Politics – non-US – Page 2 – education and deconstruction.com

We Were the Future

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The Book of the Week is “We Were the Future, A Memoir of the Kibbutz” by Yael Neeman, published in 2016. Readers might argue that the author and her cohorts were raised in a cult– brainwashed from birth. The kibbutz movement strove for 100% socialism– the economic system in which all the people (not the State) collectively owned everything; and collectively governed themselves.

In 1947, the total population of kibbutzim as a proportion of Israel’s (Jewish) population reached a high of 7%. It waned after Israel achieved sovereignty in 1948. The first half of the 1950’s saw global historical events (the trials of: Prague [1952], the Doctors in the U.S.S.R. and the Rosenbergs in the U.S. [both 1953]) that were jarring to Jews. The kibbutz movement split over ideological disagreements, especially after Stalin died in 1953 and his crimes were revealed in 1956. Adults around the author held zero discussions about this recent history.

Neeman was born in 1960 in Kibbutz Yehiam (founded in 1946) in Western Galilee near the border with Lebanon. Her kibbutz was a branch of Hashomer Hatzair (meaning “Young Guard”), the movement’s umbrella organization that began in 1913. Their motto was, “For Zionism, Socialism and Brotherhood Amongst Nations.” Her children’s group consisted of eight boys and eight girls, who did everything together, every day. She was raised among them by women who collectively took care of the kibbutz’s children grouped by age; she visited with her biological parents, but didn’t live with them in the same building.

The lifestyle encompassed a number of major ideas:

“Family and education in the rest of the industrial world were considered bourgeois institutions.”
“Everyone knew after all, that work [on the kibbutz] was more important than school, more important than anything.”
Egalitarianism for all the people was key– all decisions were made by committee.

Contradictorily:

There was a hierarchical division of labor– upper and lower. The former consisted of high-level positions in the fields and factories; held by the founders of the kibbutz, the (mostly Hungarian) First of May group. The latter consisted of low-skilled, dead-end jobs such as peeling potatoes.
The kibbutz undertook a number of enterprises through the years, including a banana “plantation” which was the most “profitable.” [these words with nuanced meanings were translated from Hebrew, but even so, these were capitalist endeavors.]

Kids whose behavior was troublesome were exiled from the kibbutz, and sent to a “special institution.” At twelve years old, all the conforming kids began to attend what amounted to boarding school, located off the kibbutz campus. They had previously received an eclectic education of hands-on instruction on a myriad of topics. Beginning in adolescence, they were allowed to shape their own education, or lack thereof.

Currently, analogous experiments are underway in American education in which adolescents are placed in front of computer screens with no teachers. Educrats and profiteers expect the software to teach them. At that age, most kids have neither the judgment nor the discipline to acquire the knowledge and skills required for becoming mature, responsible adults who can financially support themselves.

Kibbutzniks were afforded too much freedom and not enough guidance and supervision within their tiny, limited community in their early childhood. So they had a rude awakening when they were permitted (on rare occasions) to see how other kids in the rest of the world lived.

One other interesting factoid: Neeman wrote, “In our biological home, we [she and her three siblings] were already allowed to smoke on Purim when we were in the first grade.”

Read the book to learn about a boatload of other ways Neeman’s upbringing was extremely unconventional due to her fledgling homeland’s exceptionalism.

Shanghai Acrobat

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The Book of the Week is “Shanghai Acrobat, The True Story of Courage and Perseverance from Revolutionary China” by Jingjing Xue, translated by Bo Ai, published in 2021.

Born in 1947 in Zhejiang Province in China, the author was sent to live at an orphanage when he was two years old. He never did find out exactly why, as his biological parents were alive. Anyway, the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe recruited him when he was nine years old. Other members of the group were as old as fourteen. He happened to possess the right temperament to endure its rigorous training (that included corporal punishment) and get good at balancing on his hands in various precarious positions.

There were daily academic lessons, too, and a lot of political ideology thrown in. The instructors constantly emphasized the teachings of Mao Tse Tung, and bragged about what a prosperous, wonderful country they lived in. Mao took the calculated risk of allowing performers and athletes to travel outside China where they might learn about other peoples’ lifestyles and defect– so that he could show off his own people’s greatness.

By the late 1950’s, the author was traveling and performing with the Troupe. In 1960, they went to cities controlled by the Soviets, and ironically, to African countries (such as Sudan, Ethiopia, Guinea and Morocco) whose native peoples were starting to throw off their colonialist yokes.

In the early 1960s, owing a ginormous monetary debt to the Soviets and not wanting to pay it, China decided the Soviets were wrong to stomp on the memory of the great leader Stalin (who had died in 1953 and whose crimes were revealed a few years later); Mao theatrically broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviets.

In 1967, Mao capriciously imposed his new twisted logic (a different set of ideas from that of his previous campaign)– the belief that the lowest economic class (the workers, the peasant-tenants) needed to fight the higher economic classes (the bosses and landlords)– because capitalistic activities were anathema. There were a few occasions in which the author was yelled at for saying the wrong things to some non-Chinese people, even though he thought his comments would jive with Mao’s teachings.

As part of the new campaign (called the Cultural Revolution, begun in 1965) to rid China of the dissidents of the moment– performing acrobatics was out of fashion. The radicals loyal to Mao policed the Troupe, finally disbanded it, and psychologically and physically tortured the director in public self-criticism meetings. The author’s acrobatic career was (temporarily, though he didn’t know it at the time) over. He was sent to the countryside for “reeducation.”

With 20/20 hindsight, the author wrote, “To those of us who had been through the Cultural Revolution, the Watergate political scandal was nothing. We couldn’t understand how the American people could force Nixon to resign for ‘peanuts.’ ” It is unclear what kind of propaganda the author and his contemporaries were fed to come to that conclusion.

For, they might have known nothing of Nixon’s real war crimes. But even if Nixon had been innocent of war crimes, he and his underlings still committed election crimes, and worst of all, violated his numerous enemies’ civil rights– evil actions that were considered against the law in the United States. The last fifty years have seen a bit more moderation in China’s political leadership. And radicalism in the United States.

Human nature is such that there has been some convergence (!) between China’s and the United States’ ideologies in:

surveillance of citizens
incarceration of citizens
economics
education, and
other areas of life.

It’s all in the propaganda fed to the people.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s life and times, and his fate.

Cuba on the Verge

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The Book of the Week is “Cuba on the Verge, 12 Writers on Continuity and Change in Havana and Across the Country” edited by Leila Guerriero, published in 2017.

After Cuban leader Fidel Castro died in November 2016, there was a slight relaxation of economic restraints on the common people. Under the one-party rule of Castro’s brother Raul, Cubans could engage in entrepreneurial pursuits– serving tourists through renting out their homes or turning their cars into taxis, supervised by the government. Americans have begun doing the same in the last two decades, but through centralized corporate entities such as Airbnb and Uber.

Ironically, under Fidel’s leadership, Cuba developed a reputation for literacy and affordable, quality healthcare; during which time, America developed a reputation for deleterious (greedy!) practices in education and healthcare.

At the book’s writing, Cuba required working mothers to take paid maternity leave halfway through their eighth month; the paid leave continued for four and a half months after the births. An additional year was optional, for which mothers received sixty percent of their wages. Further, abortions were not only legal, but used as a form of contraception, with neither shame nor emotional hysteria generated by political activists, attached. On the other hand, the Cuban government spies on its people 24/7.

Cuban children are taught sex education beginning in the fifth grade. So kids are sexually precocious, as they learn from their older siblings. They are casual about relationships, so there are no hard feelings when families become fragmented, but there are many latchkey children, and males dominate.

After the Soviet Union broke up, Moscow’s government no longer funded Cuba’s economy. Beginning in the 1990’s, this “Special Period” saw severe shortages of basic consumer goods such as health and beauty aids and clothing, not to mention food. Unsurprisingly, domestic violence spiked.

People sold their jewelry at government trading posts in order to survive. They received mostly Panamanian goods in return. They adopted casual dress all the time– flip-flops, shorts, T-shirts– even where formal clothing had been worn previously, such as the theater. Counterfeit big-name goods flooded the market, sourced mostly from Miami, Panama, Madrid and China.

Yet another cultural change included males’ taking on of domestic chores and child-rearing, as more women could earn money through prostituting themselves. Socially-skilled men collected and sold coconuts from private properties, or sought out sexual relationships with visiting of out-of-town women who paid their everyday expenses.

Read the book to learn of the numerous other ways Cuba changed in the 1990’s, and ways it hasn’t– such as in its practices of numerology and witchcraft and in its love of baseball.

Stella

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The Book of the Week is “Stella, One Woman’s True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler’s Germany” by Peter Wyde, published in 1992.

Stella Goldschlag was born in the early 1930’s. She grew up in the wealthy, arrogant, snobbish, German Jewish social set. That set owned the major department stores and garment makers in Berlin, published the major newspapers, and dominated the theater-critic scene. Stella’s father supervised the making of globally distributed newsreels in the Berlin office of the Paris-based Gaumont; until it didn’t, when the Nazis took it over in the second half of the 1930’s.

In autumn 1935, new restrictions on the Jews meant Stella was forced to attend a high school for Jews only. The book’s author was in her class. The school was run by a Jewish teacher whose aspiration was to prepare the students to study abroad. She taught them the English language.

A set of untoward circumstances converged in bringing about the Holocaust. The nation of Germany was experiencing economic devastation from the Great Depression and from the crushing debt load of the reparations it was supposed to pay for its activities stemming from WWI. Its traditionally jingoistic people were stung and angry from losing that war. Germany’s lack of strong leadership at the top allowed a genocidal maniac bent on world domination, to come to power.

Amid the economic, political and social chaos, the number of bitter and ostracized German males coming of age from dysfunctional households, reached critical mass. Those males were easily brainwashed into believing they could enjoy a “glorious career in the service of the master race.” Or, as the 1960’s “Chicago Seven” member Jerry Rubin commented, a Nazi was a “love-starved, father-seeking fairy who had to compensate for hurried toilet training.”

The Nazis employed social contagion techniques to scapegoat the Jews– a minority ethnic group that had a history of allowing themselves to be oppressed and victimized. Other groups who were perceived as having weak genes, were also targeted for torture and elimination. In that time and place, most Germans caved in to the societal pressure, fear and force.

As is well known, as time went on, Hitler ranted and raved on the radio, placing more and more extreme punishments on the Jews. Initially, the Jewish veterans of WWI who had risked their lives for the Kaiser’s Army were left alone, but eventually, even they were spat upon and killed.

One technique the Nazis used in pursuing their goal of eliminating the Jews, was to divide and conquer– sow hostility among them. After the Anschluss began in March 1938, Adolf Eichmann recruited Jewish medical doctor Richard Lowenherz to exhaustively plan the logistics of how the Jews were to be persecuted and deported to concentration camps. In places other than Vienna, Nazis drafted Jewish rebellious youths (who expected to escape their oppressors’ abuses) to help control their fellow religionists. Those who sold out were deported anyway, but perhaps a little later on.

In Geneva, Switzerland in mid-July 1938, a conference similar to that of Davos (the annual economic forum in Switzerland, where the super-wealthy of the world go to see and be seen) took place. But instead of discussing getting richer, the representatives from industrialized nations paid lip service to tens of Jewish organizations imploring that their hosts take in Jewish refugees from Germany.

This Evian Conference was about economics, though. Everyone was still suffering the effects of the Great Depression, so they couldn’t afford to take in refugees. In their defense, at that time, they weren’t privy to Hitler’s true plans to loot the Jews of their wealth, commit atrocities and genocide, and take over the world. Most people still naively saw him as a clown.

In the early 1940’s, Stella’s family was told by the American consulate in Germany that they might get a visa to the United States two years hence (even though they had an American relative who was selflessly spending a vast amount of time and effort to help them), as more than fifty thousand refugees were ahead of them in line. “The racket in fake promises kept growing. More and more frustrated travelers forked over more and more cash for nonexistent documents whose sellers then disappeared.”

The author (who obviously lived to tell his and Stella’s stories) wrote that he learned English by reading the New York Times, which cost three cents per day. In the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he was assigned to a propaganda-distribution unit consisting of mostly Jewish refugees. In 1942, he and his cohorts weren’t aware of the scale of the Nazis’ war crimes. In late 1942, even when the BBC told the world about the gas chambers, they didn’t want to believe it.

Read the book to learn all the details of how Stella became a tattletale against her fellow Jews (Hint: she was a brilliant actress– a drama queen, who could turn her charm or hostility on and off at will), what became of her, and biographical info on the huge cast of characters with whom the author and she came into contact.

Shadows and Whispers

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“When I analyzed what passed for his domestic initiatives, it became clear that all of them were rehashings of earlier schemes and none addressed the fundamental problems of the country.”

-the author’s take on Konstantin Chernenko’s rule in 1984

The Book of the Week is “Shadows and Whispers, Power Politics Inside the Kremlin From Brezhnev to Gorbachev” by Dusko Doder, published in 1986 (prior to the historical revisionism and 20/20 hindsight of the collapse of Communism).

As is well known, Soviet leadership in the 1970’s consisted of sick, old men desperately clinging to power. Leonid Brezhnev turned 75 in December 1981. He ordered that school textbooks on twentieth-century Soviet history be rewritten to omit mentions of Stalin and Khrushchev. His own name was featured prominently. He passed away in November 1982. Two possible successors competed to take the vacant top spot. Konstantin Chernenko (a powerful figure in the Communist Party) and Yuri Andropov.

Prior to becoming the Soviet Union’s leader by the end of 1982, Andropov headed the KGB. The KGB’s tentacles consisted of about a half a million James-Bond wannabes– er, uh– operatives, worldwide. They purported to be journalists, diplomats or bureaucrats. Andropov was a reformer who purged the Soviet government of Brezhnev’s corrupt clique. However, he was ill too, and died in February 1984. Then Chernenko got his chance to exercise ultimate power, beating out Mikhail Gorbachev. The latter represented the younger generation, but had to bide his time, as he hadn’t paid his dues.

It wasn’t long– 1985, to be exact– before Gorbachev put his ambitious plans into effect, going further than Andropov to eliminate the “dead wood” from the ranks of Soviet leadership. The Old Guard was incensed at his radical plans.

Read the book to learn much more about the power struggles and personalities that shaped the Soviet Union from the mid-1970’s up until the book’s writing.

People’s Republic of China – BONUS POST

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This is the song Janet Yellen is singing now.

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

sung to the tune of “Hotel California” with apologies to The Eagles.

In a busy Asian city, bright lights in my eyes,
the stink of cigarette smoke, crowds in every high rise.
Given the agenda, I tried to relax.
The talks were heavy and deal chances slim.
It’s all spies and hacks.

I was geared to debate there. I heard the opening bell.
I was thinking to myself– so much stress. I hope I stay well.
Then they fed me their specialties, and they showed me the way.
The media waited in the corridor. Thought I heard someone say,

Welcome to the People’s Republic of China.
Such a lovely place.
Such a lovely place.
But they’re in the rat race.
Plenty of excess in the People’s Republic of China.
Oppression and fear.
Oppression and fear.
Paradoxes here.

They’ve got top officials– they got fancy cars.
They got factories and technology, they might go to Ma-ars.
How they danced in our peace talks. Overtures and threats.
We jockeyed for position. A treaty is anyone’s bet.

I said to my hostess, you’ve got a great crew.
They said we haven’t had that spirit here since 1972.

And still we put up a front in all-ll we say.
We talked circles around human rights; be reasonable– okay?

Welcome to the People’s Republic of China.
Such a lovely place.
Such a lovely place.
Always saving face.
Livin’ it up in the People’s Republic of China.
Put on a good show.
Put on a good show,
till it’s time to go.

Warships and solar panels, semiconductors and rice.
We’re all just prisoners here, of our own device.
And as part of the ceremony,
we gathered for the press.
They stab it with their steely words but it’s still an economic mess.

This was a trip to remember, as I headed for the door.
Haven’t made much progress from the place I was before.
These talks scratched the surface. But I was gladly received.
We’re entrenched countries joined at the hip, we can NEVER leave.

Voices From Tibet

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The Book of the Week is “Voices From Tibet, Selected Essays and Reportage” by Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong, edited and translated by Violet S. Law, published in 2014.

In 1910, Great Britain mandated that Tibet become part of China. The territory consisted of yak and sheep herders and barley farmers. Fighting in Tibet ensued until October 1950, when China got its way. Mao Tse-Tung directed his People’s Liberation Army to take it over, except for the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). That bit of land was led by a Buddhist leader called the Dalai Lama. In 1959, he was forced to assume a government-in-exile in India.

More recently, Tibet, with a population of approximately six million, is a mountainous region that is twelve thousand feet above sea level and three and a half times the size of the state of Texas. It has seen decades of violence from protesters agitating for independence. In July 1994, the Chinese government launched a smear campaign against the Dalai Lama. Dissidents who had any connections to Buddhism, even tenuous ones, were imprisoned or killed.

Two political dissidents– a married couple– whom the Chinese government has oppressed due to their stance on freedoms in Tibet include: Tsering Woeser (a Chinese army officer’s daughter, a poet, born in 1966) and Wang Lixiong (a novelist born in 1953).

In 1998, Wang’s writings didn’t advocate subversion, but rather, sought to educate people to effect political change, proposing a gradual approach toward Tibetan democracy. In 2001, he resigned his membership in the Chinese Writers’ Association because its actions offended his sensibilities. The Chinese government expelled him from Friends of Nature, an environmental organization he co-founded.

In 2003, Tsering was fired from a job with a publisher because she praised the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa (a Buddhist leader), and encouraged belief in religion. She moved from Tibet to Beijing and became an unofficial spokesperson for Tibetan dissidents in China. Beijing allowed a little more free speech than Tibet. She posted writings on a foreign website rather than through print-media so it was harder for the Chinese government to harass her.

In 2008, more kinds of people agitated against China’s control of Tibet. Nuns, monks, local vendors, students, farmers and nomads demanded that the Dalai Lama be allowed to return to Tibet. In 2011, almost two dozen of the religious ones set themselves on fire in protest. In 2012, about eighty of them did.

In 2006, China opened the Qinghai-Tibet rail line.”What is unfolding in Tibet is pseudo-modernization, essentially a kind of invasion, a sugar-coated act of violence.” That sounds like colonialism, but in 2008, in the Tibetan city of Lhasa, the political environment was like that of Nazism. Chinese law enforcement officers detained and rounded up about seven hundred monks from monasteries, and took them to the last rail-line stop in Tibet.

The train cars smacked of Holocaust cattle-cars. The monks ended up in either political re-education camps or prison. Armed Chinese soldiers in the streets harassed monks and youths.

Tibet caught capitalistic fever from China. There was a “gold rush” in minerals and caterpillar fungi. Strangely, “The Buddha teaches us that all living beings are equal.” But the Buddhist monasteries in Tibet became hypocrites– were persuaded by an enterprising Chinese tour company to provide Mandarin and English-language translators to fill an (extremely lucrative) niche in the tourism industry. The Chinese controlled the business, which involved swindling tourists in various ways.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more biographical info on the two aforementioned dissidents, and the many additional ways that Tibetans are losing their culture (hint: by the turn of the twenty-first century, Tibet was becoming a regular Dubai) at the hands of the Chinese.

The Impossible Takes Longer

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“The materialism here is dreadful, pitiless. To occupy oneself here with anything not directly connected with earning one’s bread, it is necessary to be either very rich or very talented.”

-Chaim Weizmann, commenting on England’s elitist, aristocratic bent– as opposed to France’s and Germany’s more meritocratic bent, at the dawn of the twentieth century

The Book of the Week is “The Impossible Takes Longer, The Memoirs of Vera Weizmann, As Told to David Tutaev” by Vera Weizmann, published in 1967.

This book’s subjects included both Vera and Chaim Weizmann. The latter was best known as the first president of Israel, but he was actually just a figurehead. His Zionism ought to be noted, though. His brand of Zionism harped on the fact that the “wandering Jew” was rejected most everywhere he or she sought refuge from oppression. By the twentieth century, Arabs, on the other hand, could find refuge in many countries which would gladly accept them if there was political turmoil in their homeland.

Vera, one of seven siblings, was born in November 1881 in Rostov, in the former Soviet Union. Chaim, one of ten siblings, was born in November 1874 in western Russia, in the Pale of Settlement.

In late 1932, Chaim delivered a lecture to the leaders of the Jewish community in Germany, raising the alarm on the dangers of Hitler’s rhetoric. Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, already provided a hint of his take on Jews. Chaim sat on various boards of Zionist-related entities. Controversies raged through the 1930’s, among myriad other goings-on, over violence in Germany, violence in Palestine, what to do about refugees, and whether to make Palestine a Jewish homeland.

In 1935, Chaim was pressured to become president again of the World Zionist Organization. He relented, but going in, he knew he would become a scapegoat for the wrongs committed by the British government. Great Britain was in a tough spot, as it wanted Arab oil and to keep control of Palestine, but part of fighting against fascism meant doing the right thing by helping the cause of freedom for all peoples of the world, including Jews.

In 1937, in a speech to the Peel Commission, Weizmann again urged Jews to leave Germany. He was the one who said there were approximately six million of them. At that time, pursuant to the British Mandate, a tiny percentage of them could obtain a certificate allowing them entry to Palestine. Between 1940 and 1944, only about thirty-two thousand people were allowed to move to Palestine.

Vera and Chaim’s Jewish ancestors had been oppressed in their native lands. The two moved to England at the start of the 1900’s to minimize the possibility of their own persecution. In 1900, when Chaim was in his late twenties, he helped found the Jewish National Fund, whose donors bought up land in Palestine for the Jews. Beginning in her late teens, Vera studied in Geneva, Switzerland to be a medical doctor.

Read the book to learn of what became of Vera and Chaim.

Sunflower in the Snow

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The Book of the Week is “Sunflower in the Snow, Tales From A Wartime Childhood” by Rachel Patron, published in 2020.

The author was born in January 1936 in Bialystock (in Poland). Her family’s textile-dyeing factory was requisitioned by the Soviets when they occupied their portion of Poland in autumn 1939. The family moved in with extended relatives elsewhere in Poland. In spring 1940, they moved back to Bialystock to their prewar house. But the NKVD requisitioned that, too.

Good news: The family wasn’t sent to a concentration camp. Bad news: The family was sent to Siberia in summer 1941, where they almost froze and starved to death, anyway. Their way of life was turned upside-down, due to all kinds of political, economic, religious and linguistic changes wrought by the War; to name just a few:

After the Germans broke up with the Soviets, the former sought to arrest all Communists and Socialists. The author’s father and much older brother were taken away by the Commissar’s thugs to serve as slave labor, and in the Red Army, respectively.
There was bartering in black markets.
The atheist Soviets canceled Christmas.
The author’s family spoke Yiddish among themselves because the Soviets did not speak it, but they spoke Russian to local officials.

When she was an adolescent, after various long interruptions of her formal education due to the government’s closing of schools for ideological reasons, the author was told she was a Socialist Zionist. This entailed:

atheism, which meant the author didn’t have to observe a kosher diet; and
the Law of Return– automatic citizenship for all Jews around the world after Israel declared its independence in May 1948.

Read the book to learn: more details of the author’s experiences, traumas specific to her family, and what became of them.

The Vortex

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The Book of the Week is “The Vortex, A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation” by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, published in 2022. This multi-faceted story involved a massive number of deaths due to (cue the dramatic music): the Great Bhola cyclone (what would be called a hurricane in the Western Hemisphere), a cholera epidemic, dictatorial political shenanigans, atrocities and genocide; plus heroic international aid workers who were horribly hindered in their disaster-relief efforts. Sorry, no romantic subplot– this wasn’t a movie; all of this actually happened within the space of about three years. But at the end, there was the founding of a new nation, called Bangladesh.

Even decades after geographic separation of various religious and ethnic groups into: A) India, and B) a sovereignty of two discrete land masses (East and West) that comprised newly formed Pakistan in 1947– hostility still reigned. In Pakistan, anger and resentment simmered between the Muslim Punjabis in West Pakistan who spoke Urdu, and the Hindu Bengalis in East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh), who spoke their own language.

In the mid-1960’s, general Ayub (“Yahya”) Khan, who became Pakistan’s leader in 1969 [For more information, see this blog’s post, “The Rape of Bangla Desh”], ordered Pakistan’s military to attack India. The United States imposed economic sanctions on both Pakistan and India for childishly fighting. Pakistan allied with China. India allied with the then-USSR.

In August 1969, American president Richard Nixon tapped Yahya to be the contact to introduce him to China’s leader Mao Tse Tung. In exchange, Yahya wanted to purchase arms for Pakistan. Nixon violated the then-arms embargo against Pakistan to sell it armored personnel carriers and B-57 bombers.

In 1970, there occurred a quantum leap in hurricane-forecasting technology what with a new satellite called ITOS 1 that gathered real-time data on the Northern Hemisphere for the National Hurricane Center. Nevertheless, because they had no clue a storm was coming (the new forecasting technology had yet to reach Central Asia), almost all local residents drowned when the Great Bhola cyclone hit the delta near Manpura island in November 1970. A month later, fifty million Pakistanis were voting for the first time in their lives.

A few months later, American weapons were killing the Bengali people. Nixon was supporting Yahya. The latter’s military leader whipped up a Nazi-level frenzy of hatred against the Hindus, massacring them with .50 caliber machine guns and destroying– via American M-24 Chaffee tanks, jeeps and F-86 jets– key communication, political, educational and law enforcement structures in the city of Dacca in East Pakistan.

Unsurprisingly, all of the above was accompanied by a boatload of radio propaganda put out by Yahya’s side. But later, radio broadcasts helped the Bengalis. Anyway, Nixon aided and abetted Yahya in various additional ways to achieve his own political aims. Refugees fled to India, and where, counterintuitively, military camps trained Bengalis (technically Pakistanis) to resist the Pakistan Army. Indians had always been sworn enemies of Pakistanis. Still, it was in India’s best interest to see the Bengalis win the war and break up Pakistan.

There have occurred countless historical tapestries such as the aforementioned in which a complex bunch of circumstances resulted in millions of deaths; one thing led to another. The authors argued that the especially severe cyclone played a major role in giving scheming politicians an excuse to abuse their power even more. They asserted that more severe storms are occurring due to the earth’s changing atmosphere, and such natural disasters in turn trigger a series of events that increase global conflicts.

BUT, arguably, global conflicts have waxed and waned throughout history, regardless of natural disasters. There are four major causes of global conflicts (that are present in different combinations):

fighting over limited (and /or exploited) resources;
tribal hatreds;
religious hatreds; and
territorial disputes.

Present-day events (!) have shown that humanity is making slow, slow, slow progress towards a total net amount of good versus evil on earth– even with all the advances in early-warning systems for disasters and the striving for more widespread humanitarian activities. Cases in point: once-Communist countries have changed for the better in certain ways in the last thirty years, and there is less colonialism in the world than there used to be.

Unfortunately, advances in technology and charitable aid still trigger profiteering and political exploitation with their attendant propaganda. Alpha males with hubris syndrome with their greed and power-hunger still rule most of the world. Bottom line: human nature doesn’t change, but globally, human beings overall, are evolving.

Anyway, read the book to learn many more story-details, involving: how Nixon (and his evil sidekick Kissinger) came extremely close to instigating a nuclear war against the USSR in the Bay of Bengal; the fates of various political and military leaders; and the hapless common people of Pakistan, and the aid workers who passionately tried to help them.