Category: History – U.S. – 21st Century

Peace

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The Book of the Week is “Peace, the biography of a symbol (sic)” by ken kolsbun with michael s. sweeney (sic) published in 2008. This colorful volume described how a symbol has gone viral worldwide. That symbol is an instantaneous message that its bearer is anti-nuclear, anti-war and / or anti-discrimination.

English artist Gerald Holtom invented and mass-produced the “peace sign” (hereinafter abbreviated ps; consisting of a circle bisected by a vertical line, and on the bottom half, an upside-down “v”), to be attached to picket signs for a 1958 anti-nuclear-weapons march in Britain. Thereafter, the ps was used on what became all sorts of memorabilia, repeatedly, internationally in different kinds of protests.

After WWII, the governments of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. brainwashed many of their citizens into thinking that the other nation (the enemy (!)) would use nuclear weapons to make war. According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, Bibliography and index), beginning in December 1960, Bradford Lyttle led ps-displaying members of the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA)– (pacifists urging American and Soviet nuclear disarmament) in a march from San Francisco to New York City, through Western Europe, that ended in Moscow in October 1961.

In November 1961, the group Women Strike for Peace (WSP; a spinoff of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) was afraid that usage of nuclear weapons at the newly constructed Berlin Wall would trigger more widespread hostilities and globally cause slow, painful deaths due to cancer. So they led about 50,000 ps-bearing females (many of whom had children) to go on strike; alpha males with hubris syndrome were the perpetrators of massively destructive war tools, after all.

In autumn 1963, freedom walkers teamed up with peace walkers to express their displeasure with violations of their civil rights, and nuclear weapons, through marching from Quebec to Cuba. Everyone wore the ps. Folk singer Pete Seeger joined in the activism. He said, “Songs are sneaky things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells.”

Read the photo-filled book to learn about numerous other people whose messaging helped spur the peace sign’s popularity through countless protests.

Flipped

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The Book of the Week is “Flipped, How Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican Power” by Greg Bluestein, published in 2022.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography), in the 2010’s, a Republican candidate in Georgia would better their chances of getting elected when they were on Fox News all the time and became a darling of hard-right conservatives.

Former president Barack Obama said manufacturing and mining jobs weren’t coming back. Former president Donald Trump contradicted him, saying the coal industry would be returning (but he was wrong). Similarly, in 2017, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams told her opponent Stacey Evans, that a certain scholarship program wasn’t coming back. Significant funding that would assist financially challenged students was part of a bygone era in Georgia. Sadly, she was right. Nevertheless, a new Democrat political coalition in the state was on the rise.

For decades and decades well into the twentieth century, the Democrats, via gerrymandering, maintained a stranglehold on Georgia politics. The GOP implemented voter-suppression tricks in order to turn the tide, beginning in the 1990’s. In 2018, state election officials sent a postcard to voters telling them they were required to re-register to vote even if they changed residences within the same county in Georgia, or else they’d be ineligible to vote come election time. The ACLU put the kibosh on that with a lawsuit.

As is well known, the most recent decade saw especially vicious feuding between Democrats and Republicans in Georgia. A bunch of cliches apply to the campaigning environment:

Turnabout is fair play, but–two wrongs don’t make a right. And a pox on everyone’s house– because an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Two other cliches apply in politics, too: A man is known by the company he keeps, and when you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.

When former vice-president Al Gore was campaigning for president in 2000, he cringed when former president Bill Clinton insisted on helping him campaign by making appearances and endorsing him. Gore’s association with Clinton was not a good look anymore. Similarly, messaging of former president Trump was unwelcome during the Georgia runoff campaigns between Democrat and Republican senate candidates at the end of 2020. The Democrats enjoyed the delicious irony that their side was helped when voters (who would have voted for the GOP candidates) were told by Trump to stay home and not vote in revenge for the “rigged” presidential election.

One theme the author also could not help but mention that involved the state of Georgia, was the recently concluded but contested, presidential election. Lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan appeared on CNN and Fox News shortly after election day in November 2020 to “… invite Georgians who had evidence of legitimate voter fraud to come forward. None could do so.” Governor Brian Kemp also stood pat and did the right thing, because the fact was, “State lawmakers can’t retroactively change election law after a vote to help a candidate [such as Trump].”

Read the book to learn of: the candidates’ campaigns, conflicts and confrontations, and their many attendant issues, such as GOP senate candidate Kelly Loeffler’s part ownership of a WNBA team and the suspicious timing of her stock transactions; the ambivalence of most GOP candidates in uttering anything negative about Trump lest they lose votes; and much more.

Arms and the Dudes

The Book of the Week is “Arms and the Dudes, How Three Stoners From Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History” by Guy Lawson, published in 2015.

In summer 2004, when he was eighteen years old, the Orthodox-Jewish high school dropout, pothead and pathological liar Efraim Diveroli became passionate about the lucrative field of supplying firearms to the U.S. military. He had been mentored by his father and uncle on contracting with the U.S. government, through their businesses. There was one particular website where he could see all the needs for weaponry for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Diveroli worked around the clock combing the website’s classified ads for competitive-bidding contracts he thought he could win, and making phone calls to contacts he made to find suppliers from whom to purchase arms, to sell and deliver, via planes and / or trucks to the U.S. military on-location. He also needed lenders to finance the deals, as he had to make down-payments of tens of thousands of dollars he didn’t have, when he was finally awarded a bid.

In early 2005, the battles in Iraq between Shiites and Sunnis became even more fierce, resulting in more roadside bombings, kidnappings, sniper incidents and ambushes. Thus, there occurred an increase in demand for rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47’s (or their equivalents; the whole world was already full of them– but apparently still not full enough), ammunition for them, and missiles.

This resulted in an even bigger spike in the number of bribes, kickbacks and Swiss bank accounts among war profiteers. Diveroli also benefited from the high turnover of inexperienced procurement officers in Iraq. Every few years, he attended war-weaponry trade shows, such as Eurosatory in 2006 in Paris, and the International Defence Exhibition and Conference in 2007 in Abu Dhabi.

The State Department rated resellers such as Diveroli pursuant to their reputations for satisfaction in completing contracts, similar to the way eBay does. Eventually, the Department allegedly compiled a “watch list” of resellers (which included a lot of offshore and shell companies) with whom the Department was supposed to exercise caution in doing business. Diveroli’s company’s name (AEY) was on that list, but background checks were (accidentally-on-purpose) sloppy or non-existent, because the shortages of weaponry and ammunition in Afghanistan were so severe.

Unsurprisingly, there was inter-agency rivalry between the State Department and Defense Department (run by the bureaucrats in the Pentagon). When Congress authorized the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security through a long, complicated document, one little phrase gave the Defense Department unlimited powers: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law.”

To boot, the Pentagon used its new hegemony to wreak capricious vengeance on people who gave it bad publicity for its misdeeds and embarrassed it; there was no honor among thieves in the cut-throat war-weaponry business. One specific overzealous individual at yet another agency, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), helped with the Pentagon’s dirty work.

In May 2007, the main plot of a suspenseful saga started when Diveroli’s two friends (also only in their twenties) from grade-school assisted him with a $300 million (!) contract (that had an interesting origin) with the Department of Defense.

Unfortunately, the trio encountered numerous obstacles in trying to complete the contract and get their money. For one, the shipment of arms and ammunition that was supposed to go from Albania to Kabul was held up at an airport in Kyrgyzstan on a legal technicality. Two, an irresponsible article in the New York Times completely botched up the real story, prompting the Department of Justice to get involved.

Read the book to learn the rest, and what became of the participants (which included a wayward Albanian official, and an Albanian-American investment banker, among other pesky characters).