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…And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since / Citizen Lane

The first Book of the Week is “…And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since, From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress” by Charles B. Rangel with Leon Wynter, published in 2007.

This repetitive, stream-of-consciousness autobiography was a bragfest, but the author’s major point was that his near-death experience while serving in the Korean War led him to realize that surviving everything else in his life has been a cakewalk.

Born in June 1930 in West Harlem, New York City– Rangel, his older brother and younger sister were raised mostly by his mother, mother’s brother and mother’s father. His maternal grandparents– white father and black mother– were originally from Virginia. His mother raised him as a Catholic.

Rangel’s mother worked as an attendant in a hotel and in resorts in the Catskills in upstate New York, while the author stayed in West Harlem with his grandfather or uncle, both elevator operators. Starting when he was about nine years old and throughout his childhood, Rangel worked at a drugstore, as a paperboy, at a hardware store, as a shoe-store assistant, cargo loader, etc.

Rangel was deeply influenced by his grandfather’s reverence for attorneys, whom he saw all day at his job in the elevator of a courthouse. Nevertheless, Rangel’s social circles in Harlem did not expose him to anyone who particularly valued education. He therefore dropped out of high school after sophomore year. He was also deeply influenced by his older brother, who valued working and volunteering for the U.S. military.

So after Rangel’s four years in the military, during which he was unexpectedly sent to Korea, he was persuaded by his brother to choose work in civilian life instead of a military career.

Eventually, realizing that his life was directionless and his lack of education was holding him back, Rangel appealed to the Veterans Administration (VA) for help– aggressively, as he was an arrogant youth with a sense of entitlement as a war hero. A VA representative provided him with the kind of guidance he needed, pushing him to focus on the goal of becoming an attorney to please his grandfather.

Rangel expanded his worldview at St. John’s law school, meeting other blacks, plus Italian, Irish and Jewish students. Later, as a Congressman, his frequent international travel led him to change his views on Catholicism.

Rangel became less religious, as “When you find Washington saying it has no moral responsibility for social services, that it’s on local or state government or the private sector, you would expect the Church to be screaming with outrage. Not just about the unborn, but about the born… I had to remind Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the media that we spend $100,000 per year just to keep one kid locked up in the city’s [New York City’s] Rikers Island detention center… Imagine if we were investing even a fraction of that in the education of every kid in New York.”

Read the book to learn how Rangel came to have daily gratitude for life after his war experiences, and rose through the ranks to have an illustrious political career, and for all the great accomplishments he considered himself responsible.

The second Book of the Week is “Citizen Lane, Defending Our Rights in the Courts, the Capitol, and the Streets” by Mark Lane, published in 2012. This autobiography was a bragfest, too.

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Lane spent his childhood in Brooklyn. He spent his early career years practicing law as a solo practitioner in East Harlem. Even though his skin was white, he defended minority teen gang members accused of serious crimes. The juries were wealthy white males only. Lane also sued slumlords on behalf of tenants.

In the second half of the 1950’s, Lane helped reveal the scandalous conditions at the Wassaic State School in upstate New York; human nature, being what it is– in the early 1970’s, Geraldo Rivera told a largely similar story involving Willowbrook State School.

Teenagers accused of petty crimes who were deemed “mental defectives” determined by only one IQ test were placed in Wassaic State School. The IQ test was given in English only. Not coincidentally, many Puerto Ricans (Spanish speakers) were immediately placed in the school.

Despite the name of the institution, inmates received no academic instruction– only psychological, physical and sexual abuse, and solitary confinement for minor infractions, at the hands of sadistic guards.

Restraints were used willy-nilly. The food was inedible. The inmates had no recreation whatsoever, not even reading. In October 1955, Paul H. Hoch, commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene called a hearing only after New York State governor Averell Harriman was prompted by political motives to do something. Hoch said it was a public hearing, but banned the press from attending. Big mistake.

The press gathered around the hearing-building and wouldn’t leave. Lane gave them the lowdown on the testimony he heard firsthand. The reader can guess where this is going. The only heads that rolled were the guards’. No one else’s. Dr. George Etling, director of the school, remained so for another eighteen years until he comfortably retired.

The next episode in Lane’s heroic career related to cofounding– with the reverend of the Mid-Harlem Community Parish– of a free-of-charge (unlicensed; read, illegal) heroin rehabilitation clinic in West Harlem. The patients kicked their addictions cold turkey through sedatives and therapy administered by doctors, nurses, social workers and psychologists. Lane allegedly got Jackie Robinson to hire all the recovered addicts (many of whom were ex-cons) by the Chock full o’Nuts restaurant chain.

Prior to election year 1960, judges and other office holders were able to vote for their cronies, even though they had moved out of the candidates’ East Harlem and Yorkville district years before. Lane’s young polling volunteers told the illegal voters they had to sign an affidavit swearing to their current addresses. Busted, the would-be voters slunk away instead.

In spring 1961, Lane and black attorney Percy Sutton went on a “Freedom Ride” (i.e., risked their lives) via buses and a plane through different southern cities, ending in Jackson, Mississippi. There, they were arrested for “…disorderly conduct by improperly ‘congregating’ and placed in separate segregated cells.” But they hadn’t been the least bit hostile. They were convicted without a trial and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. In March 1962, the state of Mississippi changed its tune and the charges were dropped.

In 2004, Lane started co-hosting a weekly radio show from New Jersey, in which he wasn’t obnoxious to callers, and “…all ridicule would be reserved exclusively for the leaders of our nation who led us into a war in which they traded blood for oil… I read the names of those who died that week in Iraq, to remind us of what we are doing.”

Read the book to learn of other major historical events in which Lane was supposedly front and center, and the ways in which he did his best to investigate scandals (including JFK’s and MLK’s deaths) in a bygone era in which:

security in buildings was poor
forensics were primitive
racism was rampant, and
cover-ups were rife (thanks to aggressive, dishonest politicians and intelligence services who spied on and oppressed their own citizens).

Thank goodness cover-ups aren’t rife anymore, given the current mean, nasty divided political situation in the United States. Right.

A Great Wall

The Book of the Week is “A Great Wall, Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History” by Patrick Tyler, published in 1999.

In this tome, the author recounted the history of the relationships between and among the United States, China, Taiwan and the former Soviet Union beginning in 1969. In March of that year, the Chinese started a border skirmish with the Soviets, killing a few tens of them.

American president Richard Nixon realized that it would be advantageous to play the Soviets off of the Chinese or vice versa, by becoming friendly with one or the other before the end of his administration. His eventual secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, insinuated himself into foreign policy matters early on by marginalizing the then-main adviser, William Rogers.

The socially manipulative Kissinger, by spring 1970, working in the White House, then proceeded to convince Nixon to take the State Department out of the loop on conversations the United States was having with China through the Pakistanis, and other players in the diplomacy game– Taiwan, Japan and the USSR. Nixon feared being criticized for betraying the democratic Taiwan by flirting with the Communists. It was completely antithetical to his past rabid anti-Communist ideology and vicious behavior against them.

Nixon’s desire for reelection in 1972, however, overrode any shred of morality he ever had and any consistent political behavior he ever displayed. In early 1971, after a few telling incidents, he relaxed: travel restrictions on Americans who wanted to go to China, and the trade embargo on products from China. That spring, as a goodwill gesture, the Chinese sent their ping-pong team to Japan to compete against that of the United States.

The major issues Nixon had to tackle in order to get reelected included the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the Vietnam War, making nice with both China and Taiwan (a very tall order), plus the Pentagon Papers; not to mention the Watergate break-in.

Kissinger tried to generate hysteria by claiming that the Soviets had designs on China, so that’s why it was a bad idea for China to officially swallow Taiwan as part of its property. China was a sworn enemy of Taiwan because its efforts to take it over had been frustrated for decades.

China’s leader, Mao Tse Tung wanted China to take over Taiwan’s seat on the United Nations Security Council. Nixon was in a tough spot because in order to become friendly with the Chinese, he needed to bow to Mao’s wishes– help to oust Taiwan from the UN and terminate all diplomatic relations between Taiwan and the United States. George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Pat Buchanan and others disagreed with Nixon’s rejecting Taiwan to court China.

“Nixon’s credibility with America’s allies in Asia and the Pacific would depend on his reassurance that he was not making deals behind their backs…” But with Kissinger as Nixon’s point man, the secret proposed agreements kept on coming, making Nixon one of the biggest liars in the world. The ridiculously phony Kissinger deserved an Academy Award for his performances; telling the Chinese one thing, and the Taiwanese the opposite, secretly wooing the other.

The Chinese and Soviets had their complicated, internal power struggles, too. Mao got rid of his second-in-command in the second half of summer 1971 for trying to argue against fostering harmony with the Americans. For, flirting with the Americans would displease the Soviets. “Even a partial break with Moscow wasn’t popular in the Chinese military, which had been trained and equipped by the Soviets.”

The plot thickened in November 1971 when the Soviet-backed India picked a fight with the Chinese-backed Pakistan. The United States imposed economic sanctions on India. Eventually, East Pakistan became Bangladesh despite Kissinger’s United States’ failed attempt to butt into the fray.

In February 1972, Nixon became the focal point of the universe when he visited Beijing. He made headlines again when he gave a standing ovation at a musical show that had the Communists beating the capitalists (that was actually a PR gaffe).

It might be recalled that former American president Dwight Eisenhower signed the Mutual Defense Treaty, which was supposedly still in effect when Kissinger arrived on the scene. That document asserted that the United States would defend Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai Shek (in exile on Taiwan) and the territory of Taiwan in the event that China got militarily aggressive.

Therefore, Kissinger had to backpedal on a new communique he and Zhou Enlai of China were hammering out. The final version omitted any reference to the protection of Taiwan altogether. It was the least bad compromise Kissinger could muster, as many Nixon administration officials were furious that the president had sold out Taiwan.

Meanwhile, the Americans agreed with the Soviets that they didn’t want the Chinese to develop nuclear weapons, which were in the offing for China by the early 1990’s, according to futurists.

However, Kissinger whispered to China that American military contractors such as General Electric and Westinghouse might license their jet-engine manufacturing and nuclear-reactor technologies to China via Great Britain or France. But he told them the United States would publicly have to say it couldn’t do that because the sellers weren’t supposed to be offering dangerous war tools to Communist nations. However, the United States believed that helping modernize China would be economically beneficial for itself, so it did want to help.

In summer 1973, Mao was livid at Kissinger’s empty promises when the United States announced an agreement with the Soviet Union on reducing nukes and protecting the other in the event of third-party aggression. Besides, the Watergate investigation was raging. Zhou was dying of cancer. Soon, the Arabs and Israelis would be going at it. That’s good times.

In November 1973, amid the full-on palace intrigue in both the United States and China, Kissinger showed himself to be a pathological liar upon his return from personal talks with Zhou. He prepared a thirteen-page memo for his boss, the president, in which he called those talks a “positive success on all fronts.” No joke.

In late 1974, when China’s new negotiator Deng Xiaoping outed Kissinger on his dishonesty, Kissinger responded with indignation, like the hubris-syndrome plagued alpha-male that he was.

President Jimmy Carter needed the support of Congress for his Panama Canal Treaties, so he trod lightly (and contradictorily as had all his predecessors) on the China / Taiwan / Soviet conundrums.

In 1979, Deng received bad publicity for perpetrating human rights abuses even though his were not nearly as harsh as Mao’s. Nevertheless, this new political football led to criticism of Carter’s failure to call him out on them. Also that year, the United States helped China start a secret spying operation in China that monitored the Soviets from Central Asia to the Far East.

The 1980’s saw other complicated issues come into play that involved the usual needless deaths and ruined lives, like the war in Afghanistan and the continuing pesky presence of the Vietnamese in Cambodia.

American president Ronald Reagan was as bad as Kissinger in his doublespeak. Not fooled, the Chinese started meeting with the Soviets. “The pro-Taiwan faction [in the U.S. government] feared that every weapon or high-tech system sold to China would end up in Moscow.”

The American president’s negotiators spent much of the 1980’s in arms-sales talks with China and Taiwan, trying not to anger one or the other. By May 1989 in China, however, dissatisfaction among university students over the authorities’ treatment of themselves and dissidents reached critical mass.

Not coincidentally, the students– because they knew the whole world would be watching– launched a hunger strike and protests in major cities across China at the same time as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing. America’s diplomatic representatives who held their reality show in Shanghai, also had their scene stolen.

Deng was embarrassed and angry that he couldn’t control the students, so he ordered law enforcement officers to disperse them with deadly weapons, arrests and executions, instead of just tear gas, water cannons and cops in riot gear. The horror and bloodshed lasted for about a month, as Hong Kong activists donated millions of dollars to the students’ cause to keep it alive.

In January 1990, president Bush vetoed a bill sponsored by Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi that would have allowed Chinese students to stay in the United States as long as martial law stayed in effect in China. Further, he failed to express outrage at Deng’s tyranny because damage to America’s ties to China would result in a financial loss to America.

From a purely ethical standpoint, Deng’s behavior was horrifying. But from a purely economic standpoint, Bush was successful with the Chinese. And economics is what really matters in a reelection campaign.

Bush played a small part in convincing Deng to try some capitalist practices to see how they compared with China’s socialist ways. Also in January 1990, to distract his country from China, ironically, Bush ordered American law enforcement to arrest and try brutal Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, compliments of American taxpayers. Panama must no longer have been profitable for the United States.

The question in Bush’s administration that continued to rear its ugly head, though, was whether trade with China should have been conditional on whether China curbed its human rights abuses.

One argument that favored linking them was that: a country whose sociopathic leader ruled his people with fear and force and disregarded their health and welfare– would behave the same way– dishonestly– in business and trade.

Businesspeople in countries ruled by a dictator make a good living through the organized-crime tactics of bribery, racketeering, money laundering, etc. And low-level workers are always at risk for grave harm due to few or no health and safety laws. Yet imposing sanctions would be economically hurtful to both parties in some sectors.

So a trade agreement between or among nations is a microcosm of a political campaign (translation: propaganda war). The terms that are finally negotiated are always based on a barrage of anecdotal evidence. The specific industries that win or lose might or might not represent a significant sector of a country’s economy.

It’s an opportunity for the agreement’s signers to brag about (projected) job creation, the (projected) stimulation of domestic product purchases, and a (projected) significant resulting increase in wealth for their respective countries’ whole economy. According to them, everyone will live happily ever after with the trade agreement.

Attendant issues that might go unmentioned though, include the impact on labor unions, additional environmental pollution from the change in business practices, a numerical estimate of the rise in prices of specific products affected by additional tariffs (if any are imposed), and whether the signers or the constituents of the signers have any direct financial interests in the terms of the trade agreement (as did Kissinger late in his career, with regard to a U.S. / China joint venture).

Anyway, read the book to learn:

the details of the aforementioned nations’ leaders’ major power struggles that led to minor changes in policy (and more blustery talk than anything else)
of the propagandizing
of the conversational and arms-deals shenanigans, etc., plus
whether president Bill Clinton did any better than his predecessors at taking decisive action that would strike a balance among the complex political, economic, cultural and social issues surrounding the United States, China, Taiwan, the former Soviet Union and their neighbors in the diplomatic game.

A Fort of Nine Towers

The Book of the Week is “A Fort of Nine Towers, An Afghan Family Story” by Qais Akbar Omar, published in 2013.

As is well known, the Russians marched into Afghanistan in 1979. The resistance fighters were called the Mujahedin, the Holy Warriors. The Russians had advanced aerial bombs, while the Warriors had old hunting-guns. The Russians left in 1989, but continued to financially support the government until spring 1992; galloping inflation ensued.

The author and his growing family lived in Kabul, of which the Mujahedin then took control. Omar’s father and grandfather ran a lucrative Oriental carpet business. They lived in a multi-generational household, with large families of uncles, aunts and cousins.

At the time Omar began to experience the hardships of war, he was about eight years old. His elementary school stopped teaching the basics of evolution, and began to teach creationism instead. There was no more fear of stray bullets in the streets, but there was a food shortage. The following year, tribal infighting plagued the Mujahedin; rockets fired from above by the different tribes– all Muslim– started to kill people.

Omar’s grandfather’s resistance to change, anger at having his livelihood, property and material possessions stolen, and love of his homeland were largely responsible for his family’s precarious situation, and their traumatic experiences in the coming decades. He insisted the family stay in Afghanistan– to try to protect what they had. He was stripped of the fruits of his life’s work, anyway. Most of their community fled. Omar’s family obeyed the law of Islam by which the females and children obeyed the oldest male relatives.

As the year 1993 progressed and the violence worsened, schools closed and no one went outside for fear of getting hit by sniper bullets, or a rocket-propelled grenade or other weaponry.

In late spring, the declaration of a cease-fire prompted Omar’s father to temporarily evacuate the family from their home in a northwesterly direction over a mountainside to a more peaceful village. They were the only people in their area who had a car.

About four miles away, the closest family members who could fit in the car, were driven to and stayed at the quiet estate of the author’s father’s fabulously wealthy business partner. Until the war came to that neighborhood.

The author, as the oldest son in his immediate family, on a few occasions in the next few years, was invited to accompany his grandfather or his father in a return to their old property to see how it was doing, and perhaps to dig up the gold they had buried in the garden there before they left. Those were harrowing, emotionally and physically hurtful episodes with gruesome scenes and near-death experiences.

For, the war had turned illiterate young Muslim men into sociopathic sadists with weaponry. The hatred among different tribes knew no bounds. On the streets, ragged, begging children were used as decoys for hidden robbers who might also commit rape if passersby stopped to help.

“Panjshiris and Hazaras were supposed to stop launching the rockets at each other that had come from the Americans to be used by the Mujahedin against the Russians. But the Russians were defeated and long gone.”

In September 1996, a new tribe, the Taliban– supplied with weapons by Pakistan– was wreaking havoc in Kabul. Omar’s grandfather described them thusly: “They capture a village and torture people and club them to death, then afterwards ask the young boys to do the same to their parents. They tell the young boys that this will make a man of them.”

The Taliban held public executions of thieves, prostitutes, murderers and gays. They enforced their own draconian version of observance of Islam. After a while, though, people at least knew what to expect. The trains ran on time.

Read the book to learn how the author and his family survived in this extremely suspenseful, emotionally-charged cautionary tale whose moral is this: early evacuation of a region with a history of civil war, whose violence is flaring up again, is advisable.

Where the Wind Leads/The Fox Hunt

The Books of the Week are “Where the Wind Leads, A Memoir” by Vinh Chung With Tim Downs, published in 2014; “The Fox Hunt, A Refugee’s Memoir of Coming to America” by Mohammed Al Samawi, published in 2018.

Both authors told suspenseful, extremely extreme, long, complicated refugee horror stories, in which they had great good luck on several occasions, and in which certain people took tremendous risks by providing the authors with invaluable assistance that saved their lives.

Born in South Vietnam in December 1975, the author of the former book helpfully, briefly described his homeland’s history three decades before his birth.

The author’s family was Chinese– neither enemies nor friends of the French, Viet Minh, or Khmer Rouge. However, in the 1940’s, the author’s father’s family’s house in the Mekong Delta had been burned to the ground twice, anyway. There was a higher risk of a Viet Minh invasion in the French territory farther north, where the family moved.

As is well known, in the mid-1950’s the French were militarily defeated by the Viet Minh– Communists– and kicked out of their colony Indochina in Southeast Asia. Thereafter, Vietnam was split into north and south. Different ethnic groups migrated toward the side where they numbered in the majority: Communists, north; Catholics and Buddhists, south.

The Khmer Rouge, comprised of Cambodians, continued to ally with the French for decades. By the late 1950’s, the author’s father had become a draft dodger, fleeing to Cambodia to avoid having to fight against the Viet Minh. In 1960, Ho Chi Minh’s militia, the National Liberation Front, was attempting to reunite North and South Vietnam. The Viet Minh was renamed Viet Cong by the United States.

Over decades, the author’s maternal grandmother began a rice-processing business that flourished. By the mid-1970’s, it had a couple of mills, a fleet of trucks, warehouses, etc. It actually benefited from America’s Vietnam War.

The family matriarch hired a matchmaker to marry off her son (the author’s father), born in 1937. He was still sowing his wild oats in his late twenties. Traditionally, both prospects’ families went on a date with the prospects. Then they saw a fortune teller.

The author’s mother was the daughter of a Chinese servant girl of a wealthy household. When she moved to her husband’s house, she had to shop daily for the fast-growing multi-generational household, because they didn’t have a refrigerator. But, since she was expected to become a baby-maker in addition to all of her other responsibilities– she was permitted to hire a teenage nanny with every additional child.

The author’s birth made five. Three more were quickly added, while the author’s father’s mistress had four. The two major philosophies of the family’s culture were filial piety and ancestor worship. Living in the South, their religion combined aspects of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. That changed when the Viet Cong attacked the Mekong Delta. The author’s family’s life was disrupted forever, as their business and real and personal property were stolen.

Due to the Vietnam government’s war against the Chinese that started in February 1979, the ever-growing Chung family became “boat people” in June. Read the book to learn of the family’s ordeal, adjustment to a brand new life, and the author’s explanation for what gave rise to his own extraordinary achievements.

Born in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen in 1986, the author of the latter book helpfully, briefly described the recent history of his homeland.

In 1987, a Sunni-Muslim group named the Muslim Brotherhood formed another group, Hamas. They were supported by Saudi Arabia, southern Yemen, Iraq and another group that formed later, Al Qaeda. Their enemies were Shia Muslims, who are the majority in Iran and northern Yemen.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the author’s Shia-Muslim family lived in a peaceful neighborhood in Sana’a in northern Yemen, where everyone got along fine. He had two older and two younger siblings. His parents were trained as medical doctors; his prominent father worked for a military hospital.

Al Samawi’s parents believed in education, but were extremely devout Muslims. So his parents were thrilled when, as an adolescent, he donated all his lunch money to the Muslim Brotherhood when the group (who were pushing pan-Arabism at the time) visited his private, well-funded grammar school.

However, the teachers preached nonstop hatred against Jews and Christians. The Quran was their authority on that. Besides, they said Hitler was a hero for killing Jews, and the Jews’ books were “dirty, amoral, sinful, impure, demonic.”

In 2000, TV propaganda in Yemen claimed that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Israel was ordering the killing of innocent Palestinians, such as a young boy (who became a poster boy to incite Yemen), for no reason. The haters ignited in most Yemenis additional hatred against the Jews and Israel’s backers, such as the United States.

Eight years later, the author thought he was falling in love at university. But his filial piety put the kibosh on that. His mother did a background check on his prospective girlfriend, and found she wasn’t good enough for her son, and given their situations, she was probably a gold digger. His father also pressured him to end the budding relationship, by offering him a car and a job if his parents could fulfill the traditional Muslim route of choosing a bride for him. He caved in to their browbeating.

However, the next chapter in the author’s life proved to be most educational. He met an inspirational British instructor at his English-language school. Surprisingly, the author’s parents were allowing their son to study English. Al Samawi and his teacher exchanged gifts (the Quran and the Bible, respectively) to try to proselytize the other one. Each dogmatically believed that his own religion was the only right one to practice, else they would go to hell upon their deaths. Then a funny thing happened.

The teacher horrified Al Samawi by telling him he’d been hoodwinked– Al Samawi had unknowingly been reading the (Jewish!) Old Testament, having started at the beginning of the book. The stories’ morals and precepts were largely similar to those in the Quran(!)

In the next several years, Al Samawi became sufficiently open-minded to try to clear up his own confusion between what he’d been taught by his parents and Yemen’s culture, and what he was learning on Facebook and from his jobs at cross-cultural peacemaking organizations and international aid organizations.

From the start of Yemen’s religious civil war in 2015, Al Samawi found himself in a life-threatening, harrowing situation for several months. In one particular instance, he wrote, “Thirty minutes later, I jumped in the back of the black sedan. I didn’t call my mom. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t pay the hotel.”

Read the book to learn the details of how Al Samawi’s friends in high places went to extraordinary lengths to change his fate, through thrilling plot twists and turns.

Freedom At Midnight

The Book of the Week is “Freedom At Midnight” by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre, published in 1975.

In August 1946, Muslims filled the streets in Calcutta, agitating for an independent nation of their own, presumably to be named Pakistan. Six thousand people died in that one episode of unrest. Many, many more would, in the next two and a half turbulent years.

Some journalists would feature the following information more prominently than the above: “Golf was introduced in Calcutta in 1829… No golf bag was considered more elegant on those courses than one made of an elephant’s penis, provided of course, that its owner had shot the beast himself.”

Anyway, as is well known, India has had a long history of violence among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Through the decades, various place-names have triggered traumatic memories of copious arson, bombs, bloodshed and atrocities in regions including but far from limited to: Amritsar, the Punjab, Lahore, Peshawar, Kashmir, and New Delhi.

The British have had a long history of encouraging jealousies and hostilities among the different religious and ethnic groups in India so as to prevent them from forming a united nation.

The authors of this book provided horribly confusing totals of the different populations. They wrote that in 1947, India had three hundred million Hindus and one hundred million Muslims, and “… the contested state of four hundred million human beings…” In two other places, they wrote that the Punjab had two million Sikhs, and “The six million Sikhs to whom… they represented only two percent of India’s population…”

In another section,”He [Mohammed Ali Jinnah] had to tell India’s ninety million Muslims of the ‘momentous decision’ to create an Islamic state…” Still elsewhere, all of India allegedly held 275 million Hindus, fifty million Muslims, seven million Christians, six million Sikhs, one hundred thousand Parsis and 24,000 Jews.

Regardless, from the 1920’s through the 1940’s, a man named Gandhi acquired sufficient psychological power over his followers– fervent believers in their respective religions– to momentarily stop killing each other and work toward the common goal of convincing the British government that it was time to give up its colony of India.

Gandhi was able to work his magic because his incredible self-control showed him to be no hypocrite (according to his crack public relations team). He took the action of a true activist— risking his life in fasting (and seriously endangering his health) practicing what he preached (according to his crack public relations team).

Nevertheless, even Gandhi could not come up with a less acrimonious plan– to allow India to evolve as a nation via dividing the peoples who couldn’t live together– than partition. Arguably, he merely postponed the deaths, rather than saved the lives of the different tribes hellbent on eliminating their enemies. India’s caste system’s abusive hierarchy meant that, other than willful violence, the causes of hundreds of thousands of deaths included starvation, disease and severe weather.

However, giving Muslims their own state would mean allocating land in India to Pakistan (with a partition), that would need to be vacated by millions of Sikhs and Hindus, while land in the new India would need to be vacated by Muslims. Those who found themselves in hostile territory– out of fear, were compelled to migrate to where they would number among the majority in their communities.

The division of India into two sovereign states was like the vivisection of Siamese twins– vital organs would be mutilated in the process. Rice, jute, cotton, wheat, barley, corn and sugar cane were grown in one prospective country, but the means of growing, processing or transporting them for export, in the form of irrigation, railroads and highways was contained in the other prospective country.

Louis Mountbatten was the British government official appointed to oversee the process of converting India from a colony of Great Britain to two independent nations. He had a thankless, impossible job.

For, in addition to the complex religious, economic and political considerations involved, there were royal families ruled by maharajahs (of all different religions) to contend with; 565 administrations of them, to be exact. They lived high on the hog, and weren’t keen to relinquish their precious stones, elephants, private railway cars, Rolls Royces, etc. Some even had their own armies– yet another wrench in the works.

Mountbatten thought the least painful plan was to keep India and Pakistan as holdings of the United Kingdom. He decided that midnight of August 15, 1947 was to be the witching hour– when the partition would take effect. Astrologers, who were all the rage in India then, were quite shaken by that decision because by their calculations, that day was bad luck and another day should have been chosen.

On another topic, the new India and Pakistan had to have separate armies. The current Indian army was comprised of the cream of the crop of Sandhurst graduates, whose costs were low, pay was high, and who engaged in leisure pursuits of the wealthy– polo, cricket, pigsticking, shooting, hockey, hunting with hounds, and fishing. However, if a soldier who chose the Indian Army, happened to live in the future Pakistan, he was forced to either join the Pakistani army, or abandon his property and move away from his family.

The way Pakistan’s geographical borders were established was accomplished via an unbiased redistricting process, of sorts. Mountbatten appointed an attorney who knew nothing about India’s ethnic and religious groups, whose job was to pore over scads of population data and maps of the region, and indiscriminately divide it up.

Unjust division of families and real estate was bound to happen, but it was inadvertent. Curiously, “All of Punjab’s jails wound up in Pakistan. So too did its unique insane asylum.”

Read the book to learn how the major leaders warded off anarchy during the independence processes; how Gandhi quelled hostilities at least temporarily in Calcutta on Pakistan’s birthday; what transpired in connection with the Hindu (!) terrorist group who had it in for Gandhi (who was Hindu); and the details of the transposition of the “wretched refugees” (hint– 800,000 refugees in the Punjab [alone(!)] constituted “… a caravan almost mind-numbing in dimension… as though all of Boston, every man, woman and child [that’s not including animals– bullocks, buffaloes, camels, horses, ponies, sheep, etc.] in the city in 1947, had been forced by some prodigious tragedy to flee on foot to New York.”).

Stars Between the Sun and the Moon – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Stars Between the Sun and the Moon, One Woman’s Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom” by Lucia Jang and Susan McClelland, published in 2014.

After the Korean War, the Communist Party of North Korea oppressed business owners– who were considered evil capitalists, but praised farmers and peasants– who were considered virtuous; they served the Party.

Adults were forced to attend self-criticism meetings every Saturday morning. The meeting leaders punished them by making them stand up against the wall while others stared at them.

North Korean leader Kim Il-sung dictated that the traditional food eaten on August 15– his birthday– was rice cakes. However, the author’s family couldn’t afford to buy rice cakes. But– he also generously provided a pork ration for one person, to all households.

Jang was born in the early 1970’s. Her family was so poverty-stricken that she had no toys, no books, nothing. Finally, at seven years old when she began to attend school, she was thrilled to have a few possessions of her own: garments, pencils and a backpack. At school, the author and her classmates praised the “great father and eternal president” every morning. Every one of them had his photo of him on their wall at home.

Around the time she started school, Jang and her mother went to a theater for the first time. They saw a movie written by their fearless leader, Kim il-sung. Of course, it ended happily because the peasants conquered the landlords.

During the months of May, September and October, teenagers were sent to the countryside to help with planting and harvesting. The author was literally starving because she lived with a host family or in a dorm where she got even less food than she did at home. But Jang accepted the fact that the nation’s leader and his son were fat because they needed the most energy to take care of the North Korean people.

Traditionally, Jang’s parents were to choose her spouse. Her marital value was greatly diminished because both of her parents had had (political) Party trouble. Nevertheless, having gotten pregnant, she broke tradition.

In July 1994 when Kim il-sung died, the nation got a ten-day mourning period. Jang grieved as though her own father had died.

Read the book to learn of the horrible experiences (which became cyclical after a while) of the author due to various factors, including the environment into which she was born, her culture, gender, lack of education and the circumstances of her generation; and what led to the radical change in her situation.

The Most Wanted Man in China

The Book of the Week is “The Most Wanted Man in China, My Journey From Scientist to Enemy of the State” by Fang Lizhi, translated by Perry Link, published in 2016. Despite its sensationalist title, this volume aptly described the unusual personal account of a Chinese dissident who was fortunate to receive minimal (but still emotionally wrenching) punishment for his “crimes” in an oppressive regime. Under that regime, there were millions of deaths due to famine and suicides.

Born in Beijing, China in 1936, Fang was the second-oldest of six siblings. As a business owner, Fang’s grandfather exploited his employees, according to the Marxist doctrine forced down the throats of the Chinese people. Therefore, when Fang joined the Communist Party for the first time in June 1955, he was compelled to denounce his late grandfather.

At university, Fang began to rebel against the robotic, rote-learning curriculum. Having developed a passion for tinkering with electronics and studying science at an early age, he asked why there wasn’t independent thinking. The authorities answered that only several sources of ideology (Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Engels and the Communist Party) had already discovered the absolute best way to think for the people, so no one need waste any more time on thinking for themselves.

Mao maintained that socialism was the best economic system, but admitted that there were three imperfections with it: “subjectivism, bureaucratism and factionalism.” Mao encountered a big problem when university students started to search for why. By using reason, logic, science and independent thinking, followers of a leader cannot help but question the leader. As an absolute ruler, Mao could not abide that.

Mao thus used four techniques of Communist dictators to maintain his power. The first was to label only 5% of the people as “rightists” and dangerous enemies. This way, the majority of Chinese people would feel threatened, so he could crush everyone like bugs through fear and force. The second was to falsely accuse them of being anti-Party and anti-socialist. [In the United States, a dictatorial president might label people “unpatriotic”].

Thirdly, Mao had his minions behave like tattletales in publicly criticizing the small groups (pairs, even) of closet rightists. Finally, the authorities organized self-criticism groups to foster group-think and herd-mentality to denounce everyone’s every transgression. Because– people feel more comfortable engaging in group-bullying than individually attacking others.

Fang became a teaching assistant at the University of Peking, until December 1957, when he was reassigned to do farm work– hard manual labor– in a rural area. He was forced to live far away from his girlfriend and later, wife and kids, over the course of about twenty years.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Fang was alternately exiled to rural areas, and returned to resume his primary career at a university, engaging in both teaching and research in nuclear physics, and later, materials science and laser physics. Ironically, Fang acquired a variety of physical skills and valuable experience in all different kinds of workplaces, such as a railroad, coalmine, pig farm, water-well, steel mill, vinyl and brick factories, tunnels, etc.

Mao ordered dissidents to be geographically separated from their loved ones, so as to: impose psychological trauma on the people, make it difficult for them to form alliances with the like-minded, and band together to fight his oppressive regime. Fang was in a special category because he possessed rare expertise in academia. So for a few months in mid-1969, he was detained with other scientists and was pumped with Mao’s ideology for hours every day.

But prior to that, in his twenties, even Fang had been ideologically brainwashed. In 1965, he thought he wanted to study in the Soviet Union because he liked its brand of socialism. He was impressed that the Soviets were ahead of the Americans in the space race.

Until he started traveling internationally, even Fang, a well-educated physicist, lived in an insular society that limited his knowledge of the rest of the world. He read scientific journals from other countries, but had no real understanding of political ideologies or cultures other than his own.

Fang lost respect for the Chinese authorities beginning in 1967, when he heard rumors that Mao’s closest political associates were just a bunch of mean, petty, vengeful people jockeying for power. Currently, in the United States, such people who are also super-wealthy, might adopt a litigious lifestyle, which is extremely expensive, but effective in intimidating and vanquishing enemies.

Mao launched a new nationwide political campaign every time the old one started to backfire on him. For example, in the mid-1970’s, “Denunciations of the wrong kind of astronomy topped the agendas, but in order to do that, someone had to read the texts of the papers that were going to be denounced. So real astronomy spread.” At least the Chinese backed up their denunciations with evidence.

In 21st century America, attention whoredom has reached new heights. For, few media commentators actually read the book, see the movie or know much about the report or study they denounce. They simply play a game of “telephone” and the tabloid-believing public eats it up. Oftentimes, it’s just a non-story, hysterically reported.

The commentators are so desperate for attention or to put their two cents in with no independent thinking that they even shamelessly admit to their own laziness or ignorance in not doing their homework.

Their audience is seeking confirmation of what it already believes, so no convincing is necessary. Further, when evidence is presented, the data are cherry-picked with weaselly language in oversimplified apples-to-oranges comparisons. So it’s as though the media have already done the thinking for the American masses.

So why are Americans so politically dogmatic on one side or the other? How are the media imposing this thought-control? It’s not through fear or force (!)

By nature people are lazy. Nowadays, they’ll get information from the most accessible sources–TV, radio or their electronic toy (phone). Those sources convey information concocted by attention whores or entertainers or profit-seekers with a political agenda. Not scholars who seek out original sources and comprehensively present both sides of an issue. This has almost always been the case in the most recent century, but the difference today is in the quality of the information presented.

The information is mostly opinions and when it isn’t, the audience can’t tell whether it’s propaganda. For, journalism verification standards have been eliminated. There used to be fact-checking departments and ethics guidelines to avoid conflicts of interest– at reputable publications and broadcasting and cable communications companies. No more.

Further, many media commentators who have no law degrees express their opinions on legal issues. But practicing lawyers are more likely to know what they’re talking about when explaining the issues. Sadly, it appears that this ignorant state of affairs isn’t going to change anytime soon.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Fang’s life and work (from the “horse’s mouth”), and whether much changed in China with Mao’s successor.

Iron and Silk

The Book of the Week is “Iron and Silk” by Mark Salzman, published in 1986. This short paperback reveals the culture of Changsha, capital of Hunan province in China, in the early 1980’s through the eyes of the then-22 year old American author.

Salzman traveled to the city of Changsha, population approximately one million, to teach English for two years, beginning in the summer of 1982. Living conditions were primitive, as were the educational resources for the author’s students (aspiring doctors) where he taught– Hunan Medical College.

The author’s boss, who roomed with her housekeeper, lived in a tiny, un-air-conditioned apartment with bare cement walls and floors, and one bare light bulb per room. She behaved like a mother-figure toward him, critiquing his behavior and clothing.

The school had only one copy machine and only one individual was empowered to use it; in his absence, documents were hand-written over again. The absence of telephones meant people visited each other personally anytime.

Read the book to learn more about the author’s adventures with Chinese bureaucracy, censorship, and how he sharpened his martial arts and calligraphy skills during his teaching stint.

Butterfly in the Rain

The Book of the Week is “Butterfly in the Rain, The 1927 Abduction and Murder of Marion Parker” by James L. Neibaur, published in 2016. This short ebook recounts a gruesome crime and the aftermath, that occurred in late 1927 in Los Angeles, California.

The fame of this sensational case was comparable to that of O.J. Simpson’s. However, the newspaper, rather than television, was the medium through which the nation was riveted by the unfolding story. The case involved a child and plenty of controversy. Read the book to learn the details.

Fu-Go

The Book of the Week is “Fu-Go” by Ross Coen, published in 2014. This book describes the precursor to modern-day drones.

During WWII, extensive research in meteorology, materials science, engineering, physics and statistics was required to send the explosives-laden hot-air balloons about 6,000 miles from Japan to America. In 1942, the Japanese began the campaign with the goals of boosting its own national morale and taking a swipe at its enemy; more specifically, to start forest fires in the Western United States, and create terror among American civilians. This would prompt America to divert its war resources to the quell the distraction. Japan lacked the funds to continue this initiative until late 1944.

The parachutes portion was made of paper from blackberry trees, and pasted together by thousands of middle school and high school girls whose education had lapsed due to the war. They performed unhealthy manual labor at a school gym and a factory. Miraculously, with significant improvement in balloon design, a few hundred of the drones landed in Washington state, Idaho, California and Montana in rural areas. There was controversy over whether to warn civilians of the danger, as this might tell the Japanese how well its campaign was working, and reveal the flaws in its system. American authorities met with the Canadian government, and pressured the media into keeping silent for a long time.

Read the book to learn whether Japan achieved its goals with this seemingly minor yet creative plan of attack.