Subject Chose to Flee Crushing Oppression For A Better Life

The Warburgs

[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 “The Warburgs, The 20th-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family” by Ron Chernow, published in 1993. This ginormous, slightly: chronologically disorganized and redundant volume, recounted mostly, the life-stories of four males born to a German Jewish family in the mid to late 1800’s, and the life-stories of their descendants.

Through the decades, different family branches traveled or moved from Germany to other countries, such as England, Sweden and Italy, due to discrimination against Jews, and world wars. Some became fully assimilated in their adopted countries and married outside the faith. Some moved to the United States.

In September 1922, “Paul [Warburg] saw America sunk in an intellectual coma and warned Washington that ‘we are surrounding ourselves with a wall and moat of cynicism and selfish materialism…’ ” As ought to be well known, there’s nothing new under the sun.

The Warburgs were “international bankers”– Hitler’s anti-Semitic code language for Jews, whom he claimed were the cause of all of Germany’s problems in approximately the two decades leading up to, and during WWII.

Aby was the black sheep of the family. He had a brilliant career in art history. The other Warburg brothers, Max, Paul and Felix became financiers, philanthropists and activists. In the 1920’s, the German government began to persecute its Jews more than was historically usual, but until the late 1930’s, the brothers evaded the brunt of the Nazis’ human-rights abuses.

The Warburgs had special influence with government officials because they had substantial assets, and their businesses’ financial transactions had a major impact on the German economy, and worldwide.

In late winter 1936, the Warburgs struck a secret deal with Heinrich Himmler that allowed them to continue doing business. However, later that year, they lost their connections to power when the Nazis forced corporate boards’ directors who were deemed Jewish, to resign. The brothers had been on dozens of boards.

The culture of the German people in their place and time was characterized by blind obedience to authority and passionate love for one’s homeland. Even after September 1937 when the brothers’ bank in Hamburg was ejected from the Reich Loan Consortium, they still clung to the hope that the Nazis’ amassing of power and menace was only temporary.

Hermann Goering scotched free trade when he formed his five-hundred employee fiefdom– the Office of Raw and Synthetic Materials. It allowed Germany to prepare for war. The Nazis needed funding for re-arming Germany, and the eventual theft of Jews’ assets would come in due time. The Jews were pawns in Hitler’s evil plan of Aryan world conquest.

A minor action symbolizing this, was the hanging of a gigantic oil painting of Hitler in the newly seized Warburg brothers’ Hamburg branch-office in May 1938. The Warburgs were allowed to choose two Aryans to run the bank indefinitely; of course, it was then unclear when or if the family would be able to reclaim their business.

In the twentieth century, the Warburgs wore the label “Jewish” that the world had thrust on them, whether observant or not, assimilated or not, for having a Jewish last name, or for having “Jewish” relatives (at the time Europe was ruled by Hitler), or having been raised by family members in this identity they felt was immutable.

“It wasn’t their [the Jews’] alien quality so much as their familiarity, their uncomfortable resemblance to other Germans, that enabled Hitler to tap fears of ‘racial pollution.’ “

Post-Holocaust, the discomfort about Jews has continued. Could it be that women who dye their hair blond, don’t want to look Jewish? And then– could it be that the Jews started the “dumb blond” jokes?

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about the histories of Warburg family members, and their times.

My Father’s Paradise

The Book of the Week is “My Father’s Paradise, A Son’s Search For His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq” by Ariel Sabar, published in 2008. In this sloppily edited volume, the author recounts the experiences of his father (named Yona) in Kurdistan, Israel and the United States, and his own generation– in America.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Ashkenazi Jews considered themselves superior to Sephardic Jews living in Palestine, and Kurdistan, a northern region of Iraq. The Ashkenazis had their own “old-boy” network, who subjected the Sephardics to institutional racism.

An oppressed group such as the Kurds are more likely than a dominant group to have impostor syndrome; as a society constantly smears a scapegoated group through social contagion, the victims begin to lose confidence in themselves and question their own competence. Ever since the Holocaust, the Jews, after centuries of passive acceptance of victimhood, decided enough was enough, and have fought back, releasing centuries of pent-up rage. Over the course of eighty years, they have gone from one extreme to the other. They have become ideologically stubborn and militarily aggressive.

Especially after WWII with the 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine, the Iraqi government stepped up its anti-Semitism. But in the first quarter of 1950, the Iraqi government allowed Jews to relinquish their citizenship, and move to another country with just the clothes on their backs, never to return. About four thousand Jews did so.

One consequence was that Iraq experienced brain drain. Israel continued to take in skilled and talented people (and other refugees in the previous decade) who considered themselves Zionists (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.).

A January 1951 terrorist attack against Jews in a Baghdad synagogue that left three dead, prompted Israel to accept thousands more Iraqi Jews by 1952. Yona’s family left Kurdistan for Israel in April 1951.

Yona learned the languages of Hebrew and English, foreign to him. For, he was one of the dwindling native speakers of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus Christ. With that language, he built a career researching its history, and creating a dictionary to preserve it. The author rebelled against his father, but their relationship began to thaw as the son matured. He wrote, “The idea that workers in China could make a Passover plate with Hebrew letters that you could buy in Los Angeles for a grandson in Maine: This, for my father, was America.”

Read the book to learn much more about Yona’s life and times, and the author’s quest to find his long-lost aunt.

Swimming to Freedom

The Book of the Week is “Swimming to Freedom, My Escape From China and the Cultural Revolution” by Kent Wong, published in 2021. Wong was born in 1948 in a coastal town in China. Mao became the official leader of China in October 1949. So that Wong’s father could keep his job at the customs agency, the family moved to Hong Kong. However, they returned to Guangzhou because the father missed his homeland.

Mao brainwashed people into believing that the Americans and their puppet, Chiang Kai-Shek were evil imperialists. The people in northern China were mostly peasant-farmers, while the people in southern China worked in factories and were better educated. More northerners starved to death, as local Communist leaders stole their harvests of grain. So after the food sources of chickens, pigs and horses were exhausted, the people resorted to cannibalism.

From the mid-1960’s, onward, Mao recovered his all-powerful position and cult of personality in the Chinese government. The Chinese times, they were changing in many ways, including:

Anyone who joined the Communist Party enjoyed a significantly better lifestyle than not.
Beginning in the early 1960’s China was gradually becoming less friendly with Russia, claiming via Mao’s drama-queen performance that Khrushchev had criticized their Communist idol, Stalin, and that their ideologies differed (actually, China didn’t want to pay Russia the humungous financial debt it owed).
Contrary to a decade earlier, the schools began to teach the English language instead of the Russian language.
High school kids were sent to the countryside to be “reeducated” (do hard manual labor) with the peasants.
Mao brainwashed the teenagers into becoming child-soldiers called Red Guards.

Across the country, the Red Guards got uniforms, marched in parades, and once they got weapons, they acquired the power to behave like Nazis. And did. They harassed people on the streets, looted stores of cigarettes and cold drinks. They incited terror by whipping people with a belt, in the public square.

In 1966, there arose two different gangs of Red Guards, who were enemies of each other. The main target of the Red Guards, though, was any “Black” family (see the paragraph below) or individual who showed capitalist leanings (thoughts, actions, writings of any kind) or association with bourgeois rich people. Every man, woman and child in China had what amounted to an FBI file on them from the time they were born, as they were legally required to register with the government.

A family was labeled Black if, prior to Mao’s reign, it had been in any kind of business or had been affiliated with Chiang Kai-Shek. One family member could shame the entire family, and cause it to be labeled Black. Wong’s family was labeled Black because they had lived in the Chiang-affiliated, British colony of Hong Kong, and his father had criticized workplace conditions.

Red Guards ransacked the family’s house for any evil materials, but found none. A Red family consisted of loyal Communist peasants. After a while, people of all ages whose families were Black were sent to the countryside. Only loyal Party hacks and rich people dodged the recruitment process.

The internet has greatly automated the kinds of surveillance, censorship and propaganda practiced by China (and the United States!) since Wong’s generation. Political retaliation has never been so easy.

On the other hand, the unbloodied elites (i.e., Donald Trump, Zelensky, etc.) don’t need to actually go into physical combat the way their countries’ militaries (or their cult-of-personality members) do. They simply sit in a TV studio to boost media ratings during a slow-news period, and have a screaming match like the clowns on the “Jerry Springer Show” used to do.

Dictatorial leaders in recent history whose names are still known, of course, have varied in their evilness and attention whoredom. However, only two (Hitler and Stalin) dominated lands (not including Churchill– whose empire was in decline) that potentially had the resources (not including nuclear weapons) to take over the entire earth. They might have, if events had happened a bit differently.

Mutual Assured Destruction has thus far kept world leaders from obliterating one another. There are other factors at work that provide a smidgen of hope for the continued survival of global humanity:

Because nations of the world are so economically interdependent or incestuous of late, no matter how much their leaders rant, rave, brag and deny– their governments are liars regarding trade negotiations.
It has become routine for leaders to incite a hue and cry from their citizens via instantaneous communications methods. This means fewer people are paying attention to the propaganda that is filtered through the narrow lens of a small number of media outlets (which are monster-sized, but not as influential as they used to be).
At least in the United States, more and more families of different ethnicities and religions are converging or assimilating, so hypocrisy among xenophobes is on the increase. The voices of the xenophobes will be eclipsed eventually when the U.S. leadership becomes more diverse. It might take a while, but it has to happen.
Nowadays, violent places of the world are confined mostly to ones that have a reputation for centuries of tribal or religious warfare, as practically all the resources have been looted from once-colonized territories.

The above are reasons why world conquest is too difficult to achieve for any current aspirant. Even so, here’s a little ditty on Trump’s latest speechifying to Congress.

JUST AN OLD FASCIST LOVE SONG

sung to the tune of “Just an Old Fasioned Love Song” with apologies to Three Dog Night, their estates, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Just an old fascist love song, emanating from the idiot-box,
and wrapped around the words, is the bragfest of a power-hog who’ll never go.

In-history you’ve heard it before. Hypocrisy rolls on.
Money, power, political-hacks. They’re never really gone.

Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.
Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.

Boosting ratings but failing to question,
because their intellect’s low.
To emphasize Trump’s love affair
with phoniness and meanness, that we’ve come to know.

In-history you’ve heard it before. Hypocrisy rolls on and on.
Money, power, political-hacks. They’re never really gone.

Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.

Boosting ratings but failing to question the song.
Just, an old song, coming forth.
Just (just) an old song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.

Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.

Anyway, read the book to learn of the author’s adventures (which included serious hardships, although he avoided getting shot, drowned, bitten by a shark, or killed by a typhoon) during his quest for a better life.

Slow Noodles

The Book of the Week is “Slow Noodles, A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss and Family Recipes” by Chantha Nguon, published in 2024. Born around 1961, the author endured the hunger, hard manual labor, bullying from the authorities and other aspects of her decades-long survival struggles through fantasizing about the food her mother cooked for her. Cooking became a life-saving skill later in her life.

In March 1970, Cambodia underwent a regime change. Lon Nol replaced Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and got a lot of financial aid from the U.S. for claiming he was anti-Communist. The new dictator also got military help in the form of American B-52s’ indiscriminately killing people in the countryside. The goal was to rid Cambodia of Vietnamese and non-Buddhist people. The author’s mother was Vietnamese, so the author was considered genetically Vietnamese, too. They were eventually forced to flee to Saigon.

All through the 1970’s, the region of Southeast Asia was particularly hard-hit by genocide, atrocities and torturous practices perpetrated by war criminals who obeyed their respective dictators. As an adolescent, Nguon was subjected to personal hardships, including the deaths of her older sister (who served as her surrogate mother until her mother arrived in Saigon) and her mother.

Nguon, like countless, anonymous hundreds of thousands of other refugees, could have died of disease, starvation, bombings, guerrillas’ bullets, pirates, or land mines, or a combination thereof. On rebuilding Cambodia after Pol Pot’s reign, she wrote, “The big foreign aid groups did their best, but they had no idea how to reshape a civilization from nothing. Who does? Donors, NGOs, and politicians want speedy tangible progress. The natural bias is ‘Hurry up and heal. We have other emergencies to attend to.’ “

Read the book to learn about the kinds of assistance the author provided to her fellow Cambodians, and much more about her food, life and times.

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…

Gratitude In Low Voices

[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 “Gratitude In Low Voices, A Memoir” by Dawit Gebremichael Habte, published in 2017. According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked an extensive list of detailed sources, and an index), through the decades of the twentieth century, Eritrea suffered the usual traumas of a former colony (of Italy from 1890 to 1941) that was fighting for independence:

exploitation of its assets and resources (including dry docks, factories, railway cars by the British, and oil by the British and the Americans in the 1940’s);
oppression of its people (by Ethiopia in the 1950’s and 1960’s, via a UN resolution that was violated after a decade);
a military draft (by the Ethiopian government in 1983);
famine (in 1984);
ideology and language of the oppressors forced on students in the schools (by Ethiopians, funded by the Soviets in the mid-1980’s); and
arrests of and atrocities committed against, Eritrean people who uttered one word in any form, critical of Ethiopia (beginning in the mid-1980’s).

In 1973 or 1974, the author was born into a typical lifestyle for his time and place. He herded sheep and goats at an early age. By then, the Eritrean independence movement was gaining ground in the form of two armed groups resisting Ethiopian oppression: Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). His father joined the former group, and desirous to have his son educated, in the early 1980’s, sent him to school in Asmara.

Through his formative years, the author received an eclectic education. At about nine years old, he became apprenticed to a carpenter. Afraid the generous pay would corrupt him, his mother sent him to study the Bible at Saint George Orthodox Church. There, he learned Tigrinya, the language of his native people. His father went to Saudi Arabia to work, and sent money home. Eventually, his family became refugees from the violence and left Asmara but stayed in Eritrea.

Read the book to learn what transpired when the author wished to gain access to the resources in a library in his neighborhood and later, when he paid a people-smuggler to help him flee for Kenya; and his and Eritrea’s fate.

The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree / The Last Nomad

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The first Book of the Week is “The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree, How I Fought to Save Myself, My Sister, and Thousands of Girls Worldwide” by Nice Leng’ete, published in 2021.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography and an index), the following is still an all-too-common scenario in a poor village in Kenya: “… it is unlikely she will finish her education [meaning– graduating what would be equivalent to grammar school in the United States]. Her father married her [off when she was] young to get a dowry. Her husband wants her home to work and raise the children.” She is fifteen years old and already has two babies.

The author’s passion is to replace the tradition of female genital mutilation (FGM) practiced by certain Kenyan tribes, with Alternative Rites of Passage. For, the culturally entrenched FGM is one major reason females in her society have been so sheltered, limited and resigned to their fate for so long.

The author grew up in a Maasai village in Kenya, near the Tanzanian border. When she was about five years old, her mother took her to witness a FGM ceremony in her community. Maasai culture dictated that when girls showed signs of puberty, they underwent the ceremony. “The cut” (of the clitoris) was extremely painful, and the presence of complications such as infection or hemorrhage could lead to chronic medical problems or even death. There were no drugs administered.

But the cut, even in the absence of physical complications, signaled the next steps of arranged marriage, childbearing and servitude for the rest of a girl’s life, usually beginning in her early teen years. Even when a girl’s mother wanted to honor her daughter’s wish to finish school and have a different lifestyle, she had no power to persuade her husband or any other male relatives to allow that to happen. The males ruled the roost.

Read the book to learn how the author escaped her almost certain dismal fate, and how she is helping other females to do the same, without their having to endure all the traumas she did.

The second Book of the Week is “The Last Nomad, Coming of Age in the Somali Desert, by Shugri Said Salh, published in 2021.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography and an index), the author’s Muslim family was somewhat anomalous, in that her father was a multi-lingual scholar who believed in education for both genders, and her grandmother was an authoritative figure. The author was born around 1974. Her culture also still practiced female genital mutilation.

The sprawling family’s tribe was nomadic– they herded camels and goats, and seasonally migrated around the desert in Somalia, looking for water. Their religion allowed polygamy among the men. The author’s father’s biological children numbered 23 among 7 wives, 5 of whom he divorced; the author’s mother gave birth to 10 children before she passed away of malaria when the the author was six years old.

In 1988, Somalia’s government and tribes devolved into civil war. “Killing, looting, destruction, and chaos was now our norm.” The people had a complicated system of relationships in which they took care of their own family and tribe, and if their brains were poisoned by war, they became hostile to all others.

The author’s sister possessed a key survival skill– thorough knowledge of her family’s lineage so that, when questioned, she knew which tribal name to utter to quell sociopathic, armed-and-dangerous child-soldiers in the streets. When the family finally fled Mogadishu in 1991, their black-market connections allowed them to obtain provisions that kept them alive– fuel for a truck, food and ammunition. However, they braved many other life-threatening dangers, including atrocities (committed by people), harm from lions, poisonous snakes and baboons, disease and dehydration; not to mention lice and scabies.

The author and several relatives were able to cross the border and stay in Kenya temporarily. Even so, law enforcement officers in Nairobi were corrupt– arresting refugees and hitting them up for bribes just before they knew the refugees were due to legally leave the country.

Read the book to learn much, much more about the author’s checkered story.

Unforgetting – BONUS POST

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The Bonus Book of the Week is “Unforgetting, A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas” by Robert Lovato, published in 2020. El Salvadorans are more populous in Los Angeles than any other major American city. The author wrote about his own family’s involvement in the politics, economics and violence that have given rise to the stereotypes surrounding El Salvador in recent decades.

It took the author decades to get his father (Ramon, born in 1922) to describe the traumas he experienced throughout his life, and especially as a nine-year old at the start of a revolution of Salvadorans of indigenous descent. Ramon’s parents weren’t married; plus he was of indigenous descent, so he was cursed by society at birth. Ramon’s father too, was illegitimate, but inherited a coffee-bean plantation, which made him a wealthy man, until the market crashed in summer 1931. However, Ramon was denied his family’s riches. He lived in a shack with his mother. A few valuable family connections did allow him to move to the United States for a better life.

Born in 1963, the author grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. As a teenager, he rebelled against his father’s lies, beatings and organized-crime dealings. He began hanging out with a drinking, drugging, petty-crime-committing crowd. But learning more about his family’s and homeland’s histories helped him to better understand his own and his father’s actions and failings. In his early twenties, the author found religion.

El Salvador was just one of many countries whose tribal, religious and political conflicts became American-taxpayer-funded military quagmires that started in the second half of the twentieth century; schemes gone awry initially backed by one or another U.S. president have persisted ever since. Pursuant to declassified documents and insiders– the CIA, other intelligence services and special-forces have engaged in top-secret international adventures in Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, etc., etc., etc.

The Reagan Era ushered in secret CIA-training of “counter-insurgency” techniques (translation: the atrocities of a dirty little war on par with Argentina’s) among young males fighting in El Salvador, with the ostensible goal of making the world safe for American-style democracy. Hilarity did not ensue. The usual hypocrisy, cover-ups, historical revisionism, and far-reaching devastation of war later on, did.

There occurred not just destruction, deaths, the trauma of fighting, family decimation, but also unspeakable war crimes such as massacres (via firing squads, even in a church(!)) of indigenous Salvadorans and rapes of females of all ages, in large numbers. “Despite the horrific civil war ravaging El Salvador [that began in 1980] the Reagan administration denied 97 percent of all Salvadoran asylum claims.”

The author listed just a few of the times and locations of mass killings, including:

December 1981, El Junquillo

August 1982, El Calabazo

February 1983, Las Hojas

Read the book to learn about war’s estimated 1980’s death toll, the fate of its perpetrators, how families tried to get more details on the fate of their disappeared loved ones, what happened in November 1989 (hint: there was a backlash in which the author played a role), and much more about why the author thought it was so important to investigate El Salvador’s past, rather than forget all that trauma.

Out of the Gobi

[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 “Out of the Gobi, My Story of China and America” by Weijian Shan, published in 2019. This volume richly detailed the hardships faced by ordinary Chinese people from the 1950’s onward.

Born in 1953, the author spent most of his childhood in Beijing. As is well known, the Communist dictator Mao Tse-tung finally achieved nationwide dominance over the Nationalist (allegedly democratic, but still horribly corrupt) Chiang Kai-shek at the dawn of the 1950’s. (For additional info on how Communism is different from Socialism and Capitalism, see the bottom portion of this blog’s post, “The Last Idealist”). Mao proceeded to do grave damage to his country, causing the deaths of millions from starvation and financial disaster (among other causes).

Beginning in 1965, Mao declared there would be a new world order in his country, in the form of a Cultural Revolution. One of many goings-on during this period was burning, destruction or confiscation of all books except for those by the authors Marx (Karl, not Groucho), Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

The evil West’s bourgeois lifestyle was violently stamped out by Mao’s private police force, the Red Guard (which consisted of mostly young, armed and dangerous radical hooligans– sociopathic sadists), which brainwashed schoolkids of all ages, up to university level, to make Revolution. They destroyed the statue of the Venus de Milo, and denounced the Russian classical novels. A couple of years later, chaos reigned, but Mao was still in control.

In autumn 1966, at thirteen years old, the author was brainwashed by the youth movement to go on a fact-finding mission in the countryside. The government did away with entrance examinations, and in fact, all formal schooling. For about three weeks, the author and his peers traveled around by trains, buses and on foot to personally witness the Revolution. At one point, they went on a hike in the mountains, retracing the steps of the Red Army. Their travel expenses were paid for, but the conditions were quite primitive.

Into 1967, upon orders handed down by Mao, the youths protested against Capitalism in a way roughly equivalent to “Occupy Wall Street” but they got bored. They were neither studying nor working. For, a few years prior, the dictator had successfully thrown the country into disarray, forcing the closure of not only all schools, but bookstores, libraries, parks, movie theaters and houses of worship.

Thousands of people disappeared, were abducted from their homes– to be jailed, tortured, killed, for so much as speaking, writing or acting in the least way, critical of the government. In the environment of fear and force, they were under pressure to tattle on others before they themselves were punished.

Schools in the author’s area finally did reopen in autumn 1968, but education was still lacking. The author’s “Worker-Peasant-Soldier Middle School” (grades nine and ten– after what would be American grammar school) had no textbooks but students were drilled only on Mao’s propaganda.

In the summer of 1969, Mao realized it was time to change tack by sending young people to the countryside, as they had been making trouble in the cities long enough. He kept them busy by inspiring them to do hard manual labor, and study revolutionary thought. The kids truly tried their hardest– they were blindly obedient to the cause of defending their motherland against Soviet aggression. In autumn 1969, the whole nation went crazy constructing air-raid shelters and tunnels.

The author was sent to the Gobi desert in Inner Mongolia. Again, conditions were extremely primitive. He and his fellows got military training. However, due to a weapons shortage, another platoon was chosen to receive (outdated, Soviet-made) submachine guns. None of the company leaders had any experience in battle, but they inspired passion in their subordinates, anyway. Under the blazing summer sun, there were vicious mosquitoes. It was freezing in winter.

The author described his physical and psychological suffering of the next several years, as his group strove to complete a series of months or years-long agricultural and infrastructure projects that actually produced a net negative effect on food production and quality of life.

In 1979, the United States resumed formal diplomatic relations with China. People in China queued up for hours and hours for all kinds of consumer goods. The author, by then a recent university graduate, reveled in his new lap of luxury– he had time to read for hours and hours, had enough to eat, and got a hot shower once a week.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional information on: the author’s experiences in China from the 1950’s into the 1980’s (which involved a slew of health hazards) including but was far from limited to:

all his hard manual labor and psychological trauma;

his short stint as a medical “doctor” in 1971;

how he enjoyed the benefits of a student exchange program in the 1980’s; and

his troubles with the INS (hint– “… a mistake in the new letter: the date by which we had to leave the country was left blank… the INS had somehow lost our file…”).

This substantial volume reveals why, politically, economically, culturally and socially, and in quality of life– overall, China is still many decades behind America (never mind the propagandists who claim that China is allegedly becoming an economic powerhouse and will someday overtake the U.S.).

I Am A Girl From Africa

[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 “I Am A Girl From Africa, a memoir (sic)” by Elizabeth Nyamayaro, published in 2021.

Born in 1975, Nyamayaro grew up in Zimbabwe. Her family belonged to the Shona tribe. She spent her early years residing in a hut in a rural village, where she was treated like an only child, unwittingly through dysfunctional-family circumstances. Her grandmother taught her to do all sorts of chores: fetching water, hunting birds with a slingshot, fishing with a sharp stick, shelling maize, tending to the goats and chickens, weeding the fields, and cooking vegetables in a clay pot over a fire that she ignited.

Life-threatening conditions abounded from diseases, poor nutrition, hostile animals such as hyenas, and droughts such as those that occurred in 1983 and 1985. The author’s gratitude for the life-saving rehydration by a member of UNICEF, led her to develop a burning desire as an adult to “give back” through working for the United Nations.

In the early 1980’s, initially, Nyamayaro’s grandmother rejoiced at the news from her battery-operated radio, that the country had a new leader, the dark-skinned Robert Mugabe. The end of British colonialism ought to have meant an end to the needless killing of wildlife, theft of precious stones, and oppression of Africans. However, a new leader is just one individual who might or might not change things for the better in the long run, given his personality and the vicissitudes of his time and place in history.

The author– who appears to have bragging-rights, given the hardships she faced– made progress on various Third-World, quality-of-life causes during her career. Mitigation of the global oppression of females was one such cause. The author was pleased to report that in 2013, the nation of Rwanda, in the previous decade, had made great strides in electing women to its parliament. But there is still so much work to be done in Mongolia, India, Zimbabwe, and the United States, etc. because propagandized gender-stereotypes are still discouraging women from running for office.

The author recounted that one day in 1975 in Iceland, all the women went on strike. The country then realized how vital females were to life. Even so, it took until 2018 (!) to legislate there on the issue of gender equality in the private sector, of equal pay for equal work. Additionally, on so many other fronts, gender equality is lacking even in the nations that consider themselves the most advanced on earth!

Read the book to learn many more details on the struggles Nyamayaro faced in her life and times.