Politics – non-US – education and deconstruction.com

A Flower Traveled in My Blood

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

The Book of the Week is “A 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

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.

Haiti After the Earthquake

The Book of the Week is “Haiti After the Earthquake” by Paul Farmer, published in 2011. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author (a medical doctor and cofounder of the organizations, Partners in Health and Zanmi Lasante) and some of his contacts, described the complex set of factors that go into helping people deal with the aftermath of a disaster in a Third World territory.

Haiti’s chaotic political history brings into question whether it has ever been a sovereign territory with sincerely elected Haitian officials (without foreign overseers and funders) for more than a few months since 1804.

There are various major reasons Haiti is still poverty stricken in the twenty-first century. Haiti lacks:

adequately functioning systems of basic services (healthcare, education, housing and food procurement) that allow self-rule;
an inspirational leader with ambitious plans to start the said service-systems with a staff who’s sufficiently experienced and competent to do so;
the money to start the said service-systems, and continue them even after disasters strike;
a way to break its centuries-long cycle of receiving outside aid; such aid prompts its dependence on countries which have strategic interests in it; such aid is perpetuated because it never learns how to create its own service-systems.

Each system is incestuous with the others: better education leads to better healthcare, housing and agriculture, and the improvements feed on themselves.

Haiti was hit with multiple storms in 2008 which brought mudslides and flooding. In January 2010, it was hit with an extremely strong earthquake. In the wake of the latter, a huge percentage of: its buildings were destroyed (including government buildings due to shoddy construction) and its population died (most of which was in poor health in the first place).

Within days, the international community sent a deluge of humanitarian aid workers to sift through the wreckage and treat the numerous injured and ill survivors. The author and his colleagues were immensely frustrated at the way administering of aid was very poorly organized, and at the severe shortages of resources, such as medical supplies, drugs and transportation.

One common scenario was that of a ten-year-old girl whose father died in the earthquake. To prevent her family’s starvation, her mother went to work transporting produce to the marketplace to be sold by other women. The girl thus had to take care of her four younger siblings in the family’s hovel made of sticks and debris. The girl was repeatedly raped. There were numerous reports of after-dark sexual assaults of females at squat-toilets which were a long walk from their makeshift housing.

When a disaster hits Haiti, the Haitian people are blamed when they can’t bootstrap themselves into independence. Unluckily, Haiti lacks valuable resources such as oil or minerals, and it has been stripped of its forests (for various reasons). So there are many other regional areas in which aid-providing countries would rather locate their military bases.

Read the book to learn much more about the stakeholders, issues and traumas involved in helping Haiti get back on its feet after so much devastation.

The Picnic

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.

The Long Walk

The Book of the Week is “The Long Walk, The True Story of A Trek to Freedom” by Slavomir Rawicz with Ronald Downing, originally published in 1956. The author told a suspenseful story of how he stayed alive after having been sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labor in Siberia.

In the nineteen-teens, Rawicz was born into a family who owned an estate in Pinsk. His mother was Russian, so he became fluent in the Russian language. In autumn 1939, he was a lieutenant in the Polish Cavalry fighting against the Nazis. He was arrested by the Russians, accused of spying, and sent to Siberia. He and some other men plotted to escape from their work-camp, which was encircled by three barbed-wire fences, guards and guard-dogs. They left in a snowstorm in April 1941.

The escapees endured countless life-threatening conditions during their walk of thousands of miles through rough terrain, meteorological extremes, and deteriorating health. Their food along the way included fish, hare, deer and snakes (in the Gobi desert). The one American in the group told them that beheading a snake would remove the sac containing its poison (if it was poisonous), and then skinning the body and cooking it would make it edible. When they reached Mongolia and Tibet, they were served tea with yak butter, oat cakes, gruel and mutton by herders whose culture required showing hospitality to strangers.

At the end of their ordeal, the author and the other survivors happened to meet members of the Allies who nursed them back to health. Doctors and nurses knew they would have what is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for the rest of their lives.

Read the book to learn the details.

The Rainy Season

The Book of the Week is “The Rainy Season, Haiti Since Duvalier” by Amy Wilentz, published in 1989. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the journalist-author recounted her and others’ personal experiences during several regime changes in Haiti in the course of approximately four years, interspersed with the history of the Caribbean territory.

In the new year 1986, the author and her fellow journalists from various nations held discussions at a hotel bar about the rumor that the-then Haitian dictator, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier, and his family were going to leave the country. For dissatisfaction among his enemies had reached critical mass, and tensions might boil over. There had been protests in Cap Hatien, on the northern coast. In February 1986, compliments of American taxpayers, the said rumor came true.

Thereafter, a six-man interim National Council of Government allegedly took charge of Haiti. Two institutions remained: its Army (a junta funded by the U.S.), and organized religion. General Henri Namphy headed the National Council and the Army. A few leaders of the old regime were sent to country-club prison for a few years, or secretly fled the country. Ordinary Haitians celebrated in the streets.

But anarchy persisted. The Army shot at anti-government and anti-U.S. protesters, the Tontons Macoute (the former dictator’s private militia, who operated a highly lucrative cocaine-export business) and Catholics– with machine guns. The protesters who were violent, armed with rocks or machetes, committed atrocities against the Tontons Macoute. Their reasoning was, since Haiti was a lawless, military dictatorship (the top leaders ignored rule of law), “the only way to find out what rights you have to is to exercise them until you get a reaction.” Arson was common, too. Unsurprisingly, lots of people died amid the violence.

The Christians hated the voodoo practitioners. The voodoo community knew how to survive political chaos in the long run, supporting whichever group had the power. A spellbinding Catholic minister named Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide preached inflammatory rhetoric that appealed to disaffected, dark-skinned, Haitian peasants. Quoting the Bible and pushing for socialist work-collectives (which people were actually forming as he spoke), he blamed the mulattoes (who were elitist), the Army, the Americans, and high-level Catholic leaders for Haiti’s corruption and misery. His philosophy was called liberation theology.

Haiti had been a slave state for two hundred years, as the property-owners hired (or imported) dark-skinned people to work their land for food and housing, but no pay. The owners kept them illiterate, and sent their own children to study abroad to become government officials, soldiers and priests.

An Article in Haiti’s new March 1987 Constitution banned thugs from the old regime from running for president in the “free and fair elections” to be held in June 1987. Unsurprisingly, it was deja vu all over again– lots of people died amid more violence. Voters and candidates were harassed, and polling places were burned down, too. This was before election day.

Emotionally-charged American propaganda (including gruesome images) broadcast from Haiti portrayed ordinary Haitians as the bad guys. The frenzy of hatred did go both ways, in the form of atrocious frontier-justice. From their history of governing through fear and force, federal and local leaders (with the U.S. as their accomplice!) would never break the country’s cycle of military dictatorship.

One of the author’s scores of interviewees commented, “Ah, the long arm of the State Department… Avril is really going for that U.S. aid. I bet Reagan is happy tonight. [The U.S. withheld aid to Haiti unless it engaged in a specific series of public relations gestures in connection with ‘free and fair elections’.] “

Read the book to learn numerous other details about roughly four years’ worth of drama queens’ political shenanigans, and their victims, in the bloody charade characterized by the lack of leadership in the U.S. puppet of Haiti.

Breakneck

WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Breakneck, China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang, published in 2025. In this hodgepodge of a volume whose language is awkward in spots, the author made vast generalizations in comparing China to the United States, sometimes oversimplifying things.

The author contended that China’s economy has grown in leaps and bounds economically in the last few decades because its government has thrown vast resources into engineering.

The author argued that the United States is in political and economic decline: due to its obstructionist legal system, and for failing to stop the offshoring of its factories to lower-cost facilities in China.

Capitalism involves profit-seeking. Communism involves a government that steals the economic surplus of the profit-seekers. Socialism is a collective, non-profit-seeking effort to provide essential services that fulfill basic human needs such as food and shelter. Some believe that the government is obligated to provide these essential services to the people.

Historically, business start-ups in the capitalist economic system have been forced to rely on mostly private funding. In the United States, when a business becomes monster-sized and politically entrenched, it gets government assistance in terms of tax breaks and legislative favoritism. The United States government sometimes makes taxpayers pay for a corporate bailout after executives have bankrupted their employer.

China’s Communist system grants a revolving credit facility to all businesses that start to show profitability, taking a financial interest in them. Some businesses still go bankrupt later on, due to a proliferation of fierce competitors engaged in price wars, because they jump into making products unrelated to their core competencies. Those failed companies don’t get bailed out. There is creative destruction.

Economics 101 says a nation needs to have a healthy, well-educated workforce to stay in good economic shape. Both China and the United States sabotage themselves in this regard in different ways.

China has become capitalistic of late– rewarding entrepreneurs who build hospitals rather than their staffs who dispense their medical expertise, resulting in engineers with robust financial health, and patients with poor physical health.

In the United States, whenever the government tries to be socialistic– say, by passing laws that financially benefit consumers who are patients, students or tenants– the medical providers, schools and landlords whose bottom lines are adversely affected, simply pass the extra costs onto those consumers by raising prices!

The bright spot in America’s selling out its manufacturing is: worldwide economic incestuousness has given rise to co-dependence, and thus forced cooperation among rivalrous nations. All the countries heavily involved on the world stage must sit down at the bargaining table now, or their own people will face severe economic hardships.

Of course, there have been world leaders in the recent past whose heartlessness sparked peasant revolts. The current leaders know that, and in order to stay in power, they keep their populations just fat and happy enough, amid their saber-rattling at their (phony) enemies.

The author commented that Boeing lost its way. It used to have a knowledge base– had a reputation for institutional memory– learning from mistakes. Its products inevitably would improve because it paid attention to process. Now China is the country obsessed with process rather than product.

A stupid employer has workers meet to discuss a recently failed project, but whose list of suggestions of how to do better in the future is shoved in a drawer, never to be seen again. A wise employer will add the list to its knowledge-base so no one has to reinvent the wheel. China currently has the latter bent.

Other factors at play in the current situation include: China has one-Party rule while America’s two political parties are in a constant tug-of-war over how to deal with its fragmented and complex economic issues. True, America’s production of consumer goods has drastically declined in recent decades, while all kinds of services now drive its economy. Its attorneys are obstructionist; however, the glacial pace of construction of infrastructure is also due to the politicians’ goal to stay in power.

No voters want politicians to raise taxes to pay for infrastructure. So the politicians don’t raise taxes; so, no infrastructure. Besides, ground-breaking ceremonies are long forgotten at re-election time. Politicians know that campaigns are more likely to succeed through mudslinging rather than through (usually empty) bragging about accomplishments.

The author asks a question for the ages: “Should it [the United States] really go all in on artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and other things that the Communist Party mocks as fictitious economy?”

Read the book to learn about additional issues facing China and America, their histories, and about their quest to dominate the world while they have been reversing their roles of late, politically and economically.

One last telling quote: “His reign was characterized by regulatory forbearance, perhaps because he was a personal beneficiary of the sector’s growth.” – written about Lu Wei, director of the Cyberspace Administration in China, the chief internet regulator prior to 2018. Sounds familiar.

ENDNOTE: The author failed to mention that, prior to this writing, the United States had illegal immigrants making significant contributions to its GDP, while China’s sex industry makes significant contributions to its GDP. Sexual issues in China are linked to its “underground” economy, while sexual issues in the United States are a whole different ball of wax.

Speaking of such issues in the United States, two assumptions apply in connection with unwanted sexual advances.

The crimes were more evil when the victims were under eighteen years of age.
If the alleged perpetrator was punished through jail time, job loss or fining, he was guilty.

That is not to say the alleged perpetrator wasn’t guilty if he wasn’t punished, but mere accusations are less conclusive indicators of guilt than actual punishment. And yes, lack of punishment can also indicate how powerful the alleged perpetrator was when the allegations surfaced.

Here’s an alphabetical list of the most famous American alleged perpetrators of unwanted sexual advances:

Roger Ailes, Woody Allen, Mario Batali, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Louis C.K., John Conyers, Jr., P. Diddy, Jeffrey Epstein, Mark Foley, Al Franken, Matt Gaetz, Dennis Hastert, Michael Jackson, Brett Kavanaugh, R. Kelly, Matt Lauer, Roy Moore, Larry Nassar, Billy O’Reilly, Bob Packwood, Kevin Spacey, Jerry Sandusky, Clarence Thomas, Strom Thurmond, John Tower, Donald Trump, George Tyndall, Mike Tyson, Anthony Weiner, Harvey Weinstein.

In the United States, the causes of sex crimes are of course, complex and fraught with political, cultural and social hysteria.

The ongoing hysteria is more lucrative than prevention. Sex crimes create business for: lawyers, therapists, the media (including social media), the medical industry, the justice system, law enforcement, and politicians. Also, who is still largely in charge of these parties? And what is the gender of all of the alleged perpetrators listed above? Arguably, preventing sex crimes threatens America’s paternalistic society.

Breaking With Moscow

The Book of the Week is “Breaking With Moscow” by Arkady N. Shevchenko, published in 1985. In this wordy volume, whose language is slightly awkward in spots, the author recounted his life and what he did when his cognitive dissonance (which everyone experienced in the former USSR) reached the breaking point.

Born in 1930, the author did his doctoral thesis on disarmament, a trendy topic in the mid-1950’s. He began working at the Soviet Foreign Ministry in October 1956. There, office resources were in short supply. He had to wait more than six months (!) to get his own desk.

In 1958, in order to have a career, he was forced to join the Communist Party; in order to move up the political ladder, he was forced to spend countless hours in Party organization, and self-criticism meetings. Prior to getting an overseas assignment, he had to be vetted backwards and forwards.

Soviet Premier Khrushchev thought president JFK was weak after he witnessed the JFK administration’s failure to: oust Castro in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and stop the construction of the Berlin Wall. So Khrushchev thought he could secretly assemble ready-to-launch missiles in Cuba and the US would do nothing once they were discovered. But he was impressed when JFK finally got tough and ordered the missiles removed in October 1962.

Beginning in 1973, Shevchenko became the UN Under Secretary General for Political and Security Council Affairs. His employer-provided housing was cramped, as he and his wife had to share a three-bedroom suite with two other tenants on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Thirteen of the twenty comrades (whom he didn’t hire and over which he had no control) he supervised were either members of the GRU or the KGB.

The USSR’s government in Moscow required that every Soviet employee pay a kickback to it; it was also the ultimate authority on approving all of Shevchenko’s communications with UN ambassadors. Messages therefore got garbled through misunderstandings in a game of “telephone.”

Spring 1977 saw the Politburo cracking down on its diplomats’ palling around with Westerners. The Politburo imposed draconian rules on its foreign-policy employees in trying to keep them from becoming influenced by bourgeois values. For the umpteenth time, it proceeded to hysterically propagandize that foreigners were national-security risks (similar to the way American media company Fox has been doing for the past ten years!).

The bloated staff of Soviet bureaucrats at the UN consisted of overpaid noisemakers doing make-work, desperately clinging to their jobs, trying to feel important; skilled in ideological propagandizing. They knew nothing about worldwide affairs and troubles, or history. Their job was to further the USSR’s goal of world conquest, but their power was limited to the role of ceremonial messengers at social events. Sounds familiar.

In 1981, Premier Brezhnev theorized that all countries of the world would inevitably practice socialism. It is unclear at this point how much further the US government will go in taking financial control of its healthcare, education and housing services.

Since the mid-twentieth century, numerous American men and a few women and their families have received government-subsidized (socialist!) education, healthcare and some housing, because they have served in the military. But as there has been no military draft in the last fifty years, that number has dropped dramatically.

The Soviet bureaucrats dismissed as cliche, the kinds of crimes America’s president Richard Nixon committed. On a daily basis, they hushed up their own routine behaviors of ruling by fear and force, spying and corruption.

Andropov and Chernenko maintained the charade of allowing the old, sick Brezhnev to continue to serve as top leader of the USSR because they needed time to consolidate their power bases to win their respective power struggles.

Read the book to learn a whole lot more about Shevchenko’s adventures stumping for the USSR.

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.

Putin

WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Putin” by Philip Short, published in 2022.

In this hodgepodge of a slightly sloppily edited volume, the author recounted many of the historical events in which Russian leader Vladimir Putin played a role. The history portion was too broad to be covered in one volume. It could have been detailed better in three or four separate books.

Putin was born in October 1952 in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union. Beginning in his youth, he studied a martial-arts discipline similar to judo, and later on, judo, and read the classic Russian novels. In the mid-1960’s, after Nikita Khrushchev was ousted, the country regressed politically and culturally. The new dictator, Leonid Brezhnev, forced the people to study Marxism and Leninism and cracked down on dissidents, whom he felt were unduly influenced by the evil West. Corruption skyrocketed.

In the USSR, ironically, there were TV shows glorifying the (British, Western) “James Bond” character: “…which related the exploits of Soviet agents in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, depicted intelligence officers as selfless patriots and heroes, defending their homeland at the risk of their lives.” In late summer 1968, such shows made Putin want to join the KGB.

Yuri Andropov happened to have begun actively recruiting new members to the spying agency. Putin’s application had various disadvantages for acceptance: He came from a working-class family, had yet to complete his military service, and hadn’t studied law at university. Other disqualifying conditions included Jewishness of oneself or relatives, having family overseas or having a criminal record.

In autumn 1970, Putin began his legal education. In that time and place, students were rote-learning robots of Stalinist ideology. They were allowed neither critical thinking, nor original thoughts. Still, a few of the rigorous KGB hiring requirements were waived for Putin. It was always possible bribery was a factor in his getting the job, but he did have one special connection. His grandfather had worked as a cook for the Communist Party elite. The KGB officially became Putin’s employer in spring 1975. Putin’s career in a nutshell: He sucked up to father figures in his workplace. That is how he moved up through the ranks quickly, even though his performance was mediocre.

Putin’s job was to try to get various expatriates in academic and communications social-circles in Leningrad to defect to the Soviets. He had little, if any success. Nonetheless, he was an ideal spy because his appearance and behavior were forgettable. His activities the next several years will never be known. Anyway, by the late 1980’s, he had a wife and daughter. He had been “kicked upstairs” to Dresden (a city out in “the sticks”). From seeing the capitalist conditions there, Putin began to realize that the competition of free markets (even black markets!) were superior to Communism.

As is well known, the tail end of the 1980’s saw tumultuous world events. The new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, let the people read authors such as Pasternak, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. There were various power struggles occurring between and among alpha males in the former Soviet satellites and within the USSR’s political bodies. A vast number of Eastern European refugees fleeing their newly discovered crushing oppression, poured into Western Europe.

Ironically, in the 1990’s, it was Soviet satellites that fell like dominoes to Western political, economic, social and cultural influences. Not (as it was propagandized during the Cold War) entire countries whose citizens’ hearts and minds were exposed to Soviet ideology. In 1992, Boris Yeltsin became the newest leader of the people of Russia. He naively followed American consultant Jeffrey Sachs’ financial advice, and crashed its economy with “shock capitalism.”

In the early 1990’s, Putin served as the right-hand man to Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of Leningrad. The latter ingratiated himself with world leaders in order to get himself invited to social events and broker peace deals. He was bored by the monitoring of day-to-day operations of paper-pushing and interactions with citizens he was supposed to be leading. Putin threw a rare temper tantrum when Estonia expressed a desire to become independent. For, his goal was to keep as many territories under the Soviet umbrella as he possibly could.

In spring 1996, Putin bought himself a graduate degree– an academic credential useful for obtaining a high-level political position in Moscow. It proved useful. By the late 1990’s, Russia was dealing with privatization of real property among oligarchs, and then a financial crisis due to plummeting oil and gas prices, and certain natural resources– its biggest exports.

By 2003, Russia was becoming Communist all over again. The author related the propaganda put out by stakeholders in the Ukraine war about why Russia was claiming sovereignty over Ukraine again, but failed to mention that Ukraine’s land contains certain kinds of rare and valuable substances that are used in specific industries; grabbing them can result in blood-for-oil type conflicts.

Anyway, read the book to learn: how, in 2004, when he ran for reelection or was appointed (in fear-and-force oriented and unfair “elections”) again and again and again as a candidate for “president” or “prime minister,” Putin didn’t let pesky provisions in his country’s Constitution prevent him from staying in power; of the staged and scripted political shenanigans including but not limited to those involving Pussy Riot, dissident Aleksei Navalny, the Magnitsky Act, the Ed Snowden affair, unrest in Syria, Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, etc., etc., etc.