Politics – Page 32 – education and deconstruction.com

Freedom At Midnight

The Book of the Week is “Freedom At Midnight” by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre, published in 1975.

In August 1946, Muslims filled the streets in Calcutta, agitating for an independent nation of their own, presumably to be named Pakistan. Six thousand people died in that one episode of unrest. Many, many more would, in the next two and a half turbulent years.

Some journalists would feature the following information more prominently than the above: “Golf was introduced in Calcutta in 1829… No golf bag was considered more elegant on those courses than one made of an elephant’s penis, provided of course, that its owner had shot the beast himself.”

Anyway, as is well known, India has had a long history of violence among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Through the decades, various place-names have triggered traumatic memories of copious arson, bombs, bloodshed and atrocities in regions including but far from limited to: Amritsar, the Punjab, Lahore, Peshawar, Kashmir, and New Delhi.

The British have had a long history of encouraging jealousies and hostilities among the different religious and ethnic groups in India so as to prevent them from forming a united nation.

The authors of this book provided horribly confusing totals of the different populations. They wrote that in 1947, India had three hundred million Hindus and one hundred million Muslims, and “… the contested state of four hundred million human beings…” In two other places, they wrote that the Punjab had two million Sikhs, and “The six million Sikhs to whom… they represented only two percent of India’s population…”

In another section,”He [Mohammed Ali Jinnah] had to tell India’s ninety million Muslims of the ‘momentous decision’ to create an Islamic state…” Still elsewhere, all of India allegedly held 275 million Hindus, fifty million Muslims, seven million Christians, six million Sikhs, one hundred thousand Parsis and 24,000 Jews.

Regardless, from the 1920’s through the 1940’s, a man named Gandhi acquired sufficient psychological power over his followers– fervent believers in their respective religions– to momentarily stop killing each other and work toward the common goal of convincing the British government that it was time to give up its colony of India.

Gandhi was able to work his magic because his incredible self-control showed him to be no hypocrite (according to his crack public relations team). He took the action of a true activist— risking his life in fasting (and seriously endangering his health) practicing what he preached (according to his crack public relations team).

Nevertheless, even Gandhi could not come up with a less acrimonious plan– to allow India to evolve as a nation via dividing the peoples who couldn’t live together– than partition. Arguably, he merely postponed the deaths, rather than saved the lives of the different tribes hellbent on eliminating their enemies. India’s caste system’s abusive hierarchy meant that, other than willful violence, the causes of hundreds of thousands of deaths included starvation, disease and severe weather.

However, giving Muslims their own state would mean allocating land in India to Pakistan (with a partition), that would need to be vacated by millions of Sikhs and Hindus, while land in the new India would need to be vacated by Muslims. Those who found themselves in hostile territory– out of fear, were compelled to migrate to where they would number among the majority in their communities.

The division of India into two sovereign states was like the vivisection of Siamese twins– vital organs would be mutilated in the process. Rice, jute, cotton, wheat, barley, corn and sugar cane were grown in one prospective country, but the means of growing, processing or transporting them for export, in the form of irrigation, railroads and highways was contained in the other prospective country.

Louis Mountbatten was the British government official appointed to oversee the process of converting India from a colony of Great Britain to two independent nations. He had a thankless, impossible job.

For, in addition to the complex religious, economic and political considerations involved, there were royal families ruled by maharajahs (of all different religions) to contend with; 565 administrations of them, to be exact. They lived high on the hog, and weren’t keen to relinquish their precious stones, elephants, private railway cars, Rolls Royces, etc. Some even had their own armies– yet another wrench in the works.

Mountbatten thought the least painful plan was to keep India and Pakistan as holdings of the United Kingdom. He decided that midnight of August 15, 1947 was to be the witching hour– when the partition would take effect. Astrologers, who were all the rage in India then, were quite shaken by that decision because by their calculations, that day was bad luck and another day should have been chosen.

On another topic, the new India and Pakistan had to have separate armies. The current Indian army was comprised of the cream of the crop of Sandhurst graduates, whose costs were low, pay was high, and who engaged in leisure pursuits of the wealthy– polo, cricket, pigsticking, shooting, hockey, hunting with hounds, and fishing. However, if a soldier who chose the Indian Army, happened to live in the future Pakistan, he was forced to either join the Pakistani army, or abandon his property and move away from his family.

The way Pakistan’s geographical borders were established was accomplished via an unbiased redistricting process, of sorts. Mountbatten appointed an attorney who knew nothing about India’s ethnic and religious groups, whose job was to pore over scads of population data and maps of the region, and indiscriminately divide it up.

Unjust division of families and real estate was bound to happen, but it was inadvertent. Curiously, “All of Punjab’s jails wound up in Pakistan. So too did its unique insane asylum.”

Read the book to learn how the major leaders warded off anarchy during the independence processes; how Gandhi quelled hostilities at least temporarily in Calcutta on Pakistan’s birthday; what transpired in connection with the Hindu (!) terrorist group who had it in for Gandhi (who was Hindu); and the details of the transposition of the “wretched refugees” (hint– 800,000 refugees in the Punjab [alone(!)] constituted “… a caravan almost mind-numbing in dimension… as though all of Boston, every man, woman and child [that’s not including animals– bullocks, buffaloes, camels, horses, ponies, sheep, etc.] in the city in 1947, had been forced by some prodigious tragedy to flee on foot to New York.”).

No Room For Small Dreams / Rabin / My Country, My Life (Very Long Post)

The First Book of the Week is “No Room for Small Dreams–Courage, Imagination, and the Making of Modern Israel” by Shimon Peres, published in 2017. This is the autobiography of the late prime minister (in the mid-1980’s) of Israel.

Born in 1923, Peres spent the first decade of his life in a shtetl on the Russia/Poland border. In 1934, his (Jewish) family moved to Palestine seeking religious freedom. At fifteen years old, he put his natural leadership skills to good use at the kibbutz Ben-Shemen. The institution was like boarding school, but it emphasized the teaching of skills for agriculture and use of weaponry more than academic subjects.

In 1941, Peres moved to Kibbutz Alumot, where he herded sheep amid olive and date groves. The youths there lived in tents lacking electricity and indoor plumbing.

After WWII, when the Jews were pushing for statehood, Peres became a disciple of David Ben Gurion. He favored a partition between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. In 1947, Ben Gurion recruited him for the Haganah, one of the intelligence services of Palestine. However, his lack of fluency in the English language was a handicap. This was remedied in June 1949, when he began to attend the New School for Social Research in New York City. Three years later, he and his family moved back to Israel, where he took a position in the Defense Ministry, and assisted with the founding of El Al Airlines.

In the early 1950’s, neither Great Britain nor the United States was in the mood to sell arms to Israel. Peres found an unexpected supplier in France. In addition, in the summer of 1957, France allegedly mentored Israel in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. In connection therewith, Peres claimed that he planned and organized the construction of a top-secret corporate village in the Negev desert near Beersheba to give the world the impression that Israel was a superpower.

In 1959, the author was elected to the Knesset and also kept a position in the Defense Ministry. In the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Egypt and Syria limited the spoils of their victory to territory they lost in the 1967 Six-Day war. According to the author, in the 1973 war, Egypt’s leader, Anwar Sadat refrained from attacking Israel’s central cities for fear it would retaliate with weapons of mass destruction. Apparently, threat of retaliation was not a deterrent to small-time terrorist groups, such as the PLO, who intermittently killed the Jewish state’s citizens, a few at a time, for decades.

Nevertheless, read the book to learn of Peres’ brilliant political career (according to him) as an economic genius and peacemaker with Jordan and the PLO. Yet, Peres admits he played the former role thanks to Israel’s cozy relationship with the United States. Yassir Arafat could not really guarantee and did not take responsibility for, violence perpetrated by the organization he headed; foolish Peres failed to take heed of the following cliche: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

The Second Book of the Week is “Rabin, Our Life, His Legacy” by Leah Rabin, published in 1997.

Born in April 1928 in Prussia, Leah Rabin met her husband Yitzhak in Palestine’s co-ed military intelligence service– the Palmach– in the 1940’s. The group was actually a secret society because it was deemed illegal by the British authorities.

In Palestine, the author and her beloved lived in a kibbutz or a tent and did farming, herding, hiking and jogging. And firearms training, not to mention military-attack drills. In the summer of 1946, due to Leah’s sixth sense about imminent danger, she avoided getting arrested by the British, but Yitzhak was caught. However, the weaponry hidden in the women’s body cavities went undiscovered because frisking of females by the authorities was chivalrous in those days.

In 1948, after spending more than four months in jail, Yitzhak became a commander in the Harel Brigade, one of three newly formed Palmach divisions. The group became part of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF)– the Israeli military– in 1949. Ten years later, Yitzhak was chief of operations of the IDF.

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel (which achieved its independence in spring 1948), belonged to the Mapai (Labor) party. Yitzhak didn’t, and therefore Ben-Gurion favored other men over him when he staffed his government and formulated military policy.

In November 1963, the Rabins made a diplomatic visit to the United States. Just after they returned to Israel, they learned that President John F. Kennedy was dead. “Yitzhak… had just completed an intensive study of state-of-the-art defense and security practices from the most powerful nation in the world, and suddenly we learned that this country’s chief executive was slain by a lone gunman.”

Shortly thereafter, Yitzhak took a break from military matters to become a social butterfly– an ambassador to the U.S., from Israel. Such a lifestyle involves having cocktails, attending parties, making small talk and gossip mongering. In 1973, Yitzhak tried his hand at elective office. He won a seat in the Knesset in the Labor party, and an appointment as Minister of Labor.

In April 1974, Golda Meir felt obligated to resign as Israel’s fifth Prime Minister due to the mishandling of the Yom Kippur war, which had occurred about six months prior. Yitzhak was voted in as her replacement. He was battered about by political contentiousness and decided after three years to resign his Prime Minister post. He remained a member of the Knesset, though. Political comebacks are not uncommon in Israel. Yitzhak staged his in the autumn of 1984. He became the Minister of Defense.

That was when the Mapai and Likud (Conservative) parties merged in order to form a major voting bloc. The new entity was called the National Unity Party. In 1985, Yitzhak helped supervise the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Jordan. He became Prime Minister again in 1992.

In the first half of the 1990’s, Yitzhak Rabin sat down at the negotiating table with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat. Many people thought Arafat was a terrorist who led a terrorist group and would never be trustworthy, and Yitzhak was being way too nice.

Further, U.S. president Bill Clinton, the mediator of the peace talks, had a credibility problem. So– it was kind of like a diplomatic charade because sincerity wasn’t a strong suit of at least two of the three parties there. Further, regardless of the ulterior motives of the three parties involved– history had already shown grave doubts as to whether durable agreements could be reached between the two centuries-long rivals.

Israel had previously had a policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists such as Arafat and had refused to meet with them under any circumstances. However, Rabin believed in appeasement of the Egyptians and Jordanians as well. He was willing to hear them out and sign documents that were supposed to foster peace in the Middle East. In this way, he garnered a lot of political enemies. Ironically, he was shot at a peace rally.

Read the book to learn the details of what transpired, the aftermath (especially the aftermath– through Leah’s eyes) and many more details of Israeli history and Rabin’s role in it.

The Third Book of the Week is “My Country, My Life– Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace” by Ehud Barak, published in 2018.

Born in 1942 in one of the early kibbutzim– Mishmar Hasharon– the small village north of Tel Aviv, Barak pursued a military career from the 1960’s into the 1980’s, alternating it with his education. He led special forces on secret missions. He eventually earned a degree in physics from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a master’s degree in operations management from Stanford University.

Barak seemed a bit resentful about Israel’s dependence on the United States for its very existence; for, when describing the Yom Kippur War, he omitted the inconvenient fact that the United States sent weapons to Israel when the nation’s ability to defend itself was in serious doubt.

Barak began his political career in summer 1995 when he joined Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s cabinet. At his first vote, he abstained, holding onto his belief that Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories pursuant to the Oslo agreements was the wrong thing to do.

However, during peace talks with Syria, Barak thought the major question was whether, if Israel were to withdraw from the Golan Heights, it could still have a secure border. As a former (military) chief of staff, he argued in the affirmative.

In late winter and spring 1996 during election season, the terrorist group Hamas tried to reduce Shimon Peres’ chances of an election victory by killing tens of Israelis in terrorist attacks. It and Islamic Jihad viewed him as a traitor for conducting negotiations with Yasser Arafat. Peres was forced to retire at 73 years old.

In June 1996, Barak was elected leader of Israel’s Labor Party. It seemed Barak changed his tune and wanted to comply with the Oslo accords in the next couple of years. He got angry at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for delaying Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories. Netanyahu was desperate for power, and withdrawal was politically unpopular.

In summer 1999, Barak was elected prime minister. In May 2000, he ordered the departure of Israeli troops from Lebanon, despite the shenanigans of the PLO in its territorial / recognition / non-belligerence discussions with the Israelis. He rambled on for page after page, detailing the summer 2000 back-and-forth with Arafat, still moderated by U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Arafat turned out to be a tease for two weeks (before Barak realized he’d been played for a fool)– not budging an inch, not counter-offering any concessions while Barak bent over backwards to offer the Palestinians sovereignty over East Jerusalem, a large portion of the occupied territories and the holy sites.

Barak lost his reelection bid in 2001, so he retired. Read the book to learn more about Barak’s life, his views on various political issues, the current situation regarding the Israelis and Palestinians, and Netanyahu’s leadership.

ENDNOTE: A distracting grammatical error that is becoming more and more widespread was made repeatedly throughout the book (the word before the gerund should be possessive):

“Though I wasn’t sure about legal provisions for officers leaving the army…” [It should be officers’ leaving the army]

“What were the prospects of Arafat reining in Hamas and Islamic Jihad?” [It should be Arafat’s reining in …]

John Tyler/Benjamin Harrison

The First Book of the Week is “John Tyler, The Accidental President” by Edward P. Crapol, published in 2006. This wordy, redundant career biography described the ideology and actions of a little-known American president and his times.

Born in March 1790, Tyler was an elitist trained for leadership in his youth. The education curriculum included Shakespeare, Anglophobia and male role models, including his father, with whom he studied law. At seventeen years old, he graduated from the College of William and Mary.

In the early 1830’s, abolitionists created a national anti-slavery organization. They launched petitioning and postal campaigns which were met with verbal harassment, egg and rock throwing, and censorship of the mail. The slave owners spread the vicious rumor that the abolitionists were colluding with the British– who had decided that slavery was uncool and had set free their slaves.

In April 1841, President William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia after one month in office. Tyler, 51 years old, then serving as vice president (rather than other high government officials) became President of the United States because he aggressively convinced the government that he should.

As a point of pride, Tyler was eager to geographically and populationally expand the United States. He boasted about what a great model for freedom America was in the world. To this end, he wanted to welcome European refugees onto America’s shores and promote free trade.

But Tyler was a hypocrite in various ways. He owned tens of slaves in his workforce at his home in Virginia. He used his personal slaves in the White House as butler and valet. He exploited female slaves sexually.

Able to project an image of independent thinking, or have the chameleon-like flexibility of a politician, Tyler refrained from declaring himself a member of the major political parties of the time– the Whigs, Democrats or Liberty Party. He voted against creating a national bank– defying checks and balances of power by keeping his own (executive) and the legislative branch (which was supposed to have financial oversight of government operations), together.

In the early 1840’s, Tyler unwittingly did good by appointing a Navy secretary who appointed a superintendent who believed in scientific research using the Navy’s resources.

Tyler made a diplomatic trade trip to China, arriving in February of 1844. By summer of that year, he truly completed a deal (didn’t just boast about having a deal that was still in progress) to sell to China, America’s excess goods. In the next five years, the total dollar value of goods exchanged, doubled.

Read the book to learn of Tyler’s various territorial, slavery-related, Constitutional and States’ Rights controversies– in Oregon, Hawaii, Texas, and Maine’s Canadian border– on behalf of the United States (in which the president launched a propaganda campaign funded by a secret slush fund (illegally) unbeknownst to Congress), his relationships with Britain, France, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, post-presidency hot-button issues (which he covered in speaking tours, and about which he didn’t shut up until his death), and more.

The Second Book of the Week is “Benjamin Harrison” by Charles W. Calhoun, published in 2005. This is a brief career biography of America’s 23rd president, whose grandfather William Henry Harrison, was the ninth president.

Born in August 1833 in North Bend, Ohio into a big family, Benjamin Harrison studied political science, economics and debating in college, and then studied law, graduating in June 1852. Like his mother, he was a devout Presbyterian.

At the time, the type of capitalism practiced in England involved a vicious economic cycle: robber barons, who– among other exploitative practices– paid starvation wages to workers, who, in turn, required government welfare. The government taxed the workers so that they needed additional welfare.

For the rest of the 1850’s, Harrison established his career practicing law and holding various Republican leadership positions in Indiana and at his church. In summer 1862, he volunteered to fight for the Union in the American civil war. He worked his way up to brigade commander.

The (financial) Panic of 1873 made Harrison more wealthy than ever by giving him copious legal work. But that is not why he viewed the depression as a good thing. It was good because after a time, it put a stop to America’s excesses.

For years, people had been engaging in gambling, thinking they would get rich quick. Excuse the cliche, “The only place ‘success’ comes before ‘work’ is in the dictionary.” He knew that rewards came over time through focused labor and clean living.

Beginning in 1880, Harrison was elected as a Republican senator from Indiana. He believed in equal opportunity for all, including blacks, and integrated co-education. He thought the most important political issue of the day was black enfranchisement.

In 1888, Harrison was drafted by his fellow Republicans to run for president. His opponent went on a campaign tour. “Long tradition called for a presidential nominee to discuss the issues in a formal letter of acceptance but otherwise remain at home and leave the hard campaigning to surrogates.” Harrison stayed in Indiana and representatives from his political network visited him. He made speeches which were printed in all the major newspapers within a day. That’s how he reached voters.

Harrison was super-cooperative with Congress, pushing through 531 pieces of legislation during his administration. In early 1891, he secured trade agreements with Brazil, Central American nations and Austria-Hungary. However, he pointedly avoided a deal with Canada because that country was neither going to stop importing factory products from England to purchase America’s, nor would it purchase America’s food from farms.

Read the book to learn of the hot-button political issues of Harrison’s time (hint– there were contentious arguments on various economic fronts); of why he was a one-term president; and of many more details about his professional and personal beliefs, accomplishments and incidents.

Chief Justice

The Book of the Week is “Chief Justice, A Biography of Earl Warren” by Ed Cray, published in 1997.

Born in March 1891 in Southern California, Warren was encouraged by his Scandinavian parents to pay for his education by working odd jobs all through his childhood. Only a small percentage of his contemporaries graduated college. But his father ended up paying his tuition anyway.

Warren majored in political science and law, so that when he graduated– in a class of fifteen students– he could call himself a lawyer, as there was no bar exam then in California.

In 1912, Warren became a Progressive after he saw what a robber baron his father’s employer– the Southern Pacific Railroad in San Francisco– was. It owned the legal system.

The California government’s patronage system was threatened by the International Workers of the World (IWW or the “Wobblies”), a radical group that fought for workers but not for America in World War I. Most of its members consisted of low-level migratory laborers on farms, in mines and the logging industry who were “… womanless, voteless and jobless.” Warren had to deal with labor issues such as the above when he was a legislative aide in Northern California in the early 1920’s.

The local Alameda County government turned a blind eye to vice, which was everywhere. It was the Prohibition Era, after all. Warren joined the Republican party and worked in the District Attorney’s office, where enforcement was a joke. He wanted to change that scene someday.

Warren got his chance in January 1925. He was appointed interim Alameda County District Attorney. He launched an investigation into the cozy relationships among bail bondsmen, jailers and attorneys in the county. In 1926, he was formally elected in a landslide, as a conservative Republican. He prosecuted the sheriff, a KKK member, and an attorney for graft.

After his reelection, Warren proceeded to drain the swamp that was the Oakland Police Department. Ironically, his office was a center of white slavery, of sorts. Attorneys fresh out of law school with impeccable records labored long hours for no pay until there was a staff opening so that Warren could officially hire them.

By 1930, Warren had eliminated partisan patronage from the District Attorney’s office. In 1934, he was elected California Republican Party chairman. By summer 1939, as Attorney General of California, he sought to completely rid the state of illegal gambling in the form of betting on racing dogs and slot machines (including those on cruise ships).

Warren tended to side with liberals on the issues of civil rights and health care. Yet, during WWII, he strongly argued for rounding up all Japanese people living in coastal California who were not American citizens, and confining them in camps. But he was anti-union and his economic views favored capitalism over socialism. He hated the New Deal.

Despite his contradictory words and actions, Warren was handily reelected governor of California in 1946. One reason, though, was that he was allowed to list his name under both the Republican and Democratic parties on the ballot.

Warren attempted to provide all Californians with catastrophic health insurance via legislation. “The outpouring of [newspaper] editorials lent the appearance of massive public opposition to health insurance. That persuaded [California] legislators. Warren could not even invoke party discipline.”

On the other hand, Warren was sufficiently popular to be drafted to run for president. In May 1952, Richard Nixon made a secret deal with Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower that if Eisenhower got the nomination, Nixon would agree to become vice president.

Two months later, on the train that took Eisenhower, Nixon and Warren and their entourages to Chicago for the Republican National Convention, Nixon betrayed both of the other candidates in his party, Robert Taft and Warren, telling people that Eisenhower should get the delegates.

In June 1964, as is well known, President Lyndon Johnson bullied Warren into leading a commission that investigated the late President John F. Kennedy’s assassination (during which the panel members had to pore through about 25,400 pages of FBI reports and more). One member, then-Congressman Gerald Ford insisted that the assassination was a Communist plot instigated by Fidel Castro. No evidence of that was found. In September 1964, the report that described the results of the inquiry numbered 888 pages.

Read the book to learn more about Warren’s words and actions in connection with the landmark cases he handled as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1950’s and 1960’s; about which members of the American government are the ultimate interpreters of the United States Constitution; how due process was affected when the legal system permitted the presence of a media circus in the courtroom in a 1954 case that was about due process itself; and other hot-button issues, such as civil rights, gerrymandering, pornography, etc.

Counsel for the Defense – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Counsel for the Defense, The Autobiography of Paul O’Dwyer” by Paul O’Dwyer, published in 1979.

Born in County Mayo, Ireland in 1907 to a family of farmers, O’Dwyer was the youngest of eleven children. Gruff and authoritative more than affectionate, his father organized a teachers’ union at the one-room schoolhouse, angering the local priest, whose power was diminished thereby.

When he was eighteen, O’Dwyer emigrated to the United States, following four of his older brothers. While studying pre-law at Fordham University, he remarked, “The contradiction in our giving munificent foreign aid while letting poor whites remain illiterate and hungry was difficult to understand. (The injustice to the Negro community was not even discussed and I did not then think about it.)” In 1926, he attended law school at the then-Brooklyn campus of St. John’s University and joined a political club comprised of Jewish democrats. At that time, Irish Catholics were liberal democrats. U.S. citizenship was required before he was permitted to practice law. He attained that honor two years after passing the bar exam.

O’Dwyer was made a law-firm partner at 26 years old, litigating cases of labor law. In the late 1930’s, his oldest brother was elected to the post of Brooklyn District Attorney. By 1945, the brother was mayor of New York City. O’Dwyer represented the National Lawyer’s Guild, an organization that defended victims of the Communist witch hunt of the McCarthy Era.

Read the book to learn of the author’s adventures in running for offices; why he identified with the Jews who were fighting for the independence of Israel– which led him to handle an arms-smuggling case; of O’Dwyer’s opposition to a literacy test required for voting in some states in the early 1960’s; and his eventual senatorial career, among other legal and political activities.

34 Days – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “34 Days, Israel, Hezbollah, and the War in Lebanon” by Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, published in 2008. This book described the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, during which about a thousand people died.

In 1982, Israel launched a war with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to drive it out of Lebanon. Hezbollah started to arrive there after the PLO left. President Ronald Reagan of the United States– which for years had been an intermediary truce-negotiating party to Middle Eastern unrest– put discussions about foreign troop withdrawal (Syrian, American, Israeli) from Lebanon on the back burner after that first war ended.

Hezbollah, comprised of Shiites, a sect of Islam, originally formed in Iran. It acquired power in the Lebanese government by electing Parliamentarians beginning in 1992. The group was allowed to keep its weaponry through the years, even though it was allegedly provoking border skirmishes by abducting soldiers.

The second war started in mid-July 2006, when Israel reacted with exaggerated hostility to the abduction of two soldiers by Hezbollah terrorists at the Lebanese border. The Israeli military wanted to entirely wipe out the terrorist group.

Ehud Olmert– Israeli president since 2000, and the “defense” minister he appointed, Amir Peretz, went hog-wild. They agreed with hawkish military leaders to not only take out Hezbollah’s Syrian-supplied Katyusha rockets on the ground before they could be deployed, but to blast transportation, media and energy hubs in Lebanon with sophisticated weaponry, knowing this action would kill many civilians.

Arab states nearby (but not Syria)– Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf Emirates– were silently cheering for Israel to take out Hezbollah, a move related to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The West chastised Israel for its aggression, although it itself was at that moment continuing to violate the Geneva Convention in Iraq, etc.

Read the book to learn details of the unnecessary parting shot at the war’s end taken by Israel, which handled the war incompetently at best and evilly at worst, that caused many needless deaths (especially civilian), with, unsurprisingly, “… both sides racing to ensure their victory and to perpetuate their own narrative of the war” to the media and the public.

Bess Truman

The Book of the Week is “Bess Truman” by Margaret Truman, published in 1986. The author described as much about the life of her father Harry Truman as about her mother Bess Wallace Truman.

Born in February 1885, in Independence, Missouri, Bess was athletic in her youth. She ice skated, went horseback riding, and played tennis, and sandlot baseball with her three younger brothers. After high school, she attended a finishing school where she was on the basketball and track teams.

Bess’ mother’s wealthy family owned a grain-milling company. However, her low-level-political-operative alcoholic father was continuously made to feel inadequate by his spendthrift wife, so in 1903, when he fell on hard times, he shot himself.

Bess met Harry in Sunday school but they drifted apart until reuniting at 25 and 26 years old respectively. He had had awful luck trying to save sufficient money for married life, as a farmer, and mining and oil investor. They finally wed in June 1919 after Harry came home from France, having fought in WWI. His haberdasher store, after its initial wild popularity, also failed with the postwar economic malaise of 1920-1921.

In 1922, Harry was elected as a judge for a term of two years in Jackson County, Missouri, even though he lacked a law degree. His daughter Margaret was born in February 1923. He then turned road-building consultant, salesman, then judge again.

Harry passed a bond issue of $6.5 million for road building in his county. He was such a highly respected politician that when the Great Depression hit, he raised almost $8 million for the building of new courthouses. Throughout his life, whenever he became overly stressed by the pressures of the political machine, instead of taking to drink, he went on a retreat.

Harry was coerced into giving patronage jobs to Bess’s brothers Fred and George. The former had trouble with alcohol throughout his life, adding additional drama to Harry’s already harrowing job. In 1934, Harry was pushed into running for the U.S. Senate. The opposing candidate engaged in evil mudslinging. Nevertheless, Harry won. In those days, though, the federal government was frugal. “It was the depths of the Depression and few people were getting paid enough to own a car. Everybody rode the trolleys and buses, even such personages as U.S. senators.”

During Harry’s freshman years as a senator, an ugly bribery scandal wrecked the reputations of various of his fellow Democratic party members in Missouri, including the power broker in his clique. Most of them went to prison.

In 1940, glutton for punishment that he was– but honest and revered among his supporters– Harry ran for reelection. He could boast that he conducted the investigations that revealed extensive corruption in the railroad industry. He “… won without the support of a single major newspaper or political organization.”

During his second term, Harry led additional investigations of other industries, so that he attracted a lot of haters. During his run for the vice-presidency via Roosevelt’s fourth term, Harry’s family name was again dragged through the mud. His opponents could have been neither meaner nor nastier. The saving grace was that he won the election.

Bess hadn’t wanted him to run, but the role of wife in her generation was to be her husband’s supporter– catering to his career and life goals, which were superior to her own. Nonetheless, they both agreed that the president’s actions were good for America, although they hated the manipulative way he used his subordinates to implement his policies.

Little did Harry and Bess have any idea of what they were getting into. A minor annoyance Bess encountered in the White House was “… the complete absence of closets which meant you could keep only a few dresses within reach…” She had that remedied by the time they left.

In spring 1945, FDR was tight-lipped with Harry, and even with the Senate about what he signed at Yalta. So upon his passing away, Harry suddenly and unexpectedly had a long learning curve ahead of him.

Read the book to learn the details of how Harry and Bess handled their high-pressure roles, and their adventures thereafter.

The Most Wanted Man in China

The Book of the Week is “The Most Wanted Man in China, My Journey From Scientist to Enemy of the State” by Fang Lizhi, translated by Perry Link, published in 2016. Despite its sensationalist title, this volume aptly described the unusual personal account of a Chinese dissident who was fortunate to receive minimal (but still emotionally wrenching) punishment for his “crimes” in an oppressive regime. Under that regime, there were millions of deaths due to famine and suicides.

Born in Beijing, China in 1936, Fang was the second-oldest of six siblings. As a business owner, Fang’s grandfather exploited his employees, according to the Marxist doctrine forced down the throats of the Chinese people. Therefore, when Fang joined the Communist Party for the first time in June 1955, he was compelled to denounce his late grandfather.

At university, Fang began to rebel against the robotic, rote-learning curriculum. Having developed a passion for tinkering with electronics and studying science at an early age, he asked why there wasn’t independent thinking. The authorities answered that only several sources of ideology (Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Engels and the Communist Party) had already discovered the absolute best way to think for the people, so no one need waste any more time on thinking for themselves.

Mao maintained that socialism was the best economic system, but admitted that there were three imperfections with it: “subjectivism, bureaucratism and factionalism.” Mao encountered a big problem when university students started to search for why. By using reason, logic, science and independent thinking, followers of a leader cannot help but question the leader. As an absolute ruler, Mao could not abide that.

Mao thus used four techniques of Communist dictators to maintain his power. The first was to label only 5% of the people as “rightists” and dangerous enemies. This way, the majority of Chinese people would feel threatened, so he could crush everyone like bugs through fear and force. The second was to falsely accuse them of being anti-Party and anti-socialist. [In the United States, a dictatorial president might label people “unpatriotic”].

Thirdly, Mao had his minions behave like tattletales in publicly criticizing the small groups (pairs, even) of closet rightists. Finally, the authorities organized self-criticism groups to foster group-think and herd-mentality to denounce everyone’s every transgression. Because– people feel more comfortable engaging in group-bullying than individually attacking others.

Fang became a teaching assistant at the University of Peking, until December 1957, when he was reassigned to do farm work– hard manual labor– in a rural area. He was forced to live far away from his girlfriend and later, wife and kids, over the course of about twenty years.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Fang was alternately exiled to rural areas, and returned to resume his primary career at a university, engaging in both teaching and research in nuclear physics, and later, materials science and laser physics. Ironically, Fang acquired a variety of physical skills and valuable experience in all different kinds of workplaces, such as a railroad, coalmine, pig farm, water-well, steel mill, vinyl and brick factories, tunnels, etc.

Mao ordered dissidents to be geographically separated from their loved ones, so as to: impose psychological trauma on the people, make it difficult for them to form alliances with the like-minded, and band together to fight his oppressive regime. Fang was in a special category because he possessed rare expertise in academia. So for a few months in mid-1969, he was detained with other scientists and was pumped with Mao’s ideology for hours every day.

But prior to that, in his twenties, even Fang had been ideologically brainwashed. In 1965, he thought he wanted to study in the Soviet Union because he liked its brand of socialism. He was impressed that the Soviets were ahead of the Americans in the space race.

Until he started traveling internationally, even Fang, a well-educated physicist, lived in an insular society that limited his knowledge of the rest of the world. He read scientific journals from other countries, but had no real understanding of political ideologies or cultures other than his own.

Fang lost respect for the Chinese authorities beginning in 1967, when he heard rumors that Mao’s closest political associates were just a bunch of mean, petty, vengeful people jockeying for power. Currently, in the United States, such people who are also super-wealthy, might adopt a litigious lifestyle, which is extremely expensive, but effective in intimidating and vanquishing enemies.

Mao launched a new nationwide political campaign every time the old one started to backfire on him. For example, in the mid-1970’s, “Denunciations of the wrong kind of astronomy topped the agendas, but in order to do that, someone had to read the texts of the papers that were going to be denounced. So real astronomy spread.” At least the Chinese backed up their denunciations with evidence.

In 21st century America, attention whoredom has reached new heights. For, few media commentators actually read the book, see the movie or know much about the report or study they denounce. They simply play a game of “telephone” and the tabloid-believing public eats it up. Oftentimes, it’s just a non-story, hysterically reported.

The commentators are so desperate for attention or to put their two cents in with no independent thinking that they even shamelessly admit to their own laziness or ignorance in not doing their homework.

Their audience is seeking confirmation of what it already believes, so no convincing is necessary. Further, when evidence is presented, the data are cherry-picked with weaselly language in oversimplified apples-to-oranges comparisons. So it’s as though the media have already done the thinking for the American masses.

So why are Americans so politically dogmatic on one side or the other? How are the media imposing this thought-control? It’s not through fear or force (!)

By nature people are lazy. Nowadays, they’ll get information from the most accessible sources–TV, radio or their electronic toy (phone). Those sources convey information concocted by attention whores or entertainers or profit-seekers with a political agenda. Not scholars who seek out original sources and comprehensively present both sides of an issue. This has almost always been the case in the most recent century, but the difference today is in the quality of the information presented.

The information is mostly opinions and when it isn’t, the audience can’t tell whether it’s propaganda. For, journalism verification standards have been eliminated. There used to be fact-checking departments and ethics guidelines to avoid conflicts of interest– at reputable publications and broadcasting and cable communications companies. No more.

Further, many media commentators who have no law degrees express their opinions on legal issues. But practicing lawyers are more likely to know what they’re talking about when explaining the issues. Sadly, it appears that this ignorant state of affairs isn’t going to change anytime soon.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Fang’s life and work (from the “horse’s mouth”), and whether much changed in China with Mao’s successor.

onassis (sic)

The Book of the Week is “onassis” (sic) by Will Frischauer, published in 1968. The biographer immediately resorted to a disclaimer on his Acknowledgements page. In compiling this volume, he sourced twelve books in his Bibliography, claimed he drew upon interviews, and fifteen years’ worth of his readings on his subject, conceding that “… in many instances the dividing line between fact and fiction is so blurred…”

Nowadays, an equally vague author, whether authorized or unauthorized– to write about a wealthy alpha male (especially a politician) whose crack public-relations mythmakers gloze over unpleasant details– usually has the goal of rewriting history. That did not appear to be the case, at least with this book.

Born in 1906 in Smyrna, Onassis was of Turkish extraction. He was six years old when his mother passed away. His father lucratively sold tobacco, grain and hides. Sent to a Greek Orthodox (Christian) school, Onassis excelled at water polo and, already fluent in Turkish and Greek– became so in English, French and Italian.

In September 1922, when hostilities flared up between the Turks and Greeks, Onassis helped his family (except for his father, who was arrested early on) survive by playing well with parties on both sides of the conflict. His good relationship with the United States Vice Consul (a neutral party) allowed him to reunite with his older sister, two younger half-sisters and stepmother in Athens, and then travel to bail his father out of jail.

The father was furious that Onassis wasted money to bribe the authorities to get him sprung, as he would’ve been released anyway. The Turks froze foreign bank accounts of the family’s business when they took over Smyrna.

In 1923, taking advice from friends, Onassis got a job with a telephone company. He got away with lying about his age (said he was older) and birthplace to obtain an ID card. Then he felt the need to strike out on his own. His persistence paid off after a number of frustrating weeks, when he was finally able to sell his father’s Oriental tobacco to the Argentinians, who had been importing it from Brazil and Cuba.

Onassis was eventually able to get both Argentinian and Greek citizenship with the use of his dishonest identity-document application. After presiding over a failed cigarette business, in the next five or so years, he made his first million dollars. It was unstated exactly how. It was stated that he made business contacts wherever he went, some of whom he obviously inherited from his father.

Onassis was appointed a trade diplomat for the Argentinian government, and got into the shipping business. He started with used ships with Greek registration, then, in the early 1930’s, to avoid petty bureaucrats, switched to Panamanian registration. Other advantages with the latter included financial transactions that were permitted to be made in any currency, that were tax-free.

Onassis revolutionized the industry by ordering the construction of monster-sized oil tankers– with unprecedented capacities of tens of thousands of tons. The Swedes built the boats, and J. Paul Getty shipped the oil to Japan. Onassis, unlike the competition, also built comfortable living quarters for his ships’ crews, to foster employee loyalty.

During WWII, Onassis broke into the whaling industry, selling whale meat to mink farms and whale livers to the Borden food outfit. After the war, he took a bride; she was seventeen, he was forty. They raised their family in Oyster Bay, Long Island.

Yet another unique shipping-related activity Onassis pioneered, involved a risk-management contractual arrangement for international shipping. Prior to its implementation, he thought he had done his due diligence.

Onassis consulted an attorney to make sure he would be complying with maritime law– as he was purchasing surplus vessels of the United States, but registering them under other countries’ flags for purposes of deregulated operations and tax evasion. Nevertheless, by the mid-1950’s, the American Maritime Commission questioned its legality, anyway.

Read the book to learn additional specifics on how Onassis became rich and famous, and stayed that way.

Counselor

The Book of the Week is “Counselor, Life At the Edge of History” by Ted Sorensen, published in 2008. This was the autobiography of a political consultant best known for most closely advising JFK for eleven years.

Born in May 1928 in Lincoln, Nebraska, Sorensen considered himself a Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian. His father, appointed Attorney General beginning in 1929, was the oldest of ten surviving children. He helped pass a law that created one nonpartisan legislative body in the Nebraska statehouse. That way, there were no fights, delays or blaming.

Sorensen himself was one of five children. He grew up in an agricultural community with a harsh climate in Nebraska, not unlike that of George McGovern’s South Dakota. There were: droughts, floods, hailstorms, blizzards and grasshoppers.

In summer of 1951, after graduating from a special five-year university law program, Sorensen sought a job by personally walking into law firms to speak with the hirers. He began his career at the Federal Security Administration, which has come to be known as the Department of Health and Human Services. He became depressed when he started to wise up and witness more of the culture of Washington, D.C.: “… more hypocrites than heroes, more sinners than saints.”

At the suggestion of the joint committee staff director, Sorensen lied about his age– put down 25 instead of 24 on his resume because men of 25 were viewed as better job candidates, having more experience. In 1952, he became a speechwriter, advisor and personal assistant to then-Senator John F. Kennedy, his opposite. Sorensen was a plain ol’ country boy, rather than a Northeastern elitist. He didn’t run with JFK’s crowd.

Sorensen claimed that JFK himself actually did the writing of the book “Profiles in Courage” despite rumors that others did. He and others helped with the research. Sorensen mentioned various of the book’s rumored ghostwriters but failed to mention the most commonly named one– Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Upon becoming president, “John F. Kennedy’s speeches stood out because they revived idealism, eloquence, and progressivism, after a decade of Eisenhower’s bland, dry approach and Joe McCarthy’s evil tirades.”

Unfortunately, JFK was afraid of being criticized for being “soft on Communism”– a common fear in those days among politicians who wanted to get reelected. So JFK continued Eisenhower’s actions; by late 1963, he had sent sixteen thousand American military advisors to South Vietnam. In 1968, Sorensen became a campaign advisor to Robert F. Kennedy in his presidential bid; sadly, not for long. Then he practiced law.

Read the book to learn of Sorenson’s adventures with the famed senator and president; his views on what would have happened had JFK not been assassinated; his other endeavors; the toll taken on his health by years of severe sleep deprivation and nonstop (no downtime) international business travel; and much more.