Vengeance (Docu-Drama, 2011). In Kill 'Em All: A True Story of Abuse, Revenge and the Making of a Monster, Green examines the life and crimes of lifelong criminal and serial killer, Carl Panzram. This was a real fiend. Despite his serial sodomies and multiple prison sentences under differing names, Panzram robbed ex-president Taft's house (taking a pistol and financial instruments), was a strikebreaker, broke strikebreakers, rode with rails with brutalizing hobos (turning tables), and suffered crippling punishments in peonage. One of the things I enjoy about Green's research is exploring possible causes in personal history. This one includes a grisly, kitchen table ersatz ear operation.
Vampire Killer: A Terrifying True Story of Psychosis, Mutilation and Murder is the account of Richard Chase. This is, I think, the most gruesome true crime stories in Ryan Green’s output. The descriptive accounts of abuse and violence include cannibalism, necrophilia, Jack Ripper-like organ play, vampiric blood drinking, Renfield's syndrome, etc. Childhood development figures in here with a recounting of two-thirds of the Macdonald triad - cruelty to animals and fire-setting. No persistent bedwetting past the age of five recounted, but these acts seem to have led to the violent, homicidal behaviors. It actually made me reach out to contact my mom and thank her for keeping pets around when I was a kid: cats, rabbits, birds. Is there any opposite, does have such as a youth foster normative social behavior? At least I think it engenders care and concern for another living thing. Recalling from the Dahmer backstory, there is also it feels a formative prelude through unparenting: Chase was left alone and funded for stretches of time and generally let to develop like a weed.
No Place for the Weak: A True Story of Deviance, Torture and Social Cleansing
"rock spider wall"
Other members of this dire dozen which I have reviewed elsewhere include:
* Buried Beneath the Boarding House: A Shocking True Story of Deception, Exploitation and Murder
* The Townhouse Massacre: The Unforgettable Crimes of Richard Speck
* The Curse: A Shocking True Story of Superstition, Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism
* The Texas Tower Sniper: The Terrifying True Story of Charles Whitman
* The Kentucky Cannibal: The True Story of an Outlaw, Murderer and Man-Eater
* Gorilla Killer: A True Story of Betrayal, Brutality and Butchery
* Doctor Satan: A Despicable True Story of Hope, Exploitation, Greed and Murder
* The Beast: A Chilling True Story of a Psychopathic Child Killer
* Crimson Petticoats: The Betrayal, Brutality and Bloodshed behind the French Maid Massacres
View all my reviews
Friday, December 9, 2022
Wednesday, December 7, 2022
Saturday, December 3, 2022
Thursday, November 24, 2022
Tuesday, November 22, 2022
Sunday, November 20, 2022
Saturday, November 19, 2022
Friday, November 18, 2022
Review: The Road to Serfdom: The Definitive Edition
The Road to Serfdom: The Definitive Edition by Friedrich A. HayekMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
The Road to Serfdom is an intellectual attack on socialism. Hayek's main message was that central planning and public ownership would lead slowly but inevitably to totalitarianism. Written in the midst of a titanic struggle against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the book offended many because it suggested that the intellectual influences in Germany were also present in Britain and the United States, and if unchecked would lead to totalitarian societies in those countries as well.- Reviewed by Richard N. Cooper in the September/October 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs
introductions Supporting international free trade
From Facebook "a right-wing classic,"
Glenn Beck:
America has always been about private land ownership. It has been a staple principle since the inception of America. So how do you convince a country like ours to be okay with the concept of owning nothing... and being happy? And if we don't own it, who will? At some point, we turned around on America's road to freedom and started heading down the road to serfdom.
"The Trump Republicans":
Let's Get Ready To Rumble. Biden & The Great Reset: The Road To Serfdom.
Ron Paul :
NATO has been obsolete for a long time. It should have been dissolved when the Cold War ended. After all, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, and thank goodness for that. It would be quite unnerving were the Warsaw Pact still around and gobbling up countries that border the United States. Americans would rightfully be concerned about the motivations behind such actions.
NATO's secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg is out telling Donald Trump that: “Going it alone is not an option". In other words, America can't just defend itself.
We're yet to see which way President Trump decides to go. Will he continue us on the current road to serfdom, or will he heed the words of Jefferson who said: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none."
"Of all checks on democracy, federation has been the most efficacious...."
"Far from its being true that, as is now widely believed, we need an international economic authority while the states can at the same time retain their unrestricted political sovereignty, almost exactly the opposite is true. What we need and can hope to achieve is not more power in the hands of irresponsible international economic authorities, but, on the contrary, a superior political power which can hold the economic interests in check, and in the conflict between them can truly hold the scales, because it is itself not mixed up in the economic game. The need is for an international political authority which, without power to direct the different people what they must do, must be able to restrain them from action which will damage others."
Federal Democracy,
Federalism
View all my reviews
Friday, November 11, 2022
Review: Truman
Truman by David McCulloughMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay. And with the cry for demobilization at a peak, he went before a joint session to call for universal military training, an idea that stood no chance, but that he believed in fervently. "We must face the fact that peace must be built upon power, as well as upon good will and good deeds." Never again could the country count on the luxury of time to arm itself. He wanted mandatory training for one year for all young men between eighteen and twenty, not as members of the armed services, but as citizens who would comprise a trained reserve, ready in case of emergency.
In an 8,000-word message from the Moscow Embassy that was to be come known soon as "the long telegram," George Kennan, the scholarly chargé d' affaires, had tried to dash any hopes the administration might have of reasonable dealings with the Stalin regime. The Kremlin, wrote Kennan, had a neurotic view of the world, at the heart of which was an age-old Russian sense of insecurity. For this reason, the Soviet regime was "committed fanatically" to the idea that in the long run there could be no "peaceful coexistence" with the United States, and further that "it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state broken...." Stripped of the "fig leaf'' of Marxism, Kennan said, the Soviets would stand before history "as only the last of a long session of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced their country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security for their internally weak regimes.
Proto-Cold War formulation of The Truman Doctrine that pledged American support for democracies against authoritarian threats:
"It is the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures," the line read in its original state. Acheson changed it to, "I believe it must be the policy of the United States..
To Clifford, it was time to take a stand against the Soviets, time for "the opening gun" in a campaign to awaken the American people. As he had urged the President to stand fast...
View all my reviews
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
Review: Art, the Arts, and the Great Ideas
Art, the Arts, and the Great Ideas by Mortimer J. AdlerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Narrated by Nadia May a.k.a. Wanda McCaddon.
View all my reviews
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Monday, November 7, 2022
Thursday, November 3, 2022
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Monday, October 31, 2022
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Friday, October 28, 2022
Review: The Port Huron Statement
The Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic SocietyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a 1962 political manifesto of student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It was written by SDS members, and completed on June 15, 1962, at a United Auto Workers (UAW) retreat outside of Port Huron, Michigan that is now part of Lakeport State Park, for the group's first national convention. Under Walter Reuther's leadership, the UAW paid for a range of expenses for the 1962 convention, including use of the UAW summer retreat in Port Huron. "The Dude", portrayed memorably by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, claims to be one of the authors of the "original" Port Huron Statement (as opposed to the "compromised" second draft). I honestly think I never knew it was a real document. So, I decided to read it once I learned of the fact.
(Mostly for convenience since I am reading a scanned image-PDF of the final, published "Port Huron Statement", I am taking at least some quotes from the text of the original draft of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, as distributed by Alan Haber to the attendees at the SDS Northeast Regional Conference, April 23, 2006. I see AMDOCS: Documents for the Study of American History appears to have some of the text version that I read as does the Online Archive of California.)
This time capsule of the radical left contains a blend of hopeful internationalism led by America, hope even for nuclear power, and attention to issues that seem to have gone to the back burner for progressives: prison reform and health facilitities.
The United States' principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and international cooperation.
...
America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities: abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.
...
...Mental health institutions are in dire need... Public hospitals, too, are seriously wanting... Tremendous staff and faculty needs exist as well, and there are not enough medical students enrolled today to meet the anticipated needs of the future.
...Our prisons are too often the enforcers of misery. They must be either re-oriented to rehabilitative work through public supervision or be abolished for their dehumanizing social effects. Funds are needed, too, to make possible a decent prison environment.
With nuclear energy whole cities could easily be powered, but instead we seem likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars in human history...
...
...atomic power plants must spring up to make electrical energy available. With America's idle productive capacity, it is possible to begin this process immediately without changing our military
allocations. This might catalyze a "peace race" since it would demand a response of such magnitude from the Soviet Union that arms spending and "coexistence" spending would become strenuous, perhaps impossible, for the Soviets to carry on simultaneously.
...
We should undertake here and now a fifty-year effort to prepare for all nations the conditions of industrialization.
Even back then, there was a need to call out the 1 %'ers:
The modern concentration of corporate wealth is fantastic. The wealthiest one percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock.
While that doesn't surprise me, the fear of time-sapping "smart"
technology is:
…we learn to buy "smart" things, regardless of their utility...
Manufacturing jobs have been declining for decades. This was an emergent priority to these authors.
In addition, the American economy has changed radically in the last decade: suddenly the number of workers producing goods became fewer than the number in the "unproductive" areas—government, trade, finance, services, utilities, transportation. Since World War II "white collar" and "service" jobs have grown twice as fast as have "blue collar" production jobs. Labor has almost no organization in the expanding occupational areas of the new economy, almost all its entrenched strength in contracting areas. As big government hires more and more, as big business seeks more office workers and skilled technicians, and as growing commercial America demands new hotels, service stations and the like, the conditions will become graver still.
War is still pictured as one more kind of diplomacy, perhaps a gloriously satisfying kind. Our saturation and atomic bombings of Germany and Japan are little more than memories of past "policy necessities" ...
The change in employment landscape had a lopsided effect on voting, as observed in Nonvoting Americans (Population Division of the Bureau of the Census, 1980):
While the number of Americans who were employed as white-collar workers was slightly larger than the number employed as blue-collar, service, and farm workers, white-collar
workers were much more likely to vote than workers employed in these other groups (72 percent and 51 percent, respectively) in 1976. The net result of these differences is that among the employed, white-collar workers constituted 60 percent of the voters but only 38 percent of the nonvoters. Blue-collar, service, and farm workers, however, constituted 62 percent of the
employed nonvoters and only 40 percent of the voters.
The then contemporary Cold War concerns seem repeated now in rhyme with Putin's Russia:
Such a harsh critique of what we are doing as a nation by no means implies that sole blame for the Cold War rests on the United States. Both sides have behaved irresponsibly -- the Russians by an exaggerated lack of trust, and by much dependence on aggressive military strategists... There are inadequacies in international rule-making institutions -- which could be corrected. There are faulty inspection mechanisms -- which could be perfected by disinterested scientists. There is Russian intransigency and evasiveness...
Today the world alternatively drifts and plunges towards a terrible war...
when vision and change are required, our government pursues a policy of macabre dead-end dimensions -- conditioned, but not justified, by actions of the Soviet bloc. Ironically, the war which seems to close will not be fought between the United States and Russia, not externally between two national entities, but as an international civil war throughout the unrespected and unprotected human civitas which spans the world.
...
As democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system. The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total suppression of organized opposition...
...
...it is evident that the American military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism. Moreover, our prevailing policies make difficult the encouragement of skepticism, anti-war or pro-democratic attitudes...
I like this terse summation of the malleability of a traumatized population:
Militaristic policies are easily "sold" to a public fearful of a demonic enemy. Political debate is restricted, thought standardized, action inhibited by the demands of "unity" and "oneness" in the face of the declared danger.
Nobody really talks "Ban the Bomb" these days:
Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal.
This look at NATO and how it was viewed by a threatened USSR is something I think Putin and his apologists could agree with to some length. I do see the line of though coming back in books I have been reading including Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate and How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe.
...the United States should reconsider its increasingly outmoded European defense framework, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Since its creation in1949, NATO has assumed increased strength in overall determination of Western military policy, but has become less and less relevant to its original purpose, which was the defense of Central Europe. To be sure, after the Czech coup of 1948, it might have appeared that the Soviet Union was on the verge of a full-scale assault on Europe. But that onslaught has not materialized, not so much because of NATO's existence but because of the general unimportance of much of Central Europe to the Soviets. Today, when even American-based ICBMs could smash Russia minutes after an invasion of Europe, when the Soviets have no reason to embark on such an invasion, and when "thaw sectors" are desperately needed to brake the arms race, one of at least threatening but most promising courses for American would be toward the gradual diminishment of the NATO forces, coupled with the negotiated "disengagement" of parts of Central Europe.
...
...the United States would be breaking with the lip-service commitment to "liberation" of Eastern
Europe which has contributed so much to Russian fears and intransigence, while doing too little about actual liberation. But the end of "liberation" as a proposed policy would not signal the end of American concern for the oppressed in East Europe. On the contrary, disengagement would be a real, rather than a rhetorical, effort to ease military tensions, thus undermining the Russian argument for tighter controls in East Europe based on the "menace of capitalist encirclement". This policy, geared to the needs of democratic elements in the satellites, would develop a real bridge between East and West across the two most pro-Western Russian satellites. The Russians in the
past have indicated some interest in such a plan, including the demilitarization of the Warsaw pact countries. Their interest should be publicly tested. If disengagement could be achieved, a major zone could be removed from the Cold War, the German problem would be materially diminished, and the need for NATO would diminish, and attitudes favorable to disarming would be generated.
Needless to say, those proposals are much different than what is currently being practised and praised. American military strategists are slowly acceeding to the NATO demand for an independent deterrent, based on the fear that America might not defend Europe from military attack. These tendencies strike just the opposite chords in Russia than those which would be struck by disengagement themes: the chords of military alertness, based on the fact that NATO (bulwarked by the German Wehrmacht) is preparing to attack Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. Thus the alarm which underlies the NATO proposal for an independent deterrent is likely itself to bring into existence the very Russian posture that was the original cause of fear. Armaments spiral and belligerence will carry the day, not disengagement and negotiation.
Much angst was then expressed about getting the two major parties "realigned" and how the conservative element in the Democratic Party was hampering the "Southern civil rights movement":
Every time the President criticizes a recalcitrant Congress, we must ask that he no longer tolerate the Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party. Every time in liberal representative complains that "we can't expect everything at once" we must ask if we received much of anything from Congress in the last generation. Every time he refers to "circumstances beyond control" we must ask why he fraternizes with racist scoundrels. Every time he speaks of the "unpleasantness of personal and party fighting" we should insist that pleasantry with Dixiecrats is inexcusable when the dark peoples of the world call for American support.
Has that realignment been completed? It was touch and go at the time.
Since the Democratic Party sweep in 1958, there have been exaggerated but real efforts to establish a liberal force in Congress, not to balance but to at least voice criticism of the conservative mood. The most notable of these efforts was the Liberal Project begun early in
1959 by Representative Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. The Project was neither disciplined nor very influential but it was concerned at least with confronting basic domestic and foreign problems...
View all my reviews
Review: The Port Huron Statement
The Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic SocietyMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
This is a 1962 political manifesto of student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It was written by SDS members, and completed on June 15, 1962, at a United Auto Workers (UAW) retreat outside of Port Huron, Michigan that is now part of Lakeport State Park, for the group's first national convention. Under Walter Reuther's leadership, the UAW paid for a range of expenses for the 1962 convention, including use of the UAW summer retreat in Port Huron. "The Dude", portrayed memorably by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, claims to be one of the authors of the "original" Port Huron Statement (as opposed to the "compromised" second draft). I honestly think I never knew it was a real document. So, I decided to read it once I learned of the fact.
(Mostly for convenience since I am reading a scanned image-PDF of the final, published "Port Huron Statement", I am taking at least some quotes from the text of the original draft of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, as distributed by Alan Haber to the attendees at the SDS Northeast Regional Conference, April 23, 2006. I see AMDOCS: Documents for the Study of American History appears to have some of the text version that I read as does the Online Archive of California.)
This time capsule of the radical left contains a blend of hopeful internationalism led by America, hope even for nuclear power, and attention to issues that seem to have gone to the back burner for progressives: prison reform and health facilitities.
The United States' principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and international cooperation.
...
America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities: abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.
...
...Mental health institutions are in dire need... Public hospitals, too, are seriously wanting... Tremendous staff and faculty needs exist as well, and there are not enough medical students enrolled today to meet the anticipated needs of the future.
...Our prisons are too often the enforcers of misery. They must be either re-oriented to rehabilitative work through public supervision or be abolished for their dehumanizing social effects. Funds are needed, too, to make possible a decent prison environment.
With nuclear energy whole cities could easily be powered, but instead we seem likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars in human history...
...
...atomic power plants must spring up to make electrical energy available. With America's idle productive capacity, it is possible to begin this process immediately without changing our military
allocations. This might catalyze a "peace race" since it would demand a response of such magnitude from the Soviet Union that arms spending and "coexistence" spending would become strenuous, perhaps impossible, for the Soviets to carry on simultaneously.
...
We should undertake here and now a fifty-year effort to prepare for all nations the conditions of industrialization.
Even back then, there was a need to call out the 1 %'ers:
The modern concentration of corporate wealth is fantastic. The wealthiest one percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock.
While that doesn't surprise me, the fear of time-sapping "smart"
technology is:
...we learn to buy "smart" things, regardless of their utility...
In addition, the American economy has changed radically in the last decade: suddenly the number of workers producing goods became fewer than the number in the "unproductive" areas—government, trade, finance, services, utilities, transportation. Since World War II "white collar" and "service" jobs have grown twice as fast as have "blue collar" production jobs. Labor has almost no organization in the expanding occupational areas of the new economy, almost all its entrenched strength in contracting areas. As big government hires more and more, as big business seeks more office workers and skilled technicians, and as growing commercial America demands new hotels, service stations and the like, the conditions will become graver still.
War is still pictured as one more kind of diplomacy, perhaps a gloriously satisfying kind. Our saturation and atomic bombings of Germany and Japan are little more than memories of past "policy necessities" ...
Cold War
Such a harsh critique of what we are doing as a nation by no means implies that sole blame for the Cold War rests on the United States. Both sides have behaved irresponsibly -- the Russians by an exaggerated lack of trust, and by much dependence on aggressive military strategists... There are inadequacies in international rule-making institutions -- which could be corrected. There are faulty inspection mechanisms -- which could be perfected by disinterested scientists. There is Russian intransigency and evasiveness...
Today the world alternatively drifts and plunges towards a terrible war...
when vision and change are required, our government pursues a policy of macabre dead-end dimensions -- conditioned, but not justified, by actions of the Soviet bloc. Ironically, the war which seems to close will not be fought between the United States and Russia, not externally between two national entities, but as an international civil war throughout the unrespected and unprotected human civitas which spans the world.
...
As democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system. The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total suppression of organized opposition...
...
...it is evident that the American military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism. Moreover, our prevailing policies make difficult the encouragement of skepticism, anti-war or pro-democratic attitudes...
Militaristic policies are easily "sold" to a public fearful of a demonic enemy. Political debate is restricted, thought standardized, action inhibited by the demands of "unity" and "oneness" in the face of the declared danger.
Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal.
...the United States should reconsider its increasingly outmoded European defense framework, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Since its creation in1949, NATO has assumed increased strength in overall determination of Western military policy, but has become less and less relevant to its original purpose, which was the defense of Central Europe. To be sure, after the Czech coup of 1948, it might have appeared that the Soviet Union was on the verge of a full-scale assault on Europe. But that onslaught has not materialized, not so much because of NATO's existence but because of the general unimportance of much of Central Europe to the Soviets. Today, when even American-based ICBMs could smash Russia minutes after an invasion of Europe, when the Soviets have no reason to embark on such an invasion, and when "thaw sectors"
are desperately needed to brake the arms race, one of at least threatening but most promising courses for American would be toward the gradual diminishment of the NATO forces, coupled with the negotiated "disengagement" of parts of Central Europe.
...
...the United States would be breaking with the lip-service commitment to "liberation" of Eastern
Europe which has contributed so much to Russian fears and intransigence, while doing too little about actual liberation. But the end of "liberation" as a proposed policy would not signal the end of American concern for the oppressed in East Europe. On the contrary, disengagement would be a real, rather than a rhetorical, effort to ease military tensions, thus undermining the Russian argument for tighter controls in East Europe based on the "menace of capitalist encirclement". This policy, geared to the needs of democratic elements in the satellites, would develop a real bridge between East and West across the two most pro-Western Russian satellites. The Russians in the
past have indicated some interest in such a plan, including the demilitarization of the Warsaw pact countries. Their interest should be publicly tested. If disengagement could be achieved, a major zone could be removed from the Cold War, the German problem would be materially diminished, and the need for NATO would diminish, and attitudes favorable to disarming would be generated.
Needless to say, those proposals are much different than what is currently being practised and praised. American military strategists are slowly acceeding to the NATO demand for an independent deterrent, based on the fear that America might not defend Europe from military attack. These tendencies strike just the opposite chords in Russia than those which would be struck by disengagement themes: the chords of military alertness, based on the fact that NATO (bulwarked by the German Wehrmacht) is preparing to attack Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. Thus the alarm which underlies the NATO proposal for an independent deterrent is likely itself to bring into existence the very Russian posture that was the original cause of fear. Armaments spiral and belligerence will carry the day, not disengagement and negotiation.
"realigned"
"Southern civil rights movement"
Every time the President criticizes a recalcitrant Congress, we must ask that he no longer tolerate the Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party. Every time in liberal representative complains that "we can't expect everything at once" we must ask if we received much of anything from Congress in the last generation. Every time he refers to "circumstances beyond control" we must ask why he fraternizes with racist scoundrels. Every time he speaks of the "unpleasantness of personal and party fighting" we should insist that pleasantry with Dixiecrats is inexcusable when the dark peoples of the world call for American support.
https://content.time.com/time/subscri...
Since the Democratic Party sweep in 1958, there have been exaggerated but real efforts to establish a liberal force in Congress, not to balance but to at least voice criticism of the conservative mood. The most notable of these efforts was the Liberal Project begun early in
1959 by Representative Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. The Project was neither disciplined nor very influential but it was concerned at least with confronting basic domestic and foreign problems...
View all my reviews
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Sunday, October 23, 2022
Friday, October 21, 2022
Thursday, October 20, 2022
Wednesday, October 19, 2022
Sunday, October 16, 2022
Friday, October 14, 2022
Thursday, October 13, 2022
Review: Sinatra
Sinatra by Earl WilsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a intimate but not overly detailed look at the Sinatra career through the late '70s. The journalist author was on the outs with Sinatra when he wrote this, and the circumstances of that break -- much ado about nothing it seems -- feels revelatory. Sinatra seems to have ghosted people completely, even if on little basis, if he assumed them to be "parasites". It feels like more is about his non-music career: love life, up and down acting career, transition from unappreciated Democratic Party shill (Sinatra's supposed Mafia ties) to GOP booster.
View all my reviews
Review: Sinatra
Sinatra by Earl WilsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a intimate but not overly detailed look at the Sinatra career through the late '70s. The journalist author was on the outs with Sinatra when he wrote this, and the circumstances of that break -- much ado about nothing it seems -- feels revelatory. Sinatra seems to have ghosted people completely, even if on little basis, if he assumed them to be "parasites". It feels like more is about his non-music career: love life, up and down acting career, transition from unappreciated Democratic Party shill (Sinatra's supposed Mafia ties) to GOP booster.
View all my reviews
Tuesday, October 11, 2022
Friday, October 7, 2022
Review: How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe
Thursday, October 6, 2022
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