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Unleashed

[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 “Unleashed” by Boris Johnson, published in 2024. This large volume was a bragfest, but it also explained the author’s opinions and his government’s policies for laypeople.

Johnson was born in 1964. “Disaster” was his favorite word. As London’s mayor starting in May 2008, he began implementing some of the same crime-fighting and environmental initiatives taken by former New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

Beginning in June 2016, after 52% of the UK’s 17.4 million population voted in favor of Brexit, heated discussions were had by everyone, including Lord Chief Justice, Master of the Rolls, and President of the Queen’s Bench Division. In 2019, Johnson was elected UK prime minister, and he became the nation’s biggest Brexit booster. The nation’s moneyed classes, and those who were pro-immigrant, wanted to remain in the EU.

The EU leadership in Brussels controlled many aspects of the economies of member-countries because it set the terms and conditions on trade unions, customs fees, currencies, factories, distribution of goods, national-border policies, etc. Johnson felt the UK was hamstrung by all the petty rules. He claimed that Canada was able to export its goods to EU’s markets absent the regulations to which the UK was subject.

In April 2020, when the prime minister ended up in the intensive care unit with a bad case of COVID, “Outside in the corridors of the hospital, though I never saw them, were representatives of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, despatched by Donald Trump to revive me with drugs not licensed or approved in the UK.”

The COVID pandemic in 2020 was a game-changer. Johnson contended that because the UK was no longer a member of the EU, certain forward-looking, skilled members of his administration were able to secure a vaccination program that was more widespread and implemented sooner than EU members’ programs. Harm done to the UK’s people and its economy was therefore significantly less than that done to comparable countries.

Nevertheless, the line graph of COVID deaths followed a largely similar pattern for each nation where COVID’s effects on the population was tracked– regardless of the actions leaders took. Sweden’s policies on quarantining were optional, while China’s were draconian, but both of their graphs showed two peaks during which the death toll went up and down during the course of the pandemic.

Another political issue shared by all major governments of the world, is immigration. Johnson heard how Australia supposedly deterred uninvited people fleeing their homelands, from arriving on its shores. Its federal immigration agency transported those people– to have their asylum claims processed to– not the nicest destination, to put it mildly, 4,500 miles to the island of Nauru. Perhaps the U.S. could look into such a policy, given that it too, is overwhelmed with asylum-seekers who have arrived on its soil illegally.

Read the book to learn much more about Johnson’s political life and times.

Other Rivers

The Book of the Week is “Other Rivers, A Chinese Education” by Peter Hessler, published in 2024.

In 1996, under the auspices of the U.S. Peace Corps, the American author taught a university course in Fuling, a small city in China. The students weren’t allowed to question the authority of their textbooks, which among other debatable historical statements, said, “..the Constitution of 1787 established the dictatorship of the American bourgeosie.” The government assigned most of the graduates to teaching jobs in rural middle schools. It’s unclear whether the culture has changed from that in the movie Not One Less, a portrayal of a teacher at a rural elementary school in China.

In 2019, the author moved back to China to teach at the elite Sichuan University, where tuition is about $700 annually. The College of Marxism’s building also housed the journalism department. The campus was full of security cameras. Nevertheless, China’s education environment was not so strict as it had been fifteen years prior.

The school’s instructors turned a blind eye to students’ subscribing to technology services (called VPNs) that encrypted their interactions on the internet– allowing them to view websites censored by the Chinese government– so as to better complete their assignments. But they were risking arrest by the government.

The author’s two American daughters began the third grade at a Chinese public school. They spent hours and hours learning the written characters of the Mandarin language. Their mother, whose great-grandfather was Chinese, helped them. Parents of their classmates posted to the instant messaging service called WeChat, day and night; hundreds of messages a day. The school used the parents as free labor, to communicate policies regarding homework assignments, uniforms, etc.

The nonpartisan Peace Corps had had a presence in China for twenty-seven years, when in the third week of January 2020, two Republican U.S. senators (Marco Rubio and Rick Scott), ignorant of what the Peace Corps was, with no authority over it, Tweeted that, going forward, there would be no more volunteers assigned to China. There were, at the time, twenty-seven Peace Corps alumni working for the State Department. The anti-China messaging had nothing to do with COVID.

Toward the end of January 2020, when the spread of COVID reached a certain level, under international pressure, the Chinese government imposed a version of martial law. People were confined to their homes, which tended to be enclosed with walled areas where the government could easily close exits and entrances. Residents could also thus be corralled and surveilled more easily.

In the city of Wuhan– the place of the first COVID case– about nine million people were affected by the lockdown. In early spring 2020, the quarantine was lifted. By mid-spring, the U.S. allegedly had a death toll ten times higher than that of China.

Daily, the author and other parents of school kids were required to report their children’s temperature beginning at 6:30am, and their temperature was to be reported four more times throughout the day. The school schedule included pauses for handwashing, and of course, the WeChat information-sharing never stopped.

One particular man who had a mild COVID case was quarantined for more than two months in a medical facility, even though his eight-day travel history (collected by spies) showed him to have infected ZERO individuals.

The author spoke with lots of people, some of whom, risking arrest, resisted certain aspects of the Chinese government’s oppression in everyday life. These rebels operated as scattered alliances of a few people, rather than as one large organized group, so they wouldn’t appear to be organized. This has worked for various terrorist groups through the decades, and was supposedly the case for the January 6 (American) protestors.

Read the book to learn much more about Chinese way of life, and its nature during the COVID pandemic through the author’s eyes.

Midcentury Journey

The Book of the Week is “MidCentury Journey” by William L. Shirer, published in a 1961 revised edition. During and after WWII, the author- who was born around 1904 in the United States– made visits periodically to Europe and the U.S. and recorded his political, cultural and social observations.

Shirer described the circumstances surrounding Hitler’s collaborators, including King Leopold of Belgium, Quisling of Norway, and Petain and Laval of France. Other leaders immediately caved in to Hitler– the king of Denmark and the queen of Netherlands. They hitched their stars to Hitler because they thought he was going to win the war and when he did, they would benefit.

The reasoning “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” was used to justify the August 1939 agreement between Hitler and Stalin. Both hated the Jews, so ordinary Germans and Russians could share in the hatred. But the relationship between two megalomaniac males with clashing egos doesn’t last long.

The Nazis were able to come to power and maintain it because they had firearms and social contagion. That is the case in corrupt, lawless countries. Money, lawyers and social connections are instruments of power in democratic countries. However, firearms can tear apart the social fabric, and when other conditions are present, can lead to corruption and lawlessness.

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the French government wasn’t as capitalistic as other nations. So most of its people suffered living standards lower than other nations’. In 1938, France was ill-prepared to fight another war. Its military leaders refused to believe that new military equipment such as tanks and planes were necessary for defense. Further, the country’s newspapers were in the pay of Hitler and Mussolini.

The French people were mad as hell at their government and other institutions. The Fascists and Communists took the opportunity to harness public outrage at the corruption and incompetence of the French government.

The French people developed black markets to keep their resources away from their Nazi occupiers, and to survive. They continued their black markets after the war because they were angry. The workers felt cheated by inflation and low pay. They committed tax evasion and refused to do public service in sacrificing for their countrymen, unlike other cultures who: volunteered, contributed raw materials, and suffered deprivations for the war effort. The French thus adopted Soviet-style Communism. Their inefficient, small businesses lingered for decades.

Toward the end of the war, reporter Leo Lania quoted a French editor, “Charles de Gaulle has become the leader of a party which rallies the traitors of yesterday, the grafters of today, and the Fascists of tomorrow under the cloak of patriotic slogans.” [Behold, “Make America Great Again.”]

Britain was so very economically devastated by the war in so many ways, that the Labour and Conservative parties cooperated in passing Communistic laws. In the second half of the 1940’s into the 1950’s, the government began to take care of the people by taking over the Bank of England, coal mining, transportation, civil aviation, international telecommunications and utilities. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as the tenor of the times warranted it!

In 1949, the British got national health insurance. The American Medical Association smeared this National Health Service as “socialized medicine” because if the idea was to be implemented in the U.S., it would threaten the autonomy and lavish livelihoods of American doctors.

During the McCarthy Era, a group of Americans passed judgement on the “Americanness” of others, trampling on their rights to due process. Shirer characterized Joe McCarthy as “… a second-rate Goebbels, possessing something of the German propaganda minister’s disregard for truth or fair play or elementary decency and his flair for the lowest forms of demagoguery, but lacking the German brain, which was above average.”

Prior to his mental decline, America’s current president-elect was the same way. Still is, and getting worse. Yet, now is a contradictory time in America, considering that free speech abounds (except for employers who make the signing of non-disclosure agreements a hiring condition!) and voter turnout is on the rise.

Nevertheless, the way Trump can prove his mental acuity, is to answer UNSCRIPTED questions at public appearances. In connection therewith, here’s a song about people who are collaborating with him: the angry, Democrat-bashing, overpaid noisemakers on the idiot box. Sometimes, one has to fight fire with fire and stoop to their level. We hate most in others what we hate in ourselves.

LIBERAL-PEOPLE HATERS

sung to the tune of “The Purple People Eater” with apologies to the Estate of Sheb Wooley and whomever else the rights may concern.

Well, I see the bullies lashing out at the Left.
Their candidates won. They’re not bereft.
Yet they continue to spew hate speech, you see.
They look like liberal-people haters to me.

It’s a mean, snide, low horde of lying liberal-people haters.
A mean, snide, low horde of lying liberal-people haters.
A mean, snide, low horde of lying liberal-people haters.
They sure look enraged to me. (Insecure?)

Well, they’re propagandists and they love ratings, you see.
Those whiny liberal-people haters, they don’t incite me.
Their greedy message they say in a voice so gruff:
We wouldn’t hate you if you watch us enough!

I heard those liberal-people haters’ nasty lines.
They’re ignorant people and they’re sure unkind.
Their behavior is considered uncool in this land.
They’re puppets controlled by thuggish Trump’s hand.

Well, bless your hearts, you childish tools, lying liberal-people haters.
You idiots all, undergrowed lying liberal-people haters.
Glaring, little-minded lying liberal-people haters.
What a cringeworthy scene.

And they rave like they’re three with a shrieking sound.
And they lash out, really flailing around.
It’s a smearing party with an ugly tune.
Sing a slur slur from phobias, boom, boom, boom.

Well, they’re not going away. That much, we know.
Unless the billionaires wisely spend our tax dough,
to revive democracy, reduce the red.
Lose those cocky fools and a prez-elect who’s brain-dead.

! ! !

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about WWII history and Shirer’s observations of it.

A Wild Idea

The Book of the Week is “A Wild Idea” by Jonathan Franklin, published in 2021. This sloppily edited volume told a suspenseful, inspiring story of a man famous for doing the impossible– saving huge swaths of ecosystems in southern regions of Chile and Argentina in the single-digit 2000’s.

Born in 1943, Doug Tompkins spent his childhood in New York City and upstate New York. A social misfit, he dropped out of high school. Nevertheless, he acquired marketable skills in tree-felling and other manual labors, and retailing, enabling him to fund his wilderness adventures. His entreprenurial bent led him to start two clothing companies that prospered.

Tompkins wasn’t some hypocritical environmental philanthropist who claimed to want to save the earth, while: generating excessive pollution with his gas-guzzling vehicles and corporate and private jets, zipping around to his various mansions, and yachting with celebrities.

Tompkins truly, deeply cared about contamination of the world’s food supply, in addition to securing nature preserves in the form of national parks. His goals were to re-balance the proportions of life forms on earth through re-populating those areas with endangered species, and to let people enjoy nature! This, in regions of South America that had yet to be destroyed by humans, only because the terrain was so inhospitable to human habitation. He lived there; off the grid, when he wasn’t on some challenging outdoors-adventure with his buddies somewhere in the world.

Read the book to learn much more about a few episodes of Tompkins’ more extreme adventures, his businesses, the changes he wrought, and how he was changed by his experiences and relationships.

A Man of Two Superpowers

The Book of the Week is “A Man of Two Superpowers, From Russia With Hope” by Yakov Grinshpun, published in 2022. This short, sloppily edited volume explained how and why the author came to the United States, and how he adjusted to living here.

Grinshpun was born in January 1944 in a part of Ukraine that became Romanian territory during WWII. The Russians “liberated” his shtetl in March 1944. He was brainwashed from birth into the Russian Communist system, with its extreme nationalism, “meetings, salutes, slogans, parades and uniforms.” He was taught that the Americans were evil. Imperialism and capitalism became conflated in his mind.

Grinshpun was branded as having Jewish nationality due to his ancestry, even though he had been born in Ukraine– a territory claimed by the Russians. His birth certificate and passport both said as much. This made him the target of discrimination in most major aspects of his life in the then-Soviet Union.

In February 1962, at age eighteen, the author had finally become eligible to vote for his country’s leader. Actually, voting was legally required! Even so, there was only one name on the ballot: Khrushchev’s.

At university, as a Jew, he was barred from studying medicine or law. The few jobs open to him involved mathematics or engineering. However, Grinshpun did get free tuition in exchange for three years’ worth of working for the State in the job chosen for him– physics teacher.

Even into his forties, the author had such limited knowledge about the collective mood of the people in his homeland. He wrote, “The Soviet Union endured for about seventy years, and as far as I could tell in [summer] 1989 would for many more years with its draconian policies.”

Most of the world was gobsmacked by the events of the next few months. Grinshpun explained the reason for his ignorance: infantilism imposed on him by the Soviet government: “… we were never responsible for much. We had a secure job and a place to live– both all but for life.” In exchange for having no worries, the people were conditioned to be blindly obedient to authority, and to lack critical thinking.

Nonetheless, there were a few independent thinkers such as Ayn Rand, who knew years in advance that Communism in the Soviet Union would eventually collapse. Even now, there are very few people in the world who have Rand’s kind of insight.

Instantaneous, global communications is actually part of the problem. It provides too much noise. Grinshpun was provided with too few perspectives and resources to see the big picture, given his time and place. Acquiring the ability to zero in on the correct signals takes decades of life-experience, reading nonfiction books, and for the most part, ignoring the idiot box and the media’s pronouncements.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Grinshpun’s life experiences.

ENDNOTE: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“I told my husband if we have to go to the White House, okay, I will go, but I’m going as myself. It’s too late to change my pattern and if they don’t like it, then they’ll just have to throw me out.”

-Betty Ford on the TV show 60 Minutes, aired August 10, 1975– a year after Nixon’s resignation, and a year into Gerald Ford’s presidency.

Here’s a ditty on why things stay the same.

HISTORY REWRITER

sung to the tune of “Paperback Writer” with apologies to The Beatles and whomever else the rights may concern.

History rewriter.

Dear loyal voter,
Don’t you read Trump’s books.
They took decades to spin, full of gobbledygook.
They’re bragfests involving his ex-contacts.

He needs a job, so he’s BEEN a history rewriter.
History rewriter.

It’s lots of dirty stories of a dirty man and his former wives didn’t understand.
His kids were sucked into his daily World.
They got steady jobs, but he’s BEEN a history rewriter.
History rewriter.

History rewriter. Rewriter.

Yet there’re millions of pages in legal truth.
There’ll be millions more in a week or two.

He’s lasted longer because he’s mastered the style. He keeps changing it round.
And he’s BEEN a history rewriter.

History rewriter.

With free speech he owns the Right. But he needs the billionaires’ oversight.

You’ll want to LOOK at transcripts.
You can’t SEE them here.
But Trump needs a break. And he’s BEEN a history rewriter.
History rewriter. History rewriter.
Rewriter. Rewriter.

History rewriter. History rewriter…

tokyo junkie [sic]

The Book of the Week is “tokyo junkie [sic], 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys… and Baseball” by Robert Whiting, published in 2021.

Whiting was born at the dawn of the 1940’s in northern California. In January 1962, while in the U.S. Air Force, he was assigned to Fuchu Air Base in a Tokyo suburb. He fell in love with Tokyo and the culture of its people, despite its sexism, pervasive sex trade, hatred of foreigners, and government censoring of its media.

Tokyo was undergoing a makeover to prepare for its debut as the venue of the 1964 Olympics. During the Vietnam Era, American college campuses exploded in protest against the war. The Japanese government supported the war. By 1969, Japanese students were protesting, too.

Over the course of decades, the author witnessed how the city changed from a war-ravaged backwater to an economic powerhouse. After WWII, the U.S. maintained a military presence in Japan, and nursed it back to economic health. This process was reflected in Japan’s education system, which mandated rigorous, nerve-racking entrance exams, which had a decidedly capitalist bent.

Another aspect of Japanese culture that showed its emulation of the United States, was the popularity of its professional baseball. However, the Japanese put their own twist on it. They allowed a few Americans to play on their teams, but criticized them for doing too well or too poorly. Too much competition would make the opposing team feel bad, but a player yielding too much to an opposing team, would be told to do better for his own team. Cooperation and sacrificing for one’s own team were key aspects of play.

The author noted one positive behavior pattern the Japanese were taught from birth. That was– maintaining the highest respect for other people’s property, and for public property. Their “lost and found” returned personal items to their owners (even cash, without a penny missing!) as a matter of the right thing to do. Tokyo is one of the cleanest cities in the world because the people feel a collective sense of ownership of their streets, so they don’t “foul their own nest.” Ironically, their politicians are notoriously corrupt.

Read the book to learn much, much more on the author’s take on how Japanese culture changed following major historical events such as Olympics, financial ruin, earthquakes, tsunamis, and globalization.

Red China Blues

[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 “Red China Blues, My Long March From Mao to Now” by Jan Wong, published in 1996.

Born in 1952, Wong grew up in Montreal. Since her parents were originally from China, she went to search for her roots there, beginning when she was in college. She spent her three-month 1972 summer vacation in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards ransacked temples and burned books, painted walls red, and posted Mao’s quotations. Chinese natives had severe shortages of consumer goods, which were exported for hard currency.

The author was assigned a minder (supervisor / spy) and a driver. The unwashed masses were squashed into noisy trams while top government officials rode around in red-flagged limousines whose windows were covered in gauze.

Wong was taken somewhere different every day, such as the Canton zoo, or the countryside. The latter was ninety miles away from Beijing. To get there, she had to take an overcrowded bus with live chickens, plus a six-hour ride on three ferries.

Fresh-faced, earnest, brainwashed cultists (Chinese youths) put on a show for Wong (a special foreign visitor). She had arrived fresh-faced and earnest, and became a brainwashed cultist herself. The most prominently featured book at the bookstore was Selected Works of Mao Zedong in various languages.

Wong became a lucky beneficiary of Mao’s campaign to open up China economically and culturally. As is well known, American president Nixon opened the door for economic benefits. The author got permission to study the Mandarin language at Beijing University. She and her dorm-mate, another foreigner, were treated like princesses rather than common Chinese peasants.

Even so, the author acquired the martyr complex of true Mao worshippers– she was eager to go to the countryside to do hard manual labor. She did, but she saw that her fellow workers had gotten tired of the leaders’ hypocrisy, and the deprivation suffered by, and oppression of ordinary Chinese people.

Mao’s latest nationwide political program was winding down. His anti-education mandate was changing. His minions began to encourage school attendance, but there was rote learning, which still put the kibosh on independent thinking. The goal of the Communists was to produce blindly obedient robots who could recite Marx, Engels , Lenin, Stalin and of course Mao, verbatim.

In the early 1980’s with a new leader, China caught the capitalism bug. But there was still loads of corruption. The government still oppressed ordinary Chinese people. Even though the author was a Canadian expatriate, she looked Chinese, so this actually gave her a distinct advantage as a journalist for a Canadian newspaper. She was able to gain the trust of the people she questioned.

Nevertheless, even the author suffered an outrageous incident: “The police not only didn’t apologize, they announced they would keep our car another month… on June 5, 1990, we got our Toyota back, a year less a day after the police had stolen it. The gas tank was empty, the odometer was broken, the cigarette lighter was gone, and cigarette butts and popsicle sticks littered the interior.”

The author acquired direct experience in two economically and politically diverse environments over the course of decades– Canada and China. By the end of the 1970’s, she had become disillusioned with the workers’ paradise, but didn’t regret the education she got.

Wong saw how, into the 1990’s, Beijing’s roads became clogged with luxury vehicles, as the new rich sought to keep up with the Joneses. At the book’s writing, she could identify dogma and hated it. She believed in dignity and building resilience through experiencing hardship. She contended that rational thought should be sufficiently simple to explain to a five-year old.

Read the book to learn of many other experiences in the author’s life, and of the major late-1980’s historical event the author witnessed, that showed that China was still not ready to join the modern nations of the world that practiced democracy and rule of law.

The Forgotten Highlander

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The Book of the Week is “The Forgotten Highlander, An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific” by Alistair Urquhart, published in 2011.

Born in 1919, the author was drafted into the Gordon Highlanders (a Scottish military outfit ultimately supervised by the British government) sent to Singapore in late 1939. By early 1942, the Japanese had marched into Malaya and Singapore in order to grab their rubber and tin. The region got scant military protection from the British, as there were other territories Churchill deemed more worthy of protection.

Stationed at Fort Canning, the author was taken as a prisoner of war in February 1942. The Japanese exploited him and his fellow Scottish, British, Australian, Canadian, American and Dutch soldiers for slave labor to clear the jungle and build a railway that stretched 415 kilometers from Bangkok in Thailand, to Burma. The latter land provided rice and access to oil fields. The feat was completed by about sixty thousand men in about sixteen months, resulting in countless, anonymous deaths.

The Japanese also forced the Thais, Indians, Malayans and Tamils to help with constructing a bridge on the River Kwai. Unlike in real life, the Hollywoodized movie “Bridge on the River Kwai” featured nicely clothed, well fed workers, sexy female natives on hand, and a labor boss who collaborated with the Japanese.

In real life, the POWs were starved to death, arbitrarily beaten mercilessly, subjected to vermin such as lice, ants, bedbugs, rats, maggots, flies and weevils, and to tropical diseases such as cholera, malaria, diphtheria and dysentery. Due to lack of treatments for the aforementioned, there were deaths and more deaths.

Read the book to learn of numerous additional details of the author’s war experiences, and of how the British government imposed insult to injury on surviving, rescued POWs such as the author (hint: The British demanded that the author comprehensively prove that he deserved a disability war pension, but the Japanese military failed to keep records of its POW-related actions– many of which violated the Geneva Convention provisions, that resulted in millions upon millions of deaths and ruined lives.).

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.