Part 3 of our Marxist tour guide Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
-The biggest characteristic of the section of the book covering the period spanning from the late-1970's to present is the repeated and (of course) unsourced use of questionable statistics. I'm not going to go into too many of those since by the time I got to this section I had spent about two weeks on this book and wasn't about to spend hours researching each claim. So these (along with what I've presented so far) are by no means the only inaccuracies of the book. Some weren't interesting enough for me to include here and I'm sure others slipped past me unnoticed. Other parts don't fall into the category of "inaccuracy" but seem to me to be distorted by ideology.
-On page 573 he attacks the U.S. for its opposition to various "revolutionary movements" in the Caribbean. I think "Soviet and Cuban backed terrorist movements" might have been a more accurate term.
-On page 578 he claims that "Unemployment grew in the Reagan years". This is the exact opposite of the truth, unless when he says "grew" he means "dropped". When Reagan was inaugurated in January of '81 the unemployment rate was 7.5%. When Reagan left office in January of '89 the unemployment rate was 5.4%. Read it and weep.
-On page 585, Zinn praises the accomplishments of "a popular Sandinista movement" in Nicaragua and tells us how good they were for that country. He claims that the opposition Contras "seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua". I guess he's hoping none of us remember what happened when free elections were finally held in 1990. He also makes no mention of Soviet or Cuban military assistance to the Sandinistas. Apparently he feels the foreign interference was only on the part of the United States.
-He gives Reagan no credit for the end of the Cold War. On page 592, he tries to give the credit to Kruschev due to his "liberal reforms" enacted in the late 50's/early 60's. I guess this is kind of a relative argument but sandwiched between Stalin and Brezhnev pretty much anyone would look like a liberal reformer, even "the Butcher of the Ukraine".
-On page 638, we get one of very few mentions of Soviet Communism. He states that the "false socialism of the Soviet system had failed". Remember, the first rule of Socialism is that Socialism that exists in reality is "false Socialism". Conversely, Socialism that exists in one's imagination is "real Socialism".
-On page 646, Zinn implies that the FBI started the Waco fire that killed the Branch Davidians. He's smart enough not to state "the FBI started the fire". Instead he implies it, saying: "the FBI attacked with rifle fire, tanks, and gas resulting in a fire...". This clearly insinuates that the fire was not started by the cultists inside the compound. He then quickly transitions into a gruesome description of some of the bodies. Anyone who makes it this far into the book should realize that it is not your intellect that is being appealed to. It is the reader's emotional response that matters to the author. It is imperative to his "social aims" that you view America (and more importantly capitalism) as a force for nothing but evil in the world and the biggest threat to mankind.
-On the very next page he talks of the need to release people from jail, and states "violent crime continued to increase" during the 90's. Again this is the exact opposite of the truth. The 1990's saw a historic drop in virtually every category of crime. Explanations as to why this happened vary, but to claim that it didn't happen is nothing more than a politically motivated fantasy.
- U.S. military intervention in Somalia was wrong. The U.S. not intervening in Rwanda was wrong .(pp. 654,655) He's trying to have it both ways. You can't cry "imperialism" in one case and call for the same thing in the other (unless it could help your political agenda I suppose).
-In keeping with the "left-wing despot love-fest" he states on page 657 that Cuba "had no bloody record of suppression". I'm sure a lot of folks in Miami would beg to differ. As would these human rights groups.
-Can anyone explain to me why the far-left is so in love with people who murder police officers? As I should have seen coming, on page 668 Zinn talks about cop-killer (and hero to fringe leftist morons everywhere) Mumia Abu Jamal. Zinn states: "Jamal was a respected black journalist who had been tried and sentenced under circumstances that suggested his race and his radicalism, as well as his persistent criticism of the Philadelphia police, were the reason he now sat on death row." Actually, the reason he now sits on death row is because he is more guilty than OJ and Mike Tyson combined. Like most Jamal supporters, Zinn shows no interest in the facts of the case. I will briefly describe them. Far from being "a respected black journalist", Jamal had been fired from a local radio station for poor attendance and was driving a taxi at the time of the murder. On the night of the murder, officer Daniel Faulkner was trying to arrest Jamal's brother when Jamal saw the scuffle and ran over and shot officer Faulkner in the back from about 12 inches away. Before officer Faulkner fell, he shot Jamal in the chest (also from about a foot away). Jamal then shot Faulkner 3 more times while he (Faulkner) was lying on the ground, before finishing him off with a 5th shot which struck officer Faulkner between the eyes, killing him instantly. Jamal then staggered over to a sidewalk a few feet away and sat down. When more officers arrived less than 90 seconds later, they found Faulkner dead, Jamal sitting on the sidewalk wearing and empty shoulder holster, and Jamal's brother yelling "I ain't got nothin' to do with this". Laying on the sidewalk next to Jamal was the murder weapon, a .38 special revolver legally registered to Mumia Abu Jamal and containing 5 empty shells in the cylinder. 4 eyewitnesses also testified that Jamal had killed Faulkner. So yeah, sounds like he totally got railroaded to me. He later became a left-wing celebrity due in large part to radio interviews conducted from prison. If you've never listened to one, he talks in this mellow, deep voice about the injustice of the white man's legal system and his sympathy for all the oppressed people of the world. So this gets played on college radio stations where black militants, delusional leftists, and spoiled little white girls here it (who by this point would no doubt be willing to have the guy's baby) decide they need to do everything they can to keep him from getting the lethal injection he so richly deserves.
Now that the history is out of the way we come to Zinn's vision for the future. This chapter is titled The Coming Revolt of the Guards. He lays out a vision of a Socialist utopia where we all rise up and "seize the reigns of power" (exactly what the hell that means and how it is accomplished are for someone else to figure out). By this point he wants his readers to feel so guilty about their nation's history that they're willing to embrace anything, even an ideology as destructive as Marxism. He never gives a good reason to embrace the only ideological system (political, religious, economic, etc.) in human history that can claim responsibility for 100,000,000 deaths in one century. The reason for this is that there isn't one. He merely spits out Socialist cliches so fast and furious that it seems as though they're being fired from a machine gun. A telling passage about the delusional nature of his goals is this one. "Work of some kind would be needed by everyone, including people now kept out of the workforce-children, old people, "handicapped" people. ... Everyone could share the routine but necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the free time for enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and ample distribution of goods. Certain things would be abundant enough to be taken out of the money system and be available-free-to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, and transportation." The word that comes to mind is "fantasy". This kind of seems to rehash the old Communist canard that it hasn't worked because "it hasn't been tried by the right people". That's because the "right people" are a figment of your imagination. It always has started with grand visions and ended with famine, shortage, and brutal repression. This is lost on today's "Libertarian-Socialists" (a term that makes about as much sense as "carnivorous vegetarian"). But then, you see, people like Howard Zinn are luxury-Socialists who live in nice houses, have cushy jobs, and make big dollars speaking about the need to redistribute (presumably other people's) wealth. Practical Socialists, on the other hand, do the redistributing themselves and wind up in jail. These are the more consistent ones in my view. Not the ones who live in the fantasy world of Acadamia. If you'd like to see what this ideology does to people check out these pictures of a gathering in a large, (sort of) American city, and remember each face in these pictures is one family's tragedy.
I am now in search of a new "worst book". I'm not sure where I'll find something worse, maybe a Noam Chomsky book, or some 9/11 "truth" garbage.
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Worst Book: Part 2
Part 2: "You say you want a revolution?"
-On page 421 he states that "more than 100,000 people died in the fire-bombing of Dresden". The actual number is between 25,000 and 35,000. I guess that wasn't startling enough, hence the need to multiply it by 4. In my research I came to the conclusion that most people pushing a figure of 100,000 or higher were doing so to push a leftist agenda. And that anyone claiming over 200,000 is a Fucking Nazi.
-The World War II chapter was probably the worst in the book.
-His section on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is particularly bad. (pp 422-424) He paints a picture of a Japan that has been trying for months to surrender, and were already about to do so when the A-bombs were dropped. He also scoffs at the notion of how many lives an invasion would cost (as he gets ripped apart for here). I realize there is debate on this, but I haven't said anything truly inflammatory since I started this blog, so I'd like to take the opportunity to do so right now..... If ever there was a society that earned the right to have 2 nuclear weapons used against it it was Imperial Japan. Japan used chemical and biological weapons against China, killing somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 with biological agents, also evidenced by over 700,000 shells containing various chemical munitions they left behind in China that are still killing people. Hiroshima prefecture was the home of a poison gas factory (this gas was used to kill around 80,000 Chinese), and they were doing things that would almost make even the Nazis cringe. (for more info, google the phrases "unit 731", "unit 516","rape of Nanjing","Bataan death march","Japanese treatment of POW's", "comfort women", "Okunoshima", "battle of the Philippines", "Japanese forced labor", etc.) Also, given the most recent example the Allies had, the battle of Berlin in which the combined casualties on both sides exceeded 200,000, they had every reason to believe that an invasion of Japan would be just as brutal. Zinn claims that the only condition for the Japanese with regard to surrender was the continued rule of the emperor, omitting the other 3. 1) No occupation 2) No handing over of war criminals 3) They would be in charge of their own demobilization. Needless to say these were unacceptable. The Pottsdam declaration also contained a warning and terms of surrender, but it was rejected by the Japanese. Another thing that always stuck out to me in this debate is that generally if someone's already going to surrender...they probably would surrender after the first bomb was dropped. The fact that there even had to be a second bomb leads me to believe that they may have been willing to fight it out until total societal collapse was inevitable. If they had surrendered within a few months, how many Chinese, Koreans, etc would have died in that time frame? Does this make the bombings morally justified? Maybe not. But in my opinion it made them absolutely necessary. I understand and to some degree sympathise with those who disagree with me on this issue, but when facts are distorted or omitted from the argument that tends to fall flat with me. To frame this issue as innocent civilians dying in massive numbers vs. no innocent civilians dying is also inaccurate; the only question here was whether they were dying in Japan or in China, Indochina, Korea, etc.
-Also, on page 424 he states "the bombing of Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped". He seems to think it was because the U.S. wanted to use Nagasaki as a guinea pig for the "fat man" bomb design (even though this design was very similar to the one tested in New Mexico). Actually Nagasaki was not the intended target when Bock'scar left the ground that day. The target was Kokura, but due to cloud cover they diverted to Nagasaki. Perhaps he means that the idea of a second bomb was scheduled well in advance but without citing any documentary evidence he doesn't back up this claim at all. As to why it was dropped, I think maybe it was because they didn't surrender after the first one was dropped. So again, we can debate Hiroshima but they had no one but themselves to blame for Nagasaki.
-His views on the Korean War plumb new depths in terms of delusion. He presents it as if the Chinese were just minding their own business until forced to enter the war. (p.428) One would be well served to remember who invaded who.
-On page 439 he tells us what a great guy his friend Fidel Castro is (was?). He set up "a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants". No mention of firing squads or secret prisons. At this point it becomes obvious that he doesn't think it's enough just to bash the U.S. (which again is fine with me, he has the right to say any stupid thing he wants) but he has to glorify our enemies simply because they are our enemies, no matter how horrendous their crimes. More on Cuba still to come.
-His love for Ho Chi Minh seems to be unconditional. On page 469 he tells us about the Vietnamese declaration of independence (written by Ho) states that "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator....(you know the rest)" And I have no doubt that Zinn actually believes Ho Chi Minh believed in those things. The true hallmark of a "useful idiot".
-On the same page he states that the U.S. made "a maximum military effort" against a "nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country". Maximum military effort? Not even close. I would also point out that at the time Vietnam had a population of around 75 million, making it one of the 20 largest nations on earth. Here we see the first appearance of a pattern of using the word "revolutionary" to refer to Communist dictators. In Zinn's view a group of revolutionaries who implement a Constitutional government are dictators, but Soviet-backed dictators are "revolutionaries"
-Still on the same page he says " it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won." At this point I laughed so hard I almost dropped the book. The only human beings who "won" were the ones who escaped the living hell that country was when the "revolutionaries" took over. This chapter had a lot of promise. You'd think that a person writing an anti-American book would have a lot of good material to work with when it comes to Vietnam, but his unvarnished cheer leading and apparent glee over that regime's victory (rivaled only by fellow moonbat and left-wing totalitarian apologist Noam Chomsky) makes it hard to take him very seriously. The phrases "reeducation camps" and "boat people" appear no where in the text. The North Vietnamese are portrayed as true believers in freedom, justice and equality who never committed any atrocities. This makes it very hard for me to view the author as a guy who just wants peace.
-He spends about half the chapter (the "revolutionaries"=good half, not the U.S.=bad half) telling us how much better the Communists made life for people in the North, so I was kind of surprised when we reach the end of the war and he doesn't tell us how wonderfully things turned out once the "imperialists" were driven out. No mention of how happy people were, or the reconciliation and era of plenty that ensued. One can only dream about living in such a Socialist paradise I suppose.
-On page 551 he tells how an American cargo ship was captured in 1975 "in Cambodia, where a revolutionary regime had just taken power" He then describes how friendly they were to the crew. He doesn't say anything else (literally, not one word) about these "revolutionaries". He doesn't tell us how they were a group of nice people called the Khmer Rouge, or that they were led by a wonderful man named Pol Pot. They were true underdogs, unable to afford things like bulldozers or lots of bullets. Still they persevered. They made people dig their own graves and used iron bars to "club their brains out like baby seals". They overcame these disadvantages and managed to cause the deaths of somewhere between 1,200,000 and 1,700,000 people in just 4 years! That is an amazing accomplishment even by communist standards considering the short time frame and the fact that there were only 7.5 million people in the country to begin with.
-On page 554, he states as a fact that "[the CIA] had introduced African swine fever into Cuba in 1971, bringing disease and then slaughter to 500,000 pigs." I assume he means literal pigs, not capitalists. I had to search for hours to find any reliable source on this, one way or the other. After viewing about 500 Marxist, pro-Castro, and "CIA created AIDS" type websites (and the CIA "family jewels"). I finally found that this claim had been pretty much debunked in a study by Raymond Zilinskas. It was published in a paper called "Cuban Allegations of Biological Warfare by the United States: Assessing the Evidence" in Critical Reviews in Microbiology, 25:3 (1999) pp.173-227. So the question is who do I believe? 500 wack-job websites or one peer reviewed scientific journal? That's a pretty easy choice. The only thing I found to back up the claim was the word of Castro (always reliable) and an interview from the San Francisco Chronicle in the late seventies with an anonymous person who claimed to have worked for the CIA and delivered a vial of this stuff to some Cuban dissidents. I've got news for you. This nation's mental hospitals are full of people claiming they work for the CIA. To pass off this claim as though it were an established fact in an alleged history book seems to me, at best, negligent.
-The last point I will include in this section is this: on page 570 he rips Jimmy Carter because he "opposed federal funding to poor people who needed abortions". Needed? or wanted? This one wouldn't have bothered me in a book that wasn't being used in high schools across the country. But again, this at least pretends to be a history book. (Although the pretext becomes flimsier and flimsier the further the book moves along, by the time we reach the modern era it's painfully obvious that this is a run of the mill Marxist tract. And not a very good one at that.)
That's all for part 2. The next section will run from 1980 through our Socialist Wonderland future.
And believe me, it's equally inaccurate, but with more nuttiness thrown in.
In the mean time check out this parody of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky doing audio commentary for the first Lord of the Rings movie.
-On page 421 he states that "more than 100,000 people died in the fire-bombing of Dresden". The actual number is between 25,000 and 35,000. I guess that wasn't startling enough, hence the need to multiply it by 4. In my research I came to the conclusion that most people pushing a figure of 100,000 or higher were doing so to push a leftist agenda. And that anyone claiming over 200,000 is a Fucking Nazi.
-The World War II chapter was probably the worst in the book.
-His section on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is particularly bad. (pp 422-424) He paints a picture of a Japan that has been trying for months to surrender, and were already about to do so when the A-bombs were dropped. He also scoffs at the notion of how many lives an invasion would cost (as he gets ripped apart for here). I realize there is debate on this, but I haven't said anything truly inflammatory since I started this blog, so I'd like to take the opportunity to do so right now..... If ever there was a society that earned the right to have 2 nuclear weapons used against it it was Imperial Japan. Japan used chemical and biological weapons against China, killing somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 with biological agents, also evidenced by over 700,000 shells containing various chemical munitions they left behind in China that are still killing people. Hiroshima prefecture was the home of a poison gas factory (this gas was used to kill around 80,000 Chinese), and they were doing things that would almost make even the Nazis cringe. (for more info, google the phrases "unit 731", "unit 516","rape of Nanjing","Bataan death march","Japanese treatment of POW's", "comfort women", "Okunoshima", "battle of the Philippines", "Japanese forced labor", etc.) Also, given the most recent example the Allies had, the battle of Berlin in which the combined casualties on both sides exceeded 200,000, they had every reason to believe that an invasion of Japan would be just as brutal. Zinn claims that the only condition for the Japanese with regard to surrender was the continued rule of the emperor, omitting the other 3. 1) No occupation 2) No handing over of war criminals 3) They would be in charge of their own demobilization. Needless to say these were unacceptable. The Pottsdam declaration also contained a warning and terms of surrender, but it was rejected by the Japanese. Another thing that always stuck out to me in this debate is that generally if someone's already going to surrender...they probably would surrender after the first bomb was dropped. The fact that there even had to be a second bomb leads me to believe that they may have been willing to fight it out until total societal collapse was inevitable. If they had surrendered within a few months, how many Chinese, Koreans, etc would have died in that time frame? Does this make the bombings morally justified? Maybe not. But in my opinion it made them absolutely necessary. I understand and to some degree sympathise with those who disagree with me on this issue, but when facts are distorted or omitted from the argument that tends to fall flat with me. To frame this issue as innocent civilians dying in massive numbers vs. no innocent civilians dying is also inaccurate; the only question here was whether they were dying in Japan or in China, Indochina, Korea, etc.
-Also, on page 424 he states "the bombing of Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped". He seems to think it was because the U.S. wanted to use Nagasaki as a guinea pig for the "fat man" bomb design (even though this design was very similar to the one tested in New Mexico). Actually Nagasaki was not the intended target when Bock'scar left the ground that day. The target was Kokura, but due to cloud cover they diverted to Nagasaki. Perhaps he means that the idea of a second bomb was scheduled well in advance but without citing any documentary evidence he doesn't back up this claim at all. As to why it was dropped, I think maybe it was because they didn't surrender after the first one was dropped. So again, we can debate Hiroshima but they had no one but themselves to blame for Nagasaki.
-His views on the Korean War plumb new depths in terms of delusion. He presents it as if the Chinese were just minding their own business until forced to enter the war. (p.428) One would be well served to remember who invaded who.
-On page 439 he tells us what a great guy his friend Fidel Castro is (was?). He set up "a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants". No mention of firing squads or secret prisons. At this point it becomes obvious that he doesn't think it's enough just to bash the U.S. (which again is fine with me, he has the right to say any stupid thing he wants) but he has to glorify our enemies simply because they are our enemies, no matter how horrendous their crimes. More on Cuba still to come.
-His love for Ho Chi Minh seems to be unconditional. On page 469 he tells us about the Vietnamese declaration of independence (written by Ho) states that "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator....(you know the rest)" And I have no doubt that Zinn actually believes Ho Chi Minh believed in those things. The true hallmark of a "useful idiot".
-On the same page he states that the U.S. made "a maximum military effort" against a "nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country". Maximum military effort? Not even close. I would also point out that at the time Vietnam had a population of around 75 million, making it one of the 20 largest nations on earth. Here we see the first appearance of a pattern of using the word "revolutionary" to refer to Communist dictators. In Zinn's view a group of revolutionaries who implement a Constitutional government are dictators, but Soviet-backed dictators are "revolutionaries"
-Still on the same page he says " it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won." At this point I laughed so hard I almost dropped the book. The only human beings who "won" were the ones who escaped the living hell that country was when the "revolutionaries" took over. This chapter had a lot of promise. You'd think that a person writing an anti-American book would have a lot of good material to work with when it comes to Vietnam, but his unvarnished cheer leading and apparent glee over that regime's victory (rivaled only by fellow moonbat and left-wing totalitarian apologist Noam Chomsky) makes it hard to take him very seriously. The phrases "reeducation camps" and "boat people" appear no where in the text. The North Vietnamese are portrayed as true believers in freedom, justice and equality who never committed any atrocities. This makes it very hard for me to view the author as a guy who just wants peace.
-He spends about half the chapter (the "revolutionaries"=good half, not the U.S.=bad half) telling us how much better the Communists made life for people in the North, so I was kind of surprised when we reach the end of the war and he doesn't tell us how wonderfully things turned out once the "imperialists" were driven out. No mention of how happy people were, or the reconciliation and era of plenty that ensued. One can only dream about living in such a Socialist paradise I suppose.
-On page 551 he tells how an American cargo ship was captured in 1975 "in Cambodia, where a revolutionary regime had just taken power" He then describes how friendly they were to the crew. He doesn't say anything else (literally, not one word) about these "revolutionaries". He doesn't tell us how they were a group of nice people called the Khmer Rouge, or that they were led by a wonderful man named Pol Pot. They were true underdogs, unable to afford things like bulldozers or lots of bullets. Still they persevered. They made people dig their own graves and used iron bars to "club their brains out like baby seals". They overcame these disadvantages and managed to cause the deaths of somewhere between 1,200,000 and 1,700,000 people in just 4 years! That is an amazing accomplishment even by communist standards considering the short time frame and the fact that there were only 7.5 million people in the country to begin with.
-On page 554, he states as a fact that "[the CIA] had introduced African swine fever into Cuba in 1971, bringing disease and then slaughter to 500,000 pigs." I assume he means literal pigs, not capitalists. I had to search for hours to find any reliable source on this, one way or the other. After viewing about 500 Marxist, pro-Castro, and "CIA created AIDS" type websites (and the CIA "family jewels"). I finally found that this claim had been pretty much debunked in a study by Raymond Zilinskas. It was published in a paper called "Cuban Allegations of Biological Warfare by the United States: Assessing the Evidence" in Critical Reviews in Microbiology, 25:3 (1999) pp.173-227. So the question is who do I believe? 500 wack-job websites or one peer reviewed scientific journal? That's a pretty easy choice. The only thing I found to back up the claim was the word of Castro (always reliable) and an interview from the San Francisco Chronicle in the late seventies with an anonymous person who claimed to have worked for the CIA and delivered a vial of this stuff to some Cuban dissidents. I've got news for you. This nation's mental hospitals are full of people claiming they work for the CIA. To pass off this claim as though it were an established fact in an alleged history book seems to me, at best, negligent.
-The last point I will include in this section is this: on page 570 he rips Jimmy Carter because he "opposed federal funding to poor people who needed abortions". Needed? or wanted? This one wouldn't have bothered me in a book that wasn't being used in high schools across the country. But again, this at least pretends to be a history book. (Although the pretext becomes flimsier and flimsier the further the book moves along, by the time we reach the modern era it's painfully obvious that this is a run of the mill Marxist tract. And not a very good one at that.)
That's all for part 2. The next section will run from 1980 through our Socialist Wonderland future.
And believe me, it's equally inaccurate, but with more nuttiness thrown in.
In the mean time check out this parody of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky doing audio commentary for the first Lord of the Rings movie.
The Worst Book I Have Ever Read.
(Note: this is another massive post. But it's not every day that I read a 700 page Marxist tract. For that reason I have split it into three parts)
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, not their own facts."-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
I have recently read A People's History of the United States, by Comrade Howard Zinn. I may have read a worse book at some point in my life, but I would be hard pressed to think of one. I normally wouldn't waste my time with something this far out of the mainstream, but since this is a very popular text in the political indoctrination centers we call public schools I thought I would check it out. I want to point out up front that my problems with this book don't stem as much from the author's politics as they do from the approach he takes toward history. I have just as much objection to revisionist historians like the ones found in the religious right. My objections also don't stem from patriotism or a naive belief that the U.S. has never done horrendous things. My objections mainly have to do with presenting a Marxist (not liberal, Marxist) political tract as a history book. Dr. Zinn admits this in the opening chapter of the book and makes no apologies for it, believing that it is more important to "inspire social change" than to deal accurately with the events of history. He fits in with a common postmodern dis-enlightenment school of thought that objectivity is a myth, and thus it is okay to bend events to suit your ideological predispositions rather than vice versa.(People have always done this, they just don't even bother to pretend any more.) He also presents all historical events as being caused by class struggle, thus finding a simple overarching "magic bullet" theory to explain even the most nebulous and complex historical events. Events are virtually never placed in context, are often distorted, opinion is presented as fact, and in several cases factual claims are made that are patently false. Every formal logical fallacy I know of makes an appearance in the book: reductio ad absurdum, appeal to popular opinion, straw-man, false dichotomies, etc. I should say that this could have been a good book if he had been willing to leave well enough alone. The chapters on the civil rights movement, and some of the sections on slavery were very good, and I found the section about the American war against the Philippines to be pretty good. Also, before ripping the book I should give credit where credit is due and say that I appreciate Dr. Zinn's work in the civil rights movement, dating back to before most Americans knew there was a civil rights movement. I also appreciate his service to the nation in World War II. That being said here is a list of things I didn't like about the book. (This is by no means a complete list. Only the things that jumped out to me enough to write them down and research them.) I am also including a number of links to resources that refute some of the various claims, and wherever possible I have chosen sources from the left side of the political spectrum. All page numbers are from the 2003 edition of the book.
- The major problem that appears throughout the book (and one which is, to me, unforgivable) is the complete absence of source citations. Often something is claimed as a fact with no support whatsoever. If I had handed in a paper like that during my days as a poli. sci. major at Western Michigan I would have received a big fat F. Dubious claims and statistics are presented throughout the book in this manner with nothing to back them up. This is probably more confusing to the reader who is not very familiar with American history (which honestly seems like the type of person this book is targeted at), when coupled with the way his opinions are consistently presented as fact no matter how outlandish. This also made researching the claims that were questionable enough to jump out at me much more difficult. I spent more time researching dubious claims than I did actually reading the book. (I've been exposed to more moonbat websites of communists, Fucking Nazis, aids-conspiracy types, etc. in the last two weeks than in my entire life.) Almost the only time he tells where he got certain information is when he directly quotes another author (The authors he quotes are overwhelmingly Socialists). There is a bibliography which reads like a who's who of leftist whack-jobs (Chomsky,etc.), but he doesn't ever tell what claim came from whom. For example, on page 49 he says "A historian" concluded that "in 1770 1 percent of Boston owned 44 percent of the wealth". Really? What was the name of the historian? What was the specific source material?
-Throughout the book "the rich" and "the powerful" are portrayed as a monolithic entity responsible for all of the ills that fall upon "the people". This oversimplification really sums up the message of the book as a whole.
-Prior to the American revolution, nothing happened except slavery and genocide. No decisions were made by anyone apparently that did not have slavery and genocide as the intended outcome. And of course, slavery and genocide spring from capitalist greed.
-On page 59 he states that the founding fathers "created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times" when referring to the constitution. He presents the constitution as a document designed to protect the interests only of rich white men as well. This is sheer idiocy and crosses over the line into delusional. The best way to control the population and expand the power of government is to write a document limiting the powers of said government? It would have been far more effective to point out the ways in which the constitution has not been lived up to over the years, but instead he indulges in conspiracy theory. He pretty much restates the position of early 20th century socialist historian Charles Beard, which is pretty well dismantled by progressive author and Air America host Thom Hartmann here (he bashes Bush at the same time, so this article has something for everyone).
-On page 85 he states "George Washington was the richest man in America." Nope. He wasn't even the richest man in Virginia. It would fit in great with Marxist mythology if he was though, wouldn't it?
-In a chapter about the treatment of women in the early 1800's he makes no comparison between the U.S. and other societies of the same era. Sexism is presented as being almost unique to the United States. Where comparisons are made they are made between the America of 200 years ago and the America of today. He also seems to be linking sexism to capitalism, as though non-capitalist societies do not oppress women. Some of the stories are interesting though.
-Lincoln gets no credit for freeing the slaves. The Civil War was all about greed.
-An entire chapter expounds on the horrors of how some people became rich in the late 1800's (of course because they all exploited "the people". On page 263, philanthropy is presented as a way for the elite to strengthen their control by producing an army of middle-men who would protect "the system". It is a recurring theme that any time the government does something good it is just a desperate measure intended to shore up its control of the proletariat.
-He suggests that the shelling of Veracruz in 1914 was a ruse to divert the nation's attention from labor unrest, including a miners strike that was going on in Colorado at the time. (p.357) Again all events must be connected by a unifying force and any events occurring simultaneously must be directly related.
-On page 387 he states that the onset of the Great Depression showed that the capitalist system is "by its nature unsound" and "a sick an undependable system". As opposed to the plan of starvation that is Marxism, of course
-I'm not sure if the chapters got worse as I got closer to the modern era, or if it just became easier to spot inaccuracies and unsound logic as it got into events I was more familiar with. In the next section I look at the WW2- Vietnam eras. In the mean time check out this hilarious site.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, not their own facts."-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
I have recently read A People's History of the United States, by Comrade Howard Zinn. I may have read a worse book at some point in my life, but I would be hard pressed to think of one. I normally wouldn't waste my time with something this far out of the mainstream, but since this is a very popular text in the political indoctrination centers we call public schools I thought I would check it out. I want to point out up front that my problems with this book don't stem as much from the author's politics as they do from the approach he takes toward history. I have just as much objection to revisionist historians like the ones found in the religious right. My objections also don't stem from patriotism or a naive belief that the U.S. has never done horrendous things. My objections mainly have to do with presenting a Marxist (not liberal, Marxist) political tract as a history book. Dr. Zinn admits this in the opening chapter of the book and makes no apologies for it, believing that it is more important to "inspire social change" than to deal accurately with the events of history. He fits in with a common postmodern dis-enlightenment school of thought that objectivity is a myth, and thus it is okay to bend events to suit your ideological predispositions rather than vice versa.(People have always done this, they just don't even bother to pretend any more.) He also presents all historical events as being caused by class struggle, thus finding a simple overarching "magic bullet" theory to explain even the most nebulous and complex historical events. Events are virtually never placed in context, are often distorted, opinion is presented as fact, and in several cases factual claims are made that are patently false. Every formal logical fallacy I know of makes an appearance in the book: reductio ad absurdum, appeal to popular opinion, straw-man, false dichotomies, etc. I should say that this could have been a good book if he had been willing to leave well enough alone. The chapters on the civil rights movement, and some of the sections on slavery were very good, and I found the section about the American war against the Philippines to be pretty good. Also, before ripping the book I should give credit where credit is due and say that I appreciate Dr. Zinn's work in the civil rights movement, dating back to before most Americans knew there was a civil rights movement. I also appreciate his service to the nation in World War II. That being said here is a list of things I didn't like about the book. (This is by no means a complete list. Only the things that jumped out to me enough to write them down and research them.) I am also including a number of links to resources that refute some of the various claims, and wherever possible I have chosen sources from the left side of the political spectrum. All page numbers are from the 2003 edition of the book.
- The major problem that appears throughout the book (and one which is, to me, unforgivable) is the complete absence of source citations. Often something is claimed as a fact with no support whatsoever. If I had handed in a paper like that during my days as a poli. sci. major at Western Michigan I would have received a big fat F. Dubious claims and statistics are presented throughout the book in this manner with nothing to back them up. This is probably more confusing to the reader who is not very familiar with American history (which honestly seems like the type of person this book is targeted at), when coupled with the way his opinions are consistently presented as fact no matter how outlandish. This also made researching the claims that were questionable enough to jump out at me much more difficult. I spent more time researching dubious claims than I did actually reading the book. (I've been exposed to more moonbat websites of communists, Fucking Nazis, aids-conspiracy types, etc. in the last two weeks than in my entire life.) Almost the only time he tells where he got certain information is when he directly quotes another author (The authors he quotes are overwhelmingly Socialists). There is a bibliography which reads like a who's who of leftist whack-jobs (Chomsky,etc.), but he doesn't ever tell what claim came from whom. For example, on page 49 he says "A historian" concluded that "in 1770 1 percent of Boston owned 44 percent of the wealth". Really? What was the name of the historian? What was the specific source material?
-Throughout the book "the rich" and "the powerful" are portrayed as a monolithic entity responsible for all of the ills that fall upon "the people". This oversimplification really sums up the message of the book as a whole.
-Prior to the American revolution, nothing happened except slavery and genocide. No decisions were made by anyone apparently that did not have slavery and genocide as the intended outcome. And of course, slavery and genocide spring from capitalist greed.
-On page 59 he states that the founding fathers "created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times" when referring to the constitution. He presents the constitution as a document designed to protect the interests only of rich white men as well. This is sheer idiocy and crosses over the line into delusional. The best way to control the population and expand the power of government is to write a document limiting the powers of said government? It would have been far more effective to point out the ways in which the constitution has not been lived up to over the years, but instead he indulges in conspiracy theory. He pretty much restates the position of early 20th century socialist historian Charles Beard, which is pretty well dismantled by progressive author and Air America host Thom Hartmann here (he bashes Bush at the same time, so this article has something for everyone).
-On page 85 he states "George Washington was the richest man in America." Nope. He wasn't even the richest man in Virginia. It would fit in great with Marxist mythology if he was though, wouldn't it?
-In a chapter about the treatment of women in the early 1800's he makes no comparison between the U.S. and other societies of the same era. Sexism is presented as being almost unique to the United States. Where comparisons are made they are made between the America of 200 years ago and the America of today. He also seems to be linking sexism to capitalism, as though non-capitalist societies do not oppress women. Some of the stories are interesting though.
-Lincoln gets no credit for freeing the slaves. The Civil War was all about greed.
-An entire chapter expounds on the horrors of how some people became rich in the late 1800's (of course because they all exploited "the people". On page 263, philanthropy is presented as a way for the elite to strengthen their control by producing an army of middle-men who would protect "the system". It is a recurring theme that any time the government does something good it is just a desperate measure intended to shore up its control of the proletariat.
-He suggests that the shelling of Veracruz in 1914 was a ruse to divert the nation's attention from labor unrest, including a miners strike that was going on in Colorado at the time. (p.357) Again all events must be connected by a unifying force and any events occurring simultaneously must be directly related.
-On page 387 he states that the onset of the Great Depression showed that the capitalist system is "by its nature unsound" and "a sick an undependable system". As opposed to the plan of starvation that is Marxism, of course
-I'm not sure if the chapters got worse as I got closer to the modern era, or if it just became easier to spot inaccuracies and unsound logic as it got into events I was more familiar with. In the next section I look at the WW2- Vietnam eras. In the mean time check out this hilarious site.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Book Review: While Europe Slept, by Bruce Bawer.
(note: this is a long one, so get a beverage. This is a book I highly recommend and I only scratch the surface here, I don't really lay out much of the book's argument here, just parts I particularly liked.)I recently read the book While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer, and found it to be an interesting look at the European mindset. I saw Mr. Bawer interviewed on Bill Moyers' Journal a while back and had been meaning to read this book for a while. After reading some articles in European papers, I decided to finally check this book out. To give some background, Bruce Bawer is a gay Catholic who wrote the book Stealing Jesus, a critical look at the Religious Right in America back in the mid-nineties. In 1998, he moved to Europe to live with his Norwegian partner and to get away from the anti-gay attitudes he experienced from the far-right in this country. At first, he found living in Amsterdam to be a refreshing change. He could walk down the street holding hands with his partner without getting so much as a funny look from passers-by. However, he soon discovered that the outskirts of that city, like many large European cities contained large populations of Muslim immigrants that didn't share this "live and let live" attitude. In the book he talks about the ever-growing number of radical Muslims living in Europe, the ideologies of hatred being spread in the mosques, and the utter inability of the European elite to acknowledge, much less take steps to solve, this problem. I'm willing to bet that he is probably considered far-right in Europe, but on the American political spectrum he falls on the left side of the spectrum. (he seems like more of a Hillary or McCain Democrat than an Obama backer reading some of his articles) I think this is the part of the post where I'm supposed to give the politically correct disclaimer. ("religion of peace", "hi-jacking of Islam", "tiny minority","poverty causes terrorism", etc.) Well, sorry you won't get any such wishful thinking from me. We're always told about how the vast majority of Muslims hate the actions of the extremists, but for the last 7 years their silence has been deafening. I believe their are a couple of reasons for this. 1) This minority is not as small as people believe. Most estimates I've seen give a number around 10-15%, I'd be inclined to believe the number is a little larger. I have no evidence to back this up, so it's only speculation on my part (and should be taken as such), but I find it hard to believe that a "tiny" minority would be able to either frighten or influence those in the majority to remain virtually silent. 2) I think that many people around the world (the Muslim world in particular) may not care for the ideology of the Bin Laden's of the world, but hate the United States worse and view it as a bigger threat. With that in mind, a lot of people are probably willing to look the other way since it's for "a good cause". Just had to get that off my chest.
The book begins with Bawer's description of the problem of Islamic radicalism in terms of violence, sharia law, non-integration with native populations, etc. (This was worse than I'd imagined, but it wasn't really a shock. What came as a shock to me is how the European political elite is not only unwilling to acknowledge or deal with the problem, but in many ways are acting in ways complicit with the destruction of their own cultures.) At this point in most of 16 to 20% of children are Muslims. This number will only grow since the average birth-rate among native Europeans ranges from 1.2 to 1.8 (since it takes 2 people to make a baby, and since not all children will live to adulthood, the number must be at least 2.1 for a population to break even) while the birthrate among the Muslim immigrants is much higher. The open-borders policies in a lot of these nations has exacerbated this. These numbers wouldn't be bad if newly arrived Muslims were integrated into the cultures of the countries (as is the case in the U.S.), but there doesn't seem to be much desire for that on either side. In a lot of cases you have 2nd and 3rd generation native born people who don't speak the language of and have little or no loyalties or connection to the nation of their birth. America has an advantage in that being an American is not about your ethnicity or skin color as much as political philosophy and buying into our system of government. The elites don't seem to understand why this is a problem in part, Bawer claims, because of the secularization of Europe. In other words, in America we have enough religious extremists to recognize that it can be a dangerous thing. In Europe, they have no "Christian Right" to scare them. This has left them vulnerable to an even more dangerous form of extremism. As Bawer puts it "Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me." He also states: "I was beginning to see that when Christian faith had departed.....it left the Continent vulnerable to conquest by people with deeper faith and stronger convictions. What's more, no longer able to take religion seriously themselves, many Europeans were unable to believe that other people might take religion very seriously indeed". I've never thought of the religious right in this country as something that inoculates us from something worse. He also discusses this weird dichotomy where people don't want other races to integrate into their cultures, preferring to let them live in ghettos where extremism breeds like bacteria, but on the other hand don't want to be looked at as being racist so they won't speak out about any violent act carried out by Muslims. Here's one chilling example:
On September 6, 2001, it was reported that 65 percent of rapes in Norway were
committed by "non-Western immigrants" (a term that in Norway is essentially
synonymous with "Muslims"); asked to comment on this alarming statistic, Wikan
(a prominent professor) said that "Norwegian women must take their share of
responsibility for these rapes" because Muslim men found their manner of dress
provocative......."Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural
society and adapt to it."
This is a common thread that runs throughout the book. Radical Muslims do something bad, so the government issues a report about how the victims basically deserve it, due to the inequalities in those nations. That said, many of these same "impoverished victims" are paid taxpayer dollars not to work (and, I should add, they are paid more money per month by the governments than I make). The prevailing idea among the left in Europe, as in this country is that terrorism's greatest root is poverty. This may be true of Palestinians, but doesn't hold up when looking at 9/11, the Madrid bombings, the 7/7 attacks in London, etc. There is a connection in all of these instances, but it's the one we're not supposed to talk about. Examples of this mind-set in Europe make appearances all through the book. At one point to summarize this difference between Americans and Europeans he says (paraphrasing) "Americans were taught to believe that their opinions about the world should (ahem) have their foundations in the world's sociopolitical reality, many Europeans were taught to be "sophisticated"-which meant holding opinions that had little or no connection to observable reality. (later) For them, the Milosevics of the world, however monstrous, are also, quite simply, a fact of life. They think of themselves as realists-but this isn't realism; it's fatalism. And it can shade into a strange, disturbing respect for dictators." No where is this more evident than in the romanticisation that has occured with regard to communism. Bawer powerfully illustrates this by recounting his experiences in Berlin. He took a train ride to East Berlin shortly after the wall fell. When he crossed from West to East, he saw a transformation from a vibrant modern city to a dilapidated place where many buildings sported 50 year-old bullet holes and looked untouched since the fall of the Nazis in 1945. Even more stark was the contrast between the people. The East Germans all looked gaunt and gray with hopeless looks on their faces. Another passenger on the train flinched at the sight of a man in a uniform, who turned out to be the conductor checking tickets. Fast forward 15 or 16 years. This same spot is now one of the most beautiful areas in Europe. He is sitting at a Starbucks near the Brandenburg gate. Gone are the gaunt, gray faces. A group of teenage boys walk by who must have been infants when the wall fell. He thought: "This is what it was all for. It was for them- for the sake of these then unborn young people- that the West had stood up to Communism for so long and at such risk and expense. It was for them that JFK had come to Berlin and said, 'Ich bin ein Berliner'; it was for them that Reagan had come and said 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.' Yet what had these kids been taught about that history?" Right after thinking this Bawer got his answer as a bunch of them were wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. (For those of you who don't know, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a murdering thug who was Castro's second in command and presided over firing squads along with founding Cuba's "labor camp" system, he is now a romantic hero to leftist morons the world over.) Bawer soon realized that a souvenir shop next to the Starbucks carried a huge assortment of Che T-shirts. Some of which also had red stars on them or read "Hasta la victoria siempre" (ever onward to victory), in Berlin of all places, home of one of those nightmarish victories. Bawer then relates a story about a friend of his in junior high school whose father had been a journalist under Batista. "When Castro and Guevara came to power they arrested Jose's father, tortured him, and put his eyes out." He talks of the first time he met Jose's father in his home and concludes: "Ever since then, every time I've seen a Che T-shirt on some clueless young person, I've thought of Jose's father sitting in his living room, surrounded by books he could no longer read." Damn.
Here are a few more (but by no means all) quotes from the book that stuck out to me.
-"...for Islamists there are no nuances. In a war between people who had rock solid beliefs and people who are capable of nuancing away pure evil, who has the advantage?"
-"After Israel did the world the favor of getting rid of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, the British House of Commons observed a moment of silence in his memory. He was repeatedly referred to as the 'spiritual leader of Hamas' which is rather like calling Hitler the 'spiritual leader of Nazism'."
- When talking about the motive for terrorism: "Such acts are not a normal reaction to desperation and poverty. There are people in China and India and South America who are far poorer than most Islamic terrorists but who would never do such things. Atrocities on the scale of Beslan are the result of intense indoctrination in a life-despising ideology."
- In the wake of the London bombing "Tony Blair named Tariq Ramadan (banned from the U.S. and France and Inayat Bunglawala (who'd called Osama Bin Laden a "freedom fighter") to a task force for tackling Muslim extremism."
- "That a silent majority of Europe's Muslims believed in democracy and despised terrorism was by now a truism. Observers found themselves thinking, however, that if that silent majority existed at all, it had to be one of the most silent majorities ever."
- "It's the absence of a patriotism as powerful as America's- the absence that is, of a life-or-death belief by individuals in their country's essential goodness and in their people's future- that's helping Western Europe to slip toward its doom"
- "In the end, Europe's enemy is not Islam, or even radical Islam. Europe's enemy is itself- its self destructive passivity, its softness toward tyranny, its reflexive inclination to appease, and its uncomprehending distaste for America's pride, courage, and resolve in the face of a deadly foe."
He concludes by pointing out that Europe's problems require some common sense solutions about immigration and how to integrate Muslim populations into the various countries. Public opinion is starting to turn around and some (minuscule) reforms have taken place since the book was written. But given the fantasy-world the political elite live in, it's likely that the problem will continue to get worse and either a) nothing is done until it's too late. b) the people will revolt and put in far right nationalists, which could involve a lot of brutality on both sides, and probably won't work due to the shifting numbers. He ends by asking where the leaders are who will lead them out of this mess. And he quotes Churchill (which is what I'm about to do, 'cause you've made it this far and since when does a guy need an excuse to quote Churchill?)
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.
Bawer concludes:"To read Churchill's wartime speeches is to experience an attitude and a
rhetoric that, in today's Europe, seem alien or antique...the stark
difference between the unwavering moral conviction that led to Allied victory in
World War II and the unprincipled spirit of compromise and capitulation that is
guiding today's Europe, step by step, to the gallows."
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Book Review: The Silence of the Rational Center.
I just finished re-reading The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing, by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke. I originally read it last summer and found it to be one of the 2 best books on politics/ government I read all of last year. The main argument of the book is that foreign policy, more than any other area of government requires thoughtful, fact-based analysis that rarely makes for entertaining debate and doesn't exactly fit into a 30-second sound byte. The overarching point is that we, as Americans prefer what the authors term "the Big Idea". From "Manifest Destiny" to "Imperialism of Righteousness" to "Freedom on the March", we prefer a grand vision to boring analysis of pros and cons of a particular action. At times this has been a good thing, for example the idea of personal liberty laid out in the U.S. constitution has served us well. In recent times an over-simplified cable-news-friendly view of events has not. The experts on foreign policy issues generally take a much more pragmatic approach. This group constitutes the "rational center".
Analysed in the book are:
-Cable news, which far from shedding light on a subject usually either involves name calling between 2 or more opposing talking heads who usually have no expertise in whatever they're discussing but are picked for their fiery rhetoric.
-How the "rational center" is supposed to function. Keeping emotion from carrying policy makers off during times of national stress, balancing ideals and actual policy in times of crisis, and how it has failed miserably at certain instances (McCarthyism, the lead-up to the Iraq war.)
-The disastrous results when "big ideas" combine with "big media" to shape public opinion through a format that de-emphasizes rational discussion, and turning complex policy challenges into undifferentiated, apocalyptic threats to the nation's very existence. This format also conditions viewers to imagine that foreign policy consists of clear, binary choices.
-The use of blind patriotism and fear to make people more susceptible to the "big idea".
-A good deal of the book examines the role of "think tanks" that look to advance their agendas by twisting data to fit a preconceived notion, and the phenomenon of "false expertise".
- A chapter is devoted to "experts" like Noam Chomsky or Paul Krugman on the left and several prominent "neocons", many of whom are famous for political positions on areas they have no special training, experience, or insight into.
-A chapter is dedicated to "elites and the use of force". Many people think we have a hawk party and a dove party in this country, but looking at our political history, a more accurate description would be a hawk party (Democratic) and a super-hawk party (GOP). Examined in this section is how political elites view military force as a policy tool.
-A chapter is spent looking at fighting insurgencies. The most interesting part of this to me is that almost no Democratic nation has fought a successful counterinsurgency campaign on foreign soil since at least 1940. This is followed by a 4-page list of conflicts and the results in that time span. The only successful counter-insurgency mentioned in the book is the one China fought against Tibet, using tactics not generally available to democratic nations (i.e. genocide). The failure rate of insurgencies is very, very low.
-The problems facing intelligence gathering agencies are detailed.
-The last section of the book examines the future of U.S. relations with China. A "big idea" leading to war with Iraq is one thing, but the same thinking leading to a confrontation with China would be catastrophic. The authors then lay out potential areas of conflict (for example, in another 20 years China will very likely demand at least 99 million barrels of oil per day. The world currently produces 84 million a day, a number that is not likely to rise.) and several ideas for how to deal with our relations to China as an ascending superpower.
-The book goes into a lot of detail, but I'm trying to keep this post shorter than the actual book. Overall an excellent read for anyone interested in political discourse that doesn't involve calling people idiots, traitors, etc. but deals with subject matter in a more scholarly fashion.
Analysed in the book are:
-Cable news, which far from shedding light on a subject usually either involves name calling between 2 or more opposing talking heads who usually have no expertise in whatever they're discussing but are picked for their fiery rhetoric.
-How the "rational center" is supposed to function. Keeping emotion from carrying policy makers off during times of national stress, balancing ideals and actual policy in times of crisis, and how it has failed miserably at certain instances (McCarthyism, the lead-up to the Iraq war.)
-The disastrous results when "big ideas" combine with "big media" to shape public opinion through a format that de-emphasizes rational discussion, and turning complex policy challenges into undifferentiated, apocalyptic threats to the nation's very existence. This format also conditions viewers to imagine that foreign policy consists of clear, binary choices.
-The use of blind patriotism and fear to make people more susceptible to the "big idea".
-A good deal of the book examines the role of "think tanks" that look to advance their agendas by twisting data to fit a preconceived notion, and the phenomenon of "false expertise".
- A chapter is devoted to "experts" like Noam Chomsky or Paul Krugman on the left and several prominent "neocons", many of whom are famous for political positions on areas they have no special training, experience, or insight into.
-A chapter is dedicated to "elites and the use of force". Many people think we have a hawk party and a dove party in this country, but looking at our political history, a more accurate description would be a hawk party (Democratic) and a super-hawk party (GOP). Examined in this section is how political elites view military force as a policy tool.
-A chapter is spent looking at fighting insurgencies. The most interesting part of this to me is that almost no Democratic nation has fought a successful counterinsurgency campaign on foreign soil since at least 1940. This is followed by a 4-page list of conflicts and the results in that time span. The only successful counter-insurgency mentioned in the book is the one China fought against Tibet, using tactics not generally available to democratic nations (i.e. genocide). The failure rate of insurgencies is very, very low.
-The problems facing intelligence gathering agencies are detailed.
-The last section of the book examines the future of U.S. relations with China. A "big idea" leading to war with Iraq is one thing, but the same thinking leading to a confrontation with China would be catastrophic. The authors then lay out potential areas of conflict (for example, in another 20 years China will very likely demand at least 99 million barrels of oil per day. The world currently produces 84 million a day, a number that is not likely to rise.) and several ideas for how to deal with our relations to China as an ascending superpower.
-The book goes into a lot of detail, but I'm trying to keep this post shorter than the actual book. Overall an excellent read for anyone interested in political discourse that doesn't involve calling people idiots, traitors, etc. but deals with subject matter in a more scholarly fashion.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Book Review: A Tragic Legacy
Here we go with my first book review. I just finished reading A Tragic Legacy: how a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency, by Glenn Greenwald. Last summer I read Greenwald's first book How Would a Patriot Act? and I read his blog on salon.com religiously so I pretty much knew what to expect. Greenwald is a former constitutional law attorney, so much of his writing focuses on civil liberties issues and he is a strident critic of much of the Bush administration's agenda of maximizing the power of the federal government. It's hard to tell where he falls on the political spectrum (in a good way). He comes across to me as someone who is driven more by rational thought and "reality based" logic than someone looking to push a certain ideology. His devotion to the constitution and the rule of law combined with intense disdain for neo-"conservatism" have made him one of my favorite writers. A Tragic Legacy is divided into 6 chapters. Chapter one describes just how unpopular the president has become. Chapter two examines the principles that drive President Bush, his polarized view of the world, and the view of himself as a man of destiny. Chapter 3 outlines Bush's conduct in the run up to and handling of the war in Iraq. Chapter 4 examines the drumbeat for a showdown with Iran. Chapter 5 outlines a lot of the ways in which the Bush/Cheney view of the constitution bares little resemblance to the document as it is written (this is kind of a running theme throughout the book, as well as insights into what makes neocons tick.) And then in the conclusion he once again talks about the Bush legacy (think Lyndon Johnson, but without the domestic achievements). So here are a few snippets that stuck out to me:-Part of the first section details how many conservatives have tried to distance themselves from Bush, but Greenwald points out that this began only after the president's approval ratings plummeted to Johnson-during-'Nam levels and that most of them were trying to re-write the history of their own involvement.
-A telling piece of polling data: In a February '05 poll asking people to describe Bush in one word, the top response was "honest" with 38%. 13 months later the top answer was incompetent (29%), and honest had dropped into 6th place, tied with the word liar (14%) and just behind the epithet idiot (17%) Ouch! The '07 results were even worse with incompetent and idiot making five point gains.
-He spends a good deal of time examining the claims by those on the right that Bush was never a conservative at all. This is followed by an interesting contrast of conservatism as it exists in theory versus what is actually practiced by those who claim to adhere to it. The conservatives in question never hesitated to claim Bush as one of their own when he was popular. He also states that: ""conservatism"- while definable on a theoretical plane- has come to have no practical meaning in this country other than a quest for ever-expanding government power for its own sake." He drives this point home by pointing out how much domestic discretionary spending increased under Reagan (a little over 11%) and W (almost 36%).
-Chapter 2 lays out the case of Bush as a man who, by his own admission, relies on his "gut" rather than careful analysis. At one point just after the Iraq war began when asked by Senator Biden why he was so confident about the prospects given how many variables existed, Bush put his hand on Biden's shoulder and responded "my instincts, my instincts".
- Greenwald does not spare the media or the "opposition" party who failed to do their jobs of scrutinizing the case being made during the prelude to the war in Iraq or during the occupation itself.
-He also makes the case that a moralistic vision is a much stronger driving force for president Bush than geopolitical considerations in handling foreign policy. To quote one Arab diplomat: "The U.S. has been Iran's best friend. You have eliminated its enemies, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. You have even reduced yourselves as a threat to Iran because you have wasted so much blood and treasure in Iraq."
-He spends a large portion of the book making the case against a potential war with Iran, and examining the neo-conservative obsession with comparing anyone who opposes any war to Neville Chamberlain. He even mentions how many of these same groups ran ads during the 80's comparing Reagan to Chamberlain because he negotiated with the USSR, rather than start World War III.
-But by far the point made most often in the book is how the administration has routinely violated the constitution and eroded freedom in the name of safety. The passage I liked best in the entire book states: "The premise of America is and always has been imposing limitations on government power even if it means accepting an increased risk of death as a result."[emphasis in original] Perfect safety is the illusion driving Bush. For example I might be safer from serial killers if the police could randomly round up and investigate anyone they wished or search anywhere without a warrant. Does opposing that make me "pro-murderer"?
-Overall it was a good read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in preserving the constitution and the freedoms it guarantees. (I would also recommend Greenwald's other book: How Would a Patriot Act?)
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