Politics – Dictatorial – Page 13 – education and deconstruction.com

Havel, A Life

The Book of the Week is “Havel, A Life” by Michael Zantovsky, published in 2014. This is a biographical tome of the late president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel.

Born in 1936, Havel’s family was wealthy prior to the Soviet Communist takeover of 1948. Fortunately, Havel parlayed his talent for writing plays, essays and articles into a lucrative career. His literary works were performed and read internationally, affording him compensation in stable, valuable foreign currencies.

The Soviets could not summarily execute him for his seditious activities, fearing an angry outcry from the international community. So instead, they arrested and jailed him a few times, and had the secret service on his tail, 24/7.

In the early 1970’s, Havel wrote a play in which he commented on the unsurprising but inevitable result of “Prague Spring” of 1968; the Soviets weren’t ready to concede their power to the Czechoslovakians, “In the finale, all the conspirators, after crossing and double-crossing each other, execute the piece de resistance, bringing in the only person who can effectively suppress all the threats, prevent chaos and restore stability: the dictator himself.”

In 1977, Havel and his fellow activists wrote a Charter detailing a democratic system they hoped would be implemented in the future. However, the then-government crushed the opposition with “…harassment, bullying, beatings, blackmail intended to make them leave the country, kidnappings, illegal house raids and searches along with other forms of abuse.”

In 1989, dissatisfaction with Soviet Communist oppression was reaching critical mass. The methods by which thousands of street demonstrators were quelled, was through head-bashing and water cannons. Havel was pushed into becoming a leader for the dissidents because he was one himself and was a talented peacemaker who could bridge the gap between his own artistic crowd and other persecuted citizens of his homeland.

For four decades, Czechoslovakians forced to live under Communism had been told everything was great. In January 1990, Havel truthfully told his countrymen that the nation was in an economically, infrastructurally, environmentally and ethically horrible state. The younger generation who had been born into the Soviet mentality– unless they were dissidents– were obedient robots. So converting people to a capitalist, liberated, honest way of thinking was very difficult.

Sidenote: The author spent an entire chapter on the newly elected Czech president Havel’s visit to the United States (via invitation by President George H.W. Bush) but failed to specify even once, the year in which that occurred, and described events and incidents topically rather than chronologically, making the storyline difficult to follow.

Numerous political parties jockeying for power during Havel’s reelection campaign in 1991(?) included: the Civic Democratic Alliance, People’s Party, Christian Democratic Party, Social Democrats, and Liberal Democrats.

It took approximately six years to build, from the ground up– a legal system, economy and “…countless institutions that make a free society work and flourish”– the new (democratic) nation of Czech Republic (after its split from Slovakia).

Read the book to learn more about the hardships suffered by the Czechoslovakians including Havel, his and his wife’s marital infidelities, and how he was instrumental in helping build a new nation.

Against the Grain

The Book of the Week is “Against the Grain” by Boris Yeltsin, published in 1990. This is the career memoir of the Soviet politician.

Born in 1931, Yeltsin always had a keen sense of justice that got him into trouble. For, his country’s leadership ruled by fear, force and deferment to the head of state for ultimate authority on all matters, rather than (like in the U.S.) open discussion, checks and balances, and consensus more or less.

After graduating from university, he learned all twelve building trades– carpenter, plasterer, glazier, painter, etc. He then decided to put his management skills to work for the Soviet government in the 1970’s.

Yeltsin was First Party Secretary in Sverdlovsk for nineteen years. He started a chess club after Anatoly Karpov complained that there was none in his district. He also organized a local volleyball team, as that was his favorite sport. He built a road and improved the housing of the worst-off citizens there.

By the early 1980’s, the government of the U.S.S.R. had fallen into stagnation under a lack of strong leadership from Leonid Brezhnev.

Crooked backroom deals were the norm, as top government officials were resistant to sacrifice their lavish perks in order to serve their nation’s citizens. Such perks included use of a luxury dacha, a car and driver available 24/7, the highest level of medical expertise the country had to offer, and a variety of expensive foods that were unavailable to the general population. Even so, because all of these were actually State-owned, the top government official (Gorbachev) could confiscate any of them on a whim. Furthermore, Yeltsin wrote, “It had been drummed into everyone from kindergarten onward that we were supposed to thank the Party [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] for all our achievements.”

Gorbachev’s attempts to reform his nation’s government resulted in two linguistic terms that were tossed around for a decade or so: glasnost and perestroika. Yeltsin had a strong desire to implement the policies they were supposed to represent. A sign that the former was working, was the unprecedented Moscow newspaper coverage of stories on vice and corruption among local politicians. However, it took some years for the author and others to engender the power struggle required to get the country moving again.

In June of 1988, the author delivered a government-conference speech that contained the following: “Clearly, we all need to master the rules of political discussion, to tolerate dissenting opinions as Lenin did; not to hang labels on people and not to regard them as heretics.”

Read the book to learn how the author came to hold different Moscow political positions while numerous government officials and organizations tried to discredit him and ruin his reputation; and of his proposals to improve the governance of the then-Soviet Union.

Haiti, The Duvaliers and Their Legacy

The Book of the Week is “Haiti (The First Inside Account), The Duvaliers and Their Legacy” by Elizabeth Abbott, published in 1988.

The nation of Haiti is on the western third of the island of Hispaniola, with neighbor Dominican Republic. Since the territory was named Haiti in 1804, the dark-skinned citizens there have rebelled against their enslavement by dictatorial rulers every few decades with little to show for it.

In the 1850’s, although blacks dominated militarily, the mulattoes led the country, owned the land, and controlled the economy. In the nineteen teens, when the United States occupied Haiti, it practiced segregation of the people by skin color. In the Dominican Republic and Cuba, slave labor was in demand for sugar cane harvesting. Haiti’s leaders through the decades sold their own dark-skinned citizens into lives of hard manual labor and extreme abuse because the citizens were tricked into believing their lives would improve if they left Haiti.

In the early 1920’s, “Papa Doc” Duvalier attended medical school in Haiti. During WWII, he generated goodwill among his people by saving the lives of countless yaws patients. During the war, when a black leader finally did come to power, he proved himself to be just as corrupt and greedy as the mulattoes, and was deposed.

Interesting Side Note: In 1947, Haiti’s United Nations vote tipped the balance in favor of establishing the State of Israel. As tokens of its appreciation, Israel sold Uzis to Duvalier’s government and translated his political writing, “The Class Problem Throughout the History of Haiti” into Hebrew.

In September 1957, the presidential election in Haiti was the opposite of free and fair. There was rampant cheating on both sides, with “… [ballot] boxes stuffed, stolen and miscounted.” Polling stations closed early, and numerous voters cast their ballots multiple times. Duvalier was the better cheater, so he was elected “president” of Haiti.

Duvalier and his successor– his son– were able to cajole economic aid from presidential administrations from Johnson through Reagan because “… the Americans were prepared to overlook torture, murder, and disappearances and listen with eager ears to reassuring speeches about democracy, human rights, and unmitigated anticommunism.” Duvalier used that last platform to his best advantage; he knew that the United States was phobic that Fidel Castro’s Cuba– Haiti’s Caribbean neighbor– would exert its evil political influence on Haiti.

The Tonton Macoutes were armed thugs responsible for violence under orders from Duvalier. They were like Mao Tse Tung’s “Red Guard” who killed people at their whim and kept Duvalier in power. To add insult to injury, the dictator named himself “President-For-Life” of Haiti. Additionally, he switched from being a medical doctor to a witch doctor– practicing voodoo to appeal to the Haitians of his generation.

In the spring of 1970, Duvalier died of various, serious health problems. His nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude, filled his position, but his widow and daughter were the true controllers of the new regime. His legacy consisted of a nation of “… millions of illiterate peasants on the edge of starvation and desperation.”

By the late 1970’s, the government’s economic policies had actually eased sufficiently to allow American businesses to physically locate factories in Haiti and exploit Haitian slave labor. Despite the continuing unspeakable human rights abuses in Haiti, loss of money and the Communist threat prompted even the Carter administration to provide financial assistance to the Duvaliers, anyway. For, all along, the money was lining the pockets of the first family, not the common people. The first family was treating the government treasury as their personal piggy bank. The leader called his political philosophy “Jeanclaudism.”

By 1980, Jeanclaudism had been shown to be an abject failure. The dictator “… presided over a nation of hopeless millions who tilled eroded soil, relied on capricious gods, and struggled against corruption, injustice and incompetence.” That same year, the dark-skinned Jean-Claude married a mulatto named Michele. Unsurprisingly, rebellion was on the horizon.

The author would have the reader believe that by 1986, the regime had devolved into the Jerry Springer Show: “…Michele was already in France, in New York, in Miami. Jean-Claude was going to divorce her for ruining his government, had only used her to cover up his homosexuality. But Michele didn’t care, the rumor-mongers declared, because she was a lesbian, smoked marijuana and had her eyes on…” someone else.

Read the book to learn more of the gruesome details of both father-and-son-Duvaliers’ leadership histories.

Jawaharlal Nehru

The Book of the Week is “Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography” originally published in 1936. This book on Indian history shows the reader yet again, that there is nothing new under the sun.

Born in 1889, Nehru, who had much older sisters, grew up in a wealthy, multigenerational Hindu family of Kashmiri origin. After completing his elitist legal education, following in the footsteps of his father, he became an Indian civil servant and political activist in Bombay. He wrote, “All the bureaucrats in New Delhi do are gossip about promotions, leave and rules, furloughs, transfers and scandal.”

In the mid-nineteen teens, the Indian populace began agitating for Home Rule (also called “swaraj”)– breaking the yoke of British colonialism, and making peace among believers of Hinduism and Islam– two major Indian religions (amid violence in the Punjab in 1919, and other areas such as Bengal). In a nutshell, “India is supposed to be a religious country above everything else, and Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and others take pride in their faiths and testify to their truth by breaking heads.”

Nehru’s father became a follower of Gandhi, who led the powerful, non-violent movement of civil disobedience, satyagraha. In the early 1920’s, a few million people participated in non-cooperation protests at Gandhi’s behest. Many, including Nehru were jailed with sentences of one to three years, sometimes with early releases, on and off into the mid-1930’s. Their civil rights of assembly, speech, etc. were severely curtailed, as was their ability to defend themselves in “show-trials” against the British authorities’ hastily conceived, arbitrary legislation outlawing the dissident political groups and their activities. [Side Note: Authorities in South Africa (a former British colony) behaved the same way as the British authorities fifty (!) years later, against dark-skinned political dissidents under apartheid.]

Nehru recounted an ugly episode involving his mother. She was peacefully marching in a protest when police arrested her and bloodied her head, beating her with their batons. “That night a false rumour spread in Allahabad that my mother had died. Angry crowds gathered together, forgot about peace and non-violence, and attacked the police.”

As well, the spirit of the times involved youth groups and workers’ trade unions, who met to talk late into the night about the social and economic problems of the day. Socialism and Marxism were in the air. Nehru and other political dissidents urged peasant farmers to initiate a rent strike against their landlords. Gandhi launched a few attention-mongering hunger strikes in his attempts to effect political change.

During 1930, there were negotiations for Indian independence. A new Constitution would have to be drafted with provisions on national defense, foreign affairs, financial and economic policy, and on what was to be done about India’s indebtedness to Britain.

Funny, in the mid-1930’s, Nehru could have been writing about current American politics: “It is very unfortunate that foolish and ill-informed criticisms of a personal nature are made, because they divert attention from the real issues.” Across the Atlantic, there was a “…Europe in turmoil, fearful of war and tumult and with economic crises always on the horizon.” At that time, India’s people were not alone in their suffering. There was more violence and death around the world due to fascism, nazism, imperialism and colonialism than now. Nevertheless, Nehru asked a question that is still relevant, “Were there any principles, and standards of conduct in this world, or was it all sheer opportunism?”

Read the book to learn Nehru’s answer, and about Indian history in the 1920’s and ’30’s, as seen through Nehru’s eyes.

Silvio Berlusconi

The Book of the Week is “Silvio Berlusconi” by Paul Ginsborg, published in 2004. This is an extended essay on the media mogul/powerful politician in Italy. It examines the issue of whether Berlusconi practiced Fascism, not necessarily through creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, but through monopolistically broadcasting propaganda in the guise of education, to the masses. He combined his business dealings with politics to amass a staggering amount of power, with the usual conflicts of interest that come with the territory.

Over the course of three decades starting in the 1970’s, operating out of Milan, Berlusconi, a construction contractor, founded an ad agency and purchased TV stations that accounted for the bulk of Italy’s visual information sources. Later, he entered politics and bought a professional European football team. He was accused of racketeering, bribery and money laundering, among other crimes.

Berlusconi proved to be teflon, escaping punishment in the 1990’s. Not only that, he made a comeback– legally, economically and politically. As of 2004, he was still dragging his feet on answering the legal charges against him, in order to invoke the statute of limitations to weasel out of going to jail.

Read the book to get the details, and the author’s take on whether Berlusconi’s political career would survive much longer, given his outrageous exaggerations when recounting his endeavors for the people of Italy in 2004. The nation’s cost of living had soared and real wages had fallen significantly beginning in 2002.

The following video of Al Franken’s speech on America’s fiscal deficit is well worth watching in its entirety; he mentions a few recent American presidents’ economic policies (starting just after 23:00)– some of which can be compared to Berlusconi’s:

https://youtu.be/hHUDPU7_2qA

Lastly, Berlusconi’s reputation for alleged extensive law-breaking had been a “thing” for a long time.

Rosewater

The Book of the Week is “Rosewater” by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy, published in 2011.

This ebook’s author, an Iranian Canadian journalist at Newsweek, tells the story of his arrest and imprisonment in Iran after the re-election of Ahmadinejad in the summer of 2009. The author was living in London with his pregnant wife when he returned of his own volition to Iran to cover news of the election. Voters were protesting in the streets, and unsurprisingly: a) riot police dealt with them violently; and b) the election results were fraudulent. The Iranian government, at the behest of its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, was tailing the author, and knew it was going to arrest him.

Bahari had written stories critical of the regime and knew he was a target. He was a Darwin Award candidate of sorts. Prior to his ordeal, he chose to live the life of a political journalist of an embattled country; he knowingly risked his life by going there, especially during election time. To push the point, he wrote, “I had been reporting on the Islamic Republic for twelve years. I knew how irrational and dangerous the regime could be.”

Further, Bahari had a martyr complex in that, while in jail, he refused to name his professional contacts when he was tortured. He was accused of being a spy against Iran. Political activism ran in his family. His father, who had died a few years previously, constantly reminded him of his own torture and gave him advice on what he himself did to remain sane and survive; his late older sister had been jailed and tortured for dissidence as well. His mother still lived in Tehran, and also loved her country but was aggrieved at what had recently happened to it. In the past, she had been politically active. It was great good luck that Bahari’s wife was yet another outspoken advocate of justice. She pressured the U.S. government via the media for his release.

The Iranian government was behaving like the Soviet Union’s did in the Stalin Era– arresting, imprisoning and torturing what it perceived to be its political enemies. Toward the end of the story, the author rambles on a bit too long about the behavior of his captors.

Nevertheless, read this suspenseful ebook to learn the insightfully described details of Bahari’s suffering, his shrewd handling of his situation and the account of yet another political prisoner of a dictatorship. Needless to say, there is nothing new under the sun.

The Truth with Jokes – Bonus Post

With the U.S. midterm elections approaching, this blogger paged through Al Franken’s book, “The Truth with jokes” (but it isn’t funny), published in 2005. It is mostly about: election, military and economic issues in connection with George W. Bush’s first term.

One controversial issue (still a relevant question years later) that Franken covers is that “…seven months into the [Iraq] war, Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo asking whether we were creating more terrorists than we were eliminating. ‘We lack the metrics to know,’ he lamented at the time.” A few years later, the government admitted it had the metrics– statistics on terrorist attacks– and the answer was yes.

In 2000-2001, when Bush was first “elected,” Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan was excited that “After eight years of Clinton-style fiscal discipline and economic growth, the era of big deficits was over, and we were running surpluses…” As is known now, Greenspan’s assessment of America’s financial shape turned out to be a bit off the mark. By 2005, the U.S. government had to borrow $2 trillion.

Therefore, the Bush administration might have been wrong in predicting that Social Security would run out of money by 2042. There were then murmurs about privatizing it. Al Franken and his political ilk squelched Bush’s attempt.

Nevertheless, Franken has done extensive economics research, as is shown in this video:

This blogger thinks it is well worth watching in its entirety.

The Courage of Strangers

The Book of the Week is “The Courage of Strangers” by Jeri Laber, published in 2002. This autobiography describes the making of a passionate human rights activist.

The author grew up in privileged surroundings in New York City, in the Sunnyside section of Queens, and Jamaica Estates when the wealthy suburban enclave was in its infancy. This was because her Russian father was a multi-skilled home builder with his own business. On the family’s newly-constructed home: “Back in 1936, it was a technological wonder, with central air-conditioning, a built-in room-to-room intercom system, garage doors that opened automatically, and, buried under the steep cobblestone driveway, wires that heated up to melt the snow.”

In the early 1950’s, Laber wanted to study Russian in graduate school, but her father objected partly because it was the McCarthy Era, and because he felt over-education would hurt her chances for marriage. She defied him. In 1954, she got the opportunity to visit Moscow with three other students. Their tour guides tightly restricted their activities, allowing them to visit only tourist sites, and Moscow State University. She recorded her impressions of the people she met, including, “They have replaced God with Lenin and Stalin…These people are healthy and happy, as long as they conform.”

Excuse the cliche, but “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” At that time, there was the “Military-Industrial Complex.” Now there is the “Military-Corporate Complex.” However, world annihilation via nuclear war was the biggest fear in the 1950’s. The continuing increase in global oppression via telecommunications and other underhanded means is the biggest fear in the early 2000’s.

The author was an eyewitness to the different speeds at which different countries threw off their communist yoke, as she visited various countries behind the Iron Curtain in turn. She writes that people in the former Soviet Union had lived under communism for decades longer than their Eastern bloc counterparts. The older ones residing in the latter had known a better quality of life prior to Soviet takeover. “They looked around them and saw corrupt, repressive governments, failing economies, contaminated water, polluted air, alcoholism, and apathy.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Read the book to learn of Laber’s career adventures in Eastern Europe, her checkered love life, the difference she made at meetings with top Soviet leaders and others by speaking out against injustice, and Eastern Europe’s radical political and social changes in the 1990’s.

The Snowden Files

The Book of the Week is “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man” by Luke Harding, published in 2014. This ebook eloquently describes how Edward Snowden became a whistleblower, and the immediate consequences of his actions.

President Barack Obama vowed to curtail intrusive collection of personal data from and on the American people during 2008. A set of policies passed after 9/11, the Patriot Act, originally allowed certain kinds of spying. The goal was to root out terrorists. Instead of curbing the program, Obama authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States government to become an all-out global spying operation. By 2009, it was collecting metadata from millions of American and English citizens, as well as numerous global government officials, through phone records and email. It teamed up with GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s governmental branch that handles intelligence, and later, elicited customer data from the major U.S. tech companies Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. The NSA and GCHQ “…secretly attached intercepts to the undersea fibre-optic cables that ringed the world.”

However admirable the intentions of government officials might be– thinking they are seeking out evil and preventing incidents of terrorism, their actions are misguided. They might contend that there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11, so therefore, the program is working. This erroneous reasoning is like the stupid joke: A man is sitting outside on a city street waving around an odd contraption. Someone walks by and asks him what it is. The man tells them it’s an elephant repellent. He is asked how he knows it’s working. He says, “It must be working. Do you see any elephants around here?”

This blogger believes that the privacy violations– arguably unconstitutional– are a secondary reason why the nature of the NSA’s actions are so dangerous. One major aspect that makes the spying so dangerous is that comprehensive searches can be done on electronic-records literally at the speed of light.

Excuse the cliche, but “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Abuse of power is inevitable. For instance, there have been incidents involving the TSA. Throughout history, only bad publicity generated by whistleblowers who have made serious sacrifices– their livelihoods and/or their lives– has stemmed the tide of the evildoing. The same is true with this NSA/GCHQ situation. This ebook likened the spying to the East German Stasi prior to the fall of Communism. This blogger thinks eventually, absent a whistleblower, there would have emerged an individual with the mentality of Stalin or the late U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fortunately, Snowden found a way to act on the conviction of his beliefs in a mature, if illegal, way. He communicated with the right individuals at The Guardian, “… the third largest newspaper website in the world.”

A minor side effect of the collection of massive amounts of data, even if only a fraction of it is looked at– is that mistakes of honest ineptitude will be made. Lives have been greatly inconvenienced at best, due to the erroneous data in credit records, and those whose names have been mistakenly placed on a “no-fly” list, among various other cluster screw-ups of record-keeping entities.

Read the book to learn of the different media cultures in the U.S. and U.K., and the details of this suspenseful saga.

Waiting for an Ordinary Day

The Book of the Week is “Waiting for an Ordinary Day” by Farnaz Fassihi, published in 2008. This is the personal account of an Iranian-born American journalist employed by the Wall Street Journal who witnessed the American occupation of Iraq starting in 2003.

Sadly, after launching the war on false pretenses, in a bungled attempt to bring democracy to Iraq through forming a new government, the Americans inadvertently generated religious hatred within the country and hatred against themselves for various actions, such as: committing home invasions in Baghdad, war crimes at Abu Ghraib, and their exhibiting bigotry, ignorance and arrogance in the execution of the operation overall.

Among the many Iraqis with whom the author talked, was a military general and shopkeepers in Tikrit–Saddam Hussein’s hometown. They were still loyal to Saddam; they thought the Americans were imperialists, and that there would be intifada, jihad and resistance in Iraq. They were right. Iraq is sought after because it has oil and a prime location near the Persian Gulf. Religious strife has obstructed the United States from achieving its political, military and economic goals in Iraq.

Prior to the ousting of Saddam– a Sunni Muslim– and his Baath political party, Iraq was comprised of about 24 million people, 60% of whom were Shiite Muslims. After the start of the war in spring 2003, more-than-usual violence erupted between Sunnis and Shiites. There was looting of shops, schools, hospitals, gas stations, museums, etc. “Weeks after Baghdad’s fall, the city’s basic urban infrastructure– electricity, clean water, and sanitation services– is dysfunctional, and fuel and phone lines remain unrepaired.”

After Saddam’s death, the tables turned and the Americans allied with the Shiites and Kurds (rather than Sunnis), who became politically powerful. In the election for a one-year interim government, Shiites, who voted because they believed Allah wanted them to vote, were easily influenced and blindly obeyed their local clerics. The clerics, perceived as Allah’s representatives on earth, told the voters for whom to vote. Mercifully, fewer than one hundred people died in election-day violence.

Fassihi spoke with people from all walks of life, including a Sunni sheikh, and chief of the Bu-Issa tribe in Anbar province, 1 of 150 tribes in Iraq. He had eight sisters, nine brothers and three wives. The author also formed acquaintanceships and friendships with people who lost their lives, livelihoods and equanimity amidst the war. Iraqis told her that the atmosphere of fear and repression in American-occupied Iraq was just as oppressive as it was living under Saddam.

Read the book to learn of: Iraqi war stories heard or seen by the author, including kidnappings and torture (with the aim of monetary extortion), car bombings, mortar and suicide attacks, raids, ambushes, sniper shootings by the insurgents (Iraqis fighting against the Americans) and Iranian mercenaries (who were inciting religious violence); what New York City would be like if it were militarily occupied the same way Baghdad was in the fall of 2004; the dispute between the women arguing in favor of secular women’s rights and those arguing for women’s rights via traditional interpretation of sharia law; the author’s and many others’ fears and anguish at the war’s effects on their daily lives; and why Fassihi left Iraq.