History – Various Lands – education and deconstruction.com

Chasing Hope

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Chasing Hope, A Reporter’s Life” by Nicholas Kristof (not to be confused with Bill Kristol!), published in 2024.

In 1959 the author was born in a lower middle-class rural area in Oregon, where boys saw violence as an admirable trait to be used to used to achieve frontier justice. Although his neighborhood was rife with alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence and crime, Kristof grew up in a stable, intellectual, loving home environment. That coould be why, as a teenager, he chose to become a journalist who revealed the world’s ugliness– to try to reduce it.

Kristof witnessed martial law in Poland and China, and the nature of the heroin trade in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While in Congo (formerly Zaire) he heard firsthand about the atrocities and genocide in Rwanda. He wrote stories on the dictatorships and crushing oppression in North Korea, Venezuela, Turkmenistan and many other places.

After a few decades of reporting on human rights abuses, he took a break to run for office. Professionals told him to change his language, so that “gun control” became “gun safety” and “inequality” became “opportunity.” To be fair, he admitted that Portland had serious problems that were caused by Democrats because it was mostly Democrats who governed it.

But the bottom line for him was, “What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and that’s achieved not by waving fists and shouting slogans but by a painstaking process of following evidence, building coalitions and solving problems.”

Read the book to learn much more about Kristof’s life and global times.

Merkel’s Law

The Book of the Week is “Merkel’s Law, Widsom From the Woman Who Led the Free World” by Melissa Eddy, published in 2024.

This short, sloppily edited, chronologically disorganized, redundant volume described the highlights of the decades-long (beginning at the dawn of the 1990’s) political career of Angela Merkel in Germany.

As much as the capitalist Americans scream “socialist!” at many aspects of the culture of Europeans, the latter are superior in gender equality! In approximately the last fifty years, several females have served as world leaders; Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir among them. But the United States has yet to elect a female president.

Interestingly, East Germany had a bigger selection of daycare centers than did West Germany at the time of this book’s writing. This meant a larger percentage of eastern German women (on whom the burden still largely falls to raise children and do housework) than otherwise, could have a career if they chose. It is still a myth that women can have it all, even in industrialized countries.

Additionally, the media pestered Merkel about various issues they wouldn’t dare have raised if she had been a male. They criticized her fashion choices. They treated her public appearances as a beauty contest. But Merkel did have a unique perspective, having grown up in East Germany under the yoke of Communism. She witnessed poor talent deployment under the crushingly oppressive system. Everyone was guaranteed a job, but there was wasted talent galore.

One behavior Merkel exhibited, for which a few male politicians have become known, was delaying making decisions until the last possible moment. There might have been various time-sensitive factors at work when she finally announced she was going to run for a fourth term as chancellor of Germany, that would begin in 2017. One factor included waiting to see whether American voters elected Donald Trump for president in 2016. Another was the possible influence outgoing American president Barack Obama had on her to run again.

On the other hand, making people wait is a control-issue. There is power in keeping information to oneself. The media has to monitor when an announcement is going to be made, and keeping viewers in suspense generates ratings.

Two major crises Merkel faced during her chancellorship, for which her reactions were lambasted– consisted of the overwhelming number of Syrian refugees coming into Germany beginning in the 2010’s, and the oversight of energy sources for Germany. Regarding the latter, Merkel chose to purchase more natural gas and stopped the use of nuclear energy after Japan became a cancer cluster from radiation. Japan suffered a meltdown of its nuclear plants from an earthquake and tsunami in spring 2011.

Many Germans thought Merkel sold her soul to the Russians on the energy front. However, all world leaders must make wrenching decisions for their nations in connection with goods and services (especially energy!), environmental friendliness (or not), economics, and diplomatic relations, because all kinds of issues are all interrelated and cannot be divorced from one another.

Nevertheless, the decisions of elected public servants tend to be selfish, as they always have their eye on reelection or their legacy. In a democratic country, the one exception is when a dictatorial leader’s decisions are all selfish– if they are in their last term due to term limits and they don’t care about their legacy.

Read the book to learn about Merkel’s career trials and tribulations, her strengths and weaknesses, and her legacy.

Kissinger

The Book of the Week is “Kissinger, A Biography” by Walter Isaacson, published in 2005.

Kissinger was born in May 1923 in an eastern suburb of Nuremberg. His ancestors came from Bavaria. When he was in his teens, his family arrived in America. Toward the end of WWII, Kissinger served in the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence division, engaging in diplomacy to de-Nazify a whole region of suburbs in Germany.

In 1951, Kissinger recruited tens of foreign-nationals and licensed-professionals for the Harvard International Seminar– a summer multi-disciplinary program featuring lectures and field trips that was later revealed to be a front for the CIA. Kissinger amassed a vast social network from the program. He had superior social-climbing skills, appealing to his betters (who were just as egotistical as he was) with flattery, but fiercely competing with colleagues of status equal to his own.

Kissinger always argued that injustice and order (a benign dictator) was preferable to justice and disorder (a revolutionary environment or anarchy) in a nation. He felt the purpose of a summit wasn’t to get a monstrously brutal leader to change his ways, but rather, to: reassure allies, get on the good side of neutral nations and show the world one’s own civility. Yet he was always listening to all sides in a debate in order to get them to agree with him.

Kissinger achieved full tenure at Harvard University in 1962. Less than a decade later, he served as a very close aide to president Richard Nixon. Just as parties are thrown to annoy those who aren’t invited, at the dawn of the 1970’s, the Nixon White House consisted of socially manipulative cliques who kept one another out of the loop of their own furtive meetings, memos and covert operations. The Nixon camp loved secrecy and tried to stop information from leaking to the press with their “plumbers.”

The president ordered that a total of seventeen secret FBI wiretaps be placed on the home telephones of high-level employees of his administration for as long as nearly two years for some, beginning in 1969. In 1973, when the media exposed this spying operation, Nixon claimed he alone authorized it. But Kissinger– a drama queen– had incited the emotional environment that led Nixon and his subordinates to commit the crimes they did.

In 1971, Kissinger participated in clandestine meetings with the Chinese government to invite trade with the United States, and change China’s mind on its claim on Taiwan. The U.S. was reducing its military presence in Vietnam, and saw that the Chinese and Soviets weren’t getting along. Thus, extending an olive branch to China was a supposedly geopolitically brilliant move on Nixon’s part.

If America got friendly with the Chinese (contradicting Nixon’s previously vicious anti-Communist stance), and negotiated arms reductions with the Soviets– America would stave off nuclear war with them, further weaken the alliance between China and the U.S.S.R., and get an economic boost.

China’s officials began the talks by requesting that the Americans tell them the issues thought to be deal-breakers. This saved a lot of time, as the Chinese considered Taiwan a minor issue and weren’t going to budge on it. They both secretly used Pakistan as an intermediate messenger. As a result, the Soviets got friendly with India. That turned into a cluster screw-up.

Kissinger could dish it out but he couldn’t take it. He became infuriated when Nixon’s aide, John Ehrlichman told him that a spy ring had been stealing documents from his office and leaking them to the press. Kissinger’s self-delusion was most cringeworthy on Vietnam. He rationalized the war’s aims, attempting to persuade ordinary Americans that the decade-long colossal human waste wasn’t the result of several alpha males’ stubborn insistence on America’s involvement (plus in Cambodia and Laos). In other words, Kissinger couldn’t admit that at least hundreds of thousands of people died for nothing.

One Bertrand Russell quote in connection therewith bears repeating:

“There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.”

There is nothing new under the sun. The media flip-flopped insofar as their stories on Kissinger brought them ratings and sold newspapers. In mid-October 1972, less than a month before Nixon’s reelection day, the New York Times and Newsweek celebrated Kissinger as he claimed to have achieved agreement on a peace treaty with North Vietnam from his confidential peace talks in Paris. He himself reveled in the glory of saving the world.

In December 1972, the seasoned propagandists turned around and labeled Kissinger a war criminal (which they should have been doing all along!) after he was found to have completely excluded the South Vietnamese leader from the agreement-announcement. Kissinger pretended to be outraged that Nguyen Van Thieu refused to sign the treaty. But the treaty’s wording hadn’t said what Van Thieu had agreed to.

Kissinger used the emotionally-charged, last-minute discord as an excuse to urge Nixon to order the resumption of America’s bombing of the North Vietnam capital Hanoi, and Nixon did. More than a thousand additional U.S. servicemen and civilians lost to history, died needlessly. Not unbelievably, given the fallibility and gullibility of human beings, in autumn 1973, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Peace prize.

In sum, Henry Kissinger achieved name-recognition in numerous communities of American life, in the following order: academia, presidential politics, foreign affairs, Hollywood, big business, and jet-set society.

As an aside, Donald Trump achieved name-recognition in the following, in the following order: big business (as a matter of inheritance), jet-set society, Hollywood, and then presidential politics. He hasn’t been all that competent in foreign affairs and academia, though.

Additionally, Trump bears many similarities to Nixon. Trump:

has a sidekick in Elon Musk as Nixon had a sidekick in Kissinger.
alternates between deep insecurities and megalomania.
appoints largely white alpha males in the White House (with a few white females thrown in).
was directly or indirectly responsible for sending to jail– almost every legally-troubled individual with whom he associated.
has a major goal of wreaking vengeance on his political enemies, using hush money when necessary.
claims attorney-client relationship and executive-privilege to weasel out of legal trouble.
projects the image of the outsider, and excessively exhibited mean-of-spirit, obnoxious behavior, but adjusted his image to become somewhat like the “new” Nixon in order to make a comeback.

It seems that Trump’s inauguration is going to be like the 1945 Yalta and 2024 Davos conferences. On steroids. Here’s a little song about the situation.

INAUGURATION

sung to the tune of “Revolution” with apologies to the members of The Beatles, and their estates, and whomever else the rights may concern.

Trump’s gonna have an in-au-gu-RA-tion,
well, you know,
in 2017 he insulted the world.

It’s a see-and-be-seen cel-e-BRA-tion,
well, you know,
his frat boys will rule the WO-ORLD.

And if he goes through with DE-portations,
he’d have to kick his own family OUT.

You know he used to be,
all-fight, all-fight, all fight.

He says he’s got resolutions,
well, you know,
it’s called Project 2025.

Billionaires make contributions,
well, you know,
they’re keeping Trump’s image a-LIVE.

Big tech and media have money for people
who SPREAD around hate.
For a grown-up Vance,
we’ll just have to WAIT.

And you know he used to be,
all-fight, all-fight, all-fight.

Trump gets to interpret the Consti-TU-tion,
well, you know,
he owns most of the Supreme-COURT.

It WAS a respected insti-TU-tion,
well, you know,
He’ll pardon THEM as a last resort.

He’s getting friendlier with the world’s tyrants NOW.
Don’t worry,
he’s losing his mind, anyHOW.

And you know he used to be,
all-fight, all fight, all fight,
all-fight, all fight, all fight,
all-fight, all fight, all fight,
all-fight, all FIGHT!

Anyway, read the book to learn much, much more about how Kissinger prolonged his name in history due to his self-absorbed attention whoredom; about how his dishonesty shaped America’s never-ending, extremely complex political, ideological, cultural and economic controversies over its “detente” versus “might-makes right” mentality with regard to the Soviet Union, Soviet Jewry, Israel, global trade, human rights, weapons stocks, neocons (the description of which was murky), the Portugal/Angola mess, etc.

Our Man

The Book of the Week is “Our Man, Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century” by George Packer, published in 2019.

“But he also helped smash up the last pieces of the postwar consensus, bringing viciousness and deception into the heart of government, making trust among people working for the same president impossible.”

Holbrooke, writing of Zbigniew Brzezinski– who sabotaged him during the presidency of Jimmy Carter

Born in April 1941 Holbrooke grew up in Scarsdale, a posh northern suburb of New York City. His high school classmate’s father was Dean Rusk, so he had a leg up in the foreign-policy social set of the United States.

As a junior diplomat, Holbrooke’s first major posting was to Saigon, Vietnam in June 1963. A few seasoned journalists there were reporting the truth, that the U.S. was already losing the war. But America’s governmental and military interagency rivalry (consisting of the usual power-struggling alpha males with hubris syndrome) put the kibosh on informed decision-making throughout the whole nine years of unconscionably wasteful military action.

In late summer 1963, Holbrooke was sent to the southernmost region of North Vietnam to try to capture the hearts and minds of rural villagers. He was kind of a hybrid neoliberal and neocon– providing food and materials to build infrastructure and establish schools, but also training the local militia to fight the Viet Cong (VC). Nevertheless, American soldiers were taught neither the Vietnamese language nor the locals’ culture. They were simply expected to be killing machines.

Holbrooke saw that the American military officers held fast to the mistaken notion that killing all the VC soldiers would rid the world of Communism. Those James-Bond wannabes threw around the term, “counterinsurgency.” But rather than killing no-name soldiers, the VC– supplied with weapons from China– sought to kill key military leaders; fighting smarter, not harder.

Holbrooke witnessed unspeakable horrors in his foreign service experiences. To salve his conscience for America’s shameful actions (and as a public relations move for Carter who would be running for reelection in 1980)– he visited and publicized the plight of refugees at a camp in Thailand. Also, he agreed with vice president Walter Mondale that countries should accept and provide more aid to refugees, at a Geneva conference in July 1979. In connection therewith, Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980.

After Vietnam, America was once bitten, twice shy when international pressure was brought to bear to take action in the Balkans at the dawn of the 1990’s. There were other reasons, too, why Bill Clinton’s presidential administration dragged its feet on going to peace talks and committing troops to NATO: Bosnia didn’t have fossil fuels of sufficient strategic value to the United States, the genocide was against Muslims, and Clinton knew that a military quagmire would hurt his reelection chances in 1996.

Eventually, Holbrooke, a bigger credit-grabber than anyone else, did take charge of the negotiations. When American military advisors died in the region, talks got serious. He believed the U.S. had to act as the world’s police force.

Read the book to learn: of the highlights of Holbrooke’s career, his trials and tribulations, love life and achievements; and why the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was vacant for a year: possibly showing how unnecessary America’s vote for world peace was even then (hint: the vacancy was a case of political retaliation). SIDENOTE: It’s time for a Reagan-style immigration bill.

Midcentury Journey

The Book of the Week is “MidCentury Journey” by William L. Shirer, published in a 1961 revised edition. During and after WWII, the author- who was born around 1904 in the United States– made visits periodically to Europe and the U.S. and recorded his political, cultural and social observations.

Shirer described the circumstances surrounding Hitler’s collaborators, including King Leopold of Belgium, Quisling of Norway, and Petain and Laval of France. Other leaders immediately caved in to Hitler– the king of Denmark and the queen of Netherlands. They hitched their stars to Hitler because they thought he was going to win the war and when he did, they would benefit.

The reasoning “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” was used to justify the August 1939 agreement between Hitler and Stalin. Both hated the Jews, so ordinary Germans and Russians could share in the hatred. But the relationship between two megalomaniac males with clashing egos doesn’t last long.

The Nazis were able to come to power and maintain it because they had firearms and social contagion. That is the case in corrupt, lawless countries. Money, lawyers and social connections are instruments of power in democratic countries. However, firearms can tear apart the social fabric, and when other conditions are present, can lead to corruption and lawlessness.

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the French government wasn’t as capitalistic as other nations. So most of its people suffered living standards lower than other nations’. In 1938, France was ill-prepared to fight another war. Its military leaders refused to believe that new military equipment such as tanks and planes were necessary for defense. Further, the country’s newspapers were in the pay of Hitler and Mussolini.

The French people were mad as hell at their government and other institutions. The Fascists and Communists took the opportunity to harness public outrage at the corruption and incompetence of the French government.

The French people developed black markets to keep their resources away from their Nazi occupiers, and to survive. They continued their black markets after the war because they were angry. The workers felt cheated by inflation and low pay. They committed tax evasion and refused to do public service in sacrificing for their countrymen, unlike other cultures who: volunteered, contributed raw materials, and suffered deprivations for the war effort. The French thus adopted Soviet-style Communism. Their inefficient, small businesses lingered for decades.

Toward the end of the war, reporter Leo Lania quoted a French editor, “Charles de Gaulle has become the leader of a party which rallies the traitors of yesterday, the grafters of today, and the Fascists of tomorrow under the cloak of patriotic slogans.” [Behold, “Make America Great Again.”]

Britain was so very economically devastated by the war in so many ways, that the Labour and Conservative parties cooperated in passing Communistic laws. In the second half of the 1940’s into the 1950’s, the government began to take care of the people by taking over the Bank of England, coal mining, transportation, civil aviation, international telecommunications and utilities. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as the tenor of the times warranted it!

In 1949, the British got national health insurance. The American Medical Association smeared this National Health Service as “socialized medicine” because if the idea were to be implemented in the U.S., it would threaten the autonomy and lavish livelihoods of American doctors.

During the McCarthy Era, a group of Americans passed judgement on the “Americanness” of others, trampling on their rights to due process. Shirer characterized Joe McCarthy as “… a second-rate Goebbels, possessing something of the German propaganda minister’s disregard for truth or fair play or elementary decency and his flair for the lowest forms of demagoguery, but lacking the German brain, which was above average.”

Prior to his mental decline, America’s current president-elect was the same way. Still is, and getting worse. Yet, now is a contradictory time in America, considering that free speech abounds (except for employers who make the signing of non-disclosure agreements a hiring condition!) and voter turnout is on the rise.

Nevertheless, the way Trump can prove his mental acuity, is to answer UNSCRIPTED questions at public appearances. In connection therewith, here’s a song about people who are collaborating with him: the angry, Democrat-bashing, overpaid noisemakers on the idiot box. Sometimes, one has to fight fire with fire and stoop to their level. We hate most in others what we hate in ourselves.

LIBERAL-PEOPLE HATERS

sung to the tune of “The Purple People Eater” with apologies to the Estate of Sheb Wooley and whomever else the rights may concern.

Well, I see the bullies lashing out at the Left.
Their candidates won. They’re not bereft.
Yet they continue to spew hate speech, you see.
They look like liberal-people haters to me.

It’s a mean, snide, low horde of lying liberal-people haters.
A mean, snide, low horde of lying liberal-people haters.
A mean, snide, low horde of lying liberal-people haters.
They sure look enraged to me. (Insecure?)

Well, they’re propagandists and they love ratings, you see.
Those whiny liberal-people haters, they don’t incite me.
Their greedy message they say in a voice so gruff:
We wouldn’t hate you if you watch us enough!

I heard those liberal-people haters’ nasty lines.
They’re ignorant people and they’re sure unkind.
Their behavior is considered uncool in this land.
They’re puppets controlled by thuggish Trump’s hand.

Well, bless your hearts, you childish tools, lying liberal-people haters.
You idiots all, undergrowed lying liberal-people haters.
Glaring, little-minded lying liberal-people haters.
What a cringeworthy scene.

And they rave like they’re three with a shrieking sound.
And they lash out, really flailing around.
It’s a smearing party with an ugly tune.
Sing a slur slur from phobias, boom, boom, boom.

Well, they’re not going away. That much, we know.
Unless the billionaires wisely spend our tax dough,
to revive democracy, reduce the red.
Lose those cocky fools and a prez-elect who’s brain-dead.

! ! !

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about WWII history and Shirer’s observations of it.

The Crash of Flight 3804

The Book of the Week is “The Crash of Flight 3804, A Lost Spy, A Daughter’s Quest, and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil” by Charlotte Dennett, published in 2020. In this fact-filled, chronologically disorganized volume, the author (a journalist, not a historian) elaborated on the actions that specific nations took, despite their announced motives, in trying to gain access to fossil fuels around several, but not all, energy-rich regions of the world.

The author described in great detail, certain historical events (perhaps those from sources to which she had easy access), and omitted or provided scant coverage on a huge number of others that were equally important. The book’s subhead should have specified, “…Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil and Gas around the Middle East, Mediterranean Sea, and Central Asia.”

The author could not possibly comprehensively cover the global history of fossil-fuels exploration in this one book. For, she also recounted her investigation into her father’s death, beginning in 1975. He was supposedly employed by an oil company, but was killed in a plane crash in 1947. He was actually working for the predecessor to the CIA.

Dennett wrote that in the 1800’s, budding empires sought to control the railroad industry, then in its infancy, in order to travel to faraway, uncharted or unclaimed territories sooner than otherwise. Most Americans have always been clueless as to the secret-goings-on of alleged religious movements that are part of America’s foreign-policy initiatives. Such operations aren’t covered in the media, except for kidnappings or murders. Through the decades, beginning in the twentieth century, spies acting on half of governments or international corporations, have masqueraded as missionaries around the world.

In the United States especially, think tanks produce reports that turn into propaganda campaigns that get leaked to the media. The “news” stories include calls to action, whose ulterior motive is helping America meet its energy needs. By the way, the Qatari publication, al-Jazeera is funded (possibly indirectly) by the United States, subject to the whims of the diplomatic community.

In the 1990’s, building oil pipelines in Central Asia became all the rage. Actually. After secretly supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, in August 1998, the United States changed its tune because Osama Bin Laden masterminded the bomb-attacks on the United States embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania. Bin Laden was incensed that Saudi Arabia was friendly with the United States. But how else was America supposed to meet its energy needs?

According to the author,”neoliberals” believe in providing economic aid to developing nations in order to bribe them to stop acting in ways that empower them, such as making WMD’s, or drilling for oil and gas in their own territories to meet their own energy needs. So when the United States’ neoliberals send aid, they are actually giving recipients fish instead of teaching them to fish. They rely on loans from the IMF and the World Bank, so unsurprisingly, they can’t break their cycle of dictatorship.

According to the author, “neocons” believe in providing military-related aid, and imposing their culture on the peoples in developing nations. As is well known, in the 1990’s and again in the single-digit 2000’s, the United States sent its troops into Iraq to maintain its access to and grab additional oil, and produce economic devastation while claiming to bring democracy to Iraq.

Thanks to globalization and the Internet, the world now knows who the major neoliberal and neocon offenders are. It’s not just the United States.

The author made inflammatory but factual statements about Israel. The reader would think she would fear getting smeared as “unpatriotic” and / or be the victim of retaliation from numerous people who have a vested interest in defending Israel.

As is extremely well-known, the least criticism of Israel (even if there is ample evidence the statements are true) elicits a knee-jerk, emotionally charged accusation of antisemitism from the Israel-defenders. Sure, there is plenty of hatred against Jews, but not all of the accusations of antisemitism are true.

One other propaganda-related issue: from 2022 into 2024, in America, media stories smeared gas-powered stove / oven units, arguing they were hazardous to one’s health. Could it be they were actually hazardous to the health of the strategic interests of the United States, in connection with the access-to-natural-gas-related mess in Syria of recent decades?

Anyway, read the book to learn (and become more cynical by the minute) about: a few different oil and gas pipelines whose actual construction was stalled; the secondary motive of the drafters of the Balfour Declaration (the first of course, was to establish a Jewish homeland; hint: in 1918, the U.S. figured out what the British were really doing in Palestine); why America arms and finances Saudi Arabia and Israel more than all of its other allies; why Gaza is such a valuable piece of real property; numerous rounds of “Curious things will happen when there’s dishonor among thieves” and other violence-inducing shenanigans plaguing certain energy-rich regions of the world.

Nightline

The Book of the Week is “Nightline, History in the Making and the Making of Television” by Ted Koppel and Kyle Gibson, published in 1996. The TV show Nightline, and this book were aired and published during the Reagan Era and president Bill Clinton’s first term, prior to the historical revisionism and 20 / 20 hindsight of even more modern times– during which politics is even more sophisticated. And when political awareness is higher than ever, due to social media’s pervasiveness.

In November 1979, Koppel began to host on ABC News at 11:30pm, what he thought was slated to be a temporary show, on the Iran hostage crisis. Thanks to videotape and satellites, he was able to feature a few different people who could talk to one another live, simultaneously, halfway around the world. By March 1980, this format had evolved into a news-analyzing talk-show called Nightline.

One of many moments in which viewers got to see major historical events happening right before their eyes, was the April 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in the state of Washington. In 1985, Koppel and his crew televised a week of episodes in South Africa on apartheid, in color, and black and white. Actually. Also in 1985, in simulcasting another set of shows in a violence-prone area, they commemorated the 10th anniversary of the U.S. pullout from Vietnam. “Le Du Tho and Henry Kissinger, co-winners of the 1971 Nobel Prize, together again for the first time.” In 1988, they went to Israel to cover the never-ending dispute between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Al Campanis had played baseball with Jackie Robinson in 1946. In April 1987, the former became a victim of cancel culture after he made some unpopular comments on Nightline. “The bigger problem for baseball was that Campanis had inadvertently revealed an ugly truth about racial attitudes in the front office, and firing him wasn’t going to end what was now a national debate.”

Read the book to learn of numerous other episodes of an educational late-night TV show that was obsolesced by the changing times in America.

My War

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “My War” by Andy Rooney, published in 1995. Rooney was born around 1920 in the Albany, NY area. He attended Colgate University. Influenced by a professor who was a devout Quaker and pacifist, Rooney joined a group in his dorm named “America First” which argued for American isolationism with regard to WWII.

Nevertheless, Rooney was pressured into doing his military service beginning in July 1941. He received his draft notice from the local upstate New York druggist who doubled as a chapter leader in the American Legion. Having fought in WWI, the druggist was a hawk.

Rooney became a reporter for the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes in the British Isles. There, he spread news of the air-war against Germany and the Royal Air Force, to sixty-eight military bases. Through 1942, he met fighter pilots after their missions to get their stories in Holland and the coast of France where they were bombing the infrastructure of the German war machine.

Eventually, the Eighth Air Force decided Rooney should be a crew member of the planes. So they taught him to fire a .50 caliber machine gun in the course of a week. He took the class with several other journalists from major services and publications, such as AP, UPI, NY Herald Tribune, New York Times, etc.

In February 1943, wearing an oxygen tank, Rooney went on a five-hour mission at 24,000 feet over Wilhelmshaven in western Germany. He wrote that luck determined who died and who lived. Just like the soldiers, he collected souvenirs from the war. To the Americans, snagging a Luger was a major feat.

Rooney commented that the Nazis legalized persecution of the Jews before they went about trying to eliminate them. Their Nuremberg Laws provided a precise definition of who was a Jew, and what he or she was not allowed to do, and what the Nazis were allowed to do to the Jews.

Anyway, read the book to learn many more details of Rooney’s experiences in the wartime military.

A World of Ideas

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “A World of Ideas, Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women About American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future” by Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers, published in 1989. This compilation of interviews was done at the end of the Reagan Era–prior to the historical revisionism and 20 / 20 hindsight of the Clinton Era and thereafter.

David Gergen was one of the few political workers who has explicitly stated that the job elected officers should be doing is governing. This means serving one’s constituents in public service– rather than wooing voters with fantastic promises that will likely be broken– effecting wily public relations that includes propagandizing and standing on ceremony, also called populism.

Forrest McDonald, one of Bill Moyers’ interviewees, commented that America’s one president fills the roles of both government officer and populist, while England has two separate people doing those jobs, respectively: the prime minister, and the king or queen. A recent American president whose populism instilled fond memories in the minds of Americans that made them forget his wrongheaded governing, was Ronald Reagan. Around the time of the interview, the Iran-Contra hearings were all the rage, yet Reagan’s charisma was on display, as much as his amnesia.

McDonald correctly prophesied that more Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals would break in future decades, due to the conflicts the president faced in executing laws while worrying about protecting his reputation. Hardly any political issues have changed at least since the late 1980’s when McDonald rightly declared, “We’re living beyond our means. Congress is for sale to the highest bidder from one election to the next, the Pentagon belongs to the fixers, the President’s out to lunch, and the media are drowning us in violence, nonsense, and trivia.”

In his interview, Noam Chomsky pointed out that the United States government is comprised of two parties (Republican and Democrat) whose main policies are based on business and economics; in other words, donor-determined. All other major, developed countries of the world have a Labor Party– comprised of politicians who lobby on behalf of the poor or working class. It appeared that Chomsky was making a value judgment that the United States was wrong for allowing money to elect its public servants.

There are pros and cons to this, which are too numerous and controversial to discuss here. Suffice to say, the American government’s leadership-and-management culture is a completely different animal from that on other continents. It allows its people the freedom to practice capitalism on a much more extensive scale. Its foreign policy, shaped by globalization of course, has played a major role.

Speaking of foreign policy, Sissela Bok wished that the United States would behave in a more humanitarian manner in international conflicts. She wanted to see more Americans value all humans equally– “… so that it becomes just as awful for us to take an innocent life in some other country as it is in our own.”

Read the book to learn the opinions of mostly university professors, on American political, economics, cultural, and social issues from the 1980’s; that show the areas in which the country has regressed or progressed.

ENDNOTE: Since the book’s writing, arguably, the U.S. is slowly but slowly, progressing in terms of maintaining a democracy, more or less. One bit of evidence of this, is that the country suffered roughly ten years in a row during which a wartime president behaved like a dictator– under LBJ and then Nixon. The next occasion of that, which was seven years in a row, occurred under George W. Bush. It took four years in a row and one day (Jan. 6) for the U.S. to get tired of the next president who behaved like a dictator (Trump), and there wasn’t a war on.

Crisis-generation has always been a cliched way for leaders to keep their power, but hyper-awareness and politicization of crises has been generated in recent decades, due to the speed and reach of modern, global communications. In this way, the traumas of recent natural disasters, financial crashes, wars and celebrity anguish stay fresh in the minds of every culturally-labeled American generation, from Depression-Era babies to Generation Z.

The institutional memory of the older generation especially, allows them to detect and minimize the impact of crises sooner than otherwise. For instance, the Baby Boomers personally experienced— how LBJ and Nixon stubbornly refused to withdraw American troops from Vietnam– a war that involved unspeakable horrors in the region, causing adverse decades-long consequences there and in this country. The Boomers saw that Trump’s megalomania, secrecy and vengeance are akin to those exhibited by LBJ and Nixon. However, Trump refuses to ever give in; whereas, Nixon was shamed into resigning.

Leaders who have harnessed ways to brainwash the masses into believing they are saviors, are the ones who keep their power, at least until their enemies out their crimes in court.

There are many more indicators that our nation won’t devolve into anarchy anytime soon, that are beyond the scope of this post.

On Both Sides of the Wall

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “On Both Sides of the Wall” by Vladka Meed, originally published in 1948. This book detailed the (Jewish) author’s and others’ wartime traumas of people inside and outside the Warsaw Ghetto (around which a wall was built by the German government) and the various groups who tried to minimize their death toll. The Jews were confined inside, and were required to wear white armbands (equivalent to yellow stars in other European locales). The Aryans outside were Polish people free to live their lives.

In July 1942, the Nazis began to deport the aforementioned Jews in vans that went to cattle cars that ended up at concentration camps. The local German authority, called the Judenrat, enlisted Jews– who became members of local law enforcement– to help them do so.

Bureaucratic rules dictated who got deported. Unemployed or sick Jews were the first to go to their deaths. The able-bodied were the last to be deported because they were needed for slave labor in munitions factories and workshops that made necessities (such as uniforms) for the war effort. Working Jews were issued employment cards. Of course, a black market sprung up in the cards, so the Nazis deemed the cards invalid in about a week.

Personal social ties with sympathetic non-Jews became priceless for Jews who went into hiding to escape deportation. Firstly, it was a death-defying feat to leave the ghetto; possibly by bribing guards at one of the wall’s transit-gates, or blending into a labor group leaving for work.

However, German officials inspected the identity papers of, and interrogated, every individual passing through. The officials arbitrarily engaged in beatings, atrocities and on-the-spot murders, or simply muggings or robberies (including of clothing!) of any Jew whose papers weren’t in order.

Further, there were Poles who walked the streets in groups looking for “Jews” (simply people whom they perceived to have Jewish facial features) to victimize and bully. And then there were Jews who joined the aforesaid local police force, who outed their fellow religionists so save their own skins.

The author was very fortunate that she had Aryan facial features. She took off her white armband and was able to get past the ghetto wall unharmed various times during the war years. But she constantly had to look for black-market housing and almost starved to death. Obviously, the fact that she lived to tell her story in this book spoke to her superior survival skills and great good luck. One way she significantly increased her chances of survival was that she joined the Resistance movement. Brilliant acting talent was the most crucial survival skill in that time and place.

In January 1943, a group of Jews finally (!) fought back against their deportations, via mostly hand-to-hand combat. The Jews by that time knew where the cattle cars were going. In April 1943, a Jewish group called the Fighting Organization and others began an offensive called the Warsaw Uprising. They fought against Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Poles who were gathered around the ghetto wall to carry out the last deportation roundup. At the time, the author happened to be among Aryans, outside the ghetto. But she possessed the experience to stay alive.

In August 1944, everyone in Warsaw— Poles, Jews, militias, etc.– cooperated in fighting against the Germans, in the Warsaw Rebellion. They were all sick of the years of oppression. Even so, the Poles committed evil acts against their fellow fighters who were Jews, and against the Jews forced out of hiding. The Germans ruthlessly destroyed Warsaw with weapons and arson, just to get back at their enemies.

Anyway, read the book to learn a lot more about the author’s trials and tribulations.