Intimate Memoirs – BONUS POST

[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 Bonus Book of the Week is “Intimate Memoirs” by Georges Simenon, published in 1981. This tome’s intended readers were his four adult children. The author detailed: his and his family members’ lives through all their changing of residences, vacations, the dysfunctionalities in his relationships with others (wives, mistresses, governesses, household help, publishing and movie personnel, etc.), and his daughter’s writings.

Born in 1903, Simenon grew up in Belgium, and served in the military in both WWI and WWII. As a teenager, he began writing. He got rich in a short time, penning via typewriter each year, about six dime novels (eventually numbering dozens in his lifetime, some of which were made into movies) about a police detective named Maigret– whose character was partly based on his father.

By summer 1940, he had a wife and son, at which time they rented a chateau surrounded by a vegetable garden and poultry farm in a coastal sub-prefecture town in France. He was supposed to sign in every day at the police station. A couple of benign German officers were posted on the outskirts of the town.

For the rest of the war, the family stayed in French coastal towns, renting homes with farms for a year or two, then moving on. Basically, they were on vacation, except for one incident that reminded them that a war involving religious persecution was taking place elsewhere.

One day, a Vichy commissioner buttonholed the author and aggressively called him a Jew, demanding that the author prove otherwise, by showing the birth certificates of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. By war’s end, many non-Jewish wealthy people had become wealthier through profiteering, while the peasants suffered the hardships of rationed goods.

The author wrote of powerful, money-grubbing people, “Sometimes there are indeed fatalities. And aren’t the worst brutes the ones that get the most applause? I no longer look on all this as an outsider. When I first got to Lakeville [Connecticut in the USA] I was told ‘Here you have to belong…'”

Read the book to learn everything you ever wanted to know, both happy and sad, about what the author wanted his children to know.

ENDNOTE: Speaking of the worst brutes, here’s a little ditty in connection therewith (This is the song Donald Trump is singing now):

THE ULTIMATE BULLY

sung to the tune of “The Boxer” with apologies to Simon and Garfunkel.

I am a super-rich man
all-powerful and bold.
I’ve-always-had HIGH resistance
to acknowledging my failures and broken promises.
At-bullying, I’m the best.
My base hears what it wants to hear
and cheers on the unrest.
mm hm, hm hm hm hm hm hm, hm
When I left my home and my family
I was not in THE least coy,
I had to teach my attorneys
dangers of beCOMing a-PR-sensation. I-wasn’t scared.
Making deals, seeking out
the easy suckers and easy girls
looking FOR the
ways I could use them in my World.

lie-le-lie, lie-le-lie-lie, lie-le-lie, lie-le-lie
lie-le-lie-lie-lie-le-lie-le-le-le-lie

Paying minimal workers’ wages
I start handing out the jobs
and pad my coffers.
One-after-another bankRUPtcy
to disappear through.
As a first resort,
I’ve made smearing, scapegoating and suing,
a na-tion-al sport.

la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

lie-le-lie, lie-le-lie-lie, lie-le-lie, lie-le-lie
lie-le-lie-lie-lie-le-lie-le-le-le-lie

Now I’m huddling with my attorneys
and wishing I was golfing at Mar-a-Lago.

But the New York City renters are in need of me,
you can’t indICT me. You’re all DOPES.

I hire the best doxers
and go to legal extremes,
so you CARry a reminder
that anytime I-can lay you down
or cut you while I lash out
in my anger with no shame.
You’ll be bleeding,
you’ll be bleeding,
and the-spiter-in-me remains.

mm-hmm

lie-le-lie, lie-le-lie-lie, lie-le-lie, lie-le-lie
lie-le-lie-lie-lie-le-lie-le-le-le-lie
lie-le-lie, lie-le-lie-lie, lie-le-lie, lie-le-lie
lie-le-lie-lie-lie-le-lie-le-le-le-lie…

Nicholas Winton’s Lottery of Life

The Book of the Week is “Nicholas Winton’s Lottery of Life” by Matej Minac, published in 2007.

By chance, Nicholas Winton’s friend, Martin Blake suggested that Winton come to Prague instead of going on a ski vacation in Switzerland, to work on an interesting project on the eve of WWII.

Winton eventually gave up a good job in London at the Stock Exchange to rescue Czech children from the Nazis. He valued human lives more than South African gold. His belief was: “People often say that something can’t be done before they even try to do it, which is just an excuse to do nothing! Most things that seem impossible can actually be achieved by hard work.”

Winton must have enjoyed the challenge of overcoming obstacles, because the burden was on him to arrange the logistics, raise the funds and complete the paperwork.

There are a few ways that Winton’s situation is analogous to this nation’s current situation:

Winton was one of countless unsung heros during a time of multi-national turmoil. His major goal was to save lives, not to make money. Countless Americans on the “front lines” are making great sacrifices to save others– without hitting the social media to brag or push their opinions on the world. The people who truly want to help others are just doing their jobs.

Creatively, Winton did an end-run around British bureaucracy at the Home Office by founding a fictional organization to speed up glacial processes. It had to be super-discreet, though, because there were spies everywhere. Ironically, Americans have unlimited free speech through texting, email, and social media, but their every electronic utterance is recorded by the powers-that-be (who are all as politically entrenched as ever), so that communications are just as insecure as they ever were!

Obviously, Winton’s communications couldn’t always be completely honest if he was to save lives. It was wartime, after all. However, Americans with ulterior motives are pushing specific proposals that will likely benefit them financially, politically or both. Incidentally, with his overwhelming power and influence in certain circles, president Donald Trump is the new Oprah Winfrey. When he mentions a company or product, its stock or the product sells like hotcakes the same way that, when Oprah featured a book on her show, it sold like hotcakes.

Prior to vaccines, Americans accepted the fact that they might become ill or even die from diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps, etc. In the last fifty years or so, money has corrupted medicine. A continuous propaganda campaign– the profit motive in the guise of life-saving treatments– has convinced Americans that it’s now inexcusable to die from disease.

Winton convinced Czech parents that everyone was in imminent danger and at least their children’s lives could be saved, as the Germans had total control of all the Czech regions by early 1939. Winton wasn’t lying when he told Czechs their lives were at risk due to wartime occupation by an evil enemy.

It’s impossible to prove that shutting down the entire United States would reduce the number of deaths from a pandemic. Especially when projected deaths have been, at best, incompetently calculated, and at worst, an object lesson in how to lie with statistics.

Clearly, WWII required there to be myths and misinformation in the media to avoid revealing state secrets to the country’s enemies. But that shouldn’t be the case with the pandemic. Yet it is.

Actually– myths and misinformation have always emanated from news sources from the beginning of time. In the last century, communications sources have only appeared to be more credible than now, because their language used to be more formal, more grammatical, and better written and formatted. The sources slanted information and got facts wrong just as often as now, due to pressure on them to get a story first, and make it entertaining and persuasive. The only slight difference is that currently, a larger percentage of content is opinions rather than information.

Winton eventually compiled a list of five thousand children to be rescued. Read the book to learn of the actual number of children he saved, what happened to them, the later fates of some of them, and what happened when a Czech documentary filmmaker found Winton about sixty years later.

Bitter Scent – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Bitter Scent, The Case of L’Oreal, Nazis and the Arab Boycott” by Michael Bar-Zohar, published in 1996.

The complicated history that led up to the situation which monster-sized international health-and-beauty-aids company L’Oreal faced in 1989 was most ironic. It dated back to the start of WWII, when two future executives of L’Oreal and Francois Mitterand (future president of France) became good friends, Nazi collaborators– pro-Vichy propagandists and sabotage-plotters, and then, when the tide of the war changed in 1943, allies of the Allies.

In March 1989, Jean Frydman (Israeli and French citizen, Jew, and former member of the WWII French Resistance,) was vice president of Paravision, his film distribution company. Unbeknownst to him, he resigned from the board of directors of Paravision in a fait-accompli by L’Oreal executives. He was ousted in absentia because he had business dealings in Israel.

Various business entities had significant financial interests in others, among them, Paravision, L’Oreal (based in a Paris suburb) and its international subsidiaries, Columbia Pictures, Nestle and Coca-Cola. L’Oreal executives felt the need to comply with a troublesome policy called the “Arab boycott” — considered ethically repugnant by non-Arab industrialized nations. L’Oreal executives were willing to go through a tremendous amount of trouble (most of which they didn’t anticipate) to comply with the boycott to enhance their business interests, but also arguably, because they were anti-Semitic.

The boycott imposed by the Arab League began in 1948 to financially strangle Israel by banning companies that did business with Israel, from doing business with any Arab countries. L’Oreal needed to get Frydman out of the way so it could say it did no business with Israel. But besides, there was a big-name cosmetics company called Helena Rubinstein located in Israel, with which L’Oreal was affiliated. The Arabs were pressuring L’Oreal to dispose of that asset as well, before it allowed lucrative trade with their side.

When Frydman was gobsmacked by his fellow executives and learned that top people at L’Oreal (including its founder) had been Nazi collaborators, hilarity did not ensue. Instead, an orgy of litigation, fishing expeditions, political machinations, palace intrigue, and of course, a propaganda war did.

Read the book to learn the details of this suspenseful, sordid story.