History – Asian Lands – Page 3 – education and deconstruction.com

A Woman Among Warlords

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“We are right now under the ‘protection’ of armed forces from 43 countries, yet we are still living with war, brutality, poverty and crime.”

The above happens to describe Afghanistan.

The Book of the Week is “A Woman Among Warlords, The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice” by Malalai Joya with Derrick O’Keefe, published in 2009.

The second oldest of ten children, born in April 1978 in western Afghanistan, the author– a political activist– deserves major bragging rights. For, she risked her life in remaining in her beloved homeland where she spoke the truth about the war, the corruption, the leaders and all the other ugly aspects of her country’s impossible situation to raise awareness of what the world could do to make things better in the future.

Joya (a pseudonym, as she was in a witness protection program of sorts at the book’s writing) spent her childhood in various refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. Her family lived in Iran because her father received medical treatment there after having his leg blown off by a land mine. He was a member of the mujahideen and political dissident. Her family moved to Pakistan because her father wanted to provide her with a decent education.

A few years after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops, Afghanistan was a chaotic, poverty-stricken, war-torn wreck, and stayed that way for the next four decades– due to very common, oft-repeated historical forces; human nature, especially. Armed Muslim fanatics roamed the streets to violently enforce the dress and behavior codes for females, five-times-a-day prayers, and to suppress free speech and ban any and all pleasurable activities in the name of their religion the way they themselves perceived it should be. Nevertheless, in the 1990’s, ordinary Afghans watched the bootlegged American movie Titanic in secret.

Shortly after 9/11, the Taliban disappeared because they knew the jig was up. They reinvented themselves as students at Ivy League universities, parliament members in Afghanistan, and propagandists. Incidentally, ex-Nazis after WWII reinvented themselves in a similar manner; those with transferable skills became Soviet officers. This kind of scenario has been repeated throughout history amid regime changes, among men with superior survival skills.

Anyway, in 2002, the United States destroyed communications infrastructure via modern weaponry in Afghanistan. After about three years, though, the U.S. and NATO failed to deliver on promises and installed a corrupt puppet regime that actually hurt ordinary Afghans. Unsurprisingly, “International Security Assistance Force” became a misnomer– just another foreign occupier. The usual CIA bribes, human rights abuses (especially against females!), growing of opium that would be processed into black-market heroin to be distributed worldwide, and other nefarious activities continued to proliferate behind the scenes.

Beginning when she was in high school, Joya taught literacy to adult women who, if they were allowed by their husbands to attend classes, were expected by their husbands to do all the housework and childcare. There was fear not only of physical abuse from husbands, but also public-square lashings, beheadings or hangings if the Taliban discovered the hidden classes held in basements.

In 2004, Joya attended a conference and delivered political speeches that provoked angry reactions from Afghanistan’s evil leaders– mostly alpha males with hubris syndrome in the dictatorship that the country had become, backed by the U.S. and NATO. Her fellow political workers called her a Communist, infidel, and worse, incessantly smearing her.

The United Nations provided some security for Joya, but she became especially vulnerable to assassination attempts when she began traveling between Kabul and her hometown of Farah City, to run for a seat in the Parliament of Afghanistan.

Joya named just a few of the ginormous number of parties whose advice and actions worsened Afghanistan’s plight in recent decades (despite all of the parties’ bragging about how they helped bring democracy to Afghanistan; in no particular order): Reagan, George W. and Laura Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Brzezinski, Obama, the CIA and NATO.

The U.S. learned nothing from the French in Vietnam, and nothing from the Soviets’ nine-year quagmire in Afghanistan, that turned into forty years of devastation. (The U.S. did, however, groom Boris Yeltsin in its own image to lead Russia in the 1990’s. Unfortunately, his reign didn’t last long due to ill health. Maybe next time it’ll choose someone with better staying-power.)

Read the book to learn of: numerous other abominations Joya harped on and lamented over as a political activist (hint: Afghan children faced “…smuggling, abduction, child labor [due to severe poverty] and lack of education”) and her recommendations for how the country could turn itself around, and her reasons for hope for her country’s future.

Out of the Gobi

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The Book of the Week is “Out of the Gobi, My Story of China and America” by Weijian Shan, published in 2019. This volume richly detailed the hardships faced by ordinary Chinese people from the 1950’s onward.

Born in 1953, the author spent most of his childhood in Beijing. As is well known, the Communist dictator Mao Tse-tung finally achieved nationwide dominance over the Nationalist (allegedly democratic, but still horribly corrupt) Chiang Kai-shek at the dawn of the 1950’s. (For additional info on how Communism is different from Socialism and Capitalism, see the bottom portion of this blog’s post, “The Last Idealist”). Mao proceeded to do grave damage to his country, causing the deaths of millions from starvation and financial disaster (among other causes).

Beginning in 1965, Mao declared there would be a new world order in his country, in the form of a Cultural Revolution. One of many goings-on during this period was burning, destruction or confiscation of all books except for those by the authors Marx (Karl, not Groucho), Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

The evil West’s bourgeois lifestyle was violently stamped out by Mao’s private police force, the Red Guard (which consisted of mostly young, armed and dangerous radical hooligans– sociopathic sadists), which brainwashed schoolkids of all ages, up to university level, to make Revolution. They destroyed the statue of the Venus de Milo, and denounced the Russian classical novels. A couple of years later, chaos reigned, but Mao was still in control.

In autumn 1966, at thirteen years old, the author was brainwashed by the youth movement to go on a fact-finding mission in the countryside. The government did away with entrance examinations, and in fact, all formal schooling. For about three weeks, the author and his peers traveled around by trains, buses and on foot to personally witness the Revolution. At one point, they went on a hike in the mountains, retracing the steps of the Red Army. Their travel expenses were paid for, but the conditions were quite primitive.

Into 1967, upon orders handed down by Mao, the youths protested against Capitalism in a way roughly equivalent to “Occupy Wall Street” but they got bored. They were neither studying nor working. For, a few years prior, the dictator had successfully thrown the country into disarray, forcing the closure of not only all schools, but bookstores, libraries, parks, movie theaters and houses of worship.

Thousands of people disappeared, were abducted from their homes– to be jailed, tortured, killed, for so much as speaking, writing or acting in the least way, critical of the government. In the environment of fear and force, they were under pressure to tattle on others before they themselves were punished.

Schools in the author’s area finally did reopen in autumn 1968, but education was still lacking. The author’s “Worker-Peasant-Soldier Middle School” (grades nine and ten– after what would be American grammar school) had no textbooks but students were drilled only on Mao’s propaganda.

In the summer of 1969, Mao realized it was time to change tack by sending young people to the countryside, as they had been making trouble in the cities long enough. He kept them busy by inspiring them to do hard manual labor, and study revolutionary thought. The kids truly tried their hardest– they were blindly obedient to the cause of defending their motherland against Soviet aggression. In autumn 1969, the whole nation went crazy constructing air-raid shelters and tunnels.

The author was sent to the Gobi desert in Inner Mongolia. Again, conditions were extremely primitive. He and his fellows got military training. However, due to a weapons shortage, another platoon was chosen to receive (outdated, Soviet-made) submachine guns. None of the company leaders had any experience in battle, but they inspired passion in their subordinates, anyway. Under the blazing summer sun, there were vicious mosquitoes. It was freezing in winter.

The author described his physical and psychological suffering of the next several years, as his group strove to complete a series of months or years-long agricultural and infrastructure projects that actually produced a net negative effect on food production and quality of life.

In 1979, the United States resumed formal diplomatic relations with China. People in China queued up for hours and hours for all kinds of consumer goods. The author, by then a recent university graduate, reveled in his new lap of luxury– he had time to read for hours and hours, had enough to eat, and got a hot shower once a week.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional information on: the author’s experiences in China from the 1950’s into the 1980’s (which involved a slew of health hazards) including but was far from limited to:

all his hard manual labor and psychological trauma;

his short stint as a medical “doctor” in 1971;

how he enjoyed the benefits of a student exchange program in the 1980’s; and

his troubles with the INS (hint– “… a mistake in the new letter: the date by which we had to leave the country was left blank… the INS had somehow lost our file…”).

This substantial volume reveals why, politically, economically, culturally and socially, and in quality of life– overall, China is still many decades behind America (never mind the propagandists who claim that China is allegedly becoming an economic powerhouse and will someday overtake the U.S.).

World Class

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The Book of the Week is “World Class, One Mother’s Journey Halfway Around the Globe in Search of the Best Education for Her Children” by Teru Clavel, published in 2019.

Born in the early 1960’s, the author had very different educational experiences from that of her children. She spent her early childhood years in Greenwich, Connecticut; middle years in New York City, and teens in Westchester county, New York. She, her husband and their three children spent a decade in Asia, and moved back to the United States in 2016.

They began their stay in Hong Kong in the expat community, but the author wanted her children to see how the natives actually lived and learned. The rat race among the super-rich elitists had become tiresome. So in Hong Kong and later in Shanghai, she found a preschool and elementary school that were right for her then-two children. Even so, most local Asian schools demanded discipline and rigorous academics that were standardized nationwide.

In Shanghai, though, her family endured hardships in order for her children to get the best educations– authentic to the culture of that place and time. In Asia, teaching is a highly respected profession for which there is rigorous training and a highly selective hiring process.

Both the author’s family’s local public school and their residence were structurally dilapidated. The former had classrooms that were unheated, so in winter, the kids wore their coats all day. The grounds had no playground, only a concrete basketball court with a bare hoop. The family’s home had vermin and unreliable water and internet service.

At the elementary school, the teachers specialized in math, Mandarin, English language or other subjects, and were paid more than the homeroom teacher. The kids learned with pencils and paper; not tablets and videos.

Every day before preschool began, the kids were subjected to a color-coded health examination: red (a lucky color in China) meant the child was well, yellow meant slight illness but okay to be in class, but blue indicated that the child would spend the day at the school infirmary. Most parents of elementary schoolers work to support a multi-generational household: an only child, the parents, and both sets of grandparents of the child.

The author’s six-year old son’s report card was a 46 page bound book containing assessments in each subject including social skills– comprised of opinions of the parents, teachers and students themselves. According to the author, the Chinese education system is a meritocracy, with high school and college entrance exams the keys to the kingdom.

The author wanted her children to attend high school in the United States, so the family moved to Palo Alto in California– the best school district in the nation; but, as the author found out, only reputationally.

Read the book to learn: many more details of Asian education and cultures, and how they compare to the American system in recent years; the author’s advice and tips for how parents can seek out the best education for their kids; and biographical information on the author and her family.

India

The Book of the Week is “India, A Million Mutinies Now” by V.S. Naipaul, published in 1990. While visiting India a few times, in 1962, in the 1970’s, and the late 1980’s, the author interviewed several Indians from a range of castes, and reminisced with them about how cultural mores changed through the decades. The author provided a bit of historical backdrop with each vignette.

The author was born in 1932 in Trinidad, to which his ancestors migrated from India. They were peasant farmers. The Indian diaspora (prompted by political, religious and economic turmoil) spawned new Indian communities. Through the decades after the 1947 establishment of India’s partition with Pakistan, the culture of the people who left India diverged with Indians who stayed. The former were subject to the culture of their adopted countries. They moved to, in addition to Trinidad– Fiji, South Africa and England in large numbers.

The author interviewed someone who practiced the (extremely non-violent) Jain religion. By the 1960’s, a devout believer such as the latter could no longer work in the construction industry in India, as organized crime had forced him out. He could, however, make a living in the securities industry.

Over the course of half a century starting in the 1930’s, the Untouchables caste (or the Dalits, as they were renamed) had been slowly achieving upward mobility, helped by the inspirational leader, Dr. Ambedkar, who died in 1956. By the 1980’s, they had allied with the Muslims, other victims of discrimination. Speaking of oppressed groups, “The sexual harassment of women in public places, often sly, sometimes quite open, was a problem all over India.”

On his last visit, the author commented on the horrible air pollution in Bombay. Local residents breathed brown-black smoke emanating from motor vehicles fueled partly by kerosene. He also remarked on the Indian mentality, that natives were willing to make the sacrifice of living in the most disgusting, cramped conditions imaginable, thereby saving money on housing, in order to get started making money; then move to a better place later, when their financial situation improved. One indication of this was a humungous shantytown just outside Bombay, where a range of different groups (from the political to the swindling) were just beginning their struggles in the capitalist vein.

The author described conditions back and forth in time, including the atrocious religious, ethnic and skin-color conflicts between and among all different Indians.

In the 1930’s, India practiced segregation in public facilities between Brahmins and other castes similar to the way Americans did between its light-skinned people and those of other phenotypes. Beginning in 1937 in the Indian state of Tamil-Nadu, there was the Hindi-language war in education similar to the mid-1990’s ebonics controversy in Oakland, California (except that the former forced the schools to use Hindi only). The year 1967 saw Brahmins (the top caste) in the southern part of the country violently expressing their hatred for the non-Brahmins in the north. The Dravidians were fighting the Aryans.

On another topic, in India it was commonplace for a bride’s family to incur excessive debt due to various customs, including paying for: all of the venue and food-related expenses of wedding guests comprising the family’s entire community, two days’ worth of traditions, rituals, and a dowry that in modern times involved expensive toys such as motor scooters or electronics, clothes, jewelry, cookware, housewares, bedding; plus ceremonies and festivals throughout the year. A family of sons paid only for their education.

Just to push the point on how universal some of India’s problems are that prompt political upheaval: “Where there isn’t a sense of history, myth can begin in that region which is just beyond the memory of our fathers or grandfathers, just beyond living witness.”

Read the book to learn much more about India’s political, economic, cultural and social problems, as seen through the eyes of all different Indian castes, ethnic groups and religions (such as Jains, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs) in different decades (1930’s through the 1980’s) in different Indian regions, including Bombay, Calcutta and Lucknow.

Made In China

The Book of the Week is “Made in China, A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Costs of America’s Cheap Goods” by Amelia Pang, published in 2021.

“A guard grabbed a prisoner by his hair, twisted his head, and smashed his face into a heater… They beat him with electric batons until his body convulsed, then hung him by his wrists for two weeks– with his toes barely touching the ground.”

No, the above describes not the Holocaust, not a lynching, but a forced-labor camp in China in 2008 (!)

In the last few decades, the Chinese government has committed human rights abuses against its own citizens– not only dissidents, but also against a group called the Falun Gong (a group that practices exercises, meditation, and espouses certain lifestyle choices). Such citizens are sent to slave-labor camps, where they are tortured and starved but kept alive long enough to serve their sentences by making consumer goods (for export) for no pay amid extremely squalid conditions; they are charged with crimes and punished through what would be considered a complete violation of American-style due process.

In China, as of 2013, the camps numbered an estimated one thousand, at minimum. The author wrote that in all her research, she found only one American company that was ever prosecuted for importing consumer goods from such a camp in China, in the course of twenty years. The camps are bad enough, but to add more shock value to the already unspeakable horrors, the camps are a source of black-market transplant-organs in China, estimated to be worth $1 billion. In December 2013, China said it would be converting its reeducation (brainwashing) camps to ones that imposed labor for drug rehabilitation instead. However, the lipstick on the pig didn’t change the pig.

The main focus of the book was the true story of a man named Sun– a Falun Gong member who was sentenced to two and a half years to an aforementioned camp. He risked his life to hand-write a note containing a desperate plea for help, that ended up in the package of a Halloween product purchased by a woman in Oregon in the United States.

In 2016, Big Brother was growing ever more intrusive in China, as Turkic Muslims (the Uyghur tribe and Kazhaks), were targeted for “blood tests, fingerprints, voice recordings, and facial scans.” An estimated three million of twelve million of them are detained in the camps. They live in a location where China borders more than a few strategically located nations on the Silk Road– still a crucial trade route. The Chinese government doesn’t want any rebellious behavior from them. Reeducation is the goal, besides the economic benefits for China. All of them are forced to speak Mandarin, or else.

The author wrote with some alarm, that the torture chambers for victimized ethnic groups are arguably genocidal. She suggested that China’s atrocities might become comparable to the Holocaust all over again. But– this is not a Hitler situation, and is unlikely to become one. This, because Hitler had grand designs to take over the world through arming a military that committed imperialism, and creating a master race through eliminating the Jews and others he deemed genetically inferior– through genocide.

Matters will eventually come to a head when a significant proportion of the two minority populations are in the camps, and the export market is oversaturated with goods made by them, sold through big-name companies like Nike, Apple, BMW, Amazon, etc. An economic slowdown will mean a reduction in the need for the camps. (That’s NOT to say that the camps should exist, or that nothing should be done to stop the atrocities.)

International outcry will eventually reach critical mass, so that pressure will be brought to bear on China to reduce its human rights abuses, through economic punishments. Unlike most of the rest of the world, –like clockwork every two years– the United States holds elections for some powerful federal and state offices during which, a significant number of Chinese voters can influence political candidates to take a stand on this issue.

Anyway, read the book to learn additional details about Sun’s fate, and how the situation can be changed for the better.

The Rape of Bangla Desh

The Book of the Week is “The Rape of Bangla Desh” by Anthony Mascarenhas, published in 1971.

In March 1969, Pakistan got a new leader named Khan. The reason was that dissatisfaction with Khan’s predecessor had reached critical mass among various parties that were keeping him in power, including the military.

Khan made the following campaign promises: “drain the swamp” in the government, and hold elections that would establish parliamentary (representative, civilian rather than military) government, pursuant to a constitution. The sovereignty of Pakistan had not held elections since its 1947 inception via the partition of India (amid excessive bloodshed, religious hatreds and a caste system that retarded the country’s economic, cultural and social growth for decades; see this blog’s post, “Freedom At Midnight”).

In November 1969, Khan claimed he was still working on the new constitution. He made other announcements on other issues that made it pretty obvious to politically astute people that he was turning out to be yet another dictator. He declared that Sind, Punjab, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier (in West Pakistan) would become separate states again, and changed how votes would be tabulated, territorially.

Khan set dates for steps that helped Pakistan prepare for its elections, which would allegedly be held in October 1970. But they weren’t. In early November 1970, a tidal wave and cyclone hit the coastal areas of East Bengal. Khan then had a great excuse to postpone the elections until December.

Khan wrote the new constitution, which contained “small print”– a Legal Framework Order– that basically gave Khan unlimited powers; plus murky language that would cause endless arguments over the application and jurisdiction of laws between the provinces and Pakistan’s federal government.

However, in his evil scheme to become Pakistan’s supreme ruler through “divide and conquer” Khan’s new vote-tabulation method allowed Bengalis (of East Pakistan) to obtain too much representation in the national assembly, in the elections (when they were finally held). West Pakistanis became resentful, although they had previously enjoyed the lion’s share of control of governmental affairs for decades.

By February 1971, Khan had been executing various political machinations, including dissolving his civilian Cabinet. He said that he couldn’t let civilians rule Pakistan’s government just yet, as there was a national-security emergency– conflicts among East and West Pakistan, and India. The military had to handle them.

Unsurprisingly, in the first week of March 1971, there began more than three weeks’ worth of violence, rioting and looting, with Bengalis’ agitating to become an independent Bangladesh. To sum it up, “Pakistanis are intensely patriotic people and could not for one moment believe that their government was deliberately misinforming them so terribly.”

Read the book to learn the details of this “textbook example” of how actions taken by an alpha male with hubris syndrome (whose actions backfired!) led to circumstances that resulted in independence for a specific group of people in a particular territory (not without: serious sacrifices of human lives, the usual ethnic, tribal and religious warfare– including what some have defined as genocide; plus linguistic and other issues, and millions of refugees).

Promise and Power

The Book of the Week is “Promise and Power, The Life and Times of Robert McNamara” by Deborah Shapley, published in 1993.

NOTE: The author (a journalist, not a historian) rambled on for pages and pages on certain events (perhaps those were from sources to which she had easy access), and omitted or provided scant coverage on others that were equally important. [Case-in-point: She completely neglected to mention that the Washington Post initially published an excerpt from the Pentagon Papers, and the New York Times printed additional excerpts. It is unclear whether the omission was intentional.] Even so, on another point– it is difficult for anyone to extract truth from accounts of any CIA- related activities unless they come verbatim from declassified documents, not the minds of media members or historians playing “telephone.” History during McNamara’s career was crowded with CIA incidents. The whole premise of spying-agencies is based on using dishonesty to gather information!

Born in 1916 in San Francisco, California, McNamara spent most of his childhood in Oakland. His parents doted on him. He attended high school in a good school district, and made additional contacts while attending University of California at Berkeley. He became active in campus social life, cozying up to the college president and provost. McNamara and a friend got their graduate-business degrees at Harvard, where they were already displaying the kind of arrogance that gets politicians in trouble.

SIDENOTE: Both politicians and voters can learn from previous, recent presidents’ mistakes of arrogance (but it seems they never do!):

Ronald Reagan’s secret, international military adventures;

George H.W. Bush’s ill-advised optics and messaging;

Bill Clinton’s poor impulse control in the face of the age of zero privacy for public figures;

George W. Bush’s history of failing upwards thanks to inheritance, that allowed him to ultimately gain maximum power that led to profiteering and good-enough optics and messaging to get him reelected, but that ultimately ruined his reputation– but he was too sociopathic to care about a legacy;

Barack Obama’s optics and messaging that caused most conservative Republicans to claim: he made the U.S. appear weak in the eyes of the world, and led America’s healthcare industry in the wrong direction; plus, the facts that health-plan applicants could not necessarily “keep their doctor” and initially, they had excessive trouble signing up; notwithstanding, most liberal Democrats would agree he did the best he could under the circumstances (which he inherited), and he will be remembered for continuing the national healthcare debate because he helped pass historic legislation on it;

Donald Trump’s —– [redacted, censored, protected by non-disclosure agreements or executive privilege].

Anyway, at the start of WWII, McNamara and his friend settled for being posted overseas so as not to begin on the lowest rung of the military ladder. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t play well with others. McNamara’s lifelong philosophy was always action-oriented– take risks, do something, even if it was the wrong thing. Unfortunately, the truth didn’t change just because he didn’t want to see it, hear it, or speak it. And it didn’t get any less complicated just because he oversimplified it.

By the end of the 1940’s, McNamara was helping turn around Ford Motor Company, where he and his leadership team created and implemented the cost-accounting system (a trendy new method for numerical tracking and analysis) he had learned in business school. The executives were credit-grabbers and tooted their own horns. In the Postwar Era, they and their families needed to keep up with the Joneses.

But, when asked by JFK what he could do for his country, McNamara made a snap decision to become defense secretary in December 1960. His sole goal was clearly only amassing power, because he had just been promoted to president at Ford– so he was relinquishing outsized compensation by becoming a public servant– and unlike in recent times, actually (ethically) put his assets in a blind trust.

Cold-War hysteria was rampant, fueled by propaganda put out by the Kennedy administration. The public-relations lies McNamara told about the missile gap with the Soviets were comparable to those told by George W. Bush on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq after 9/11. Ordinary Americans were building fallout shelters, convinced that the Soviets could unexpectedly launch a nuclear attack against the U.S. at any time.

McNamara then whipped up anger against himself when he aggravated inter-service rivalry between the Air Force and Navy, on project-contracts. The American intelligence services failed to anticipate that the Soviets would build a Wall in Berlin in August 1961. America’s leaders changed their tune about using nuclear weapons if provoked– but only as a last resort. Twenty years later, McNamara flip-flopped like Jeanne Kirkpatrick on many political issues, including nukes.

In the early 1960’s, however, he whipped up anger against himself again (from England and France) when he spoke for his country’s government, saying the United States needed to centrally control nuclear weapons because the Soviets wouldn’t be deterred from committing aggression if inventories in other nuclear nations of NATO were fragmented and complex. McNamara also needed to explain to Soviet leader Khrushchev that the United States had a plan to avoid vaporizing the entire world ten times over by (graciously) avoiding attacking major Soviet cities and using conventional weapons instead.

By early 1963, McNamara had amassed a bloated staff of bureaucratic, numerical-data-oriented paper-pushers, who had no clue what was really going on in Vietnam. The Americans were supplying weaponry and military consulting, but South-Vietnam-leader Ngo Dinh Diem’s soldiers took care of their own, in only pretending to fight. Newsflash– “Using napalm and herbicides didn’t win the hearts and minds of the peasants, who disdained Diem.”

American journalists physically present at the conflict-site, such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan truthfully described what they saw. McNamara didn’t want to believe them, but for his own purposes, chose to believe reports (that said America was making great progress) from consultants he controlled. Nevertheless, in spring 1968, McNamara became head of the World Bank, apparently to salve his conscience through saving the world (by eliminating hunger) for getting his own country into a quagmire.

Over the course of more than a dozen years, he radically changed the organization– for the good in some ways, and bad in others.
After about a decade, however, the negative aspects of his leadership style proved detrimental more often than not, to the Bank. McNamara was shown to be a hypocrite, like so many other alpha males whose hubris syndrome leads them to believe they are allowed to preach, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

In 1972, McNamara claimed the Bank’s projects would be environmentally friendly. But in 1981, he approved road-building in the Amazon region in Brazil that destroyed the rain forest and the way of life of the native tribes there. He left at the end of that year because his wife was ill, so conveniently, he wasn’t there to answer questions about the Bank’s serious problems when it hit the fan.

Incidentally, three other American contemporary figures come to mind on the environmental front, who were like McNamara: Al Gore, John Kerry and Michael Bloomberg– telling ordinary Americans to save energy while their ginormous carbon-footprints grow every day, traveling around to their various mansions through the use of exclusive flights and gas-guzzling vehicles. Note to current president: Arrogant hypocrisy makes American voters mad.

Read the book to learn of additional ways McNamara’s head eventually got too big for the team everywhere he went, prompting him and his colleagues to engage in disastrous military action in Vietnam, causing needless deaths and ruined lives; and the major historical events in which he had a role, that ruined his own and others’ reputations.

Ghosts of the Tsunami – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Ghosts of the Tsunami, Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone” by Richard Lloyd Parry, published in 2017.

As is well known, cancer cases will cluster among residents near even peacetime nuclear facilities that are working properly. Sadly, Japan’s poor foresight on its energy policy turned it into a boatload of misfortune waiting to happen.

In March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami in Japan reminded the world yet again how one disaster can lead to another, especially when it comes to the use of nuclear energy. After radioactivity (colorless and odorless) from its three melted-down nuclear reactors spread across Japan’s countryside, leaving a huge number of people sick and dead, it closed its remaining fifty reactors. Taking a lesson,–Germany, Italy and Switzerland stopped their nuclear energy programs.

The author, however, focused mostly on the no less traumatic deaths (some of them needless) and destruction in one small place, caused by the disasters. He spent an extensive amount of time corresponding with victims in the fishing village of Onagawa on the island of Honshu, where there occurred a large percentage of needless drownings at the local elementary school: 74 of 108 kids, and 10 of the 11 teachers.

The Kitakami river overflowed its banks, but school administrators failed to take precautionary measures to evade the flooding. “Within five minutes– the time it had taken them to evacuate their classrooms– the entire school could have ascended hundreds of feet above sea level, beyond the reach of any conceivable tsunami.”

Read the book to learn about the victims’ families’ quests for finding their loved ones and for the true details of how they died, and whether their deaths were preventable.

Daughter of Destiny / Getting Away With Murder

The first Book of the Week is “Daughter of Destiny, An Autobiography” by Benazir Bhutto, published in 1989.

“If you do not appoint me president along with my team, then I’m afraid I’ll have to explore other options. I may even have to start my own party. I will be your biggest opposition.”

-said to Benazir in late 1984 by one of the Old Guard PPP members in exile in London

Upon the initial sovereignty of Pakistan in 1947, there was an egalitarian climate in terms of gender– women could join the country’s National Guard. Born the oldest of four siblings in June 1953 in Karachi, Benazir Bhutto began studying at Radcliffe College (the sister school to Harvard) in 1969. There, she made many friends who achieved high positions in the world, affording her political assistance through the years.

The Bhuttos were something akin to a royal family in Pakistan in the second half of the twentieth century. They were one of the largest tribes in Sindh. They were Muslim, and most of their members lived in Larkana where they had plantations of rice, sugar cane, cotton and guava. Females inherited land when their relatives died, but their marriages were arranged.

Benazir’s grandfather was progressive in permitting his female descendants to get an education. Ironically, many families didn’t educate their sons because the sons were almost guaranteed a living from supervising servants who worked the land.

Benazir’s father– Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a Sunni, studied abroad at the University of California at Berkeley, and then Oxford University’s law school in England. Benazir’s mother, a Shiite, was: a second-generation Iranian, allowed to forgo covering herself up with clothing, and allowed to drive a car.

As is well known, through the centuries, there has been almost non-stop tribal and religious warfare in the territory that has become Pakistan. In the 1960’s, the major sites of bloodshed included the Kashmir, the Punjab and Sindh. In 1967, Zulfikar (Benazir’s father), a wildly popular government minister experienced in various political areas, helped form the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). In 1974, Zulfikar, as a master diplomatic negotiator, participated in talks over the territory that was to become Bangladesh.

In March 1976, Zulfikar was elected president of Pakistan. He nationalized major corporations, re-allocated land to peasants and outlawed gender discrimination in employment and government. Pairs of groups engaged in constant conflict: separatists in certain regions of Pakistan fought with those who believed the people would be better served by a federal government; rich opposed poor; landowners tangled with the educated, etc. Surprisingly, most of Pakistan’s population was still illiterate.

In the first half of the 1970’s, Zulfikar and his ilk continued to anger the United States with their actions. The leader spoke out against the Vietnam War, made friendly overtures to China, and took the Arab side in the Yom Kippur War.

Beginning around the middle of 1976, the French were teaching the Pakistanis how to make nuclear weapons. The latter were having a little spat with India besides. So the following year, the newly elected president Jimmy Carter secretly sicced the CIA on Zulfikar. It collaborated with the PPP’s rival party, the PNA (comprised of thugs, arsonists and sociopathic sadists with weaponry) to commit black-market currency manipulation to lower the value of the American dollar. Predictably, there were ugly consequences.

Carter and Ronald Reagan after him, like all American presidents, had to decide the kinds and amounts of aid to give to, or withhold from nations such as Pakistan, with its human rights abuses and temptation from the Soviets to adopt Communist policies in exchange for financial aid and weaponry.

As is well known, Pakistan borders on Afghanistan, in which the Soviets militarily insinuated themselves in late 1979. There were complicated economic, trade and geopolitical considerations– including a huge number of Afghan refugees– which as usual, were favored over stemming abusive treatment of ordinary Pakistanis by their government.

In July 1977, Zia ul-Haq, a general, had finally gained sufficient sway over Pakistan’s military to arrest and jail Zulfikar. Zia canceled the elections and declared Martial Law when he saw that there was still huge support among common Pakistanis for the Party (PPP). In October 1979, the Bhutto family’s newspaper was shuttered. The remaining media outlets of course, were censored by dictator Zia. Political parties were outlawed.

Dissidents, including Benazir and her mother (who, for some years stayed and fought, and other years, fled the country until there was less danger of assassination) were subjected to the usual Third-World-country human-rights abuses.

There was the vicious cycle of arrests on false charges, jailings with horrible conditions, arbitrary releases and re-arrests on different, absurd charges; firing on protesters– killing hundreds or thousands (accurate documentation was hard to come by, as foreign journalists were censored or banned from the country during the worst years of the oppression). For, the government controlled the courts, the army, and the media.

By the 1980’s, Pakistan was making a transition from military dictatorship to theocracy, as Zia supported the Wahhabis. However, on and off through the years, Zia must have still cared about world opinion because international complaints prompted him to, among making other concessions, allow Benazir and her mother at different times to be released from jail to receive
treatment abroad for serious medical conditions.

Anne Fadiman, a writer for Life magazine recounted an interesting experience riding in a car with Benazir going to a political rally in August 1986. Benazir stood on the seat with her head through the open sunroof (or emergency exit) when police officers started spraying tear gas. Incidentally, that tear gas was made in America, by Smith & Wesson.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details on Pakistan’s political history from the 1970’s up until the book’s writing as seen through Benazir’s eyes and personal experiences (Hint– it involved the usual, repetitive dictatorial shenanigans), and how she portrayed herself as the new Mahatma Gandhi toward the end of the story, in the spring of 1986, amid riots in Karachi over identity politics, and identity cards for voting).

The second Book of the Week is “Getting Away With Murder, Benazir Bhutto’s Assassination and the Politics of Pakistan” by Heraldo Munoz, published in 2014.

The author wrote, “The commission soon encountered a country deeply skeptical of authority and the justice system because of widespread corruption , abundant behind-the-scenes political deal making, and the regular impunity that had met previous unsolved political assassinations [which included Benazir Bhutto’s brother; her father’s was a death sentence but an assassination nevertheless].”

From its founding in 1947 through the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pakistan has had a European-style / military / theocratic government, each of which has waxed and waned with the vicissitudes of geopolitical shenanigans.

In mid-2004, the United States persuaded Pakistan’s leader Pervez Musharraf (who was turning into a dictator) to plan to give up his generalship in the Pakistani military and exile himself at some future date at U.S. taxpayer expense (because he knew the tide was turning against him), rather than the alternative. Benazir was considering returning to Pakistan to run for the top leadership position in an election, when Musharraf’s latest term was supposedly going to expire.

Talks also dragged on for three years between Musharraf and Benazir over a proposed power-sharing arrangement. Always a bad idea. For, a co-prime-ministership would certainly have failed. In the vast majority of cases, with a more-or-less democratic government, there can be only one leader.

Two very different people such as they, unrelated by marriage or blood are highly unlikely to have enough common vision, complementary talents and skills, and strategic interests to cooperate enough of the time to make it work.

Elections to governing bodies and top leaders in Pakistan were scheduled for January 2008. Benazir Bhutto had, in the past, been at various times– top leader, party leader, jailed, in exile, and physically present– mentored by her father who led Pakistan before her in the 1970’s.

Conspiracy theories abounded surrounding the circumstances of Benazir’s December 2007 assassination in Rawalpindi. A few bullets allegedly penetrated her head (or not– she allegedly bumped her head on the lever controlling the sunroof / emergency exit of the vehicle in which she was standing up with her head exposed to rally-supporters / protesters / political enemies), plus a suicide bomber’s explosives detonated near her vehicle that might have contributed to her death.

However, the fact that she was killed should have come as no surprise. She knew she was at risk for harm, considering that all political leaders are surrounded by security at all times, even those from democratic countries. Ones from Third World countries like Benazir, are especially vulnerable to physical danger from political rivals.

Just one day prior, terror attacks against her supporters in the form of two explosions in Karachi left hundreds wounded and dead. The then-leader of Pakistan’s military dictatorship who had grabbed power in a 1999 coup– the aforementioned Musharraf– refused to allow the FBI or Scotland Yard to investigate, not wanting to appear to be a puppet of the West (though he so obviously was).

A year and half later (!!) (rather than the next day), in February 2009, the United Nations (UN) began an inquiry into Benazir’s death. It wasn’t meant to result in any trial or punishment, but was simply a way for the investigators to remain relevant, and counter the Pakistan government’s historical revisionism with their own.

The author was named to the UN Commission of Inquiry, which traveled three times to Pakistan. Read the book to learn much more about the history of Pakistan and his experiences in trying to get the facts on the events that led to Benazir’s death.

The Edge of Terror

The Book of the Week is “The Edge of Terror, The Heroic Story of American Families Trapped in the Japanese-Occupied Philippines” by Scott Walker, published in 2009.

This was a suspenseful story that focused mostly on a few lucky survivors of a war ordeal, but “American military losses in the Philippines are staggering and have never been fully realized by the American people.” For the reason of brevity, the author obviously could not cover all aspects of the historical backdrop that came together to determine which people in the story survived or died.

Anyway, in 1898, the Philippine islands became a protectorate of the United States. After WWI, Baptist medical missionaries settled in the city of Capiz on the island of Panay there. They established a nursing school and teaching-hospital, treating patients in a province comprised of approximately three hundred thousand people.

American expatriates in the Philippines fell largely into two categories: missionaries and mining-industry employees. They interacted socially– playing bridge and volleyball, attending beach parties and dances. The islands had mineral resources, and were strategically located on major trade routes.

In the first half of 1941, General Douglas MacArthur was appointed the supreme leader of American troops in the Philippines. But he wasn’t physically present for the rest of the war. That summer, some expatriate and military families sent wives and children back to the United States because they knew America would be entering WWII at some point. Up until the last week of December, others were evacuated from Manila to Bataan or Dumalag.

A week after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in early December 1941, they attacked Luzon. American and Filipino troops retreated, leaving large quantities of ammunition, supplies and food. MacArthur, already suffering from a bad case of hubris syndrome, incompetently waited a few weeks too long before deploying American troops to deter an attack on Manila Harbor; that Japanese attack came in the first week of January 1942. Many American lives were lost, and much American military hardware was destroyed. Mining engineers would no longer receive shipments of food, currency and supplies from the harbor.

By February 1942, what with all the bloodshed and disease, about 17,000 Japanese men died on Bataan alone. A couple of months later, the vast majority of 10,000 Americans commanded by 62,000 Japanese men, marched to their deaths there. In certain regions, the American military used scorched-earth tactics. They burned a hospital and sabotaged electricity and water supplies so that the Japanese couldn’t avail themselves of the benefits when they took over.

After several more aggressive attacks in the Philippines in the next several months, the Japanese demanded that the Allies surrender by June 6, 1942 so that they could occupy all of the islands, or they would kill every last person on them.

One particular group of American miners and missionaries decided to defy the Japanese order, and fled into the foothills to hide outside of Katipunan on Panay. They built a community called Hopevale. A few thousand Filipino troops also refused to surrender, and cobbled together a ragtag guerrilla army to fight the Japanese. At any time, the Japanese could have bribed a disloyal individual to tell them were the enemy was hiding. By then, the Japanese had a reputation for barbarism, and didn’t hesitate to massacre, torture, bayonet, rape or behead people, burn villages, etc.

The Japanese aimed to occupy the strategic location of Port Moresby near Australia, but the Americans bested them with air power in the Battle of the Coral Sea. In early 1942, about 3,200 people who didn’t flee for whatever reason, were interned in Manila.

By summer, that number had grown to 7,000. About three quarters of them were American. They organized themselves to fulfill their basic needs, and even educated the young. The living conditions were primitive of course: lack of food and other necessities, poor sanitation, vermin, and limited activities. However, the Japanese were sufficiently liberal to allow dancing, poker playing and touch-football.

Read the book to learn of additional ways war brings out the best in human beings– in terms of cooperating to survive; and the worst in human beings– how they have learned war-crime techniques from previous combatants; and the fates of the Hopevale expatriates, their families and others in the Philippines (Hint– even the survivors’ stories never have an entirely happy ending.)