Category: Hodgepodge – Wordy, Redundant, Disorganized

Peter the Great

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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.

Timebends, A Life

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The Book of the Week is “Timebends, A Life” by Arthur Miller, published in 1987.

Born in 1915 in New York City, Arthur Miller was an internationally famous playwright best known for Death of A Salesman and The Crucible.

Miller commented that in 1932, ordinary Americans were out of money and hope, and the Republicans were out of ideas. In 1952, the Republicans were extremely furious that the Democrats had had a stranglehold on the American government for twenty years. Miller was a participant in an informal think tank of intellectuals– academics, writers and artists, and as was common for the time– who were also heavy drinkers and smokers. They were at wits’ end trying to counter the overwhelming, vicious anti-Communist propaganda of the political Right.

In 1948, Miller and his friend, an Italian attorney, met the mafioso Lucky Luciano in Sicily. In exchange for having three cartons of American cigarettes taken from them, Miller and his guide got a free road-tour of the island. Curiously, at every gas station, their driver wasn’t charged for fuel, either.

In the early 1950’s, Miller tried psychoanalysis, which was the latest thing among deep thinkers like himself. However, he gave it up, as he feared that digging too deeply into his subconscious might curb his creativity, which would mean the loss of his livelihood.

The [U.S. government’s] House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) maximized its power to terrorize all Americans by convincing them that Communists were conspiring to take over the country. BUT the Communist Party had been legal in the 1930’s and 1940’s– the period when the accused had allegedly been associated with it, or knew those associated with it. In many cases, by the end of the 1940’s, the accused had shed their ties to it, so at the time allegations surfaced in the 1950’s– there was no illegality. Even the accused who were actually guilty, were denied due process.

Besides, in the United States, the Communist Party and its front had had mostly Socialist, not Communist goals. There was, and still remains so much ignorance about the two ideologies. In this blog, do a keyword search for “Communist” and “Socialist” to become informed.

Miller forgave Hollywood-director Elia Kazan for naming names of alleged Communists he’d interacted with when HUAC pressured him into doing so. Miller argued that if Kazan had not caved, his career would have been ruined, so he wouldn’t have made any more emotionally moving movies with socially valuable messages; the same way some politicians who make ethically difficult choices by voting on legislation that will harm their constituents, are doing it to get reelected so that they may continue to do more good for their constituents in the long run.

On the other hand, in recent decades, laws have been changed to make excessively unethical behavior legal. So most of the disgusting behavior of America’s leaders is lawful, regardless of the leaders’ unconscionable greed and hubris. One ray of hope indicating that the United States still has democracy, is that it still has two political parties– one to rein in the other.

Read the book to learn a lot more about Arthur Miller’s life and times, generally a rerun of earlier times.

The Dark Pattern

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WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “The Dark Pattern, The Hidden Dynamics of Corporate Scandals” by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage, published in 2025. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the authors listed the various goings-on that inevitably lead to a scandal at a big-name corporation. They cite several real-life examples such as Theranos, Boeing and Uber.

Although the authors have European names and do college-level teaching in Switzerland, this book covered American companies and reflected the American mentality. It is difficult, if not impossible to fact-check propaganda spouted by American companies because they manipulate the media.

Prior to the scandal, the media crow about how the CEO is doing a great job in enriching the company’s shareholders. Leadership (that is toxic and heading for trouble but the public doesn’t know it) is enhancing shareholder value (yay!). Until it isn’t. After breaking news of the scandal, the media pile on about the company’s seamy underbelly that led to the failure.

Scandals erupt again and again due to human nature– fear and greed are the two major motivators that cause most of the trouble in the world. Moral failure gradually occurs on a colossal scale throughout the organization, because if it really were only a “few bad apples” there wouldn’t be a scandal. Here’s how it happens.

A large number of employees are eventually brainwashed into rationalizing away their bad behavior, through:

  • ethical shift (baby steps which gradually take one down an unethical path, until matters come to a head; breaking one taboo makes it easier to break more of them);
  • pluralistic ignorance (getting influenced by how others react in an unclear situation);
  • evaluation apprehension (fear of getting publicly judged for speaking up);
  • bystander effect (not reporting bad behavior because one thinks others will do it);
  • euphemistic labeling;
  • what-about-ism;
  • minimizing, ignoring or misconstruing the consequences;
  • dehumanizing the victims to make it easier to harm them.

The human resources department covers the employer’s legal ass by establishing an “ethics hotline” for employees. It is a joke because employees are reporting the bad behavior of their bosses to the very perpetrators of that bad behavior! The bosses will be vengeful– harassing those employees, shutting them up, or firing them.

When interdepartmental rivalry within the company is taken to the extreme, one of two things happen: the company has a scandal, or a group of workers will leave to form a company that competes against their former employer.

The usual cliches apply: The fish rots from the head down; if the truth makes you angry, you’re living a lie; and just another case of the fox guarding the henhouse.

Anger from perceived unfairness will lead to additional vicious office-gossip, and an even more hostile work environment.

Excessive greed led to: 346 deaths in two plane crashes in 2018 and 2019; attendant trauma, lawsuits, hearings; a few heads’ rolling; an attempt to move on, so as to forget all that unpleasantness. Never mind learning from it.

Such was the case with Boeing, whose CEO James McNerney, made approximately $290 million between 2001 and 2016.

Boeing was aware of its software bugs in its plane mechanics. It was cutting costs to the bone in the name of profit. It deemed training pilots in a simulator or in the actual upgraded plane, too expensive.

Boeing also forgot to tell the FAA about that issue. The understaffed, underfunded FAA (a federal agency which is supposed to regulate airline safety) changed its language and became besties with Boeing. “By 2018, Boeing already certified a stunning 96% of their own work [doing the FAA’s job.]”

Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos was a spellbinder, and became a cult leader. She was able to fund her pipe dream because her family and friends were wealthy. The social networks of the wealthy, trust one another even when they lack direct knowledge of a technical subject, such as medicine or investing (like with Bernie Madoff), so they throw their money at the opportunity, blinded by greed.

Uber slapped the new name “gig economy” on an old idea, but became successful because the concept was ready for the technology of the times. The problem was, Uber’s purely libertarian culture got it into legal trouble. A corporate culture of pure libertarianism means zero-sum, cut-throat competition. One independent-contractor’s gain means another’s loss.

After the fact, there is: displacement of responsibility and blaming the victim.

Read the book to learn additional lingo of psychology describing more details of the above, and about other corporate scandals.

This Is for Everyone

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WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “This Is for Everyone, The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web” by Tim Berners-Lee (hereinafter referred to as TBL), published in 2025. In this hodgepodge / bragfest / advertisement for his company’s services, the author (who has bragging rights only insofar as the World Wide Web was his idea) recounted how he actually helped change the world. Americans might balk at the English mentality of TBL. He constantly claimed that the internet should not be a profit-seeking entity, but at the same time, he was woefully naive in saying that the capitalistic side-effects of it that are evil, can be reversed.

IT IS ALWAYS TOO LATE TO REGULATE ANY TRENDING TECHNOLOGY BECAUSE ITS NEGATIVE EFFECTS AREN’T SEEN UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE!

The author came across as an idealist, one of three kinds of major world-influencers. The other two are the pragmatist, and the strongman. The first kind is like Bernie Sanders– generous to a fault, desirous of creating a utopian world. The next is like Barack Obama– acknowledges the reality that there are haters and evildoers who will “poison the well” in their misdirected rage. So he picks his battles and compromises with the angry nasty haters, etc., BUT– he’s a peacenik, not a pacifist– until the tide can be reversed. The strongman kind is well known; his initials are DJT.

TBL was born in London in 1955. He related a (rather fanciful– to the reader) anecdote about how the Web could educate people in all different countries. In the early 2010’s, a centuries-old farming technique used in the African country of Burkina Faso was translated into various languages and put on video on the Web when an NGO gave a farmer a smart phone.

Other farmers in his area, and as far away as Mali and Niger allegedly learned the technique from him. The reclaimed land (which was thought too arid to be farmed) provided enough food to nourish an estimated three million people. The reader might ask: Over the decades, why haven’t NGO’s helped farmers in that region, albeit a little less efficiently, prior to that??

One answer might be, that nations in Africa have the same kinds of problems as those of Haiti, in terms of feeding their people [See this blog’s post, “Haiti After the Earthquake”].

Anyway, in describing how he pushed for his idea of the World Wide Web, TBL was far from comprehensive in naming specific entities and people that and who were major influencers along the way; among the omitted: ICANN, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Julian Assange, Loebner Prize, WHOIS.com, etc.

TBL repeatedly circled back to “Solid” which is his company, that sells a “pod” based on his idea of a kind of electronic account that links ALL personal data– financial, medial and whatever else an individual user wants to keep there. Yes, it’s maximally efficient and the user has full control over all privacy settings. BUT it’s at high risk for maximally efficient theft of ALL personal data– financial, medical and whatever else the individual user is keeping there! No social engineering required.

Sooner or later, there will be a disgruntled or incompetent employee at Solid, who will not even need to be a hacker!! Even secure servers, obviously, wouldn’t prevent the data from disappearing in the event of a Crowdstrike (honest ineptitude) type crash.

Solid is going to end up like Bitcoin. It was created for the Silicon Valley set, and will spread to their family and friends, and perhaps to a few ordinary Americans, because TBL is more concerned about privacy and efficiency than security. Americans are hyper-aware of all three. Further, when TBL was asked whether Ed Snowden was a hero or a villain, he said hero. So even when the world was made aware of the US and UK governments’ abuses regarding spying with software, no watchdog groups changed Big Brother’s behavior. In fact, it got worse.

Another cringeworthy electronic service the author also described, was a chatbot named Charlie. The author provided a sample conversation between Charlie and a user, in which Charlie was condescending. The author described the negative psychological effects of evil social media, but also (blissfully unaware of his hypocrisy) proudly proclaimed that everyone should have a personal AI friend like Charlie.

One way AI is making positive medical advances is in diagnoses of patients. The software is more accurate than human doctors. It has multiple regression analysis behind it– statistics handled by software that, in the past would have taken humans years to calculate by hand for diagnosing one patient!

Additionally, TBL discussed the newest version of chat rooms or forums, in which there are rules for civil discourse. Good luck with that, all. Perhaps moderators can keep the peace in user-discussions, but governments can’t regulated users’ behavior or user-related policies set forth by the companies on the internet. They’re global 24/7.

There is no global government. The UN comes close, and it’s better than nothing, at attempting to keep the world civil. What the US government can regulate is business-related crimes that deal with anti-trust issues, financial and securities matters and data breaches. The trouble is, politicians financially benefit from lack of regulation of the internet companies, as the companies are political donors.

Read the book to learn much more about entities, people, issues and controversies in connection with the Web’s evolution, including but far from limited to: the Web Foundation; intellectual property rights; deepfakes; and lest it be forgotten, 23andMe’s bankruptcy filing in 2025 when the data ownership question reared its ugly head yet again.

The Lords of Strategy

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The Book of the Week is “The Lords of Strategy, The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World” by Walter Kiechel III, published in 2010. This wordy, redundant volume showed how: times have changed; capitalism has become leaner and meaner; and in one way, American society has stayed the same since the Era after WWII.

In the 1950’s, the major reasons American companies began to acquire other companies included:

  • Dividends paid by public companies were highly taxed, so instead of paying dividends to shareholders, a growing company that was sitting on a pile of cash would reinvest it by acquiring other companies.
  • There were antitrust laws prohibiting companies from acquiring others in their same industry, so the companies bought others in industries unrelated to their core competencies, or snapped up companies in their supply chain.

By the end of the 1960’s, companies were going bust because, blinded by greed and ego, the stupid corporate executives had no experience in industries unrelated to their own.

In the early 1970’s, management-consultants began to counsel their clients (who mostly manufactured physical products) on strategy. Also, Boston Consulting Group began to advise their consumer-goods clients to engage in deficit financing to grow their businesses. Corporate executives began to adopt an even more greedy mentality. Maximizing shareholder value became their main goal.

The author listed four game-changers of recent decades:

  • deregulation;
  • new technologies including computers, the internet, the maximization of computing power and simultaneous minimization of costs in connection therewith;
  • the way target-companies wised up after the hostile takeover-mania of the 1980’s; and
  • globalization.

As America has switched to a service-oriented economy in the last fifty years or so, the consultants have been forced to pivot to advise clients on human-resources, public-relations and technology. In the early 1980’s, a Harvard Business School professor did a study of senior executives at major U.S. corporations, and found that their game-changing stemmed not from bossing people around or speechifying, but rather, from infinite interactions with their social networks whose relationships they’d been developing over the course of years.

The author commented that when internet use was becoming widespread, there was a brief flirtation with socialistic entities arising from the open-source movement, including but not limited to: the Linux operating system, wikis, BitTorrent, and Napster. But the inclination of the American powers-that-be, to monetize everything, has largely put the kibosh on those.

Generation X and the Millennials have picked up the cudgel of capitalism and it remains to be seen how Gen Z is going to make a living. Having evolved rapidly in the last thirty years, the internet is currently plagued by creative destruction. But not to worry. There will be jobs in national healthcare, geriatrics, building charging-stations for hybrid vehicles, and harnessing renewable energy. Lying politicians (a redundant phrase) will say they “created” those jobs. Don’t vote for those politicians.

On the other hand, it’s deja vu all over again in American society. Nowadays, AI software is replacing consultants because: American management-consultants were mostly elitist, sexist, racist alpha-males in the “old boy network,” and AI software is created mostly by elitist, sexist, racist greedy alpha-males, still in the “old boy network” (but that network is slowly shrinking).

And the stereotypes about the consultants (and now AI software creators) are still true: They’re like seagulls– they fly in, leave a mess, and fly out; they show their clients a line graph that looks like a hockey-stick– that represents how their services will do financial miracles for the clients’ business, but the line graph has no correlation with reality.

Read the book to learn the details.

A Flower Traveled in My Blood

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The Book of the Week is “A Flower Traveled in My Blood, The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children” by Haley Cohen Gilliland, published in 2025.

In 1966, General Juan Carlos Ongania became the military dictator of Argentina. He oppressed hippies– arresting, torturing and killing them pursuant to their unacceptable clothing, hair and music. He imposed anti-capitalist economic reforms that caused inflation to soar. Unrest erupted on the streets of Buenos Aires.

People who wanted to become revolutionaries, joined one of the “alphabet soup” of political groups; mostly they were students or jobless youths. One such group was the Montonero, which got combat-operations training in Cuba. The most extreme groups attacked government forces, detonated bombs and effected kidnappings. They were mostly James Bond wannabes.

In the mid-1970’s, military leader Jorge Rafael Videla came to power. His police-force allegedly investigated fraud, but in the second half of the 1970’s alone, that force abducted, tortured and killed or “disappeared” an estimated thirty thousand people, including children.

One woman got so frustrated going around to law enforcement and government offices looking for her disappeared son that, in late April 1977, she staged a “sit-in” with other women in the main public square in Buenos Aires. They were risking their lives, as Argentina’s dictator banned assembly of three or more people.

The group marched weekly, and were eventually named “Madres de Plaza de Mayo.” Their mothers and mothers-in-law began a letter-writing campaign to all different parties– the Pope, ambassadors, journalists, the UN, Red Cross, human rights organizations, etc.– who might help them find their grown-children and grandchildren who had been taken as newborns or toddlers and adopted mostly by military couples who wanted children.

In October 1983, Argentina was to hold its first democratic election for its top leader in forty years. The military thus signed the National Pacification Law– pardoning itself for all of its past crimes. Further, the giant cover-up regarding the disappeared, continued. Even so, the aforementioned mothers and grandmothers were beginning to track down adoptees– proving their blood relations through genetic testing.

Read the book to learn about Argentina’s decades of: political gyrations (and those of other South American countries due to an actual conspiracy), and complications experienced by, associated with and progress made by, the movement begun by those intent on finding their disappeared loved ones.

Strongmen – BONUS POST

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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.

The Picnic

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The Book of the Week is “The Picnic, A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain” by Matthew Longo, published in 2024. This volume, whose language is awkward in spots, detailed some of the changes– especially in Hungary– that led to major transformations of balances of power in the world.

In sum, thousands of people acting together (rather than one dissident here and there) whose dissatisfaction reached critical mass, are what forced Eastern Europe to radically change politically, culturally, and socially, starting in the late 1980’s. Or, as the American 1960’s counter-culture expressed it: “United we stand. Divided they catch us one by one.”

The author called people who fled East Germany at the tail end of the 1980’s, refugees. They were actually immigrants. Refugees are fleeing from war, anarchy or starvation where their lives are in danger 24/7. Immigrants move to a different country because their own country dooms them to a life of crushing oppression, but no immediate life-threatening danger.

Anyway, by the late 1980’s, there appeared signs that the Soviet yoke of Communism in Hungary was becoming frayed, as its leaders sensed the people were approaching the point at which beheadings or a firing squad of themselves was in the offing.

In 1988,

  • “Moscow” (the authority that ruled all Soviet satellites, which included Hungary) allowed Hungarians to form non-Communist parties, although the new parties had only advisory power;
  • Moscow restored the freedom of assembly;
  • Hungary’s economy was tanking, so its Communist functionaries appointed as its prime minister, a young economist– Miklos Nemeth, a believer in free markets and democratic elections– who had studied in the US;
  • Moscow began to allow the issuance of special travel visas for families to drive into Austria to shop for Western consumer goods with a $350 government subsidy.

And in 1989,

  • The Hungarian minister of state delivered a radio address, shocking listeners (who had been brainwashed by Soviet propaganda for decades) with the truth about the 1956 uprising and incredibly, he wasn’t shot or hanged by his comrades;
  • In Budapest, police allowed a public protestor’s recitation of a poem about tyranny;
  • The Hungarian prime minister asked Mikhail Gorbachev to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary, and the latter agreed to withdraw a few, as a public relations gesture;
  • Through Gorbachev’s permissive policy that each Soviet satellite’s leader could take whatever political actions he deemed necessary to keep the peasants from revolting, Nemeth ordered the dismantling of electrified barbed wire at Hungary’s borders with Austria and Czechoslovakia;
  • Some of the Stasi (the ubiquitous, brutal [Soviet] East German spying agency– the new breed of “Nazis” after WII), actually directed East Germans toward a border-crossing location, or stood by and let Hungarians and West Germans help the East Germans run through the gap in the barbed wire, in order to cross the border to Austria or Czechoslovakia.

There were countless other societal changes taking place in Eastern Europe. In June 1989, a few Hungarian dissidents who were forming a new political party, planned a picnic as a symbol of friendship among Hungarians, East Germans and Austrians.

In October 1989, the GDR turned forty years old. “There were lavish parties, honoring years of Soviet-East German cooperation.” Small wonder why the peasants were revolting. By November 1989, the Soviets had secretly moved all their nuclear weapons located in Hungary, to Ukraine. By the dawn of the 1990’s, the Hungarian Communist Party had ultimately renamed itself the “Hungarian Republic.” BUT a one-party State is not a democracy!

The former Stasi spies who got new jobs after the USSR dissolved, felt right at home helping Western businesses seek new markets in Eastern Europe. For, skills required for the jobs included exploitation, expropriation, and data collection.

The author wrote that a compromise between capitalism and socialism is possible. In 2009, he had a reunion with an East German couple who had fled to West Germany. They were very anti-Communist, but also shunned using crassly commercial, modern technology such as mobile phones and email. They didn’t care that they weren’t keeping up with the Joneses. Their experience in the East taught them to be grateful for the material possessions they did have.

But it’s actually not that simple. If everyone disengaged completely from their automated lifestyles and electronic communications, the world economy would crash.

Read the book to learn about various East Germans who left their homeland for what they perceived to be a better life after seeing how the non-Communist world lived, and about some of the historical changes wrought in their region of the globe.