History – Various Lands – education and deconstruction.com

A Greek Tragedy

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The Book of the Week is “A Greek Tragedy, One Day, A Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis” by Jeanne Carstensen, published in 2025.

The author a bit naively labeled her jumbled compilation of stories, “the” refugee crisis. It was tiny compared to WWII’s refugee crisis. Two among many others that occurred from the second half of the 1970’s into the 1980’s included the “boat people” in the waterways between the United States and Cuba, and between Vietnam and Thailand. By the 1980’s, the United States and Thailand respectively, resented taking in those refugees.

A mere twenty years later, refugees (mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq) in overcrowded vessels in the Aegean Sea were fleeing their troubled homelands. By 2015, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey were tired of taking in those refugees.

In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author described the various groups of people (smugglers and the smuggled, humanitarian workers, the rescuers and the rescued, residents in the area, and government officials) involved in a late October 2015 disaster in the Aegean Sea. Two overcrowded boats collided. Organized crime groups in Turkey ran the people-smuggling rings which refugees hired for steep prices, to help them get to Greece, and they hoped, to freedom.

The governments of Turkey and Greece don’t cooperate in investigating refugees who disappear while fleeing their homelands. So no one has accurate numbers on the dead and missing on the aforementioned boat collision. Never mind the number who have gone missing through the decades.

Read the book to learn: the history of the region; the extremely good and bad behavior prompted by the disaster (hint: among the bad– price-gouging of food and supplies for the refugees; among the good– people risking their own lives to save others’); and the prevailing political, cultural and social conditions of that particular time period.

The Dope

The Book of the Week is “The Dope, The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade” by Benjamin T. Smith, published in 2021.

In this wordy and redundant volume, the author mostly stuck to his subject of narcotics– opium, heroin and cocaine, but also mentioned marijuana (not considered a narcotic nowadays). From the 1800’s, there have always been legal loopholes allowing stakeholders to sell narcotics.

The cycle of changing politics, supply and demand of specific illegal drugs, enforcement efforts and violence, have become a cliche in both the United States and Mexico. The author mentioned France, Canada, Colombia, Peru and China in passing, but failed to mention other narcotics sources and hubs that might be relevant to the story, such as Bolivia, Panama and Central Asia.

Anyway, destroying narcotics supplies and distribution networks NEVER works when politicians and law enforcement are trying to get rid of certain kinds of drugs. In a few years, entrepreneurs will always have found a way to make money from other kinds of drugs, or other enterprises– such as protection rackets. The same old corruption and atrocities return, time and time again. Unsurprisingly, it is actually ulterior political motives and the profit-motive that drive the cycle.

Starting in the late 1800’s, opium was a drug whose regulatory crackdown was an excuse for a smear campaign against Chinese immigrants in Mexico City– the major makers of it. In the nineteen teens, Americans zipped down to Tijuana or Mexicali in Mexico to get their fill of gambling, the sex trade and alcohol.

In June 1916, the governor of Baja, California put on a show, pretending to ban opium and shutting down its distribution, and killed some Chinese drug traffickers. It was a charade because the black market on opium stayed alive and well and the drugs’ stakeholders paid the governor protection money. With the minimum portion of that money he needed to spend to stay in power, he did public-works projects and funded schools in his district, imposing mandatory education.

In the 1920’s, goon squads in Mexico City raided Chinese stores and arrested anyone with opium paraphernalia. That same decade, the state of California passed anti-vice laws that adversely affected the Chinese.

In 1925, in Mexico, the secret service agent who investigated and prosecuted members of a large Mexico City heroin ring, became the new chief law-enforcement officer, and eventually the new drug kingpin. The year 1936 saw Mexico again become a hub for illegal narcotics going to the U.S.

In early 1940, Mexico tried a new policy: opening dispensaries that allowed addicts to get their fix at a discount while still holding down a low-skilled job, in order to put black-marketeers out of business. Yes, street-crime in the local areas fell because addicts no longer had to steal to stay alive.

However, the head of the U.S. Treasury was against the dispensaries. He was “supremely pragmatic and with only a passing interest in the actual facts, he would go on to blame U.S. narcotics addiction on an almost comically incoherent litany of shady conspiracies…” He was the one who decided which countries’ narcotics were medicinal only, not recreational; only the medicinal could be imported into the U.S. The dispensaries were shut down in a few months.

President Nixon (with his usual “public humiliation, manufactured panic and diplomatic bullying”) started anti-narcotics hysteria in his first term. But the series of anti-narcotics operations implemented in Mexico by American presidents and law-enforcement from the late 1960’s to the mid-1980’s, never did reduce the overall addiction rates of Americans, because other countries picked up the slack.

Around 2006, Mexico became like the red-light district of Amsterdam. Former members of Mexico’s military in the Zeta drug cartel violated what in the United States were the “RICO” laws, amply aided by gun violence.

Read the book to learn a boatload more about: how untold amounts of American taxpayers’ monies have been wasted in all different ways on trying to fight the drug wars; what roles shifting power structures (involving different stakeholders including but not limited to PJF, DFS, DEA, ICE agents, drug traffickers and cartels), weapons (guns, grenades, bazooka missiles), herbicides, deaths (lots of them!), and marijuana have played in the narcotics shenanigans in the last hundred years.

Peter the Great

The Book of the Week is “Peter the Great, His Life and World” by Robert K. Massie, originally published in 1980. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author recounted in great detail, from the mid-1600’s to the first quarter of the 1700’s: the territorial conquests of various European countries’ leaders with their infantry, artillery, cavalry and navies, including those of Tsar Peter of Russia; the book’s title was thus misleading.

Russian Tsar Alexis’ wife died giving birth to their fourteenth child in March 1669. In February 1671, the tsar, at forty-one, found another wife. She, nineteen, was raised by a foster royal-family whose wealth and power rivaled the first wife’s. In May 1672, she gave birth to Peter. The tsar died of illness when Peter was three and a half.

Peter’s older sister Sophia became Peter’s regent, a surrogate tsar, until Peter was old enough to lead Russia. There ensued a power struggle for which heir would become tsar, as the other two candidates had health issues. Peter eventually became co-tsar with his older half-brother Ivan. Sophia had military protection from the Streltsy, about twenty thousand soldiers. She was a power-grabber, and for her time and place, afforded opportunities and a well-rounded education unusual for her gender.

When Peter was fourteen, he formed an army of about six hundred of his peers, called the Preobrazhensky Regiment. They were trained and paid like real soldiers. He acquired battle-smarts, rather than academic smarts. His mother hoped to produce a male heir to increase his family’s power, by marrying him off. She also felt the need to rein him in, as he was off learning the design and carpentry of warship-building instead of following protocol by attending royal ceremonies. His arranged marriage took place in January 1689.

At the dawn of the 1700’s, Peter imposed a draconian policy of a mandatory twenty-five years of military service for all young men. By June 1701, one quarter of all the church bells in Russia had been melted down to be used to make cannon because time was too short to refine new metals for arms-making. After the Russians defeated the Swedes in Poltava, many nations tried to curry favor with Russia.

In winter 1711, Peter considered himself the liberator of the Balkan Christians. He tried to solicit the assistance of soldiers of various religions to fight the Muslim Ottomans in Arabia. After losing that war, he transferred his military resources from the Black Sea region to the Baltic Sea, trying to preserve his namesake city, St. Petersburg, at all costs.

Read the book to learn about the shifting alliances and wars among and between Peter’s Russians, the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Tatars, Ukrainian Cossacks, Swedes, Danes, Saxons, Poles, Hanoverians, Prussians, French, Scottish, etc.

On My Watch

The Book of the Week is “On My Watch, Leading NATO in a Time of War” by Jens Stoltenberg, with Per Anders Madsen, published in 2025. This hodgepodge of a volume alternated in describing snippets of world history from all different centuries, and the major military conflicts of the world from the 2010’s onward.

The Norwegian author served as secretary general of NATO for ten years, beginning in October 2014. There is always controversy over which group– the EU or NATO– should militarily aid a NATO member that is attacked. And since its inception, NATO has had its intrigue and James Bond wannabes. “At the end of September [2021] we expelled eight Russians who were accredited as diplomats to NATO, but who in reality were active intelligence agents.” Periodically, NATO nations hold summits. Attendees of the 2021 London summit discussed a ten-year plan in connection with climate change, infrastructure, cyber-threats and China.

In early 2020, the Trump administration struck a deal with the Taliban behind closed doors, without other NATO members present. All American soldiers (after 40 years of CIA-shenanigans), and NATO troops (after twenty years of ups and downs) were to leave Afghanistan by the end of April 2021, subject to the following conditions to which the Taliban agreed (nod-nod, wink-wink):

draft a new Constitution for Afghanistan;
have the Taliban’s soldiers join the regular Afghan military;
stop launching terrorist attacks;
sever its alliance with al-Qaeda.

By summer 2020, Trump had changed his mind, and wanted all American troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. He thought that promising to “bring our boys home” would help him get reelected president in 2020.

For a different reason, the author’s colleague agreed that withdrawing all troops was a wise move. From an economic standpoint, throwing bad money after bad money was stupid, and the participating nations should have cut their losses long before then.

Over the course of four decades, alpha males with hubris syndrome couldn’t face the reality that Afghanistan’s people consist of numerous tribes who have been fighting one another for hundreds of years and their vendettas are not going to stop anytime soon. Afghans are insular, and so would reject outsiders’ (the EU, UN or NATO) coming in to supervise the leadership of their territory.

On a larger scale, countries of the world have their shifting alliances and hostilities. The Ukraine war which began in 2022 had China, North Korea and Iran supplying military resources to Russia, while NATO supplied weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s take on, and how he dealt with delicate diplomatic situations.

Walter Ralegh

The Book of the Week is “Walter Ralegh, Architect of Empire” by Alan Gallay, published in 2019. There are alternate spellings of “Ralegh” but the author used this spelling.

In this hodgepodge of a tome, the author recounted the tenor of the times and exploits of the explorer, colonizer and treasure-seeker Walter Ralegh. Around the time Ralegh (born circa 1554), men originally from Spain owned most of the riches of the world. Humphrey Gilbert, Ralegh’s older brother by seventeen years, got permission from Queen Elizabeth of England to go on expeditions in order to steal those riches.

International voyages were dangerous, and use of multi-disciplinary expertise (of mathematics, ship-building and maintenance, cartography, alchemy and medicine, etc.) somewhat reduced the risks involved.

Queen Elizabeth believed she was (the Anglican Church) God’s representative on earth. England had an anti-Catholic bent. So when she funded Ralegh’s trips sailing across the Atlantic to colonize the Eastern Seaboard of North America, he recruited dissidents (who tended to be Catholic) to help him, to get them to leave England and become some other territory’s problem.

The voyages were made at intervals of several years, as they involved planning (data collection of the location of enemies whose ships could be pirated for their cargo), fund-raising, provisioning, recruiting of crew, etc.

Ralegh truly wanted to civilize the natives of foreign shores, but pirating of ships was so much more lucrative. He had thousands of men including his cousin, under his command. Through the decades, they encountered Native Americans when they hit land after their transatlantic voyages. Some expedition leaders ruled by fear and force and provoked violent incidents with them. The land was richly endowed with resources such as seafood and timber, and crops such as maize and tobacco could be grown for a profit. In his thirties, Ralegh named the territory now known as Virginia.

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about Ralegh’s adventures at sea, on land along the coast of North America, southeastern Ireland, and Guiana in South America.

Strongmen – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, published in 2021. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author described the traits and behaviors of a “strongman” through a few real-life examples of dictators of the past hundred years.

A strongman is a male leader who finds ways (that happen to be nefarious) to maximize and maintain his power; including: causing needless deaths and ruined lives in the forms of propaganda (repeated scapegoating, generating crises and other brainwashing techniques), waging war, engaging in sexual conquests, seeking political dominance and enriching himself, usually through looting resources from the territory or territories he rules.

In October 1922, in an Italy of about forty million people, approximately thirty thousand people comprising the Fascist Party appointed Mussolini as prime minister. In the next two decades, in order to rule by fear and force, Mussolini formed various political and military groups, and passed laws that violated human rights. He incited excessive violence, and had dissidents killed.

In July 1925, Mussolini pardoned all political criminals (those who would help him stay in power). But by 1926, he had run out of money. Fortunately for him, he had friends in high places. Thomas Lamont– his contact at the American financial institution, J.P. Morgan, arranged a loan of one hundred million dollars for him. At that time, Hitler actually looked up to Mussolini and eventually got friendly with him, in order to get mentored. By 1933, the German industrialists had fallen for Hitler’s populist rhetoric.

In 1965, Mobutu, who engaged in drugs and arms sales, (with the help of the CIA) came to power in Zaire. He, along with a number of other dictators, had been war heroes, so they had military backing. Beginning in 1969, oil money allowed Gaddafi to give his government a socialistic bent– funding Libyans’ education, housing and other basic needs.

In 1994, Italy’s Berlusconi controlled very nearly all the messaging heard and seen by his people. He crafted laws to: give himself a get-out-of-jail-free card, and his businesses, to weasel out of legal and financial trouble. His propaganda screamed that immigrants were criminals. Gaddafi and Berlusconi (who should have been enemies) became besties– keeping their friends close and their enemies closer. Libya got weapons from Italy, and Italy got oil from Libya.

In Trump’s United States, “Women advance their careers by making it easier for the leader and his inner circle to harm other women.” Another strongman technique Trump uses is to put his assets in foreign bank accounts. In 2014, Eric Trump said, “We [Trump Organization] don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need from Russia.”

Like Berlusconi, Trump and his media outlet, Fox News, have repeatedly, emphatically smeared immigrants as criminals, and he has used his military, ICE, to detain or deport them. The author named locations of various detention camps that had inhumane conditions: in Florida– Homestead, and in Texas– Clint, McAllen, Rio Grande, and El Paso del Norte.

In sum, once the strongman has stolen all he can get from his citizens, his next tricks are to negotiate a peace treaty and schedule elections.

Read the book to learn much more about how the above-named and a few others have used strongman tactics to turn into not-so-benign dictators.

ENDNOTE: Here’s a song that describes Trump’s strongman tactics.

MODERN STRONGMAN

sung to the tune of “Modern Woman” with apologies to Billy Joel and to whomever else the rights may concern.

You see Trump on the idiot box touting his high-tech war-toys of his cronies’ design.

With his continual cruel smears he aggravates the tension. Tries to save face while losing his mind.

Now Trump’s in trouble. He fired all the intellectuals. He always figures voters aren’t very smart.

Or maybe he hopes his hype covers up his conflicts. Oh, he’s got to use PR tricks ’cause his wrongdoing’s off the charts.

He always puts on an ACT of ranting-frat-boy modern strongman. And he’s an old fascist man. He understands just what he’s doing. He’s a modern strongman.

His mean streak is exceptionally unprofessional. He’s got a lot of cockiness, it’s easy to see. You don’t want to be rude but you get so furious when he’s so injurious to American democracy.

He’s got bile and he’s got billionaires’ money and lots of attorneys so his-foes, he quickly disarms. His slow rise means you may not realize, YOU’RE jeopardized by his gradual harm.

He’s got his plan of attack and got the power-play knack of modern strongman. And he’s an old fascist man. He understands just what he’s doing. He’s a modern strongman.

The king won’t die. There is no president. He says he loves you but he treats you unkind. In the morning he detains you. You’re accused by your neighbors. It’s a cagey situation for an old fascist guy.

Times have changed, and you cry in vain, lately. He’s become extreme in his bad attitude. His cock-and-bull just used to be for kicks. But now he controls your politics. After 2026, you might get a clue.

You can’t relax and face the facts of modern strongman. And he’s an old fascist man, he forces your hand in the things he’s doing.

He’s a modern strongman. He’s a modern strongman.

He’s got the sociopathic zip that allows the grip of the modern strongman.

Totally Unofficial

The Book of the Week is “Totally Unofficial, the Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin” edited by Donna-Lee Frieze, published in 2013.

Born in 1900 in territory that was alternately Lithuania and eastern Poland, Lemkin was raised among four peasant-farming families who grew clover and rye, and herded sheep and goats. He enjoyed an idyllic early childhood of nature and horseback-riding.

After earning a law degree, he worked for the government in Poland, obtaining higher and higher fancy titles. Even so, he was strangely obedient when, in early September, 1939, the (German occupied) government ordered all able-bodied men to leave Warsaw immediately. He got on a train, which was bombed. He walked to the forest in the countryside.

Later on, Lemkin did use his connections, however, to emigrate to a less dangerous place. In Vilnius in Lithuania, in autumn 1939, he spoke with a Russian soldier whose mentality was: The Western (Britain and France) Allies would fight the German military until they destroyed one another. Then the Russians would come and take over. Americans would sell arms to the Allies so that the Allies would have more resources than the Germans.

The German mentality was: Only the land of any territory Germany occupied, not the people, could be Germanized. So in October 1939, it (along with Russia) proceeded to deport all the Poles from Poland. This plan was written in Hitler’s 1924 book, Mein Kampf. The reason it took so long for the civil Europeans and Americans with sufficient power to head off the danger, was that they didn’t believe anyone could be so barbaric.

Earlier international agreements set out rules of engagement with regard to war. In general, destroying enemies’ military and fighting-infrastructure was believed to be justified. Nevertheless, the documents failed to mention persecuting and killing of civilians of a specific group. Lemkin felt this instance which he called genocide, needed to be codified, because early in the war, he had witnessed it in his native land. In summer 1942, he was unable to convince FDR of the urgency of making genocide an international crime.

Finally, in November 1946, Lemkin spoke with all kinds of diplomats when the world was ready to sit down at the bargaining table and form the United Nations. Panama, Cuba, India and global women’s organizations initially agreed to sign his resolution, by then called the Genocide Convention.

Still, there were years of arguments over every word, resistance and the usual political shenanigans. For, postwar, some arrogant government officials (such as French intellectuals and the British attorney general) were angry that their country had been taken down a notch in world status, so they argued that a Genocide Convention wasn’t necessary. The Nuremberg judgment had already outlawed war crimes, during times of war.

Lemkin explained that even in peacetime, human nature would dictate that a handful of evil people would acquire significant power to hate on others; thus, the need for a reminder in writing that the international community should put the kibosh on such behavior.

Read the book to learn much more about the trials and tribulations Lemkin experienced in trying to get the world to understand and commit to his ideology.

Between Two Fires

The Book of the Week is “Between Two Fires, Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia” by Joshua Yaffa, published in 2020.

In this volume, the author described various workers in entertainment, tourism, war, religion and humanitarian aid– under Vladimir Putin’s reign. In order to avoid getting arrested or worse, the subjects needed to play well with the government, which funded a large percentage of their activities. Each of their stories was chronologically disorganized, wordy and redundant, but the author clearly conveyed their plights and mentalities.

Putin came to power when Boris Yeltsin resigned at the beginning of the year 2000. Shortly thereafter, Putin’s government took over the media, forcing a mogul (whose TV channel could reach as much as 98% of Russian households which had a TV set) to sell his media empire to the State (the Russian government).

In the late 1990’s, the site of a closed Russian prison called Perm-36 was turned into a museum whose curators tried to inform the public about crushing oppression suffered by Cold-War Era Soviet dissidents there. After Putin had come to power, German university students who believed in the cause of democratic freedoms, volunteered to do maintenance work on the site.

However, they got offended when a former prisoner was forgiving and even behaved in a friendly manner toward a former guard, who had become a security officer at the museum. The German’s were “bound by strict, categorical norms, an ethical prism born [sic] of Germany’s admirable– if often inflexible– attitude toward totalitarianism and those who serve it. A political prisoner and his guard should not shake hands, and from that flows a whole way of seeing the world.”

The former prisoner explained: The guard had been young and therefore impressionable, easily brainwashed into rationalizing that he was simply following orders as a messenger, putting prisoners into solitary confinement. The guard didn’t directly kill anyone; he was subjected to the same drab environment and fed the same food as the prisoners.

On the immorality / morality spectrum, no one’s perfect. Nevertheless, it appears that, in human history, the kinds of people who are evil– on the extremely immoral end– have become dictatorial world leaders in disproportionate numbers.

The author spoke with a local “fixer” in the war in Chechnya in the 2010’s. She served as messenger, bailed dissidents (anti-government rebels) out of jail, and aided journalists covering the war. She had adopted a kind of pragmatism– cooperating with the administration of the Soviet-appointed leader of Chechnya– even though he and his ilk brought genocide, atrocities and crushing oppression to her people.

For approximately the first decade of Putin’s dictatorship, ordinary Russians’ living standards improved due to modernization, plentiful oil, and an increase in consumer goods in the stores. They also enjoyed religious liberalization (except for Western Christian and Catholic worshipers– those denominations competed too much for congregants with the Russian Orthodox Church). Freedom rang until it didn’t, as Putin’s hunger for, and amassing of power got him “reelected” as supreme leader in 2012. From then on, under Putin– Russia’s, Crimea’s and Ukraine’s leadership became Stalinist all over again.

At any rate, like the United States media, the Russian media has its trivial distractions. A scandal, which the State investigated for two years, erupted when a contemporary art museum’s curator allowed an Azeri exhibit to feature children’s dolls in gruesome positions.

After a while, employees in many workplaces, couldn’t guess what would spark an inquiry from the authorities. There were neither written nor spoken rules on acceptable behavior. Of course, spies were everywhere, ready to arbitrarily wield power.

Read the book to learn much more about various workers in the Putin years.

Children of Radium

The Book of the Week is “Children of Radium, A Buried Inheritance” by Joe Dunthorne, published in 2025. The morbidly curious author wrote this book after engaging in “roots tourism” to learn about his (Jewish) great-grandfather’s and grandmother’s lives in Germany and Ankara in Turkey before, during and after WWII.

In the 1930’s, the author’s grandmother grew up in Oranienburg in Germany, the most radioactive town in the country. There was a chemical weapons factory there, at which her father (named Seigfried) worked as a creator and tester into the mid-1930’s. Just around that time, German schoolchildren were supplied with gas masks and taught how to protect themselves from wartime air-contaminants. The chemicals from the factory were disposed of through burying, burning or pouring into a river. One of the chemicals was phosgene, which smells like a freshly mowed lawn. In 1935, Siegfried’s family moved to Ankara, but he continued to test gas masks there.

In 1937, the Turkish government purchased chemical weapons from Germany to ethnically cleanse residents in Dersim in the mountains in eastern Turkey. Over the course of two years, the roughly thirteen thousand people who died presumably served as the Nazis’ preliminary test-case of the mass murder of the Jews a few years later. Toward the end of the war, in August 1944, it seemed Turkey had an attack of conscience (or else its strategic interests changed!)– because it broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and detained a couple of hundred non-Jewish refugees, but granted continued liberty to war-refugees whose passports said they were Jewish.

From the 1990’s into the dawn of the twenty-first century, the author read his family’s documents archive, met with some neighbors of his ancestors, and went to see whether his family members’ homes still existed. Most didn’t. The Russians destroyed the aforesaid factory after the war. But decades later, an entrepreneur bought the site (which was still a toxic waste dump, consisting of 26,000 tons of poisons), and built a nightclub and swimming pool on it, complete with imported controlled substances.

In the 1990’s(!), there were still homes getting destroyed and people getting killed by unexploded bombs, and homes getting built on radioactive sand dating back to WWII.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s adventures in learning about Seigfried’s state of mind as a Jew who was (possibly initially unwittingly) aiding in the German war effort, his activities, and those of his other family members.

Zbig

The Book of the Week is “Zbig, The life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet” by Edward Luce, published in 2025. In this slightly sloppily edited tome, the author threw in the kitchen sink on every historical event that occurred during Brzezinski’s lifetime. Yes, Brzezinski was a major influencer of certain events, but such brief descriptions are overwhelming (or tedious and boring!) for young students of history. For more knowledgeable readers, this is a reference book.

Anyway, Brzezinski’s ancestors were royal family members in what is now Poland. Brzezinski was born in 1928 in Warsaw, but spent his early childhood in various European countries. In autumn 1938, his family fled Europe for Montreal, Canada. He became a Canadian citizen in 1951, and an American citizen in 1958.

Academically, Brzezinski was a genius. He won all sorts of awards. Together, he and Carl Friedrich of Harvard’s Department of Government theorized about totalitarianism of the U.S.S.R. In their book, they wrote of its traits: a monopoly on violence and communications, a majority group who truly believes in their ideology which is imposed officially, ruling by fear and force via law enforcement, and a government-directed economy. But the U.S.S.R. didn’t have a majority group of true believers; it was comprised of diverse territories and peoples. Sounds familiar.

In the second half of twentieth century, Brzezinski’s counterpart turned out to be Henry Kissinger, president Nixon’s foreign-policy sidekick. Kissinger had been born in Europe, had a foreign accent in the United States, was multilingual, and was enjoying a brilliant career. When Brzezinski saw what Kissinger had achieved, he realized he himself had a chance to do the same. He did, as president Jimmy Carter’s foreign-policy sidekick.

After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the CIA claimed that Khrushchev said the U.S.S.R. would economically catch up to the United States by 1970. Kissinger agreed with the CIA, that that would happen. Brzezinski personally visited the U.S.S.R. and saw that it was in decline. His writings contradicted the prevailing Cold War nonsense.

It was unclear whether the CIA was extremely incompetent in its intelligence-gathering, or was lying in order to incite Cold War animosity among the American masses. Journalists would call such dishonesty, “disingenuous” but nowadays, the public is wise to propaganda such as that. There is hyper-awareness of the general conditions of every country of the world.

Brzezinski became obsessed with convincing those around him that the world should simply let the U.S.S.R. dig its own grave. In 1972, he, along with a few other alpha males with hubris syndrome, founded the Trilateral Commission. It was a nonpartisan think tank that contemplated the geopolitics of the future. The opinions the Trilateral Commission expressed were perceived as evil in different ways on both sides of the political spectrum. That might have been intentional. Currently, all think-tanks are partisan, but there is still this kind of super-rich boys’ club running the United States.

Kissinger, knowing journalists find it easier to write stories about colorful characters who make foreign-policy rather than write stories about complicated foreign-policy issues, played the media. He stroked their egos. Brzezinski accused him of flip-flopping, but the two maintained a relationship of healthy disagreement and civil discourse; they kept the drama going to stay in the headlines in order to stay relevant.

Read the book to learn much, much more about Brzezinski and his times.

The cliche is true: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the last forty years, three presidents of the United States have become senile while in office: Ronald Reagan, Joseph Biden and Donald Trump. Here’s a song about that, and other universal political conundrums.

EVERYTHING IS CYCLICAL

sung to the tune of “Everything is Beautiful” with apologies to Ray Stevens and to whomever else the rights may concern.

A politician loves his flock of voters,

all the voters of his world.

He’s always ready to fight.

He cares nothing for wrong or right.

A politician loves his flock of voters in his world.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America,

three prezzes covered up their senile brains.

Everything’s cyclical, in its own way. It’s human psychology.

The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way.

The voter is in a bind, as backroom deals he cannot see.

We must prepare for what’s in the minds, of our leaders who say we’re free.

At every election, the hypocrites are standing by.

You know candidates’ resentments smolder.

It’s time to take action on ethics and grow up.

Honest stakeholders need to get bolder.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America,

three prezzes covered up their senile brains.

Everything’s cyclical, in its own way. It’s human psychology.

The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way.

We shouldn’t care about Trump’s unruly hair, or his apish orange skin. We must focus on his crimes and make sure they don’t happen again.

We need to work together now. Dictatorship is out. Fine.

Stop wasting time on trivial distractions, my friend, and pay liars no mind.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America,

three prezzes covered up their senile brains.

Everything’s cyclical, in its own way. It’s human psychology.

The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America…